I was born in 2002 and wasn’t really much exposed to the internet until 2012. I saw my older brother and sister watching YouTube on my Dad’s laptop in 2007 with a (presumably ethernet) cable, but I’m sure they weren’t using dial-up, and I think most people had abandoned it by that time.

Regardless, I was learning a bit recently about how dial-up worked, and saw that it was still possible to set up in modern-day; so it got me wondering what the privacy implications would be if I hypothetically were to use it. I imagine it would be terrible!

1mb would take around 6 minutes, since IIRC your speed would be closer to 28.8 than 56 (I seem to recall that 56k was in large part due to compression, and those file types are all compressed).

Compression has nothing to do with it. Had to do with line strength and packet overhead. Like DSL, if you were too far away from the central location you’d have reduced speeds. Typically 3KB. If you lived close enough you’re speeds would jump to 6K. That’s about 48kbps and overhead eats up a good chunk of the remaining 8kbps.

Interesting!

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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