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bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de

University of Kent

http://www.textfiles.com/news/hackpape.hac
"As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ... In the middle of Stanford University there is a large concrete- and-glass building filled with computer terminals. When one enters this building through the glass doors, one steps into a different culture. Fifty people stare at terminal screens. Fifty faces connected to 50 bodies, connected to 50 sets of fingers that pound on 50 keyboards ultimately linked to a computer. If you go further inside, you can discover the true addicts: the members of the Establishment. These are the people who spend their lives with computers and fellow "hackers". These are the members of a subculture so foreign to most outsiders that it not only walls itself off but is walled off, in turn, by those who cannot understand it. The wall is built from both sides at once. ... Even if we ignore the costs to society as a whole, we have to look at the costs to the people involved. The computer is a modifier of personalities. It is highly addictive. People who gain this addiction for a period of several months tend never to give it up. And the symptoms are very sad. ..."

That was from 1980, when I first read it in high school (on a timeshared computer terminal. :-) It was a good warning, even as it ignores that certain types of people (especially introverts) may be more attracted to certain forms of activity, whether as a bookworm or a hacker. Too bad it did not mention vitamin D deficiency disease and vegetable deficiency disease and the need for treadmill workstations (among other good things it does say. :-)

See also:
    "Supernormal stimuli: how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose"
    http://books.google.com/books?id=HQlg3rQquUoC

And:
    "How to escape The Pleasure Trap !"
    http://drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

And:
    "Rat Park: A study on the role of stress as the cause of addictive-seeming behavior"
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3011 (replace Yahoo! w/ Google)

So there's an easy way of solving this: somebody just needs to figure a way of getting Tetris exhibited in a gallery, and problem solved.

Screw Tetris -- I miss loading ANSI.SYS, connecting to various BBSs and watching the terminal scroll all the beautiful ANSI / ASCII (actually CodePage 437) art at 14.4Kbps. I spent months designing artwork & animations in with cp437 + ANSI for my own BBS, clearly some was trash or utilitarian, but many others were beautiful art. Hell, I even created a multi-player Tetris door game for my BBS using ANSI to update the movements (the line noise interspersed randomly created beautiful abstract art that put elephant or even monkey made paintings to shame).

Just recently I figured out how to change the Linux terminal to codepage 437 & "watched" my old BBS graphics, and tons more art from the archives. (Hint: I Use a small Perl script to read chars from the file and output them to the terminal at the desired bitrate for better emulation -- use an actual VT, not the terminal emulator).

Yes, ANSI art has been on exhibit (some even with custom built scolling picture frames), so it is indeed (by your definition) art.

Some links with pics from some of the exhibits: aitek dh foxgirl1 foxgirl2 t12 joe grand skully doug pinguino

I posit that if some moron converts digital photos to push-pin by number, and manually fills pixels according to the computer's algorithm, and that gets considered "art"; Then ANSI / ASCII graphics (manually filling text cells with color & symbols to make pictures WITHOUT THE COMPUTER TELLING YOU WHAT TO COLOR WHERE) must be art too.

If novels can be "art", then look no further than old text adventure games, or MUD door games to prove that games can be art.

A computer that understands this.

It loosely meets the definition of a virus. It wasn't the first computer virus. It isn't very noteworthy, other than it was the first known computer virus which the author(s) took full credit, and provided their real names and accurate contact information. We have other words for this type of software now. You might even call it copy-protection, or DRM, today.

Computer viruses started off as an academic exercise. In other words, the goal was to create a self-reproducing program with survival instinct, similar to that of a real-world virus. According to Mark Ludwig's Little Black Book of Computer Viruses, the functional elements of a Computer Virus follow in the list below. I highly recommend the book, for anyone interested

1. MUST contain a search routine. Important for both self-replication, and survival. Where and how will the virus replicate?
2. MUST contain a copy routine. This is the self-replication part, and its obviously important for the survival to the virus.
3. SHOULD contain anti-detection routine(s), or somehow evade detection. Obviously important to the survival of the virus.

Number 3 is really what separates a true "virus" from programs which are mislabeled as such. If the virus displays a message "I'm in your computer eating your data, nom nom nom!", it limits its own effectiveness. The virus will get eradicated, it will not survive in the wild. Which comes back to my point about this story. While this program loosely meets the definition of a virus, it was not written to be a self-reproducing entity with simulated survival instinct. It was primarily intended to prevent unauthorized copying. Its impact was limited to floppy disks with unauthorized copies of the program it was intended to protect from copying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)

http://pdf.textfiles.com/academics/wilyhacker.pdf

The article has stuff not in the book. He was briefly used as an expert-(news)-commentator on hacker things. After a week he was no-more-to-be-seen. My bet is he was just too wacky for the average American viewer to find credible. Or Clifford gave it up as he vieweed the "news" as too wacky to be credible. Hm.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
This man goatse'd Myspace.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1376
With charts!

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
This man goatse'd Myspace.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1376
With charts!

No kidding.

Wikipedia tried to hush up scandal after scandal after scandal. The Durova "hit-list" scandal. The Essjay scandal. The "Jimmy was cleansing his girlfriend's wikipedia page" scandal. The "Jimmy was embezzling money" scandal. The Wikia/Wikimedia financial embezzlement scandal. "Sam Blacketer", Sockpuppet Admin. Wikipedia Scanner's revealed abuses. The Siegenthaler scandal. Gary Weiss as "Mantanmoreland" and Wikipedia administrators' refusals to investigate and accept evidence on the problem.

The ongoing behavior of the harassing, abusive assholes who call themselves "administrators" on Wikipedia and operate in ways that have been well documented, over and over again.

Why don't people donate to Wikipedia? Let's face it, if Wikipedia deserved it - if it were a worthwhile institution - they wouldn't be nearly having this much trouble. But they don't deserve it, so people don't donate. It's really that simple.

Right, because no one's ever considered doing this before. Especially not in the UK!

To answer your question: http://www.textfiles.com/underconstruction/

I just wanted to say thanks for pointing that video out to me. I had never heard of Jason Scott and I found his talk very interesting, even though it was over an hour long. I'll definitely be checking his site out: http://textfiles.com/.

just talked about this in his defcon talk, "You’re Stealing it Wrong" http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2714

Even as much as I love classic arcade games, I haven't seen the movie. Everything I've read about the movie casts it as over-edited to the point of being fictionalized. Here's just one such review.

Perhaps this is a timely link: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717

I found out the hard way when mp3 dot com went down. I wish I did a batch download of the artists I had bookmarked. Alot of good music was lost when that site imploded.

That King of Kong "documentary" was very loose with the facts to make the story more fun and the "villain" in the movie more evil: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1303

My advice is coming late in the thread, but I hope the submitter gets it:

The first person I would talk to is Jason Scott of textfiles.com. He collects old BBS files and some hardware. He would be able to give you some tips on the system or put you in touch with someone who can.

And if you do manage to get the data without his help, please send it to textfiles.com anyway so the world has access to it.

ASCII art is one of these things that has been around since the dawn of telecommunications and just won't go away. There's always groups of people who think it's cool. Jason Scott (of textfiles fame) as a nice video (actually about porn in the computer age) that shows fine examples of early ASCII and typewriter art.

Bambi Meets Godzilla for the VT100/ANSI terminal crowd...

This is why I run a beater. Much simpler to just swing and let the spellchuckers throw over you, so long as there's a healer that can raise you without comps, or someone who will bestow some PoY to de-age you after. Sucks to die old.

I've always run Ninjas in Avatar, an old NovaNET game (now on cyber1,apologies for /.ing them) which I started in on in about 1985 or so (hard to remember when). I know Jim, and I was the first of the =mainei signons to get whacked, having offended many UICU ops, admins, and profs with my political views in =events (at the time UICU was infested with leftists, Marxists, and socialists. Probably still is.)

I still play Avatar on cyber1, God forgive me, and I'm in my third year of learning to manage a healer and wizard. But I digress...

This is the age-old problem in all role-playing games. How 'realistic' do you want your fantasy?

Realisticaly, you would be an unusual specimen if you could in fact master all three major classes. Just the time needed to build knowledge and physique makes it impractical, as if fantasy is realistic at all. So games that enforce the three-class paradigm make sense. But more to the point, most good role-playing games are founded on team building.

Think about it. Playing D&D with just you, the all-powerful master, and a DM who tries to make you dead, and no one else? Pointless. A decent weekend playing D&D needed about a dozen people. Someone had to get pizza, beer, and toilet paper. Cmon, man.

So team play had to, from the beginning, be designed in. Best way to do that is to divide skills so that you need at least two on a team to survive surprise encounters, and of course three or more to challenge demigods. How many to thrash a boss? This is why I'm not the least into WoW or any of that, though Diablo II almost got my attention.

At some point, these games devolve into simple (?) problem-solving, and while the graphics are pretty, they genuinely never match up to my imagination. The last interation of Avatar on NovaNET statted off with a detailed description of many things, suchas the dungeon, monsters, and player characters. Well, I always thought Wyvern Skin was not very stinky, and there were LOTS of monsters taller than 9 feet. And the dungeon was sometimes pretty clean, and sometimes pretty nasty, and it didn't matter now deep you were. But telling me what the writers' concepts were was not good. Avatar is a graphics-challenged game. You needed an imagination if you were the least into fantasy.

Now, Avatar on cyber1 is dominated by problem-solvers, who cruise the bottom to find the next insanely great thing. And I run a beater because, sadly, I don't have to time to be part of a team and do more stuff. So my challenges are to survive surprises with really harsh monsters, beat down the rich ones, amass the next billion in gold, and find a damned RoTP please, if you don't mind, there has to be ONE MORE LEFT, ok?

The class complaint is just another variation on 'I want to be all-powerful'. Many a DM punished those who expressed that sentiment in their presence. No different with the video versions.

Good luck, and good hunting.

I googled for Jesse Hirsh, and I did not find the Unauthorized access of a computer link anywhere in the first 10 pages of the results.

I doubt he has anything to worry about.

"No scientist would ever - ever - delete raw data, at least without a gun to his or her head."

Cough. The NASA Apollo tapes? The ones found under a staircase in Australia with a sign saying "beware of the leopard"?

After about Apollo 14 it seems even the scientists were bored with the whole moon landing thing.

Also Princeton apparently doesn't keep very good historical records either.

"You'd think somebody must be writing a history of the Institute. You'd think there would be some records of what the seminars were, but I'm told that as far as records go, the records of our physics here at the university are in a shambles. The wastebasket is full of stuff at the place up on Nassau Street where the university archives are. So if somebody following up the lead of this morning's paper decides to shred all of those, there will be no earthquake that I know of. I don't know anybody who's working with those papers or organizing them."
-- John Wheeler, oral interview, 1994. http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/5908_9.html

I have this impression of scientists as a bunch of ADD eight-year olds hopped up on lemonade. That's historical data! Don't care about that! Only old people like the past! Onto something newer and cooler now! Grant monies kthx!

Unfair I know, but sheesh. Forgetting how we got the science we have bugs me. Sometimes going back and re-analysing old raw data with a new methodology can lead to very different conclusions, and sometimes the people running the labs at the time weren't all squeaky clean saint-geniuses. Even in the 'hard' sciences like physics, especially post WW2 with all the atomic secrecy and government money. Wheeler elsewhere in that interview series observes that even all the scientists working on the H-bomb and fusion didn't know what each other were doing, and some still can't talk until their classification expires. So reanalysis of old data in the light of new knowledge can be very very important.

We're salvaging historical data in the arts. The BBC purged old Doctor Who tapes, and most of the tapes of Metropolis the movie were lost but one was recently found. Jason Scott at http://www.textfiles.com/ is salvaging 1980s computer history. So we should be pushing for the same level of data preservation in science.

I just read the file and there isn't anything in there that would cause any reasonable person cause to not trust you.

The only way that would come up is if they were looking to fire you/not hire you anyways.

My official arrest record is worse then that and it's never hurt me.

Of course, posting it on Slashdot means you didn't learn anything from the event, or that you are just fishing for attention.

http://textfiles.com/politics/SPUNK/sp001201.txt

Now people will be able to more easily find it.

Jake Baker http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Baker http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/CHN/time1.txt

It is also fairly likely that it is in this section:

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/

Here is the offending file on textfiles.com:

I found it by doing a search on google for "site:textfiles.com university computer system" and it came up as the first match

The Anarchives

In early march of 1995 I was arrested for "Unauthorized Use Of A Computer". (About 15 years ago)

I was being accused of breaking into the computer systems at the University Of Toronto for the purpose of publishing "Anarchist newsletters".

---------------

Doing a little bit more research shows that Jesse Hirsh is also a contributor to Slash Code:

http://www.slashcode.com/docs/AUTHORS

Rummage away dude:

http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/

The quality of the content is right up there with 4chan too.

Or, his name is Horror Kid

or even

Geeze I don't know. Many of the files up there are about preventing hacking too.

Or, his name is Horror Kid

or even

Geeze I don't know. Many of the files up there are about preventing hacking too.

Yep, that bad ass hacks calculators! Do you know the turmail he could have caused! He should have been sent away for a very very long time!

Most of those files were work of BBS users and can range anywhere from complete bullshit all the way to actually working stuff.

I guess you know this, but rest of slashdot could take a peek at those manuals here: http://textfiles.com/

At least they archived all the "under construction" gifs (WARNING: clicking on that link may be dangerous to your mental health.)

Ah, the wonders of a blind text search. I recognize one of them as being not an "under construction" banner, but part of a screenshot from "Ultimate Wizard", presumably extracted for a fansite that wanted to replicate UW's mainpage.

I KNEW all my years before various level editors would eventually come in handy!

At least they archived all the "under construction" gifs (WARNING: clicking on that link may be dangerous to your mental health.)

Ah, the wonders of a blind text search. I recognize one of them as being not an "under construction" banner, but part of a screenshot from "Ultimate Wizard", presumably extracted for a fansite that wanted to replicate UW's mainpage.

I KNEW all my years before various level editors would eventually come in handy!

At least they archived all the "under construction" gifs (WARNING: clicking on that link may be dangerous to your mental health.) If anyone's interested this metafilter thread has the story of the guy who created the first of these gifs about halfway in.

"Regular RAM" has neither parity nor ECC.

The original PC added a 9th bit to each byte, creating parity RAM. It was unique among personal computers at the time. None (or nearly none) of the original PC's contemporaries did this. But, since IBM did, many clones followed suit in the PC space. Macs, notably, didn't support ECC for many, many years, but if you pop open a Columbia Data Products PC, you'll see parity RAM. (Note "128K RAM with parity" in that scan.) IBM went with byte parity in part because bytes were the smallest memory unit the CPU read or wrote to the memory. With byte parity, every memory access could be protected.

This ratio of 9/8 stuck with the PC's memory system over the years, following it to ever wider interfaces. That includes the 16 bit buses of the 286 and 386SX, the 32-bit buses of the 386DX and 486, and the 64 bit bus of the original Pentium. While many manufacturers made the byte parity optional as a cost saver, it was still rather common.

Once you get to 64 bits, you have 8 extra parity bits for a total memory width of 72 bits. This is enough bits to implement a single-error correct, double-error detect Hamming code on the 64-bit data. As long as you always read or write in multiples of 64 bits, you can also generate the Hamming code on writes and check it on reads.

Note that caveat: "As long as you always read or write in multiples of 64 bits." By the time you get to the 486 era, on-board L1 caches started to become standard equipment. Caches can turn a single byte read or write into a multiple byte line-fill (assuming they do read-allocate and write-allocate). They can also make writes wider. In write-back mode, they tend to write back the entire cache line if any portion was updated. In write-through mode, they could theoretically package additional bytes from the cache line to go with whatever bytes the CPU wrote to get to a minimum data size. (I don't know if the 486 or Pentium actually did this, FWIW. I'm speaking of general principles of operation.)

The combination of caches and wider buses made ECC practical for PC hardware starting with the Pentium. That's why you started to see it in that time frame and not before.

BTW, the error rate for individual DRAM bit flips should increase as the bits get smaller. It doesn't surprise me that your Pentium Pro's bits never flipped. It was probably built around 16 megabit DRAM chips, or maybe 64 megabit. If you compare a 16 megabit DRAM chip to a 1 gigabit DRAM chip of the same physical size, the bit cells on the gigabit chip are 1/64th the size. That means far fewer electrons holding the bit. As you can imagine, that might increase the likelihood of error per bit. Google's study didn't show an increase in error rate across memory technologies, but its window of memory technologies didn't stretch back 15 years to the Pentium Pro era.

There's also just the total quantity of memory. Your Pentium Pro system probably had at most 128MB. Compare that to a modern system with 4GB. A 4GB system has 32x the memory of a 128MB system. Even if the per-bit error rate remained constant, there are 32x as many bits, so 32x as many errors. Modern systems also implement scrubbing, meaning they actively read all of memory in the background looking for errors. Older systems just waited for the CPU to access a word with a bad bit to raise an error. This also makes the observed error rate drastically different, since many errors would go by unnoticed in a system without scrubbing, but would get proactively noticed (and fixed) in a system with scrubbing.

FWIW, I run my systems these days with ChipKill ECC enabled and scrubbing enabled. Not taking chances. I'll give up 3-5% on performance since most of the time I won't notice it.

When people write like that about the Wikipedia and go on and on, they usually have some personal axe to grind. Do you, and if so, which one?

When people respond like that, it's usually a sign they're a brainwashed wikipidiot.

What's my issue? I have watched countless articles, worked on hard by tireless individuals, turned into rubbish by a combination of morons, power-hungry game players, and organized POV-pushing mobs. I've watched excellently written and researched articles destroyed, turned into stubs, and then deleted by 16-year-old "administrators" who don't know what a scholarly journal is and believe that if they can't get the text on the internet, it doesn't exist.

I've watched scandal after scandal after scandal when the "inner workings" of wikipedia were exposed. I watched the entire crop of Wikipedia's admins stand by and do absolutely jack crap while Essjay rose up, blocked the publication of truthful information on the strength of falsified credentials, banned whoever the fuck he pleased, and generally made a bigoted douchebag of himself before finally being exposed for a liar and a fraud.

Was there ever an apology to the number of people Essjay libeled? Those he banned from the encyclopedia that didn't deserve it?

Where has there ever been an apology made for the constant misbehavior of ANY wikipedia administrator for that matter? Not only has there not been one, the trend in changes has always been consolidation of power and elimination of any ability for editors falsely accused and abused by the abusive personalities that consist of Wikipedia's "admin" group to speak back in their own defense.

There hasn't, not once. Even trying to investigate whether people were treated fairly and within policy is usually grounds for being called a "troll" and summarily banned by the abuse-defenders. Wikipedia is hopelessly broken as long as the entrenched douchebags are in power.

No kidding.

The problem is the incestuous "culture" - or more to the point, the haves-and-have-nots attitude of the majority of their administrators and so-called "respected users" - that works on the basis of gaming the system.

Words by a former wikipedia administrator that showed me how their system really works. And then of course there's scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal (the last one is incredible fun, too... if you think that's the only secret organizing list for abusive wikipedians, admin or no, you're delusional).

Wikipedia doesn't work. It hasn't worked for a long time and I don't think it ever really did. It has horrible bias against anyone who is a verifiable expert in their field. It has MASSIVE problems with cliques going around pushing their agendas and claiming that anyone new coming to an article or set of articles on their favorite topic (global warming, middle eastern conflict/culture, scientology, etc). If you show up with well-researched refutals to the crap that is 99% of wikipedia, you are labeled a "troll", or abused, or targeted by one of their throwaway accounts so that a friendly behind-the-scenes admin can slap an indefinite ban on you. This is deliberate: 20 newcomers to an article might be able to outweigh the morons pushing bad information, but as long as they can pick them off one at a time, they "win" in the wikipedian system.

A few wikipedians have been there "Forever." They'll never go away. More have been there "A very long time" and have developed incestuous, corrupt relationships with each other and with the "forever" types. Meanwhile, anyone new coming in is instantly accused of being a "sockpuppet", "meatpuppet", or whatever other epithet can be thrown at them.

It's no coincidence that the "Checkuser" tool, which was originally ripped out of David Gerard's corrupt grasp after a series of false-attack incidents (privately hushed up, naturally) has on en.wp been removed from the ability to "prove innocence." The accusation of "sockpuppetry" is an abuser's tool of force, pure and simple. In the Wikipedia "judge, jury, and executioner" administrator zone, any tool that could prove someone is innocent is to be neutered as soon as possible.

The statistics on blockings/bannings and responses to them are likewise hidden. Why? Because analysis of these shows what really goes on. Most administrators don't bother to communicate with users when placing a block. They drop indefinites immediately with no remorse, using wikispeak code rather than plain language. The "appeal" process is a laughable joke as well, with maybe 5-8 active "reviewers" who basically use it as a stress-relief tool, beating up on people who are helpless (because they don't have the admin bit) to begin with.

Face it. Wikipedia is worthless with the current "leadership." All the good editors and conscientious administrators were driven away long ago.

The problem for me isn't censoring the internet per se, but rather that censorship often branches into the realms of legal (but not necessarily attractive to the majority of people - think fetish sites for example) activity and can crush freedom of speech.

All too true, I'm afraid. Not that I'd cry over a few blocked fetish sites in particular but if I want to learn how to make a hydrogen fuel cell, or hell, how to make a bomb, I want that info to be online and as easily accessible as any cookie recipe. Yes, bombs are bad. Does that mean that all us geeky MacGyver fans are terrorists who should be surveilled and controlled?

So, what do you want? A lawless place with its inherent risks and joys, or a gated community that forces you to leave the toilet seat down, always say please and thankyou, and kicks you out if you walk on the grass? Give me the lawless any day.

Slashdotters seem to be under the impression that it's one or the other, dictatorship or anarchy. Well it's not! Speeding or driving while intoxicated is hardly more legal than watching child porn and yet we don't have special tire-slashing patrols ensuring that no drunk driving or speeding can happen. Ok, car-related analogy (or whatever that was) done. My point is, rules can be enforced in cyberspace as much as in meatspace (yes, I know we all hate that word). In meatspace though, there are strict rules on how rules can and should be enforced. The law doesn't allow cops to go around giving people preemptive beatings to remind us they are there. Similarly, howstuffworks.com, textfiles.com, freakforum.nu (norwegian, retarded), /. and other such pages should never be blocked because I might find info there that I might use to build a bomb.

If I do, however, build a bomb and blow up a school and the police make a lawful arrest and get a by-the-book, fair warrant for my computer gear (and logs, where possible).. Sure, my computer can count as evidence (if I'm dumb enough to leave traces on it) every bit as much as if I had planned the attack with pen-and-paper and the cops found that. What they absolutely can't do is regulate and moderate the entire net so I can't find info that isn't in itself illegal but might help me make something that actually is. That would be like out-lawing toothbrushes because one could use them to make a shiv.

If crocs could somehow work space travel into their lifestyle, this could lead to something...

Have you met the Clathrans?

I mean, if they got their way, completely. What would happen? Anyone motivated enough could find an exploit of their own and hack anyone else. But presumably this would eradicate the script-kiddie element as it would require an element of skill.

It goes back to an amplified version of the old BBS philez days. Except now they're not historical curiosities but relevant instructions as the exploits they describe remain current. At least, for a short while.

Since we're not falling back to the old analog MODEM days, but remaining here in the current Internet era, these tutorials will be just as distributed as they are now. They'll be fed in to the underground community instead of the general public. But in the Internet era, that underground community is much more connected and vast. The only limiting factor will be the rate of trickle-down as a zero-day spreads from the inner circles to the general community.

Of course, there's money to be made on this information. Malware markets and security vendors will both eagerly offer bounties for the information while attempting to cultivate direct contacts / placement in those communities. Once malware is developed on a new exploit, security vendors will analyze it to update their software. And in kind, once security vendors update their software, malware marketers will analyze patches / releases and develop malware seeking to take advantage of the adoption curve.

In short, we'll cycle through the 80s and 90s up to today's environment in record time. With arguably more chaos.

Yeah, except it confuses integers and floating points on PowerPC. Try running Lavacap on x86 under DOSBox, and it'll run fine: on the first level, the score requirement is 360 points.

Try the same on the PowerPC version of DOSBox, and it'll tell you that your score needs to be 359.99999999999...

Call me when they pay me to view porn _and_ read Slashdot.

1) Go to work.
2) Browse Slashdot at -1 and read all the trolls.
3) PROFIT!

The copypasta of the old cDc article featuring Debbie Gibs0n and T1ffany was fucking epic.

I had the same "fun" with the Atari ST long ago.
http://cd.textfiles.com/806atari/501-600/577/AMULTI13.FLD/AMULTI.DOC

I concur: The argument 'it's not Free' is rather rubbish, because the public doesn't give a shit.

A far better argument is this one: you have no control over your data if the company goes under and you aren't paying them. I refer you to these excellent two web posts by Jason Scott: Fuck the Cloud and Dancing on Magnolia's Grave: Fuck the Cloud II.

Seriously, if you don't use Flickr Pro, don't keep anything on there where you don't have a backup. Et cetera.

I concur: The argument 'it's not Free' is rather rubbish, because the public doesn't give a shit.

A far better argument is this one: you have no control over your data if the company goes under and you aren't paying them. I refer you to these excellent two web posts by Jason Scott: Fuck the Cloud and Dancing on Magnolia's Grave: Fuck the Cloud II.

Seriously, if you don't use Flickr Pro, don't keep anything on there where you don't have a backup. Et cetera.

First thing was to copy over my BBS news server and database from a Convergent Technologies MiniFrame to a big shiny 486 linux server. http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/BBSLISTS/bbucket9201s.txt

Holy shit, no wonder it's awesome. I'd forgotten all about CDC. The next flu pandemic story is a textbook opportunity for the +5, Troll accomplishment.

There are people collecting this kind of malware and reading their descriptions for fun. F-Prot (for DOS) even had a special setting for them as "virus collection".

It is a work of professional evil genius, no issue on that. I know 2 more viruses who were particularly interesting and probably was written just because they can. No kind of money involved.

They are MSDOS-GoldBug which does amazing things like hiding in video cards memory and Win32.Hybris which is a state of art code hopefully no virus/malware developer will never achieve again. To give a clue about the complexity of code, it didn't bother with users addressbook to grab new mail addresses, it basically watched the tcp stream of windows for mail-like addresses.

BTW, here is Goldbug description http://www.textfiles.com/virus/gold-bug.txt . This is Hybris http://www.viruslist.com/en/VirusList.html?page=0&mode=1&id=4112&key=00001000130000100044

Jason Scott of textfiles.com has a nice take in Fuck the Cloud