Slashdot Mirror
Going Back To The Past of the Internet
*no comment* writes "deadly.org currently has a story about a new grassroot network springing up. It consists of free shell access, and is trying to revitalize the olden days of the Internet. Free speech, free information are the key features, but I wonder if this is jsut another free DDoS drone as well."
To give credit, I first heard this phrase coined by Steve of Secure Design Software.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Ahhhh... reminds me of dialing into various BBS's that I could get numbers for on my 8088 (When my parents had went to bed and I sneaked back down to the computer) Or making the long distance call to the nearest CompuServe node and racking up enormous phone bills (the enjoyment wasn't worth the punishment I got from my parents in return though:) )
But seriously... I loved those times... logging onto servers that you had little clue about.. seeing what was there... who was there... etc.
This seems like a good project to play around with.
... that within a few years, there'll be informal networks across the country. I can just see my apartment complex linking all the computers together via 802.11 and sharing what they got. Once you've got a network at an apartment complex (for example), then it isn't hard to link it to a neighboring complex. Anybody remember that story of the guy getting a 3-mile LOS wirless connection going in San Fran? (I may have the details wrong, but the idea mostly works..)
If/When that becomes popular, before long people'll be able to look to these informal nets when the corporate internet lets them down. Maybe I'm just fantasizing, but I do think networking has become cheap and easy enough, and I think the internet is getting regulated enough that people will have interest in doing these kinds of things.
"Derp de derp."
Ok here is the plan/possibility. Request slashdot feedback:
The idea mentioned in the story is a noble one, but what about this:
Already 801.11a-b networks are emerging. And soon UWB networks as well. What is to keep new protocols and p2p networks, and what Crngley mentioned as ad-hoc wireless mesh networks from popping up spontaneously all over the globe, and eventually having this island wireless networks start to connect and talk with each other - and before you know it - we have a whole NEW internet, one that does not go thru the big boys, one that is anarchistic, spontaneous, unregulated and wireless.
With 802.11 being built into all future chips, such a possibility seems more and more likely. Imagine the new internet - NAN's, WAN, LANS, all over the place.
Is this where things might go, or is it also doomed to invasion from large corporate and governmental forces?
www.enthea.org
I missed the good old days of the Internet by about 15-20 years or so having never really gotten into the Internet until college (fall of '95). Unfortunately I bet this just turns into a haven for IRC bots and the like.
If you are looking for something cool to be involved in and has a sense of community i'd advise checking out the 6bone (www.6bone.org), the IPV6 testbed. Everyone there is very helpful and friendly and there is a sense of some greater good. Hehe its kind of cool because not everything works in IPV6 so people are working on porting old taken for granted apps like different MTA's and other servers. I wonder if the way the 6bone folks work togather is similar to the old days of the Internet.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
Okay, we've heard your reasons for not wanting to post cache versions of /.'ed sites, but what's your explantion for allowing a site to be slashdotted when the maintainer is actively trying to avoid having his machine melted down by the slashdot effect let alone the inevitable DDOS that will follow, given the nature of his service?
At the very best, this is kinda irresponsible.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I remember my first expirence with the internet. A dialup line to a unix box, it did cost a fortune.
The amount of machines was small and there were no such thing as a web browser.
Personally I found it to be a great source of lyrics and guitar tabs in ascii format. Could find a tab for every song I wanted to play.
The signal to noise level was good since it was free for spam, ads. etc.
It had little use for my daily work, a few computer companies(like HP) had servers up where you could ftp latest patches, but mostly I had to rely on my CompuServe account to get the latest drivers and patches.
The problem I remeber with my CompuServe account was that there were no dial in lines in my country, it came later on though.
I remeber that hardly any of my friends or co-workers found it interesting, I got the account from by boss who had ordered but didn't really find any use for it.
I have always been hooked on computers my primary drive for working with them is that I like the concept of making them work for me, and when I got this fancy new internet console, it was interesting simply by the fact that could access a computer on the other side of the world. Normally one would dial a BBS locally and sometimes when one could afford the 2$ pr min. for a call to the US, I would try it with one eye on my watch.
When the place I worked at later on, got the first internet connection with the fancy new blazing fast ISDN standard(still to expensive for private users), the new mosaic browser came to my attention and we had to open up for port 80 since no one was using the connection for browsing.
I also remember something about we couldn't access all parts of the internet. There was some US backbone parts that were closed, that only got open to us because we were a goverment owned research institution so we could get access to the same lines as the US univ.
Then we started running dual IDSN and my friends had begun showing interest into that internet thing and their envy were hard to hide for them. I woked in a place where I could download with 14 kilobytes pr second!!!. Then we got our 256kb line and I had my friends visiting me at work, just to see this line where I could download with over 20 Kilobytes pr second.
Ah, and these days, no one is amazed by my 2048 Kbit ADSL line with 512Kbit upstream that I have at home....
my sig
Free love, free speech and free downloads, man... Just we'll forget to bention that back in the good ol' days the internet was primarily used as a DoD line of communication that couldn't be interupted. Yeah, fight the power!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Malda could have the slashcode automatically create a cache of the victim's site, but by default point the link to the actual site (not the cache.) Allow the webmaster several easy ways to turn caching on. Allow permission to be granted in robots.txt files! Allow permission to be granted in some slashdot form! Allow permission to be granted by email! Allow permission to be granted by phone!
Of course, none of this will be done. Slashdot's coders once tried to innovate; then they became part of a corporation. Nothing kills real progress like hopes of profit.
"Whatever happened to fair use?"
-- Duff-Man
We do something similar. We give out free "Shell" account, but rather than using *nix, we use OpenVMS. The idea is two fold. If gives people a place to play, and use a different operating system. OpenVMS is often considered one of the most secure operating sysems around. :)
IF interested, check out http://deathrow.vistech.net, or you can even
telnet to dahmer.vistech.net or manson.vistech.net.
Back in the good old days, remember when....
* 99% of the data transmitted on the net was useful informtion; now, 99% of the data transmitted on the net is porn, spam, advertisements, and useless graphics. Pretty soon, even Google won't be able to find a website that actually has text on it.
* You didn't get 1000 e-mails a day telling you about the latest greatest super-duper penis enlargment plan where you could make your penis larger just by "jilking it".
* You didn't get 1000 spam messages a day telling you about easy quick idiot-proof ways to make a million dollars in a few hours.
* The evil forces of the dark side, the raiders of the lost net, the proprietary corporate IP mongers, hadn't yet started bending the internet to their perverse Orwellian ideal of perfect control?
* News groups and message boards actually had mostly intelligent conversaion, as opposed to being flooded with, "YOU SUCK, I'M RIGHT YOU STUPID ****, EAT **** AND DIE".
* Al Gore was busy inventing the net.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
And it will exist the way you like it until it becomes noticed. I don't think the politicians have screwed it up as much as the business people have. The politicians didn't wake up one morning and say lets fuck with the internet. Business people on the otherhand did.
'Same speed C but faster'
True, True!
For me, the most nostalgic thing about the old 'net was the sense of net community. This was a feature imparted by the very small population and the very age/academia/gov't skewed user demographics at the time. I.e. a bunch of geeks noodling around online.
As universities started to open access to undergrads, the September Effect (cf. the Jargon File) came into play... which was still okay while the numbers were such that older netizens could impart netiquette to the newbies. Later, the online population explosion really started to ramp, perhaps marked by the Neverending September of AOL.
Today's Internet is a very different place socially, characterized more by microcommunities. These, ironically, were enabled by the very same massive population that engulfed the old 'net community.
It's all just been one big lesson in eternal change, AFAIC.
[With a shell account,] you wouldn't need to [haul big files] very often - you do most of your work in your shell account on the remote box, right?
Much of my current work involves image editing, audio editing, and development of interactive graphical simulations. Do those work well over SSH?
The thought process is that since you have so little bandwidth and probably less power, disk space, memory, etc. at home that there's not much point in using that computer as anything but a glass terminal, and doing interesting things only on the remote system.
I'm still unclear on some of the uses of a shell account. Let's cross-check your thought process against your list of applications:
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Not according to the AUPs of most of the free shell providers I've seen. (Free shell providers are the subject of this Slashdot article.)
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
Which is limited by the speed of the eyeballs and fingers. How is reading mail over SSH any better than reading mail over SSL'd IMAP? And unless you run a mailing list, why would sending mail need a lot of server bandwidth?
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
To what? To other people's shell accounts? Transferring big .jpg files using a shell account doesn't get them to my screen any faster.
You can run servers, read mail, send mail, transfer files around, develop software, and so on.
I assume you're just talking about logging into a remote machine to maintain a CVS repository such as on OSDN's own service. Otherwise, doesn't a fellow who develops software want a fast connection from the box where the application runs to the box where the application's display runs? That's likely to be a lot faster on localhost than on dial-up. In addition, using a programmer's text editor such as GNU Emacs or Vim over a network connection with a 200+ ms ping is a pain in the donkey.
The shell account is the network pc taken one step further, and is effective even with fairly slow networks.
Unless you want to run anything that's image or audio based and interactive. Take too much intelligence off the client, and you run the risk of having the cumulative effects of long-haul latency (speed of light across a big country such as the United States) and last-mile latency (slow dial-up connection) ruin the interactive experience. Has X11 been optimized to run efficiently over 48 kbps down, 24 kbps up?
Still, if you didn't think thin client computing was a good idea, you probably don't find shell accounts useful either.
Makers of modern network computers recognize that thin client does not mean as thin as a teletype machine's paper. They try to achieve a compromise between the shell account setup (all intelligence on the shell server; client is just a terminal or X server) and the PC setup (all intelligence on the client; only data is shared across the network) by using applets compiled to a cross-platform bytecode and run across the network. For more about this approach, look at Java(tm) technology or its competition.
Will I retire or break 10K?