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Maybe you should do a little research first. As seeing as I know the guy who started the whole group back in the 1980's (something that Wikipedia's admins and users voting in the VfD continued to not believe as they deleted the article) and having access to some of their old content, I think I know what I "mean".

In regards to their trolling activities, your reply PROVES that ideology constantly gets in the way of Wikipedia. One of the many reasons stated in the VfD is that "trolls" do not deserve to be noted in Wikipedia. This shows an inability for people to distance themselves from ideological viewpoints and common social attitudes. If Wikipedia states to be "NPOV" then I would expect it to actually be NPOV. But of course, Wikipedia is trying to be a psuedo-"democratic" encyclopedia where everyone gets a say. Being objective an NPOV is obviously exclusive to appealing to masses of people who do hold differing attitudes.

This blog entry by Jason Scott made that same point really well, I think.

http://www.textfiles.com/survival/

This technique must be usable on most keyboards, because judging from this the FBI sometimes uses (or has used in the past) this technique. From the page:

Audio surveillance. This method is a variation of Attack #4. FBI technicians install an audio bug near your computer. The sounds generated by the keyboard can be analyzed. By comparing these sounds with the noises made during generation of a known piece of text, the FBI can often deduce your passphrase - or come so close that only a few characters need to be guessed.

Oh and by the way, that page was written in 1998, so these UC-Berkley students (and the /. editors) are about 7 years slow.

Ehh, please don't use lame windoze rubbish like Melissa and ILoveYou as examples of some bygone golden age. Mention something with a bit of substance, like the Morris worm, Zalewski's WormNet, Creeper or even Shockwave Rider.

" Both of those words you mentioned apply to phenomena that never existed before. "
Not really.
Blogging:
The only thing relatively new about blogging is the content being stuff we don't care about. It's no different than what most of us did in the 90s with the NewsPro CGI script. Back then we just called them web pages, or specificly the news part of a webpage. Maybe even 'news page'.

Podcasting:
A different delivery method doesn't warrant a new name. A tv show is a tv show, whether over a cable, satalite, UHF, VHF, the internet, or on dvd/vhs. A radio show is still a radio show if you download it at a later date. Doing it over the internet is nothing new. Textfiles even has an archive of online radio shows that would now be called 'podcasts' but predate the term by years (I used to listen to hackermind back before hardware mp3 players were mainstream, and lest we not forget slashdots own geeks in space)

Spam:

I don't mind this term nearly as much, but unsolicited email and 'ads' kind of sums it up nicely.

Those who didn't miss the irony in my post may appreciate the fact that the laptops in question were manufactored by Apple. And Apple is a company founded by individuals who partook in simular activities as those that the parent poster claims would be the downfall of our society. It might be noted that these types of people are not unique in the Valley or the IT industry in general.

He's right, though. Jason Scott brags twice about how it's "Creative Commons licensed" as though that's a meaningful statement.

It's meaningful to some people. At the least, it shows I am aware of and acknowledge Creative Commons, which is an important first step.

Anyway -- look out, MPAA! Hundreds of hours of interviews with ex-BBSers? With competition like that on the horizon, the movie studios might as well just shut their doors!

The purpose of the Creative Commons license is not to shut down the movie and media industries; I'm sorry you read it that way. My own reasons for licensing my work Creative Commons were discussed in a statement I made some time ago, but the core reason was "because I want people to enjoy my work and not feel like they're suspects in a criminal case". It's a little more complicated than that, but that's what the statement is for.

I just read through a list of BBSs in my area code (courtesy this site) and it felt like reading through the obituaries.

You are speaking of the Morris Worm. You can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

It was an interesting worm in more ways than one though: it affected multiple operating systems and it used multiple paths to get into the hosts (sendmail as well as fingerd). You can read a thorough analysis here by a "respected" security guru: http://protovision.textfiles.com/100/tr823.txt

strike

The bug exploited to break fingerd involved overrunning the buffer the daemon used for input.

First off, the overwhelming majority of calls I get are commercial (usually credit cards/mortgage loan scams). So, be that as it may,

The airhorn idea is not going to work. What you really want to do is get ahold of a small amplifier...

here you go

(Disclaimer: I am not liable for anything you do with this information)

3.1.1. fingerd and gets

The finger program is a utility that allows users to obtain
information about other users. It is usually used to identify
the full name or login name of a user, whether or not a user is
currently logged in, and possibly other information about the
person such as telephone numbers where he or she can be reached.
The fingerd program is intended to run as a daemon, or background
process, to service remote requests using the finger protocol.
[Harr77] The bug exploited to break fingerd involved overrunning
the buffer the daemon used for input. The standard C library has
a few routines that read input without checking for bounds on
the buffer involved. In particular, the gets call takes input to
a buffer without doing any bounds checking; this was the call
exploited by the worm. The gets routine is not the only routine
with this flaw. The family of routines scanf/fscanf/sscanf may
also overrun buffers when decoding input unless the user
explicitly specifies limits on the number of characters to be
converted. Incautious use of the sprintf routine can overrun
buffers. Use of the strcat/strcpy calls instead of the
strncat/strncpy routines may also overflow their buffers.
Although experienced C programmers are aware of the problems with
these routines, they continue to use them. Worse, their format
is in some sense codified not only by historical inclusion in
UNIX and the C language, but more formally in the forthcoming
ANSI language standard for C. The hazard with these calls is
that any network server or privileged program using them may
possibly be compromised by careful precalculation of the
inappropriate input. An important step in removing this hazard
would be first to develop a set of replacement calls that accept
values for bounds on their program-supplied buffer arguments.
Next, all system servers and privileged applications should be
examined for unchecked uses of the original calls, with those
calls then being replaced by the new bounded versions. Note that
this audit has already been performed by the group at Berkeley;
only the fingerd and timed servers used the gets call, and
patches to fingerd have already been posted. Appendix C contains
a new version of fingerd written specifically for this report
that may be used to replace the original version. This version
makes no calls to gets.

Just for the record, my 5 and a half hour documentary (8 episodes, 3 DVDs) on Dial Up Bulletin Board Systems, which is here and can be ordered here was licensed Creative Commons. Creative Commons Attribute-Sharealike, even. And it's done me very well indeed. Financially, personally, and socially.

I'll gladly speak to any group about how I turned a profit in less than a few weeks by doing this.

In fact, just feel free to read the massive essay I wrote about why Creative Commons worked for me.

Dvorak can suck an egg.

Sure, that would work.

The fact of the matter is that are a lot of common household items that can easily be made to "blow up". Just look at Timothy McVeigh. Good luck outlawing the "raw materials" needed to make a fertilizer bomb.

If you put an emitting source in a furnace, heck, even in a campfire, how would you tell now that it is emitting? Its warmth is not noticeable.

I really have no idea what you're getting at. The rocks would have been warm to the touch. That's it. Why you think it matters that they were hot in an unfissioned furnace is beyond me. Once the pile starts fissioning, though, you'd get plenty of heat and light.

I didn't think that it was possible to feel the heating effects of radiation and survive. But it appears I am wrong, because down below ColaMan links to a site with info that seems to indicate that it happened.

Of course you can survive. Radiation doesn't melt you. It just starts breaking down the occasional molecular bond. The problem is that in the presence of a lot of radiation, your DNA is toast. Unfortunately, you won't feel those effects until the next few generations of cells begin to attempt to make use of the massive number of transcription errors.

I still think it is very unlikely alchemists were making piles (as you say). To create a criticality with materials you just find around is quite difficult. You really need enriched materials, and these are difficult to make even if you know you are making them, let alone by accident!

Basic enrichment isn't too bad. I used to have some cutesy instructions laying around for how to do it in your backyard with a few buckets. Ah, here we are. Keep in mind that you don't need the same purity for an atomic pile as you need for a bomb. Just as long as you can get enough of it (say, from the Ozark cave I linked to) and can purify it to a reasonable degree (basic metallurgy/smelting, perhaps?) then you should be able to increase the rate of fission in the materials.

Why stop 10 years ago when you can go 30 or 40?


--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org :
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !

Mr. Sharpe, the New Jersey prosecutor in the case, said that Mr. Singh had boasted to his high school friends about his ability to create the zombie networks. "It was an ego thing," Mr. Sharpe said. "Hacking in its purest form is not about compensation or about wrecking a Web site. Hacking in its pure form is to show what you can do."

Ok this was addressed a very long time ago.

Every so often people think they can simply erase a persons copyright with an eraser.

It's never been an issue.

Interview with Bill Gates
Lissen carefully to Mr Gates explain how he will prove his ownership of a given program with out need or benifit of a registered copyright.

The truth is if you regester your code to the copyright office it will make enforcing your copyright easier. However that has absolutly nothing to do with the GPL.

The GPL is simply a liccens and the ability to identify and prove code ownership is an unrelated issue.

My favorite method is the Buckets method of separating the UHF in your backyard. Quick (yeah, right), easy (if you are REALLY strong), and safe (you'll be dead when you're done)! What could be better? ;-)

I remember finding this textfile when I was a teenager back in the 80's. Never got a chance to try it out, but obviously North Korea has been trolling my old BBS...

http://www.textfiles.com/apple/PIRACY/bye.mnlghtng

#34 x The Bronze Rider 04/20/89 NJ Sysop: Hard Rock Cafe

(What happened to me)
http://www.textfiles.com/uploads/incident.txt

ANUS has been around about 15 years longer than GNAA.

Hrm. 1999? 2000? I think you're a decade or so off. All the old h/p/a/v/c BBSs not to mention Compuserve and GEnie have used "netspeak" since at least the late 80's and I imagine earlier.

It is a little hard to find old text documents, but here is one from circa 1985 entitled The History of Real K-K00L DOODS.

Of course that is when it was cool to type in all caps with only a splattering of 0's and 1's in words, BeFoRe ThE MuLtI-CAsE ThING WaS K-RaD eLiTe.

There are some great old textfiles. Including the smiley dictionary (1989/1990), The Jargon File (1990), and a post about Compuserves Online Magazine in 1989 that includes such wonderful ones as ROFL, OIC, OTOH, etc.

Hrm. 1999? 2000? I think you're a decade or so off. All the old h/p/a/v/c BBSs not to mention Compuserve and GEnie have used "netspeak" since at least the late 80's and I imagine earlier.

It is a little hard to find old text documents, but here is one from circa 1985 entitled The History of Real K-K00L DOODS.

Of course that is when it was cool to type in all caps with only a splattering of 0's and 1's in words, BeFoRe ThE MuLtI-CAsE ThING WaS K-RaD eLiTe.

There are some great old textfiles. Including the smiley dictionary (1989/1990), The Jargon File (1990), and a post about Compuserves Online Magazine in 1989 that includes such wonderful ones as ROFL, OIC, OTOH, etc.

http://artscene.textfiles.com/asciiart/ASCIIPR0N/

http://www.textfiles.com/phreak/BLUEBOXING/

I was fairly good friends w/ the author of NATAS and helped debug NATAS and some of James' other viruses during their development. I'm the dude that inadvertantly got him fired from his job in Virginia (writing a NATAS cleaner for Norman Data Defense) for coming to visit him after he was suppost to "break all ties with the computer underground" as a condition of his employment.

Around 1994, the NATAS virus stormed computers all around the world. It was the first polymorphic virus. And it was undetectable with traditional means (didn't alter the exes' CRC).

Oh, come on! NATAS wasn't the first polymorphic PC virus. It wasn't even the author's first polymorphic virus (Satan Bug was his first polymorphic virus, and a hell of a lot of fun to read if you know x86 assembler-- good for a lot of laughs). It was one of the first polymorphic viruses to use a polymorphic engine that appended the decryption code to the end of the executable, rather than appending the encrypted virus to the the decryption routine. It was a technique to make the polymorphic engine more simple, though the engine, in the end, generated code that was still reasonably "detectable".

McAffee released a new (experimental?) version of their antivirus, so that it would clean NATAS. Unfortunately, sometimes if you pressed CTRL-C, part of your programs' code would execute randomly (later, they released a completely different version, which effectively cleaned NATAS and similar viruses, without having such nasty bugs).

No, no, no! NATAS exploited a bug in some versions of Thunderbyte's TBCLEAN, which used, at the time, single-step and breakpoint interrupts to trace through an infected program until the virus restored the original execution point and jumped there, at which point it re-wrote the executable back to disk (undoing any relocations on the way) w/o the virus. The author of NATAS found a condition in which TBCLEAN could be made to execute arbitrary code, and added a "payload" to NATAS that, upon "cleaning" by this vulnerable version of TBCLEAN, would simply turn off TBCLEAN's single-step interrupt and the virus would proceed to running normally. Look for the label "anti_tbclean" in the NATAS source if you wanna know more. His Jackal virus did even nastier things when run under the vulnerable TBCLEAN version...

Here's an excerpt from George Smith's book that talks about James/Priest and a little more about his viruses. Take George w/ a grain of salt, I feel strongly that a significant fraction of the later details are crap.

An IBM 7094 sang "Daisy" in 1961. Google.

And the Theremin was patented in 1929. Wiki.

This one really tickles me. The very first pirate / phreak bbs i ever logged on to was 'The Pirates Bay' in 415. It was run by Mr Krack-Man who many of you that owned Apple ]['s will remember. He cracked many well known packages, including Print Shop.

old school

Well, we can go around and around on that. Obviously, if they have no entry fee and can take most anything shoved in, they're run kind of ad-hoc and probably rather arbitrarily. I would leave it at your essay and then move on, really. The world is full of podunk festivals, contests, "certifications", and other such constructions that end up being rather inside, arbitrary, or not-to-snuff. I'd let the game speak for itself. I'd also put some screenshots up on your site.

All this said, however... you run the fuckin' MODARCHIVE. You RULE, and get bonus points beyond all reason for doing so. I run artscene.textfiles.com, which has a mod section, but really, I know where to bow down. And for you, I do. Let me know if I can be a mirror.

"For a while, I was running a .torrent of all textfiles you could download on the textfiles.com website. It was very popular, so popular, in fact, that it was killing my bandwidth. Also, as time went on, it started to get out of sync with the files on the website itself. I guess I didn't think the whole thing through as much as I would have liked."

I think this or this should work ; P

I think this or this should work ; P

uhm, 2000 books is very few.

Project Gutenberg sports over 13,000 books (these are legal)

if you go to your local alt.binaries.ebooks or just #ebook you can easily double or triple Gutenberg count (my current library has around 30,000 books). Ofcourse would not so legal to download/own as they still would technically be under a copyright. But then, some of the books are easier to download illegaly than to get them at a library (as soon as I found out that my library has Shadow Puppets by Orson Scott Card I signed up and was waiting for over 7 months till I downloaded it).

and if are a maniac (as I am) of reading, but prefer to read legal things, then you could/should go with the lower quality writtings that are provided through various BBS archives various pr0n archives, as well as fan finction. Heck, there is even wikibooks.

What is needed is some project that makes a global internet library out of all of these resources. Where we have things rated per genre (tied with the iblist or, ugh, amazon) But for all the texts, not just published/bookstore works.

Watch it here. You need to use slowcat or it's over a little too quickly to enjoy.

Watch it here. You need to use slowcat or it's over a little too quickly to enjoy.

He draws numbers and has legions of "fans", but I have no clue why people think this guy really deserves the attention he gets and apparantly craves.

Two words: consistent output.

The world is filled with people who will gladly fire off a two-sentence refutation/dismissal of someone else's work, but it is starving of folks who will begin at square 1 and roll at some distant point in the future over the finish line.

I am attempting to feed that world. I wish you would take a shot at it too.

A long time ago, when I was particularly despairing of criticisms and jibes from folks who themselves were contributing very little else in any circles, I wrote an essay called "The Haters, The Haters", which is located here. It states quite unequivocably and more effectively than anything else I could write here, what drives me and why, faced with the vacuum of better content you present, I will move on with my projects.

He draws numbers and has legions of "fans", but I have no clue why people think this guy really deserves the attention he gets and apparantly craves.

Two words: consistent output.

The world is filled with people who will gladly fire off a two-sentence refutation/dismissal of someone else's work, but it is starving of folks who will begin at square 1 and roll at some distant point in the future over the finish line.

I am attempting to feed that world. I wish you would take a shot at it too.

A long time ago, when I was particularly despairing of criticisms and jibes from folks who themselves were contributing very little else in any circles, I wrote an essay called "The Haters, The Haters", which is located here. It states quite unequivocably and more effectively than anything else I could write here, what drives me and why, faced with the vacuum of better content you present, I will move on with my projects.

300 baud was great. I could read at 300 baud so screens would load at the perfect rate. Fortunately I was poor at the time so I couldn't spend too much time trying to download pictures from Rusty n Edie's BBS.

I even ran my own single line bbs on an Atari 800. Nothing but text files, really, mostly discussion of text adventure games. The Wolves Den, though that entry is wrong as it was in San Leandro and ran software I wrote myself.

Those were the days...if I knew then what I knew now I'd buy a lot of Microsoft stock.

clicky clicky

You mean plans like these?

Just watch out for those nasty ANSI bombs...

Well, now that you've got a cookbook, it's probably time to think about loosing weight - well for most of the slashdot readership anyway. The proper book to do so may be John Walkers The Hacker's Diet: How to lose weight and hair through stress and poor nutrition

Enjoy your memories.

All the fun of BBS textfiles without the modem.

As the administrator of TEXTFILES.COM, I can attest that it is certainly the case that modern writers who submit me works for the uploads section generally pay little or no attention to formatting along any given column length. Keep in mind that I always ask for these submissions in ASCII form, so this isn't the result of converting over from Word or StarOffice.

I think the reason I get files like this one is that people just let notepad and similar programs do the wrap for them. The fact that web browsers don't always wrap means you get some pretty funky looks.

This is not 100 percent true, of course: I've gotten submissions just this year that keep to the 80 column limit and include formatting taking advantage of it.

But on the whole, I think it's just that people no longer think of the world as sized in 80 columns, and we might as well understand that's the case. My heart will always be for the way it used to be, of course.

As the administrator of TEXTFILES.COM, I can attest that it is certainly the case that modern writers who submit me works for the uploads section generally pay little or no attention to formatting along any given column length. Keep in mind that I always ask for these submissions in ASCII form, so this isn't the result of converting over from Word or StarOffice.

I think the reason I get files like this one is that people just let notepad and similar programs do the wrap for them. The fact that web browsers don't always wrap means you get some pretty funky looks.

This is not 100 percent true, of course: I've gotten submissions just this year that keep to the 80 column limit and include formatting taking advantage of it.

But on the whole, I think it's just that people no longer think of the world as sized in 80 columns, and we might as well understand that's the case. My heart will always be for the way it used to be, of course.

As the administrator of TEXTFILES.COM, I can attest that it is certainly the case that modern writers who submit me works for the uploads section generally pay little or no attention to formatting along any given column length. Keep in mind that I always ask for these submissions in ASCII form, so this isn't the result of converting over from Word or StarOffice.

I think the reason I get files like this one is that people just let notepad and similar programs do the wrap for them. The fact that web browsers don't always wrap means you get some pretty funky looks.

This is not 100 percent true, of course: I've gotten submissions just this year that keep to the 80 column limit and include formatting taking advantage of it.

But on the whole, I think it's just that people no longer think of the world as sized in 80 columns, and we might as well understand that's the case. My heart will always be for the way it used to be, of course.

As the administrator of TEXTFILES.COM, I can attest that it is certainly the case that modern writers who submit me works for the uploads section generally pay little or no attention to formatting along any given column length. Keep in mind that I always ask for these submissions in ASCII form, so this isn't the result of converting over from Word or StarOffice.

I think the reason I get files like this one is that people just let notepad and similar programs do the wrap for them. The fact that web browsers don't always wrap means you get some pretty funky looks.

This is not 100 percent true, of course: I've gotten submissions just this year that keep to the 80 column limit and include formatting taking advantage of it.

But on the whole, I think it's just that people no longer think of the world as sized in 80 columns, and we might as well understand that's the case. My heart will always be for the way it used to be, of course.