6 ms·

A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of l

A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. It was just people had set up their own hubs and switches in their appartment buildings and strung cables between buildings. This blew my mind. They just ran themselves ethernet and everyone got a drop from a switch in their building. It wasn't clear how it got from a neighborgood level upstream. But just the idea that they could all just decide to give themselves internet, and ethernet no less, string ethernet outside the walls of their own appartments to other appartments, and outside the building from one building to another? Unimaginable in the US. I was boggled and jealous.

wyldfire 2y ago
> Unimaginable in the US With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.
- xnorswap 2y ago
  UK building codes (we call them building regulations) should also have prevented Grenfell. A large issue was that the companies involved were using materials which weren't up to code.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    Specifically, they stuck to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. (made an 'equivalent' fireproof product, which legally didn't need retesting, but in fact performed far worse) Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
    - lotsofpulp 2y ago
      I’m sure construction workers/supervisors/engineers would love the idea of having all of their decisions be subject to judgment by lawyers or a jury.
    - pessimizer 2y ago
      > The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit. I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether. And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps. This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty. If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity. There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay. > Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test. > wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis. The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
- macspoofing 2y ago
  > Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK US building codes are pretty good and well enforced, just as they are in the UK ... but even with that, you have a Surfside condominium collapse - so not perfect.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Surfside was almost a half-century old, so the building codes were surely different back then. Also, building codes concern how to design and build a structure; they aren't going to help much with terrible maintenance.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Yeah, one of the things that makes disasters impossible in the US is that we have real Professional Engineers with Iron Rings doing everything. If you don’t have an iron ring, you can’t really understand what it takes to build a thing in the real world. You can play with your software or whatever but you’re not going to reliably change the real world. Even Ghost Ship had no iron rings present. That’s what got them. You need those rings. One of my friends has one on each finger. A true 10x Professional Engineer. Nothing he has ever built has a single flaw.
  - pkaye 2y ago
    Iron rings is for Canadian engineers.
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      But they were, all of them, deceived for another ring was made.
    - mustntmumble 2y ago
      Huh, today I learned about Iron Rings! Thanks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
- potato3732842 2y ago
  The code is just as bought and paid for by the materials manufactuers in the US as it is anywhere else. They get fiery but mostly peaceful apartment building siding, we get spray foam and rotten roofs.
  - mapt 2y ago
    Polyurethane spray foam is pretty damn fiery in most conditions, even if the right number of carcinogenic flame retardants can limit open flame spread on a surface. It's also got the most toxic, thick sort of smoke of the available options, other than the polyiso in Grenfall. There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain. Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      Fire departments generally love foam because while it does burn it fills entire spaces and prevents fire spread and limits exhaust of combustion byproducts (which limits oxygen intake on the other end). What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab. I'm still not a fan though.
      - trogdor 2y ago
        > What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab. In my (admittedly minimal) experience as a volunteer firefighter, “minor repair and smoke damage rehab” isn’t a thing once a fire is progresses handheld fire extinguishers. Water causes a massive amount of damage, and you often need to rip apart walls and floors - with water sometimes joining the party - in order to ensure the fire is fully extinguished.
secstate 2y ago
There was a great book (that I thought was called Nerds 2.0, but now I can't find it again) that I read decades ago that described how Cisco got there start. Running wires through gutters on Stanford's campus and hoping no one asked any questions. Built their own routers and what not. The official story now looks like Stanford knew what a great idea that was, but the history that Lerner provided in the book suggests that their initial response was pretty negative and only positive once they formalized the project and made a company around it.
seabass-labrax 2y ago
That you can do what you describe is why I love the Internet! There is effectively no limit to the scale and topology of the network, and with a well-configured system you can literally yank cables out and find the network operating without more than a second or two of additional latency. I play chess on lichess.org, and when the Wi-Fi signal drops out my device switches to LTE without even interrupting the game! The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.
brk 2y ago
Odds are those connections weren't sanctioned by the building management and were the result of lax enforcement. There are actually plenty of smaller apartment buildings in the US where tenants could get away with this as long as they didn't damage the building or cause frustration for other tenants.
alsetmusic 2y ago
You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream. I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.
- eep_social 2y ago
  Very early on, say maybe late 90s, cable companies didn’t lock down their networks and you could effectively do this if you were on the same loop. It was amazing to browse neighbor’s windows SMB shares, play LAN games, etc.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    Later I had RoadRunner in Albany NY when it first came out, and it was exactly like that. Whole neighborhood was a lan.
- jon-wood 2y ago
  My neighbour and I did this when we were about that age, and it was just as good as you imagined it to be! I think we managed to talk our parents into it because it would mean we were no longer tying up the phone line and racking up bills to play Doom.
- newdee 2y ago
  Having ISDN whilst most of my friends were on 56k made me really appreciate it. It connected silently and almost instantly, ping times were low with virtually no jitter, it was a consistent 64k whilst also leaving the phone line available (a boon for parents and kids alike) or you could use both lines for 128k. Fond memories.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Direct local PPP dialup (i.e. between two PCs) wasn't too bad for multiplayer for games that era.
jeff_vader 2y ago
Not from Russia, but nearby.. It was very common - kinda wild east and nobody cared. As soon our telecom started providing DSL - we (neighbourhood kids) got a commercial DSL into my apartment and shared it between 2 five story apartment buildings. Our set up was tiny and not very reliable. Some local networks like this grew and became almost proper internet providers. But they continued this gray practice of pulling cables in the air, between buildings. They'd also do other sketchy stuff like installing hubs/switches into electrical boxes and tapping supply from the building. We learned about it when a technician from a provider like this dropped a screwdriver on live wires and knocked out power for half of the building.
Propelloni 2y ago
That's how I learned the limits of hub cascades ;) Add collision domains on top and you are in not-funny-land.
- blitzar 2y ago
  IPv6 will fix that ;)
  - avidiax 2y ago
    Just to be clear, hub collisions are a layer 2 problem, and nothing at layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6) can fix it.
wil421 2y ago
Lots of co-workers in Serbia do this today. Someone gets a fast fiber connection and they run an Ethernet cable to their friend in the building across the way. They both split the costs.
swatcoder 2y ago
> Unimaginable in the US. Not at all. Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available. Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly. What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Yep, a coworker of mine even made a business out of it. He owns a lot of land, put up (essentially) a big cell tower with directional radios, signed some paperwork with AT&T for the upstream and sold to his neighbors who only had shitty CenturyLink on the cheap. I think he's still doing it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- iforgot22 2y ago
  I've seen this in remote areas in the US too. There's a broadband ISP, but they only connect to one house for some reason, even though others would be willing to pay. So "neighbors" (separated by a thousand feet) share ethernet and wifi.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly. Something I've always been curious about: how much stolen electricity / water can a modern utility detect? And how well can they localize the source? Asking for friend.
pxeger1 2y ago
Highly relevant is this article about an unsanctioned internet network built by students at Moscow State University: https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...
jedberg 2y ago
I did that in college in 1997 (in the US). :) I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.
mplewis 2y ago
This exists in the US. Check out https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/
int_19h 2y ago
In mid-00s this was still how much of the country got its Internet, actually, even in Moscow. I wouldn't say those things were "community", exactly; it would usually be a few people with enough knowledge to set it up, running it all as an actual business - officially registered and all - with other residents of those buildings paying for their connectivity. But even then it was still very anarchic. For example, one common perk of such setups for their customers was that traffic inside the LAN would be free. And they'd run searchable file sharing servers and P2P hubs (Direct Connect, usually) inside the net, which members would use to share their file collections. Some of those actually evolved into "proper" ISPs eventually.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Oh that's right, I think I remember them talking about local file stores and other local services too. Initially they had only said something off hand that was normal for them, but the whole room was fascinated and asked them questions and they ended up describing as much as they could. They didn't actually know that much about how it worked or was set up, they were just a regular user.
Dracophoenix 2y ago
> A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. He might have been a student at Moscow State https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...

wyldfire 2y ago

> Unimaginable in the US With good reason. Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK. Run plenum-rated wires through an appropriate space for safety's sake.

xnorswap 2y ago
UK building codes (we call them building regulations) should also have prevented Grenfell. A large issue was that the companies involved were using materials which weren't up to code.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  Specifically, they stuck to the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law. (made an 'equivalent' fireproof product, which legally didn't need retesting, but in fact performed far worse) Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes, when far better would be to wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    I’m sure construction workers/supervisors/engineers would love the idea of having all of their decisions be subject to judgment by lawyers or a jury.
  - pessimizer 2y ago
    > The pattern is that complex regulations always have loopholes I think the pattern is that regulations that prevent people who have money from making more money will always have loopholes lobbied into them, and thereby become complex. But the complexity is an effect, not a cause or really the problem. The problem is that they are going to make sure that a particular unsafe product or unsafe use of a product, that is known to be unsafe in other jurisdictions and banned, will not be stopped if subverting the legislation costs less than doing the unsafe thing will benefit. I think specifically for Grenfell that the fact that the material was banned for that usage elsewhere created the pressure to lobby to maintain that unsafe usage in Britain. If they hadn't been able to sell it as cladding, they probably would have had to shut down production of it altogether. And iirc it still would probably have been safe enough if it hadn't had a horrible corner cut installation that resulted in leaving flammable trash behind the cladding, and gaps. This was not a design failure for difficult to devise regulation, this was a government failure, fueled by multiple layers of corruption. Putting it on the wording of the regulations, and implying that the problem is that regulations are inherently hard to write is just an apology for the guilty. If anything, the difficulty of writing a lot of legislation is the difficulty of making it ineffective for the thing that it is purporting to regulate, but can't, because you've been bribed in some way. It's like the difficulty of writing RFPs that will only apply to a particular company that you've already agreed to award a contract to. It leads to complexity. There's a reason why political jobs where you get to award contracts or write legislation cost more to get than they pay. > Same with VW and dieselgate. (made a car which did well when tested, but badly in the real world) But this wasn't just a testing failure, this was people intentionally cheating on the test. > wipe out all the regulations and simply put in prison people who don't take sufficient care of the environment or other peoples lives. Let courts decide what is insufficient care on a case by case basis. The result of this would be extremely wealthy judges, prosecutors and judges and prosecutors families, you going to prison when you do something that was totally allowed, and rich men never even being indicted.
macspoofing 2y ago
> Building codes in the US prevent disasters like the one that happened at Grenfell Towers in the UK US building codes are pretty good and well enforced, just as they are in the UK ... but even with that, you have a Surfside condominium collapse - so not perfect.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Surfside was almost a half-century old, so the building codes were surely different back then. Also, building codes concern how to design and build a structure; they aren't going to help much with terrible maintenance.
renewiltord 2y ago
Yeah, one of the things that makes disasters impossible in the US is that we have real Professional Engineers with Iron Rings doing everything. If you don’t have an iron ring, you can’t really understand what it takes to build a thing in the real world. You can play with your software or whatever but you’re not going to reliably change the real world. Even Ghost Ship had no iron rings present. That’s what got them. You need those rings. One of my friends has one on each finger. A true 10x Professional Engineer. Nothing he has ever built has a single flaw.
- pkaye 2y ago
  Iron rings is for Canadian engineers.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    But they were, all of them, deceived for another ring was made.
  - mustntmumble 2y ago
    Huh, today I learned about Iron Rings! Thanks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring
potato3732842 2y ago
The code is just as bought and paid for by the materials manufactuers in the US as it is anywhere else. They get fiery but mostly peaceful apartment building siding, we get spray foam and rotten roofs.
- mapt 2y ago
  Polyurethane spray foam is pretty damn fiery in most conditions, even if the right number of carcinogenic flame retardants can limit open flame spread on a surface. It's also got the most toxic, thick sort of smoke of the available options, other than the polyiso in Grenfall. There are two inherently fire-safe, inexpensive insulation options, borated cellulose and mineral wool. You can even use them as fire-stops. Neither are good to use in an application where they receive rain. Polystyrene and fiberglass get runner up status because they melt & retreat from a fire at sub-ignition temperature, which doesn't spread the flame but does open up the wall.
  - potato3732842 2y ago
    Fire departments generally love foam because while it does burn it fills entire spaces and prevents fire spread and limits exhaust of combustion byproducts (which limits oxygen intake on the other end). What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab. I'm still not a fan though.
    - trogdor 2y ago
      > What would have been total losses turn into minor repair and smoke damage rehab. In my (admittedly minimal) experience as a volunteer firefighter, “minor repair and smoke damage rehab” isn’t a thing once a fire is progresses handheld fire extinguishers. Water causes a massive amount of damage, and you often need to rip apart walls and floors - with water sometimes joining the party - in order to ensure the fire is fully extinguished.

secstate 2y ago

There was a great book (that I thought was called Nerds 2.0, but now I can't find it again) that I read decades ago that described how Cisco got there start. Running wires through gutters on Stanford's campus and hoping no one asked any questions. Built their own routers and what not. The official story now looks like Stanford knew what a great idea that was, but the history that Lerner provided in the book suggests that their initial response was pretty negative and only positive once they formalized the project and made a company around it.

seabass-labrax 2y ago

That you can do what you describe is why I love the Internet! There is effectively no limit to the scale and topology of the network, and with a well-configured system you can literally yank cables out and find the network operating without more than a second or two of additional latency. I play chess on lichess.org, and when the Wi-Fi signal drops out my device switches to LTE without even interrupting the game! The fact that all of the above is possible with only a single kind of cable and generic, 'dumb' switches is icing on the (seven-layer) cake.

brk 2y ago

Odds are those connections weren't sanctioned by the building management and were the result of lax enforcement. There are actually plenty of smaller apartment buildings in the US where tenants could get away with this as long as they didn't damage the building or cause frustration for other tenants.

alsetmusic 2y ago

You're describing the sort of daydreams I had about running a cable between my home and my friend's home when I was 14 years old. We were too far apart. But playing Descent matches would have been awesome. We got by on dialup, but a kid can dream. I also dreamt of ISDN. Looking back, it seems such a paltry offering, but that tells you what an old man I've become.

eep_social 2y ago
Very early on, say maybe late 90s, cable companies didn’t lock down their networks and you could effectively do this if you were on the same loop. It was amazing to browse neighbor’s windows SMB shares, play LAN games, etc.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Later I had RoadRunner in Albany NY when it first came out, and it was exactly like that. Whole neighborhood was a lan.
jon-wood 2y ago
My neighbour and I did this when we were about that age, and it was just as good as you imagined it to be! I think we managed to talk our parents into it because it would mean we were no longer tying up the phone line and racking up bills to play Doom.
newdee 2y ago
Having ISDN whilst most of my friends were on 56k made me really appreciate it. It connected silently and almost instantly, ping times were low with virtually no jitter, it was a consistent 64k whilst also leaving the phone line available (a boon for parents and kids alike) or you could use both lines for 128k. Fond memories.
int_19h 2y ago
Direct local PPP dialup (i.e. between two PCs) wasn't too bad for multiplayer for games that era.

jeff_vader 2y ago

Not from Russia, but nearby.. It was very common - kinda wild east and nobody cared. As soon our telecom started providing DSL - we (neighbourhood kids) got a commercial DSL into my apartment and shared it between 2 five story apartment buildings. Our set up was tiny and not very reliable. Some local networks like this grew and became almost proper internet providers. But they continued this gray practice of pulling cables in the air, between buildings. They'd also do other sketchy stuff like installing hubs/switches into electrical boxes and tapping supply from the building. We learned about it when a technician from a provider like this dropped a screwdriver on live wires and knocked out power for half of the building.

Propelloni 2y ago

That's how I learned the limits of hub cascades ;) Add collision domains on top and you are in not-funny-land.

blitzar 2y ago
IPv6 will fix that ;)
- avidiax 2y ago
  Just to be clear, hub collisions are a layer 2 problem, and nothing at layer 3 (IPv4/IPv6) can fix it.

wil421 2y ago

Lots of co-workers in Serbia do this today. Someone gets a fast fiber connection and they run an Ethernet cable to their friend in the building across the way. They both split the costs.

swatcoder 2y ago

> Unimaginable in the US. Not at all. Even in the US, rural folk have been beaming directional wifi to each other for a couple decades now (at least), and sharing utilities by personally running electrical, coax, telephone, or ethernet throughout a shared building or across houses stretches back for as long as those services have been available. Sharing ("stealing") Cable TV by just running coax around was huge before those systems transitioned from simply using sometimes-encrypted broadcasts to a more authenticated/addressable scheme. For decades, party lines (for the telphone) were both official installations from the telephone company and de facto local networks run by one's handy neighbors. Countless people punched ethernet between walls in apartment units just the way you describe to share upstream connections. Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly. What made it unfamiliar to you (and perhaps many here) was probably just the class and finances of your family and the people they mingled with.

Spivak 2y ago
Yep, a coworker of mine even made a business out of it. He owns a lot of land, put up (essentially) a big cell tower with directional radios, signed some paperwork with AT&T for the upstream and sold to his neighbors who only had shitty CenturyLink on the cheap. I think he's still doing it.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
iforgot22 2y ago
I've seen this in remote areas in the US too. There's a broadband ISP, but they only connect to one house for some reason, even though others would be willing to pay. So "neighbors" (separated by a thousand feet) share ethernet and wifi.
ethbr1 2y ago
> Same goes for power in squatted urban units or among trailers/shacks where they would be clustered tightly. Something I've always been curious about: how much stolen electricity / water can a modern utility detect? And how well can they localize the source? Asking for friend.

pxeger1 2y ago

Highly relevant is this article about an unsanctioned internet network built by students at Moscow State University: https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...

jedberg 2y ago

I did that in college in 1997 (in the US). :) I wired up 1/2 of our building by just throwing cables between rooms via the windows. We got our upstream via a commercial DSL connection, which when split 11 ways, was about the same price as dialup, but way faster.

mplewis 2y ago

This exists in the US. Check out https://www.nycmesh.net/ https://www.nycmesh.net/

int_19h 2y ago

In mid-00s this was still how much of the country got its Internet, actually, even in Moscow. I wouldn't say those things were "community", exactly; it would usually be a few people with enough knowledge to set it up, running it all as an actual business - officially registered and all - with other residents of those buildings paying for their connectivity. But even then it was still very anarchic. For example, one common perk of such setups for their customers was that traffic inside the LAN would be free. And they'd run searchable file sharing servers and P2P hubs (Direct Connect, usually) inside the net, which members would use to share their file collections. Some of those actually evolved into "proper" ISPs eventually.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
Oh that's right, I think I remember them talking about local file stores and other local services too. Initially they had only said something off hand that was normal for them, but the whole room was fascinated and asked them questions and they ended up describing as much as they could. They didn't actually know that much about how it worked or was set up, they were just a regular user.

Dracophoenix 2y ago

> A hundred years ago on irc someone from Russia was describing their internet connection, which was ethernet, while I had only ever heard of dial up outside of large companies. He might have been a student at Moscow State https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-by-students-211539855cf9 https://scribe.rip/p/moscow-state-university-network-built-b...