Could we have this over https?
My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
textfiles.com
91–100 of 196 posts
Re: textfiles.com
#92Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
It feels like that, but I think the world has just become more complicated and the signal/noise ratio is different and the publishing avenues and methods are much more dispersed. Back in the BBS/Usenet days if you wanted to write a FAQ or doc on a specific topic you typically did it in one of the very few places (text file, FidoNet, usenet). Now you can create a video on Youtube, post on a major social network (Facebook group, subreddit, topic-specific forum, etc.), create your own webpage, etc.
As someone who grew up in the BBS era I am often nostalgic for it because everything felt a lot easier to grasp and much more simple, but in truth the amount of information out there and easy to access is many orders of magnitude higher these days.
Re: textfiles.com
#93Could we have this over https? My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
There are some mirrors linked on the site, some of which have https
Re: textfiles.com
#94Could we have this over https? My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
Use https://archive.org/ ?
Re: textfiles.com
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's there but I think it kind of gets lost as people lost interest in ad-hoc curation. If we arrive at a page today it's normally because some large entity with a commercial incentive brought us there via a search engine or a social network. Meanwhile, people no longer really host link pages or curate webrings. It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social ne…
Search used to rely on formalized 'ad-hoc' curation in the form of DMOZ and other web directories. Without it, SEO has become the main influence on results and search-engines are now heavily focusing on novelty and recency in the hope of turning up something that the user was actually looking for. Of course 'novelty' is the polar opposite of something like textfiles, or of many well-established online resources.
While links have in the past been used to rank webpages, it isn't strictly necessary. You could have billions of documents and still figure out which one answers a question simply with a good ML model looking at the text of the documents alone.
Re: textfiles.com
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the author had a spat on twitter a while back because of the same question. There really isn't any excuse to not have TLS on your site, even if purely to thwart MITM injection. Most arguments are BS but still keep popping up: - heavy on the CPU (not with anything after 2006) - hard to setup (not with LE + ACME) - I don't process information (that doesn't matter/is not the reason, DPI, MITM come to mind) - bro…
> unless you're using a browser from To be fair, a lot of Jason Scott's audience is people who might choose to use ancient browsers on obsolete platforms.
Doesn't that make it double-bad?
Again, people might come up with the argument that it's their own problem if they get abused, but also that is just not the reality we live in; any compromised system can (and will most of the time) be used to infect/compromise/attack other systems.
Re: textfiles.com
#97Could we have this over https? My internet connection blocks most pages of the site as "Adult content", presumably because it has bomb making instructions on, and the UK government is tetchy about that kind of thing nowadays.
If you are an adult, why would your internet connection have any reason to block it?
Re: textfiles.com
#98An important piece of the early internet. I remember when my brief submission made it to the last issue of HOE (Hogs of Ecstasy) and felt like a small celebrity.
This wasn’t even internet. Dial-up. Hardly anyone used TCP/IP or FTP or telnet ( only universities ). At home we all used software with protocols like XMODEM, YMODEM, and ZMODEM for file transfer. Everything else was plain ASCII over serial connections with modems between two devices.
Ugh I remember trying to dl files using XMODEM at 300 baud. Like maybe 10% of the time it would work. ZMODEM was a huge improvement in reliability.
Re: textfiles.com
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should poke around in gopher. Has a very dial-up BBS feel, complete with FIGlets. Here is a nice web proxy: https://gopher.commons.host/
Floodgap is the de-facto home of Gopher: https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/ If you are on Windows, I have written a nice modern gopher client: http://www.jaruzel.com/gopher/gopher-client-browser-for-wind...
Very cool, but the screenshots are really small.
Re: textfiles.com
#100The owner of the site gave a talk at DEFCON 17, "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY&ab_channel=Chris...
Finally, a talk that isn't PC sanitized..