Though I do think some people are looking back with rose tinted goggles on.
I don't thing so, it was very very good, interesting, original, revolutionary. In the early 2000s the net was a completely fascinating place. No policing, totally free speech - 'free' music - access to information [and people] never before attained. It was awesome.
Well this forum certainly wasn't 'awesome' circa 2000, if you ask me.
I remember somebody leaking the mods private forum, with lovely threads such as "Why do [the racist name for pakistanis] smell?"
And that was from the owner (RIP)!
I got banned a lot back then for being 1 pixel/KB over image size sigs/posts![]()
You rebel.
It wasn't all that long ago that sites were made to start using https :/
Before that it was trivial to hack some of them, including Facebook. They only started using encryption in 2013 I think. All you needed was wireshark to get someone's login details if they were on the same network as you. Uni and any public networks were a free for all.
People just didn't want to know about internet security (and still don't). But they would if they knew someone was actually messing around in their accounts. Hotel wifi often still has huge security holes. Sometimes you can connect straight in to their servers or routers, even other people's devices![]()
Same here all of the above, UT99 competitively too, guessing you also spent a lot of time on Clanbase then like myself.I used to spend way more time on OCUK forums than I do these days. I spent many countless hours catching up with them. I was active for quite a while 'pre-nuke'. My first foray into the online world would be with Compuserve or AOL dial-up. You'd spend forever waiting on the homepage loading!
I got into UT99 heavily and probably spent upwards of 5 hours a day playing it at a pretty high level. ICQ was good, and also Quakenet on IRC. Winamp was awesome. Back when it took 20 minutes to download a single song from Napster or Limewire.
I still remember the dreamcast chatrooms, sega were way ahead of every other console
my parents got a phone bill of like £700 lol...... I bet BT made a killing from dialup internet
Today's Internet is crap, stupid Facebook, twitter, Instagram. It was loads better when the Internet was full of people who knew how to use it.
This place used to have threads that made me pee myself. Why did the get rid if stumbleupon, all the Internet is good for now is people falling out, bad news, and shopping, even porn got stranger lol, not that I watch any.