In the early 2000's I was working as an analyst for a VFX studio, and I had a meeting with the CFO first thing in the morning. At some point we needed to look at something on his computer, and he responds "we'll have to wait about 15 more minutes." "Why?" I ask, and he shows me every day when he turns his computer on the browser starts producing "pop under windows" at a rate of about 10 pr second, and that lasts for about 40 minutes. Shocked, I debate with him for a bit and he says they've tried every antivirus. I shake my head. When they stop popping windows he has a program that mass closes all of them and then he goes to work, using that same computer - and for studio finances. Blew my mind.

In Germany there is a "WhatsApp" SIM [1], where you have to pay for normal internet use, but WhatsApp texts are free of charge.

With a technique which you described, you could probably abuse a phone with this SIM as a "free" hot spot with infinite data.

[1] https://www.whatsappsim.de/

I recall one time in 2015 or 2016 when I had only a very weak 2G signal, but wanted to check a couple of pages (at least one of which was several hundred kilobytes). Connections always timed out in browsers, but I got it working by SSHing into my VPS, downloading the page with curl, then copying that down with scp. My recollection is that the file size would increase by 32KB every 15–30 seconds. Fun times!

> It also was a time where companies were paranoid into letting employees access the internet, but at the same time had abysmal security

In the early 2000s I was working at an insurance company. They used some kind of blocker in their outgoing firewall that prevented access to certain sites. At one point the blocklist included sourceforge, which threw my team's work a wrench because at the time a lot of the packages we depended on were hosted there. It took a few days to get that removed from the blocklist.

This same insurance company shut down for multiple days when a virus, I think it was ILOVEYOU, infested their email system so bad that nobody could work, and everyone (except the poor IT folks) got a long weekend. And then a while later, it happened again, but with a different virus, possibly Nimda. The company was very bad about updating its systems, and even in 2003 most users were stuck on Win95.

> It also was a time where companies were paranoid into letting employees access the internet, but at the same time had abysmal security.

I recall we had a crappy firewall that would collapse under the load of NAT for the 100ish employees and so executives got static IPs mapped to their machines. The late 90s and 00s were crazy.

I did the reverse and had an ssh connect to my home machine and ran an IPv4 tunnel back through it so that I could browse the entire corporate internet from my home network, creating a full VPN essentially. Make me about 10 times as productive as going through the dial-up we had to use while we were oncall.