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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#281

Post by skuhn »

flachsechs wrote: post #269
jasongill wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User #527 here. I sold my username (iota) on eBay for $150, back when your slashdot user number still meant something. I've always wondered what the buyer was up to, it was funny at the time to think of "selling" something that didn't exist. I guess it's commonplace now

came here looking for a story like this. i had a 2-digit id that i coincidentally sold for exactly $150 on ebay also. college beer money. don't regret it at all. cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few days.

I had (and I guess still have) user id #10, which for a few years conveyed a minor amount of Internet cred. I should have sold out in 2005 and retired to a country with an extremely low cost of living.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#282

Post by hyperbovine »

flachsechs wrote: post #269
jasongill wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User #527 here. I sold my username (iota) on eBay for $150, back when your slashdot user number still meant something. I've always wondered what the buyer was up to, it was funny at the time to think of "selling" something that didn't exist. I guess it's commonplace now

came here looking for a story like this. i had a 2-digit id that i coincidentally sold for exactly $150 on ebay also. college beer money. don't regret it at all. cmdrtaco announced his site on irc and i happened to see it in the first few days.

I remember /. before user reg even existed. There was some buildup to it finally being released, I recall. I signed on within an hour of it going live and though it was all pointless. Guess that's why I wound up with a 4-digit uid instead of a 2-digit one :)

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#283

Post by Natsu »

serf wrote: post #197
samstave wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web I am going to have to call you out. I had a low-digit ID on /. We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES. I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck i…

same story here. Low number ID, privacy advocate, etc since the 90s. the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway." I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the deathknell of the personal privacy movement. Whether or not th…

Yeah, it's funny. We all heard about ECHELON a long time ago, only to find out it was true and that not many people care because they don't really get what it means.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#284

Post by Andrenid »

thefalcon wrote: post #236
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear. I had a conversation last week where I mentioned that 20 years ago, on Usenet of all places, people were saying that due to the growing size of corporate databases, privacy had already been dead for a long time.

22 years ago: "You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!"

17... cute. I wonder how many it is today.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#285

Post by themaninthedark »

KGIII wrote: post #31
conesus wrote: post #11

I never publicly announced this but I loved Slashdot’s friend/foe system so much that I built it as a cross browser extension for Hacker News. It’s called Hacker Smacker and it’s on GitHub. https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker Supports not only friends and foes but also friends of friends and foes of friends. Makes it easy to scan the HN homepage and comment threads and see what’s good. Much like how Slashdot’…

I have wanted HN to have a friend/foe system since I first found the site. I'd also like it to have the ability to make notes, like 'farkies' from Fark. On Slashdot, you simply add them to a friend or for list. On Fark, you get to flag them in certai colors and then leave yourself a note (other people can't see it but admins probably can) that I use to remind me of why I put them on the list. I'd like a combination o…

Slashdot is where I first read your comments, then you didn't post for a while and I found HN and you post here too!

I didn't create an account on /. since AC was easy and I mostly lurk anyway but I always enjoyed the insights that everyone brought.

I remember either around the time of the revelation of the NSA phone closets there was a guy who used to do SIGINT and he posted a bunch on how to avoid surveillance. I think he had moved to the Philippines, sometimes what happened to him.

Just wanted to say hi and that you seem like an interesting guy!

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#286

Post by cjbprime »

heroprotagonist wrote: post #238
zo1 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but there is no way that I'm aware of to whitelist (or blacklist!) specific channels on youtube. And thanks to HTTPS, I can't even intercept + modify youtube pages at the network level. Thank you, privacy folks, hope you're happy! Alternatively, there is always kids.youtube.com which is weirdly just an app for Ios/Android. I haven't tried it, and myself have actively disabled/removed all Youtube from bein…

I haven't tried it, but it should be possible to MITM SSL for your own machines since you have control over trusted certificate authorities. There might be a better article if you search deeper than I did to come up with a quick link, but here: https://blog.heckel.xyz/2013/07/01/how-to-use-mitmproxy-to-r...

I haven't tried it either, but many big name sites use certificate pinning to avoid the attacking form of this MITM.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#287

Post by taneq »

mindcrime wrote: post #260
thefalcon wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22 years ago: "You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!"

Not a great movie in the traditional sense, but they hit on some important stuff. I loved when the one fed was reading from the Hacker Manifesto... This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you cal…

> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons

This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#288

Post by ktta »

Alex3917 wrote: post #276
brandnewlow wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, along with a lot of people, joined HN in 2008 after Techcrunch wrote about it. That's pretty close to "Group 2 joins" and yet 9 years later HN persists!

I get the feeling a lot of group #1 left in between 2010 and 2012. There are still tons of folks here who made accounts on day one, but a lot of the more conservative or libertarian leaning folks seem to have migrated to other communities around that time.

>other communities

lobste.rs ?

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#289

Post by dredmorbius »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #274
dredmorbius wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are platforms which can and do survive. HN, despite bumps, does pretty well. Metafilter is another that seems to be kicking along. Others tend to become Generation Ships of the founder culture. I'd put the Well in that category, as the userbase still seems to be strongly focused on the original cohort. Some fresh blood is necessary. Actually: the idea of a university as an intentional community that tends to su…

The platforms that survive tend to be either incredible focused around a certain niche (ycombinator), or heavily moderated with a strong editorial hand (metafilter). Slashdot is still limping on as a much less interesting site since it had money behind it but places like Kur05hin (however it was spelled) and its ilk quickly imploded. People like to complain about heavy-handed moderation but all the experiments to try…

I'm coming to agree there's no substitute for effective moderation.

And despite occasional (and strong) disagreements with dang and sctb, they do a really good job on HN.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#290

Post by bradleyjg »

kazinator wrote: post #266
shortoncash wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have time for Natalie; I'm fretting over Netcraft's confirmation that BSD is dying.

I'm dreading the first of those Microsoft Halloween documents that are going to be leaked soon, all about how WSL will wipe out GNU/Linux.

2018 is going to be the year of free as in speech GNU/hurd on the desktop. M$ is shaking in thier boots.
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