fun thing is a bunch of hobbyists are running around with SDRs and old cell hardware and running low power experimental cell networks in their houses, questionable legality be damned.
OpenBTS/YateBTS/OsmoBTS and friends are useful here to spin up a working network and relive a happier time.
I've been meaning to get one of the tiny SDR cards like an XRTX and place it into a Pi or similar device and build a "mobile mobile hotspot" - LTE/5G in, 2G/3G out for old crap.
EDIT: I almost forgot, too. The N95 has Wi-Fi and a SIP client, so it's not completely useless even in 2026!
The easier option I'm afraid would have almost been to just not pay your bill.
No, I'm not even kidding here, Verizon has apparently in the last year randomly just been turning on multi-month past due accounts and going "lol we'll just let you come back if you pay your next month's bill like nothing ever happened" and zeroing out thousands+ dollar past due balances in the name of "customer loyalty".
I'm actually frustrated we lost web browser access on gaming consoles, especially in the era of people calling for technical support to their internet providers for "it's too slow" and we can't run a proper speedtest to the world from the console to figure out if it's the gaming provider or the Internet connection...
We'll know the price in two more weeks. I'm yolo'ing it and I can't wait for my little orange-wrapped pickup.
So far their manufacturing and progress videos are quite impressive. The fact there's 25-50+ basically production-ready prototypes if not more now driving around their factory and doing testing compared to most of the other vaporware companies out there has me holding out strong.
(How many Elios are out there doing testing? How many TELOs? Oof.)
Pepperidge Farm remembers the $19,995 MSRP Ford Maverick with its standard hybrid drivetrain. Missed my chance to buy one, watched the price bloat out and nope.
Back in the late 2000s-early 2010s you could grab some Verizon bubble pack flip phones and just dial an activation string on the handset itself and it'd set up a new phone number for you and you'd just have to go add airtime with a prepaid card or credit card without having to provide anything.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
American Airlines captain Warran VanderBurgh once called this phenomenon "the children of the magenta"[1] in his talk on automation dependency in the 90s.
I wonder what we'd call the children today in hindsight and what line they're chasing now...
I noticed quite recently in awe at the Chinese parts recycling market with the N95 (and a few other old Nokias) - https://www.ebay.com/itm/227249518747
Apparently they've been rebuilding full "new" N95s and other Nokia fare from old motherboards and new spares/knockoff parts. It's like a new legitimate knockoff from the grey market? They've even got things like 'refurbed' N900s...
Mine came with a text message still in the inbox from testing it with a test SMS on China Mobile in 2025 - so even the modem works!
And if they haven't migrated the ownership of the OneDrive to another user's account in 12 months (such as cascading the drive up to the next manager to pull out whatever docs)... what kind of other bad IT and managerial practices are in use?
I did this and was immediately closed for "crowdfunding" by Stripe :)
Lovely company. Paypal dumped me with no explanation, and Stripe tells me to just straight fuck off and now I'm disconnected from accepting most payments. Glad it wasn't my livelihood or anything :)
My "oh shit" moment was when I was abused by an AI support robot that gave me false information and cost me financial harm.
It was never disclosed it was AI, I submitted a support query with a company, got a suspiciously fast response back, didn't realize it was A Robot, a month later got harmed and was told in response "the robot gave you a bad answer and was coached, sorry, sucks to be you".
"Coached." The only recourse I get is being told a robot was told it was wrong. That's it. No actual solution for me.
I get screwed and the AI keeps getting paid.
I'm glad people can shove hundreds and thousands into these products while people like me in the blue collar rat race get screwed again and again.
Ah yes, just like that time Kodak licensed their name out to make checks... air purifiers? (Bonus points: their brand licensee on most of that crap is now out of business.)
I think they may have scaled back from this, but they were running a 100% malware-style playbook to hit the Tiktok servers like it was some kinda sketchy C2 package. Lots of attempts of their own DoH (and DoT!) and normal DNS servers to try to get into the Tiktok network.
https://vay.io/