Party Vibe

The definition got changed in the late 1990s (to bring it in line with all other metric units) – before that kilobyte was used for 1024 bytes.

Windows still calculates a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, it varies with other operating systems. To confuse things further, modern hard drive capacity is usually stated in the “new/metric” units, which is why Windows seemingly underreports drive sizes.

Compared with 30 years ago for day to day use other than kernel level coding all these the rounding errors do not cause too much hassle – back then 24 bytes mattered a lot more due to the lack of RAM compared with today – if coding a database you might even use a byte to store 8 flags of data (true/false) whereas today many apps would use a whole int for that (4/8 bytes), which is why today I end up carting around 50 GB from place to place :laugh_at:

I remember reading that a few years ago (its not the only such experiment) although there are more data security issues doing it that way – I’m one of only 3 people with this model of e-bike in the entire county and get my cycling jackets from the other end of England (near where Tryptameanie is), where they are available in a distinctive red colour no one else has. This would make impersonation or misrouting harder, compared to pigeons of which there are literally thousands of round here both in urban and rural areas (East Anglia is a main habitat region for collared doves).

Also I can meow at the cats and they do not bother me – although town cats are lazy, the rural ones (many of which are related to one another) form prides and still tend to hunt any birds in their territories..

Coincidentally I was going to use this picture for a poster at work explaning why we need firewalls and IT security procedures..

its the size of a bank card but slightly thicker, as I already use an Ortlieb dual pannier system this hardly takes up any space.

The UK has moved on slightly from the days of these..

which only stored about 20 megabytes!

My high school had a 10MB hard drive on the BBC Micro Econet (16 workstations + a server) in 1986, this was fast enough and big enough for me to hide a RAT in my personal storage area without being discovered (as even if the teachers went through it they would have only found a stored screen image from a character mapped display in which I’d buried the RAT code and removed the end marker from the BASIC code which triggered part of it so it looked like a binary file. TBH I wouldn’t be surprised if the RAT remained there a couple of years after I left in 1990 (when they eventually replaced these with PC-based workstations).

similar but on a smaller scale. The screen shot was of the front menu for a wordprocessor app we had to use, it was set up so running the control app would just look like the wordprocessor menu. BBC Masters of that era had a * and # on the numeric keypad like telephones, it was set up so double tapping # would go to the real wordprocesor (if teachers were watching) but *(access code)# would open up the RAT control menu, which could do a variety of things such as send text messages to other computers without displaying on the audit log (like passing a note around in class), remote procedure calls and memory inspection of workstations (including the server, which enabled me to get the SYST ID (equivalent of root on Linux) even when the teacher (this very strict battleaxe of a maths teacher) had decided to shut off her console monitor at the mains), or deliver a copy of the RAT to another machine.

TBH I’ve forgotten how to do half of that at low level nowadays and if I do mention it to any younger folk of school age I warn them first as trying any stunt like that in school nowadays gets you arrested and the bobby and NCA end up having a talk to your parents.

TBH it was small potatoes to what the kids in mainland Europe of the same age were getting up to, and TBH a lot of it was more constructive as they had more enlightened educators and PTT (telecoms) organisations who legitimately gave them access to resources rather than give them trouble for harmless experiments.

Although what I do today is ultimately beneficial to society, in a more enlightened environment I’d probably have started doing the more positive things with tech a lot earlier in my life rather than going off the rails a bit during the 90s…