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Investigating corrupt Winamp skins

jordaneldredge.com

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Re: Investigating corrupt Winamp skins

#22

Post by ggm »

_def wrote: post #2

Love it. I really wonder though how people ended up doing this?

Some of it was stupidity, some of it was cupidity, some of it was deliberate. The piece about people running slow IP over the text fields in the website for their frequent flyer miles homepage (accessible for free on in-flight wifi without paying for it) is an example of deliberate: I think some of this was early file sharing and warez in .. winamp skinz.

"what does this do" causes a lot of things to happen. you zip up a folder and forget the metric tonne of other files in it, which don't interfere with the prime function so just come along for the ride.

Re: Investigating corrupt Winamp skins

#23

Post by hluska »

RyanShook wrote: post #3

Was the internet better back then or am I just old?

It might be somewhere between the two. The internet was messier back in the day. It didn’t feel as corporate and there was a strong spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun. Nowadays, it seems like everyone is just trying to get paid. And that’s fine because getting paid is fun too, but the spirit has changed.

On the other hand, my eight year old is a big fan of a YouTube channel called Pilot Debrief. We just watched a documentary on the Gimli Glider and when we talked about it after, it was apparent that she has learned a tremendous amount about flying from that channel.

So for my kid, that spirit of sharing cool things because cool things are fun is still going strong. And when I experience her experiencing things like that, I’m reminded that that spirit is still out there but I’m just old.

Re: Investigating corrupt Winamp skins

#29

Post by wiseowise »

echelon wrote: post #5
RyanShook wrote: post #3

Was the internet better back then or am I just old?

You were young and not working. The world was full of new frontiers and possibilities. Young people today are on Minecraft, Roblox, VRchat, Discord, and YouTube. That's their frontier internet, and they probably feel the same way about it as you do. A Geocities website, phpBB or EZBoard, webring, Xanga, and AIM/IRC has a similar analogues today. The pieces just have different names and shapes.

That’s not the point. Modern crap doesn’t hold a candle to what we had back then.

And no, this is not the rambling of getting-older-man.

Rampant corporate control, completely sanitized internet by default, “social” networks that literally give kids https://cwi.pressbooks.pub/urj/chapter/2022-first-place-inst... mental disorders, political agenda pushed from every hole, disinformation campaigns, bots to the point where you don’t even know if you’re talking to a real person. Internet became a weapon.

Back then we an intranet within local ISP (additionally to internet access) that had a sense of community, local services, file sharing, chats, meetups which generally self moderated themselves and everyone knew each other. What do you have now? Proprietary discord chat rooms filled with degeneracy? Good luck going through that.

Say what you want, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September is real.

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