Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons
Now that the founders of The Pirate Bay have been thrown in a deep and dark dungeon, maybe you should watch a documentary about the current state of copyright and culture, which is free for download at… The Pirate Bay, but I suggest you start here.
Stream the full feature in high quality.
My first contact with the electronic world would be back in the early 90s when I was driving my parents nuts with towering phone bills and hours spent behind the computer browsing various BBS’s and later logging on the Internet. BBS’s (Bulletin Board System) are an ancient way of sharing software, textfiles, pictures, etc. I used to log on to them using a 2400 baud modem, which was pretty far out back then and it was fun seeing the technology improve up to the point where I’m posting my own bullshit on my own website with pretty much unlimited bandwidth. No more waiting around for that hot p0rn picture to show on my screen.
Now, since this is an ancient technology, people are bound to forget about it. It’s hardly used anymore and the Internet ate everything so someone (actually the owner of textfiles.com) came up with the idea of directing a documentary about the wildly entertaining world of Bulletin Board Systems. The end product is roughly 5,5 hours long and they released it on DVD. Here’s a bl0rb from the website mentioned above:
In the Summer of 2001, Jason Scott, a computer historian (and proprietor of the textfiles.com history site) wondered if anyone had made a film about these BBSes. They hadn’t, so he decided he would.
Four years, thousands of miles of travelling, and over 200 interviews later, “BBS: The Documentary”, a mini-series of 8 episodes about the history of the BBS, is now available. Spanning 3 DVDs and totalling five and a half hours, this documentary is actually eight documentaries about different aspects of this important story in the annals of computer history.
* Baud introduces the story of the beginning of the BBS, including interviews with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who used a snowstorm as an inspiration to change the world.
* Sysops and Users introduces the stories of the people who used BBSes, and lets them tell their own stories of living in this new world.
* Make it Pay covers the BBS industry that rose in the 1980’s and grew to fantastic heights before disappearing almost overnight.
* Fidonet covers the largest volunteer-run computer network in history, and the people who made it a joy and a political nightmare.
* Artscene tells the rarely-heard history of the ANSI Art Scene that thrived in the BBS world, where art was currency and battles waged over nothing more than pure talent.
* HPAC (Hacking Phreaking Anarchy Cracking) hears from some of the users of “underground” BBSes and their unique view of the world of information and computers.
* Compression tells the story of the PKWARE/SEA legal battle of the late 1980s and how a fight that broke out over something as simple as data compression resulted in waylaid lives and lost opportunity.
* No Carrier wishes a fond farewell to the dial-up BBS and its integration into the Internet.
But that’s not all, folks. The same dude came up with the idea to do a documentary on text-based adventure games. Yep. That is probably even MORE ancient; you can find info about it here. Jason Scott is still digging up the fossils so the work is still in progress but it promises to be something interesting, especially for all those geeks out there who used to spend hours during the night typing shit like: “get key” or “go east”.
In vervolg op mijn eerdere post over de World of Warcraft 2.1.0 patch die ik zeer genereus, al zeg ik het zelf, op 100mbit ter download geef, even deze opmerkelijke constatering:
Verbazend grafiekje. Hoewel het geen drama is, had ik niet verwacht dat er zo veel verkeer op af zou komen dat ik tegen de 8GB per dag zou gaan duwen, dus besloot ik maar even te loeren waar dit allemaal vandaan komt.
# grep -c "GET /tmp/wow/WoW-2.0.12" access.log
23756
# grep "GET /tmp/wow/WoW-2.0.12" access.log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -10
882 89.152.88.79
1069 81.86.143.98
1172 70.70.139.223
1227 84.122.155.219
1347 81.215.185.183
1478 218.167.19.85
1772 88.246.82.99
1859 189.140.215.150
2684 88.243.202.16
2935 83.18.78.75
Verbazingwekkend. Waarom zou je 2935 keer die patch downloaden? En waarom zie ik een-en-dertig!! unieke IP adressen die meer dan 100 keer die patch gedownload hebben?
Het mooiste is misschien nog wel dat het IP 83.18.78.75 [dsl van tpnet.pl] wel 2935 maal die patch download, maar maar 21 hits op Kutwereld.com heeft weten te maken.
Wat een ontzettend vaag verhaal!
Soms kan je best lachen om serieuze mailinglists:
> Here is a way to send spam from your server:
> telnet mail.jreality.com 25Interesting! telnet per se is not running on the server. This must be a telnet buried in exim. Is this correct? If so, how can it be turned off? Or is it crucial to exim operation so that turning it off is unwise? This seems like a big security hole.
Steeds vaker zie ik filmpjes langskomen waarin een soort van nieuwe ’slimme’ input-techniek wordt tentoongespreid.
Eyecandy? Of stiekem toch ook wel handig? Nuttig of niet, het is wel erg vet dat ze bezig zijn met datsoort zaken. Zo ook dit nieuwe onwijs intuitieve ‘instrument’, genaamed Reactable (sources available!).
Botte shit dus.
Mind your ears though. Dem dere be pretty techy sounds! Yo momma won’t like dat. :-)
Tijd voor tech-talk. Tech talk? Ja, tech talk.
Ik wil jullie graag een truukje leren waarmee je ‘veilige wachtwoorden’ kan verzinnen, die toch relatief simpel te onthouden zijn.
Je kent het wel, kom je op je nieuwe werk, hebben ze alvast accounts voor je aangemaakt met van die wachtwoorden die nergens over gaan: heiF6me5, AeThe3Ee of GeX8eTho ofzo.
