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This brings back memories of being a clueless script kid in the 1990s.

I knew those tones as CCITT5 tones.

In the days of blueboxing I had a 486 laptop that I acquired because the harddrive died and booted from floppys, a DOS program called 'The Little Operator' that played tones and a photocopy of a book about telephone switching.


You're right; I think CCITT5 is just another name for SS5, because different groups were writing standards. Bell called it one thing, CCITT (an international standards group) called it another thing. And then in the 1990s, the CCITT renamed itself to ITU.

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5

SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf

The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.


CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...

I am not a lawyer.

I would be a little worried about the possibility that the SEC would consider this to be an investment contract, thus making it a security, thus requiring it to be registered with the SEC, which will be a huge hassle involving very expensive lawyers.

I point to the case of LBRY inc, which issued tokens including rewarding people who made video content, spent a fortune fighting the SEC in court and went bankrupt.

There is the issue that the company would be forbidden to issue equity to some people such as people in sanctioned countries.


I reckon that 'gnutella reborn' would look like Retroshare in the year 2019. (and probably today, I haven't tried it recently)

Same as all p2p systems, Retroshare has the problem of NATs and firewalls preventing two thirds of the users from directly exchanging data.


There were a few aspects of early p2p filesharing that I thought were technically interesting.

Original Napster was completely centralized. All searches went to central servers. Notification that metallica_enter_sandman.mp3 could be downloaded from a particular ip and port came from the central servers. At one point there were two sets of servers so you might not find that rare mp3 someone was sharing.

Original Napster did not have hash links and if the TCP connection closed before an mp3 fully downloaded it could only start again from the start of the file. When it took forty minutes to download a single mp3, because many people were on dialup, this was frustrating.

Napster unsurprisingly got sued out of existance.

Gnutella was a reaction to that. No central servers.

Gnutella formed a mesh of TCP connections between clients and passed messages.

Your search for "metallica" got passed to your clients peers and onward through the mesh.

You could see the search queries passing through your machine, many of which were obscene. Anyone could modify the software to send links to windows malware exe files in response to any and all searches.

It was really inefficient. In those days you might have 20KBps upstream and Gnutella could fill it with search queries.

ED2K protocol, used by edonkey, emule and other had (and still have) Distributed Hash Table search. DHT search is better than flooding out search queries. Imaging you made a distributed dictionary, someones home computer gets to answer queries for the words from Orange to Orangutan using alphabetical order. DHT search is like that but someones home computer picks a small range of numbers and handles searches for whatever files have a hash that falls into that range.


I see that you operate a movie recommendation website.

Do you want a VPS provider that ignores copyright complaints?

Do you care if the VPS is on the other side of the planet so web browsing through it will add a noticeable amount of lag?

You mention "five eyes", if three letter agencies are your threat model then I think that having much confidence that you are out of their reach requires more effort than a $10 vps. The big cheap VPS companies use the usual big carriers that the USA has power over and probably half the websites you look at are MITMed by cloudflare.

If you prefer to not give a VPS company a real name and address then there are loads that accept cryptocurrency payment, which is a whole different hassle.

For a web browsing VPN I like regvps Switzerland location.

Years ago, for torrenting without copyright complaints I liked xserver.ua using their Ukraine datacenter, they were in an active war zone for a while, I don't know how reliable they are since the Russians invaded.

For web browsing, an option that is less subject to being blocked by lots of websites is Scaleways NAT gateways. Scaleway charge by the hour so spinning up a VPN server just when you need it can be very cheap but it is complicated to use and like AWS it is possible to accidentally run up a huge bill.


> I see that you operate a movie recommendation website.

> Do you want a VPS provider that ignores copyright complaints?

Yes, familymoviedb.com. It's a side project. Have not had any copyright complaints so far. The question at hand here is completely unrelated...

Essentially just looking to have my own VPN and not have to rely on a VPN-as-a-service (e.g. ExpressVPN, SurfSharkVPN, Mullvad, etc, etc).

Thanks for the recommendations! I've added them to my list of considerations...



Various similar services have existed then stopped working after a single-digit number of years when the owner of the domain stopped paying or maintaining.

Currently working equivalents

lvh.me

anything.lvh.me

fbi.com

anything.fbi.com

anything-that-isnt-a-numeric-ip.traefik.me

127.0.0.1.nip.io 127.0.0.1.sslip.io 127-0-0-1.backname.io

Since the point is to have multiple names available you can also use 127.0.0.2.nip.io etc (if your webserver is listening on 0.0.0.0)

There are a few services that will point a subdomain name at an ip of your choice

localhost.ipq.co localhost.fdns.uk

Someone has already created localhost1.ipq.co localhost2.ipq.co etc


An acquaintance of mine has a fairly expensive Sage brand toaster that has an LED bar graph showing remaining time and an 'a bit more' button. Overall it is a nice toaster, but the linear variable resistor for the slide control that sets the toasting time has become noisy so the LEDs light up unexpectedly now and again. We are hesitant to spray aerosol switch cleaner into a food appliance, sliding the time control end to end a few times clears it for a few days.


The office I work in has that brand of toaster. The countdown timer is a nice feature, but the push-button interface seems needlessly fussy. People routinely need to be shown how it works the first time they encounter it.

Perhaps a mechanical twist-timer like this would make a nice toaster interface:

https://www.mcmaster.com/products/twist-timers/wall-mount-ti...


There is another brand that works like you want it to, Breville smart toaster. It generally gets the toast to a consistent toastiness, but if you want a bit more you just twist one of the two wheels on it


One aspect of the google plus thing was that google liked to link it to peoples other google services.

Some people had their google+ accounts suspended for reasons such as "google is not sure that you are using your real name" or an unspecified terms of service violation and got their gmail accounts locked as well.

For many people, loosing access to their gmail is really bad. Suddenly it's a huge hassle to get their car insurance policy pdf or email their landlord.

For many people, it was not worth the risk of loosing access to their main email address.


Good point. The "real name" policy - in combination with the tie-ins into the rest of the "Googlesphere" was bad news for many.-


The maximum power of license-exempt transmitters is set by the government of the country.

In the USA, there is FCC part 15 which covers license-exempt communications and part 18 which covers 'Industrial, Scientific and Medical'.

In the USA, you can radiate much more power for ISM than you can for communications. The part 18 rules forbids any "telecommunications function".

On specific frequencies, you can use much more power for things like drying rolls of paper in a factory by blasting kilowatts of gigahertz RF or medical diathermy than you can for communications such as wifi.

The FCC guidance for wireless chargers for phones is that the power transfer has to meet part 18 rules and any communication between a smartphone and a wireless charger has to meet part 15 rules.

(Technically, in the USA the legal term is 'licensed-by-rule' rather than 'license-exempt'.)

Using more powerful wifi than you need to is antisocial, you would often be reducing the performance of your neighbors wifi. If everyone does that then everyone suffers.


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