|
|
|
|
|
|
by jabbany
697 days ago
|
|
|
So, as someone who has lived in regions with pretty severe internet censorship in the past and built circumvention software back in the day, I've always pondered the idea of whether one could build a fax-based thing like this for browsing the web. Kind of as like a "last resort" system.^ Could have a form that you fax in with, like a URL and session info (cookies and stuff), and then it faxes back the page, and you can circle stuff and fax the page back to interact and "click on" things. Plus, since computers can ingest faxes, you wouldn't need to waste paper printing everything out, and could just do everything digitally. But you still had the option to use paper and a fax machine if you really need to. ^: Yes, I know faxes are unencrypted and phone lines can be tapped. But I've always found the idea intriguing. Plus having some emergency point-to-point communication to bootstrap things like key exchange could still be neat. |
|
|
There was a time when web browsing was crazy slow and expensive, but there were e-mail services that were also crazy slow, but free.
There were mail to web gateways that you could e-mail a URL to, which would then reply with the contents of the web page. You'd then send another URL from that page, and get another reply, and so on. Free slow-motion web browsing.
I say "slow-motion" because this was back when getting a response to an e-mail took hours or days, not seconds. So you were lucky to get through three or four links in a day. But it was free, and we had other things to do than surf the web anyway.