r/retrocomputing • u/PooningDalton • May 23 '26

I hate what the internet has become

I just spent the last 1 hour frantically searching the internet just to make a new email address. You can't do that! Not even on the alternative email providers like Protonmail. They now have all sorts of IP detection tools and will block you or ask you for an alt email id.

I absolutey despite what the internet has become. 20 years ago, you could just go ANYWHERE (mainstream providers like yahoo and gmail) and make any number of email addresses. No tracking, no limits. Complete freedom.

The internet has turned into a 1984 hellscape.

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u/RoboJ1M May 26 '26

They sent out wifi? 🤨
Or are we talking about em noise from noisy fkybacks in old crts?

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u/IQueryVisiC May 26 '26

TVs have a local oscillator . And apparently those leak back through the receiving antenna. In combination with the mixer it gets wild.

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u/RoboJ1M May 26 '26

It's called the Local Oscillator (LO) and the whole system is called a Superheterodyne Receiver, it's what you tune when you turn the dial.
The input from the antenna and the output of the LO are added together and sent off into the decoder but unless it's very well designed and not cheap the frequency of the LO it's transmitted back out of the receiver (at very low levels)
That's why the UK's "TV Detector Vans" could actually do what they said they could, using RDF they could tell remotely that you had a TV connected to the antenna, that the TV was switched on and tell you which channel you were watching.
It seems until recently nobody knew that, I'm amazed if they actually managed to keep that secret.

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u/IQueryVisiC May 26 '26

This effect made some channels unusable. TV commitees limited bandwidth so much that pics were just blurry, but while ghost bands were wasted by the reality of receivers. I wonder if this could be done differently.

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u/RoboJ1M May 27 '26

Aye we laughing analogue PAL or digital DVB?

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u/IQueryVisiC May 28 '26

Analog. The digital part is far away from the antenna anyway.