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Gizmo's Tech Support Alert freeware site shutting down

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Shades:
Back in 1998 I was working for a Dutch ISP. It was very common back then to access the internet by 33k or 56k modem via your land line. Not only needed you to pay for each "tick", you also needed to pay the ISP a monthly subscription fee. That Dutch ISP was one of the first to offer "free" internet. As in, they dropped the subscription fee, but users still needed to pay for each "tick".

A very successful move, the amount of customers increased very, very fast, as did the amount of employees. For legal reasons there had to be a paper trail per subscription, so every 2 to 3 weeks one or more laser printers (professional business ones) needed to be replaced as the counter for its functional life exceeded the maximum. Content creation was important, the occasional sponsored deal was a nice bonus, but the real money was made from the kick-back fees, "generously" offered by telecom companies.

Those days (the first years) were long, but fun as heck. Unfortunately also very profitable. Investors came by and not all of them were of the friendly sort. Both co-founders were each sent packing with 4.000.000 euro, and still the investor got away with 20.000.000 euro more when the ISP was sold and moved to a different part of the country. Ah, those pre-bubble-popping days....

Deozaan:
Think it wouldn't be much of a problem to host somebodies data, as long as you and "they" can never know what's inside.
That, plus a BAT tip of sorts for the extra bandwidth.
-dantheman (August 18, 2021, 04:23 PM)
--- End quote ---

Sounds like you're describing Filecoin, which is another (cryptocurrency-based) file-storage technology being developed by the folks who developed IPFS.

By the way, you can see stuff that uses IPFS here, if you'd like to explore a bit: https://awesome.ipfs.io/

Don't know about a browser but we had a couple of ISPs that provided free internet if you allowed them to show you ads - they didn't last very long.
-4wd (August 18, 2021, 06:09 PM)
--- End quote ---

In the USA there was one called NetZero. IIRC, they lasted a surprisingly long time, but eventually abandoned the adware model and went to normal subscriptions.



Oh wow. I just did a search and it seems they're still alive. And in addition to their subscriptions, they're still offering 10 hours of free dial-up per month. I didn't know dial-up was still a thing. :o It probably uses up the whole 10 hours just to load the Google home page on dial-up. . .

JustinOthername:
Seems like they were revived...
https://www.techsupportalert.com/about-gizmos-best/
 :up:

Tuxman:
Were they hacked or does their humor just cater me well?

Gizmo's Tech Support Alert freeware site shutting down

wraith808:
Perhaps hacked or one of their volunteers made a change, as the primary one on the front says:

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