121–130 of 196 posts
All hail Jason Scott. As may have said, this guy has brought so much joy by preserving and highlighting all of this content. I've known Jason for years from the old scene and was one of the old school original (uberspace) textfiles mirrors, which was hosted on a modified Cobalt Cube running NetBSD from my 22nd story apartment (Golden Gate Apartments) in SF, which at the time, happened to include free internet on a fu…
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The owner is also a totally great guy
Yep, he took the time to answer questions from highschool me more than a decade ago and he was very friendly. I'm glad everyone else seems to have had positive interactions with him also.
I appreciate when someone young or curious reaches out to me for context or questions because I did that throughout my life and I always appreciated when it was rewarded with a response. I try to be the person I always hoped was on the other side.
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The one's from 80's and 90's just grew up and dot-com era really gave more opportunities for the creative programmers. Younger people will never write on many of the topics in these files because it will land you in jail FAST. It used to be more anonymity back then. Phreaking, warez scenes were alive and well. Heck, even demoscence is not the same anymore. Anyways if you are into coding/hacking, working for a startup…
There was also a lot of motivation to phreak and trade warez due to a lack of things we'd simply take for granted nowadays, such as always-on connectivity and a widespread free-software and free-culture scene. It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at le…
The new web is commercial, monitored, controlled.
The 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...
Initial post: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/989
Post about goatse: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
More: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1012 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127
Moral: HOTLINKING BAD
I always loved this story of his: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1127 For some reason, the original is gone. That's his sequel.
I tracked down the links to the saga:
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The one's from 80's and 90's just grew up and dot-com era really gave more opportunities for the creative programmers. Younger people will never write on many of the topics in these files because it will land you in jail FAST. It used to be more anonymity back then. Phreaking, warez scenes were alive and well. Heck, even demoscence is not the same anymore. Anyways if you are into coding/hacking, working for a startup…
There was also a lot of motivation to phreak and trade warez due to a lack of things we'd simply take for granted nowadays, such as always-on connectivity and a widespread free-software and free-culture scene. It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at le…
There is a version of communism that says that people should live in a local community that helps people who need it. As long as someone who doesn't want to live that way has the reasonable option to leave, this is actually pretty hard to object to.
There is a version of anarchy that says that all laws and taxes should be at the local level and furthermore that some localities might then choose not to have any, or only the most basic ones like a prohibition on violence. It's almost the same thing -- pretty hard to object to when people have the option to exit.
What they have in common is that they can't exist when you have a central government de facto prohibiting them. There might be some real efficiencies in a commune that has its own doctors, but that doesn't really work if everybody there still has to pay twice the cost of their own community's doctors in Medicare taxes. You can't have much of an anarchist collective if the feds are still arresting anybody who tries to sell pot brownies or break DRM so they can repair their own tractor.
So people have been looking for ways to shed the yoke of central power for a long time. The US was practically founded on it, both in terms of why the revolution was fought and how the constitution was laid out, but the forces of centralization have been hacking away at those foundations and doing what they can to destroy the "laboratories of democracy" of Brandeis for a long time now.
Is it really that surprising that people were excited about a then-emerging opportunity to potentially take some of it back?
Has 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?
So I started and maintained a text BASIC programming fanzine back in 1994-1996 and.. I'm still in the business producing weekly newsletters for programmers 25 years later, except now it's my job! :-)
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.
If you are an adult, why would your internet connection have any reason to block it?
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They grew up. And the internet of books became the internet of videos. They're out there writing technical manuals, exising in middle age and earning money. Back in those days a place like textiles would be an aggregator on a fairly small internet. Most of those content types can be found with their own larger more focused niche sites.
Is it growing up? For me it’s more that everyone reads books like „How to brand yourself on the internet“ that’s why there is no personality left... the same goes for quirky software there is not much coming because everyone writes a sideproject notetaking electron app because it’s something everyone wants and can relate too. The problem with the modern web is not growing up it is the loss of personality.
Like ahlzeimers? It doesn't make sense that the graphics heavy world would have less personality than the constrained world of text.