Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Not recently, but I had bought a USB GPS unit for my laptop back in the mid 2000's specifically for war-driving, mapping, and cracking the weak-ass encryption of early Wifi routers to share with a community of travelers when free wifi hotspots weren't really a thing.

I may or may not be using P2P devices to share my Internet with all my neighbors.

But I also paid to have the neighborhood wired with fiber for internet.

About 20 years ago, there was only dial-up internet available in my street. My parents lived about 200 m away from me in another street, and they could get ADSL. So I set up a wireless bridge to them, and it worked surprisingly well after some tweaking. Kept it running for a few years, eventually got my own connection because one day my dad called me because he needed the router password. Turns out he was also sharing the connection with his neighbour who was running an internet radio station.

I know someone who does business IT where the ISP were trying to charge a huge amount to connect fibre to one of their sites. Thankfully, they had another site a few miles away that was already connected. They found it was cheaper to stick a pole on each building with an omnidirectional WiFi antenna. Apparently the speeds weren't too bad even though ping often left a little to be desired.

I built a Pwnagotchi but I haven't cracked any of it's handshakes yet.

Over 25 years ago, during the dial-up era, there were many computers compromised with certain worms that would open up your computer for remote connections. One of the possibilities when connected was to download the system saved passwords including those for the dial up software. I had many, many, such logins saved including corporate and education ones, with no time caps. During about a year I would only pay for the phone call, not for the internet service. Simpler times.

I did some wardriving a long time ago but never used those internet connections. And I shared my connection before and had a Freifunk router. With the neighbours not so much. I'm mostly nice to them and ask before borrowing their stuff.

my friend had a black box for cable back in the day but that was about it; i would say internet would probably have been easier for the dial up networks in the 90s since most of the time they were wide open as long as you knew the number.

That's a freaky ass idea. I believe you can use the router to spoof or some shi but that was back in wep most use wpa2 so idfk brah but I like the way your brain thinks hehe I was literally asking the same thing not too long ago

way back in the early days of Wifi (802.11B was the cutting edge magic future technology) I had a large antenna hooked up to my laptop PCMCIA wifi card and could pick up some open networks from a few neighbours away. I used to set it up and leave winmx running on my laptop to download all sorts of garbage.

My home internet at the time was up-to 512Kbps satellite downlink (usually around 200k and lots of packet loss and very high ping) with a ~56k dial up uplink which was also the failover when the satellite was too weak, so it was very asymmetrical and unreliable.

This is semi-rural Australia in 1999/2000 and was the best we could get until we got a 3G connection that usually got 1.5meg down and 500k up on a weak HSPA connection, that place didn’t get 8/1 ADSL a couple of years later around 2005/6. A couple of streets away there were already on cable and better DSL lines were available so I assume I was connecting to one of those.

Over the weak long range Wifi connection with a makeshift "cantenna" that probably wasn’t quite right I usually got around 250k symmetrical if I recall correctly, which was really nice compared to the satellite link despite the lower maximum speed.