You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.
Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.
For the love of (Important Thing to You), please don't call the numbers. Look for a modern BBS list of which many are available on the net and call those, if you wish to call a BBS using a modem.
Here were the sources I used for the initial revision of the list:
1. Fidonet Nodelists. Everyone's figured that out and I credit where I got them from. I used something like 16 years of lists, so that gave a lot of information about timespan, sysop name, different BBS names, and the like.
2. The USBBS List. This was also called "The Darwin List" and was a very popular BBS list that's been around for well over a decade. I used this to import timespans as well, since in one case it would list the first year the BBS showed up on the list! Very convenient.
3. Smaller BBS lists done here and there. I found a lot of old (1991-1995) lists on the internet in searches for a couple days. This isn't old old, but it was definitely a way to get some names and numbers down. In some cases, I had BBSes that were around since the beginning of the 1980's that had survived in some form to the 1990's, and these 1990's lists had them listed, but with inaccurate (smaller) timespans.
There's probably an entire field of study for the methodology I'm using to construct the list; basically it throws out redundant information and focuses on what's new. This means that if a BBS was listed in one place as "The Slashdot BBS" and elsewhere as "Slashdt bbs", both are listed. It will take a human going through the list by hand to fix this up further. And I will do that when I get the next set of scripts ready for me to do "Housecleaning".
Congratulations on making it to the first revision of the list, but I want to stress to everyone (and I say this on the site in the FAQ) that just because you're not listed does not mean you're being excluded! It just means that I didn't find you in the first two weeks of work. Since this article came out, I've added verification, further information, and addition of over 8,000 BBSes. !!! This is from people who saw the list wasn't accurate or missed something, wanted to make things right, and mailed me corrections.
And I want everyone to know I appreciate these corrections very, very much. I also know what I'm doing for the next week.:)
An excellent story, TheDreamer. I would invite you and others to submit these stories to the site so that I can put them together on a story page, with a link from your location on the BBS list to your story, and from there to places like your lhaven.net web site which lets people see even more about your past.
If enough people did this, we'd have a real resource on our hands.
Here's my current thoughts about user comments: No and Yes.
No, I will not be putting up message bases under each BBS for people to post about. I think it would be clunky, prone to abuse, and not very helpful. There are plenty of places to discuss BBSes; my current preferred place is the 1980's BBS Discussion List which is where a bunch of people are discussing aspects of BBSes and saving the past and the good times and, well, pretty much everything you'd expect such a list to have. I think this would concentrate things a lot better... imagine the process of trying to scan for new comments on the site!
Now, what I do want are STORIES written by people who used a specific BBS or set of BBSes, so that I can put links into a "story page" that is going to be going up on the site very shortly. I think that will really encourage people to write well-thought-out essays about different places instead of just throwing out one-line messages saying "XXXX BBS was G00D" and leaving it at that. We want to remember, not throw out little one-line accolades for BBSes we all agree we liked being on.
It's a usability thing, and that's where I stand. Use mailing lists for discussions; use this list for memory and narratives.
I'm a little confused by what the Anonymous Coward is trying to say. Is the implication that bbslist.textfiles.com is some sort of beachhead to make us get rid of the Internet and return to Dial-Up BBSes?
I hope people don't think what it's about. It's about documenting and remembering the past, maybe thinking back to those times and the experiences we had. It's about coming up with a body of knowledge that exists in tiny, month-by-month fragments (buffered BBS lists) that people naturally considered throw away and bringing them together to show the universal information they provide, about all the BBSes there have been.
There is an entire other aspect to the message that is inaccurate as well; to say that no-one is putting up new BBSes and BBSes get zero callers. Not every country has bridged "the last mile" with Cable and DSL. In fact, not even the United States has done so. So in many, many places the networks such as FidoNet represent cost-effective, efficient ways to bring information to masses of computer users. They're a long way from dead...
As for the implication that might arise that this site is my way of saying the present day is worse than the past, I'd like to include a quote from... myself! Being interviewed by Wired News for this article, I made this statement:
While it all may smell suspiciously of nostalgia, Scott won't suffer those who long for the days before mom and pop showed up online.
"The one thing I don't hold truck with is people saying to me that everything's gone downhill since then, that the new people are ruining everything," said Scott. "It took me four years to track down all these textfiles; people can now download them in 45 minutes. That's not going downhill."
This isn't about trying to reinstate BBSes as the most popular and world-wide form of communication used by computers; this certainly isn't about acting like we're not living in some technologically breathtaking times. Quite the opposite; this is about trying to document and remember the centuries (as in "man-centuries") of work we put into Bulletin Board Systems, and maybe come away knowing how truly far we've come and how far we can go.
Before people blame Michael, I wrote that headline.
I wrote the headline like that because it catches the eye, it gets your attention, and people get involved and want to make it live up to that. 14,000 visiting sites later, my approach is proven right.
This is NOT currently "Every BBS that Ever Was". But there is nothing stopping it from being that. I am refining the scripts such that they will work with any given country, and as new countries are added (with maintainers to help collect the information?) then this will truly be a Global list.
In other words, assume this is the "North American Coordinator" speaking. Assume there will one day be a "European Coordinator", "Australian Coordinator", "Sealand Coordinator", etc. It can come true!
When I started nibbling on the edges of this project, I was sure it could never be pulled off. But the idea was just too cool to avoid, and after a while, I started coding some ideas. Then I discovered the FidoNet nodelists, and I was suddenly up to 35,000 BBSes, and away I went. You're seeing the THIRD WEEK of this project. Obviously, just as the Gnu Project or Apache started out as single FTP sites or web sites and are now massively mirrored projects with many maintainers, I could see this project doing the same.
The intention, ultimately, is to branch out into all the major countries that I can. However; focusing on just the United States is a daunting project in itself. Along the way to adding the many thousands of BBSes, I am putting together a killer group of scripts to maintain and run the BBS list. These scripts can later be modified to handle another country, probably with a different split, like, say, bbslist.textfiles.com/sweden or the like. Then you would be able to have the BBSes listed there.
To be successful at this, you need to know how a certain phone system is set up. My system is very geared towards the phone number pattern of XXX-XXX-XXXX; it will take modifications for the suite of scripts to allow anything else to function. Small modifications, but still modifications.
Over time, I think all countries will be handled. And yes, the story of BBSes is HARDLY OVER; I know that there's still thousands and thousands of very active BBSes all over the world.
I chose an arbitrary mark and and working up to it. That mark is not permanent.
Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.
There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.
So you are saying that her nasty libel was a punishment for him not talking? That sounds like blackmail.
Blackmail isn't a word that scares me, but I don't know if it applies in this case. "Punishment", however, very much does. If Hafner had said to Mitnick something along the lines of "How else is your side of the story going to appear in my book if you don't let me ask you a few questions?", then in some way that might be an unpleasant level of pressure, but nothing a reporter for Newsweek wouldn't be using in the daily course of business anyway. Many subjects don't want to be interviewed, especially when they know their cases are notorious and already overblown, and when the wife of the journalist who got your face on the front page of the New York Times as an FBI's Most Wanted Computer Hacker is there with a pen and a notebook, you already know the article/book being researched isn't going to laud your existence anyway. Mitnick, who was not exactly resplendent in monetary fortune, is not all that out of line to ask for compensation to tell his exclusive story to a couple of book authors who are going to rake in some bucks for splattering his name across the front of their primary-colored book on "Outlaws on the Computer Frontier". And Markoff/Hafner wouldn't be the first authors to not stay their hands in writing about their subject after they're turned down.
In the chat transcript that you link to Hafner says that she tried to interview Mitnick, but he only wanted to talk to her for money, which she declined.
Yes, that's definitely her side of the story at that time. But if you dig a bit deeper, looking at writings by Mitnick and other references to her and Markoff's work on the book, a much uglier picture starts to appear.
I suppose I could spend some time writing another massive message with all the different sides of this story, but the fact is I've not met Hafner OR Mitnick, and only the two of them know all the details. Mitnick wanted to be recompensated for his story, which, considering that there was a biography being written about him that would garner no small amount of money for its writers, may or may not have been a reasonable request. Hafner and Markoff, unable to get this keystone interview for the portion of their books about Mitnick, went ahead and wrote in the style as if they had. That's particularly henious. You can read Cyberpunk and really feel like they got that interview. You don't find out otherwise until the end of the book, long after you've been treated to quote after quote after quote.
It's a very, very ugly situation, and not one you can toss off with a single sentence as if this somehow vindicates Hafner.
Ohmigod, am I really about to agree (kind of) with Jon Katz?
It's not that hard to "kind of" agree with Jon Katz. He writes in such a general fashion and generates such a goulash of cross-purposed ideas that he's bound to hit on some aspect of a subject that you agree with. This is the same approach that works with prime-time television and Boy Bands, and speaks more for the banality of not taking a firm stand on anything, than anything else.
After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.
I use the term "Hacker" as a general-purpose term for all aspects of deep technology lovers/users. I personally think the "Hacker/Cracker" language war was lost a long time ago; and I do think the whole "geek" idea has turned out to be a good approach. If you would prefer, switch "Hacker" with "Geek" or "Technophile", and I think it still works. This is a bit of a language issue and is partially the work of 1980's era journalists, who also pioneered the use of "-gate" as a suffix meaning "scandal".
As for Cyberpunk, if you feel like doing so, try this experiment: Reread the "Kevin" chapter, and count how many times it mentions Kevin's weight, face, and eating. And ask yourself how, if Katie professed that she'd never actually met Mitnick, how she garnered such details as describing how he held a wine glass on page 85. You don't have to use the word "Hacker" to be anti-hacker; in fact, it's better if you don't. At least re-read the introduction to Cyberpunk and ask yourself what the writers are trying to do.
Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.
1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?
No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.
I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.
Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.
2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.
There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.
As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.
I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
Of course, everyone has to make a buck, even if it's off the backs of talented, driven people. But it would be good to know beforehand about their motives.
I took Rusty's LGP source code and hacked it up (and hacked is definitely the dominant verb) so that it could work with any collection of *.c files. I named this hack "codewheel", although I promise I won't be passing the thing off like I wrote it or anything.
Basically, it works just like LGP except that it 1. Works with a single directory instead of many, 2. Doesn't put in Tux, the key, the title, or anything, and 3. Includes a slight more documentation than the original, though not that much more.
Everyone wanted it, it's now something you can check out and download and play with. Anybody who programs for a living will sneer and snicker at my efforts, but that's life, right? At least I put my efforts up for others. Enjoy.
I can vouch for this place; I heard about them a pretty long time ago (over a year and something ago) and I immediately send out money to buy one of every cartridge they had.
He's actually sold out of a few of them, but on the whole, this is a great, great thing. If it was 1983, I'd look like the richest kid on the block (instead of the most geekily nostalgic).
Obfuscation against Reverse Engineering is Old.
on
Obfuscated Circuitry?
·
· Score: 1
In this excellent file, if you search for "OBFUSCATION", you can see a discussion of how Apple II programmers were making false assembly code to fool crackers.
They're also available in many other places, but I'll always be sure to keep up with the Phracks as well. (They're the original Hacker E-zine, depending on how you look at it).
This Phrack Section is one of several dozen that I keep about different Electronic Magazines of the last 25 years on the site.
..I have a cute little band I did back when I was in high school called "Bovine Ignition Systems" that I'm currently hosting on mp3.com. I figured, what the hey, it's somewhat amusing, and maybe even more people need to hear The Girl With the Biggest Hair and other timeless classics.
Well, I uploaded 15 songs to them, and to my surprise, two were rejected! One, "Do Not Side Behind One Particular Band", has a sample from SOMEWHERE on it, of one person saying a sentence and someone saying "I know". They said this "possibly violated copyright". In other words, they premptively said it must be some illegal sample, and took it away. (It later showed up again, don't ask me why.
But the second song, "Fight to Your Right to Bovines", was also struck for "possible copyright violations". Great. The song is certainly reminiscent of "Fight for your Right to Party", except it's got COMPLETELY different lyrics, uses an actual band, which jams and interacts through the song, and which sounds like a rock tune more than rap. It's parody, people! The supreme court was unanimous that parody was A-OK!
So my opinion, based on this, is that after MP3.COM got sacked with their possible huge judgement coming shortly, and while they negotiate like mad to get out of the impending mess, they are being WAY overcautious and WAY hesistant to take on anything that might even smell of copyright violation, even if that's being judged by someone with too much coffee and 1,000 songs to review through that day.
A number of years ago, I was working for a Video Game Company that had split off of another video game company and which, sad to say, wasn't doing entirely well. Like many start-ups, financial problems were beginning to loom and I hadn't recieved a paycheck in a while. So it was with great reluctance that I started looking for a new job to start paying my own bills again.
I decided to go with a company called "Information Access Company", which was in need of a UNIX Administrator, as they were expanding into the UNIX market at their hosting company. Expanding from what? Well, from VAXes and VMS. Information Access Company had started as a consulting firm run by two ex-Digital developers who had worked on the VMS operating system, and had eventually been bought by Ziff-Davis and then sold to the Thomson Corporation (an Extremely Huge Company). The point of mentioning all that is that this company had gone through a lot of changes, but there was one shining point when it looked like it was going to be important indeed.
It seems that for a while AT&T was going to get into the online service buisness, to compete with Compuserve, AOL (this was early 90's when it still looked possible to) and MSN. The name of this online service was going to be Interchange, and to achieve this, they used VAXes for the vast majority of hardware. After putting millions into this project, AT&T decided to pull the plug and not go into that business (which is why you've never heard of Interchange) and the company turned its attention to other kinds of hosting.
How big a project was this? Well, it's been told to me by the people who were there that our building at one point had the largest non-government amount of VAX hardware in the United States, and therefore probably the world. This is a lot of VAX.
This project attracted some very talented people, people who really knew their butter when it came to VMS. Me, being 25 and cocky, thought of VMS as this clunky, horrible thing with terrible interfaces, no graphics, and was for all purposes dead. I was pretty much giving off that attitude in front of the old-timers, as I happily turned up Solaris Box after Solaris Box, snickering as I had 4 or 5 Ultra 2s in the same place as one of their massive tape drives.
Well, let me tell you, if you've never seen VMS and VAXes run by people who are true and honest wizards at it, you haven't seen the true power of that OS. Probably one of the most impressive things about VMS that I saw was their Clustering, which is just starting to make appearances in UNIX and Linux and the like. In VMS, the Clustering was True; that is, you literately had multiple machines that were, for all purposes the same machine, down to the hardware, doing the same work, and you could take individual machines down for servicing while leaving the others up, and the customers would never know. The whole setup would just deal with it. That's an easy one off the top of my head, but there's many magical things I saw the wizards accomplish. I quickly learned to focus on what I knew, and not just fly with my Grand Opinions off the top of my head. Thank goodness I learned it back THEN.
So, you think that eventually they threw out all their VAXes and the company just runs Pentium 800mHz rackmounts? Why, no, in fact. In fact, a lot of VAXes are still in use at this facility, and an on-site tech from Compaq/Digital continues to work there full time maintaining the boxes via a contract with Compaq. Many of the wizards have left but in some cases work for companies that still host at that facility, working on VMS.
VMS has a hell of a learning curve, but like many things in life, witnessing people who are at the top of that learning curve was magic itself.
Here's some files from my site, textfiles.com, that give a little history or at least humor (and therefore a feeling for them) about VAX, VMS, and Digital:
I have been following Senator Dianne Feinstein's efforts to control unpopular information on the internet for a number of years now, because her activities specifically and directly affect the viability of sites like textfiles.com which chronicles over 20,000 textfiles from the 1980's era of the BBS. The fact is, during this part of America's history, BBSes contained (besides information on UFOs, modifying computers, transcriptions of news articles, and vicious fan fiction) many files on making bombs or causing general trouble, and some files were created about the process of using or making drugs. I'm not for or against this informaion: I'm just trying to rescue it from being lost because it missed the boat of being uploaded to the Internet.
I believe in what I'm doing. Very much.
For what I believe in, Sen. Feinstein would have me imprisioned for up to 10 years.
Before her dreams can become reality, I will be making all of textfiles.com downloadable in one huge file, for everyone who wants to save the site to have. Maybe the big smackdown won't come this time, maybe not the next time, but I am sadly coming to the conclusion that one day it will. Thanks for your help.
I heard about the EMPEG player before I heard about slashdot.. In fact, it was trying to find out more about this really cool-sounding device that I had to go slogging through Slashdot, and eventually fell in love with the place. So SOMETHING good's come out of the wait...
Unfortunately, it has been nearly a year since this little item was announced. In that time, I've had a Christmas, a bunch of travel, and a whole other bunch of the typical "life things" get my monetary attention, and after a while, when you're waiting for months and months for the holy grail of a piece of consumer electronics, you start to lose faith. The upshot is, as soon as this announcement came, I ended up cancelling my queue position.
Maybe later this year, I'll buy one, but looking at how we were treated, I'm sorry, this was one of the worst handled product introductions I've seen. Yes, I know the toughness of just jump-starting an entire production run of such a complicated item, but we were promised bi-weekly updates, and someone couldn't be bothered to write a simple "here's what's up" to everyone putting thousands of dollars up? Months would go by without a decent update. All in all, it left a very bitter taste in my mouth.
I wish the gang the best of luck, and I have no doubt they will be millionaires by the end of the year, but not with my money (yet).
Darkle, you know nothing. Bleem is now available at the bleem site. I just downloaded my copy and with the key CD I have I'll be deep into Gran Turismo by the evening.
As for Key CDs being out, maybe you should go talk to ID Software, since they had that too.
And fix www.fedora.org, will you? It's embarassing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're just being contrarian here.
You're mistaking nostalgia and historical perspective for clinging to the past and rejecting the wonder of the present. In fact, I make no assertion that the past is better than the present, in any way except that it gives us a perspective on what we have now. The speed of today's home computers, the ability to transfer files, the coolness of Peer-to-Peer and for that matter Instant Messaging and all sorts of neat new technologies seem that much sweeter when you think of where you've come. Although, reading through your note, I don't think it's a place you've personally come from; you seem rather young.
Please don't speak for others that they don't want to look at ANSI Art or look over old documentation or even to browse old BBS List Entries... everything has its place, and history shouldn't be burned and destroyed at the first opportunity just because you think the time before you got on the scene was neanderthal and useless. People spent years and years working on these BBSes; I'm proud to have brought some memories back for them.
For the love of (Important Thing to You), please don't call the numbers. Look for a modern BBS list of which many are available on the net and call those, if you wish to call a BBS using a modem.
Here were the sources I used for the initial revision of the list:
1. Fidonet Nodelists. Everyone's figured that out and I credit where I got them from. I used something like 16 years of lists, so that gave a lot of information about timespan, sysop name, different BBS names, and the like.
2. The USBBS List. This was also called "The Darwin List" and was a very popular BBS list that's been around for well over a decade. I used this to import timespans as well, since in one case it would list the first year the BBS showed up on the list! Very convenient.
3. Smaller BBS lists done here and there. I found a lot of old (1991-1995) lists on the internet in searches for a couple days. This isn't old old, but it was definitely a way to get some names and numbers down. In some cases, I had BBSes that were around since the beginning of the 1980's that had survived in some form to the 1990's, and these 1990's lists had them listed, but with inaccurate (smaller) timespans.
There's probably an entire field of study for the methodology I'm using to construct the list; basically it throws out redundant information and focuses on what's new. This means that if a BBS was listed in one place as "The Slashdot BBS" and elsewhere as "Slashdt bbs", both are listed. It will take a human going through the list by hand to fix this up further. And I will do that when I get the next set of scripts ready for me to do "Housecleaning".
Congratulations on making it to the first revision of the list, but I want to stress to everyone (and I say this on the site in the FAQ) that just because you're not listed does not mean you're being excluded! It just means that I didn't find you in the first two weeks of work. Since this article came out, I've added verification, further information, and addition of over 8,000 BBSes. !!! This is from people who saw the list wasn't accurate or missed something, wanted to make things right, and mailed me corrections.
:)
And I want everyone to know I appreciate these corrections very, very much. I also know what I'm doing for the next week.
An excellent story, TheDreamer. I would invite you and others to submit these stories to the site so that I can put them together on a story page, with a link from your location on the BBS list to your story, and from there to places like your lhaven.net web site which lets people see even more about your past.
If enough people did this, we'd have a real resource on our hands.
Here's my current thoughts about user comments: No and Yes.
No, I will not be putting up message bases under each BBS for people to post about. I think it would be clunky, prone to abuse, and not very helpful. There are plenty of places to discuss BBSes; my current preferred place is the 1980's BBS Discussion List which is where a bunch of people are discussing aspects of BBSes and saving the past and the good times and, well, pretty much everything you'd expect such a list to have. I think this would concentrate things a lot better... imagine the process of trying to scan for new comments on the site!
Now, what I do want are STORIES written by people who used a specific BBS or set of BBSes, so that I can put links into a "story page" that is going to be going up on the site very shortly. I think that will really encourage people to write well-thought-out essays about different places instead of just throwing out one-line messages saying "XXXX BBS was G00D" and leaving it at that. We want to remember, not throw out little one-line accolades for BBSes we all agree we liked being on.
It's a usability thing, and that's where I stand. Use mailing lists for discussions; use this list for memory and narratives.
I hope people don't think what it's about. It's about documenting and remembering the past, maybe thinking back to those times and the experiences we had. It's about coming up with a body of knowledge that exists in tiny, month-by-month fragments (buffered BBS lists) that people naturally considered throw away and bringing them together to show the universal information they provide, about all the BBSes there have been.
There is an entire other aspect to the message that is inaccurate as well; to say that no-one is putting up new BBSes and BBSes get zero callers. Not every country has bridged "the last mile" with Cable and DSL. In fact, not even the United States has done so. So in many, many places the networks such as FidoNet represent cost-effective, efficient ways to bring information to masses of computer users. They're a long way from dead...
As for the implication that might arise that this site is my way of saying the present day is worse than the past, I'd like to include a quote from... myself! Being interviewed by Wired News for this article, I made this statement:
This isn't about trying to reinstate BBSes as the most popular and world-wide form of communication used by computers; this certainly isn't about acting like we're not living in some technologically breathtaking times. Quite the opposite; this is about trying to document and remember the centuries (as in "man-centuries") of work we put into Bulletin Board Systems, and maybe come away knowing how truly far we've come and how far we can go.
Before people blame Michael, I wrote that headline.
I wrote the headline like that because it catches the eye, it gets your attention, and people get involved and want to make it live up to that. 14,000 visiting sites later, my approach is proven right.
This is NOT currently "Every BBS that Ever Was". But there is nothing stopping it from being that. I am refining the scripts such that they will work with any given country, and as new countries are added (with maintainers to help collect the information?) then this will truly be a Global list.
In other words, assume this is the "North American Coordinator" speaking. Assume there will one day be a "European Coordinator", "Australian Coordinator", "Sealand Coordinator", etc. It can come true!
When I started nibbling on the edges of this project, I was sure it could never be pulled off. But the idea was just too cool to avoid, and after a while, I started coding some ideas. Then I discovered the FidoNet nodelists, and I was suddenly up to 35,000 BBSes, and away I went. You're seeing the THIRD WEEK of this project. Obviously, just as the Gnu Project or Apache started out as single FTP sites or web sites and are now massively mirrored projects with many maintainers, I could see this project doing the same.
The intention, ultimately, is to branch out into all the major countries that I can. However; focusing on just the United States is a daunting project in itself. Along the way to adding the many thousands of BBSes, I am putting together a killer group of scripts to maintain and run the BBS list. These scripts can later be modified to handle another country, probably with a different split, like, say, bbslist.textfiles.com/sweden or the like. Then you would be able to have the BBSes listed there.
To be successful at this, you need to know how a certain phone system is set up. My system is very geared towards the phone number pattern of XXX-XXX-XXXX; it will take modifications for the suite of scripts to allow anything else to function. Small modifications, but still modifications.
Over time, I think all countries will be handled. And yes, the story of BBSes is HARDLY OVER; I know that there's still thousands and thousands of very active BBSes all over the world.
I chose an arbitrary mark and and working up to it. That mark is not permanent.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.
There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.
So you are saying that her nasty libel was a punishment for him not talking? That sounds like blackmail.
Blackmail isn't a word that scares me, but I don't know if it applies in this case. "Punishment", however, very much does. If Hafner had said to Mitnick something along the lines of "How else is your side of the story going to appear in my book if you don't let me ask you a few questions?", then in some way that might be an unpleasant level of pressure, but nothing a reporter for Newsweek wouldn't be using in the daily course of business anyway. Many subjects don't want to be interviewed, especially when they know their cases are notorious and already overblown, and when the wife of the journalist who got your face on the front page of the New York Times as an FBI's Most Wanted Computer Hacker is there with a pen and a notebook, you already know the article/book being researched isn't going to laud your existence anyway. Mitnick, who was not exactly resplendent in monetary fortune, is not all that out of line to ask for compensation to tell his exclusive story to a couple of book authors who are going to rake in some bucks for splattering his name across the front of their primary-colored book on "Outlaws on the Computer Frontier". And Markoff/Hafner wouldn't be the first authors to not stay their hands in writing about their subject after they're turned down.
By the way, I'm not the first to delve into the intricacies of this debate. And I'm sure I won't be the last.
- Jason Scott
textfiles.com
In the chat transcript that you link to Hafner says that she tried to interview Mitnick, but he only wanted to talk to her for money, which she declined.
Yes, that's definitely her side of the story at that time. But if you dig a bit deeper, looking at writings by Mitnick and other references to her and Markoff's work on the book, a much uglier picture starts to appear.
I suppose I could spend some time writing another massive message with all the different sides of this story, but the fact is I've not met Hafner OR Mitnick, and only the two of them know all the details. Mitnick wanted to be recompensated for his story, which, considering that there was a biography being written about him that would garner no small amount of money for its writers, may or may not have been a reasonable request. Hafner and Markoff, unable to get this keystone interview for the portion of their books about Mitnick, went ahead and wrote in the style as if they had. That's particularly henious. You can read Cyberpunk and really feel like they got that interview. You don't find out otherwise until the end of the book, long after you've been treated to quote after quote after quote.
It's a very, very ugly situation, and not one you can toss off with a single sentence as if this somehow vindicates Hafner.
- Jason Scott
textfiles.com
Ohmigod, am I really about to agree (kind of) with Jon Katz?
It's not that hard to "kind of" agree with Jon Katz. He writes in such a general fashion and generates such a goulash of cross-purposed ideas that he's bound to hit on some aspect of a subject that you agree with. This is the same approach that works with prime-time television and Boy Bands, and speaks more for the banality of not taking a firm stand on anything, than anything else.
After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.
I use the term "Hacker" as a general-purpose term for all aspects of deep technology lovers/users. I personally think the "Hacker/Cracker" language war was lost a long time ago; and I do think the whole "geek" idea has turned out to be a good approach. If you would prefer, switch "Hacker" with "Geek" or "Technophile", and I think it still works. This is a bit of a language issue and is partially the work of 1980's era journalists, who also pioneered the use of "-gate" as a suffix meaning "scandal".
As for Cyberpunk, if you feel like doing so, try this experiment: Reread the "Kevin" chapter, and count how many times it mentions Kevin's weight, face, and eating. And ask yourself how, if Katie professed that she'd never actually met Mitnick, how she garnered such details as describing how he held a wine glass on page 85. You don't have to use the word "Hacker" to be anti-hacker; in fact, it's better if you don't. At least re-read the introduction to Cyberpunk and ask yourself what the writers are trying to do.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM>
Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.
1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?
No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.
I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.
Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.
2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.
There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.
As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.
I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
Of course, everyone has to make a buck, even if it's off the backs of talented, driven people. But it would be good to know beforehand about their motives.
Hafner in a Chat from 1992
Mixed Reviews of Hafner's Book with John Markoff
Kevin Mitnick's view of Katie Hafner and John Markoff
It would be really sad if Katie Hafner were allowed to shunt her past work and reinvent herself as a technology advocate. She is anything but.
I took Rusty's LGP source code and hacked it up (and hacked is definitely the dominant verb) so that it could work with any collection of *.c files. I named this hack "codewheel", although I promise I won't be passing the thing off like I wrote it or anything.
Basically, it works just like LGP except that it 1. Works with a single directory instead of many, 2. Doesn't put in Tux, the key, the title, or anything, and 3. Includes a slight more documentation than the original, though not that much more.
Everyone wanted it, it's now something you can check out and download and play with. Anybody who programs for a living will sneer and snicker at my efforts, but that's life, right? At least I put my efforts up for others. Enjoy.
- Jason Scott
Amateur Code Guy
I can vouch for this place; I heard about them a pretty long time ago (over a year and something ago) and I immediately send out money to buy one of every cartridge they had.
The result can be seen in this older photograph of my entertainment center. All those grey boxes in the lower left are brand-new, still in box Atari and Jaguar cartridges.
He's actually sold out of a few of them, but on the whole, this is a great, great thing. If it was 1983, I'd look like the richest kid on the block (instead of the most geekily nostalgic).
People should never underestimate the power of a protest/parody site to give helpful perspective to a .com (or .net). For example:
Company: HarvardNet
Parody: HarvardNetSucks.com
In this excellent file, if you search for "OBFUSCATION", you can see a discussion of how Apple II programmers were making false assembly code to fool crackers.
They're also available in many other places, but I'll always be sure to keep up with the Phracks as well. (They're the original Hacker E-zine, depending on how you look at it).
This Phrack Section is one of several dozen that I keep about different Electronic Magazines of the last 25 years on the site.
..I have a cute little band I did back when I was in high school called "Bovine Ignition Systems" that I'm currently hosting on mp3.com. I figured, what the hey, it's somewhat amusing, and maybe even more people need to hear The Girl With the Biggest Hair and other timeless classics.
Well, I uploaded 15 songs to them, and to my surprise, two were rejected! One, "Do Not Side Behind One Particular Band", has a sample from SOMEWHERE on it, of one person saying a sentence and someone saying "I know". They said this "possibly violated copyright". In other words, they premptively said it must be some illegal sample, and took it away. (It later showed up again, don't ask me why.
But the second song, "Fight to Your Right to Bovines", was also struck for "possible copyright violations". Great. The song is certainly reminiscent of "Fight for your Right to Party", except it's got COMPLETELY different lyrics, uses an actual band, which jams and interacts through the song, and which sounds like a rock tune more than rap. It's parody, people! The supreme court was unanimous that parody was A-OK!
So my opinion, based on this, is that after MP3.COM got sacked with their possible huge judgement coming shortly, and while they negotiate like mad to get out of the impending mess, they are being WAY overcautious and WAY hesistant to take on anything that might even smell of copyright violation, even if that's being judged by someone with too much coffee and 1,000 songs to review through that day.
A number of years ago, I was working for a Video Game Company that had split off of another video game company and which, sad to say, wasn't doing entirely well. Like many start-ups, financial problems were beginning to loom and I hadn't recieved a paycheck in a while. So it was with great reluctance that I started looking for a new job to start paying my own bills again.
I decided to go with a company called "Information Access Company", which was in need of a UNIX Administrator, as they were expanding into the UNIX market at their hosting company. Expanding from what? Well, from VAXes and VMS. Information Access Company had started as a consulting firm run by two ex-Digital developers who had worked on the VMS operating system, and had eventually been bought by Ziff-Davis and then sold to the Thomson Corporation (an Extremely Huge Company). The point of mentioning all that is that this company had gone through a lot of changes, but there was one shining point when it looked like it was going to be important indeed.
It seems that for a while AT&T was going to get into the online service buisness, to compete with Compuserve, AOL (this was early 90's when it still looked possible to) and MSN. The name of this online service was going to be Interchange, and to achieve this, they used VAXes for the vast majority of hardware. After putting millions into this project, AT&T decided to pull the plug and not go into that business (which is why you've never heard of Interchange) and the company turned its attention to other kinds of hosting.
How big a project was this? Well, it's been told to me by the people who were there that our building at one point had the largest non-government amount of VAX hardware in the United States, and therefore probably the world. This is a lot of VAX.
This project attracted some very talented people, people who really knew their butter when it came to VMS. Me, being 25 and cocky, thought of VMS as this clunky, horrible thing with terrible interfaces, no graphics, and was for all purposes dead. I was pretty much giving off that attitude in front of the old-timers, as I happily turned up Solaris Box after Solaris Box, snickering as I had 4 or 5 Ultra 2s in the same place as one of their massive tape drives.
Well, let me tell you, if you've never seen VMS and VAXes run by people who are true and honest wizards at it, you haven't seen the true power of that OS. Probably one of the most impressive things about VMS that I saw was their Clustering, which is just starting to make appearances in UNIX and Linux and the like. In VMS, the Clustering was True; that is, you literately had multiple machines that were, for all purposes the same machine, down to the hardware, doing the same work, and you could take individual machines down for servicing while leaving the others up, and the customers would never know. The whole setup would just deal with it. That's an easy one off the top of my head, but there's many magical things I saw the wizards accomplish. I quickly learned to focus on what I knew, and not just fly with my Grand Opinions off the top of my head. Thank goodness I learned it back THEN.
So, you think that eventually they threw out all their VAXes and the company just runs Pentium 800mHz rackmounts? Why, no, in fact. In fact, a lot of VAXes are still in use at this facility, and an on-site tech from Compaq/Digital continues to work there full time maintaining the boxes via a contract with Compaq. Many of the wizards have left but in some cases work for companies that still host at that facility, working on VMS.
VMS has a hell of a learning curve, but like many things in life, witnessing people who are at the top of that learning curve was magic itself.
Here's some files from my site, textfiles.com, that give a little history or at least humor (and therefore a feeling for them) about VAX, VMS, and Digital:
VMS Hacking Files
VAXOLOGY: A Poem about Vaxes
Alice in DIGITALand
God Logs Into his Vax
And the Ultimate VAX War Story.
If you're only in the mood to read one file, read that last one.
There's other classic VAX/VMS files on textfiles.com, including the VAX TREK series; I'll be sure to get them to an easy to find place very soon.
ALL HAIL THE VAX!
I believe in what I'm doing. Very much.
For what I believe in, Sen. Feinstein would have me imprisioned for up to 10 years.
Before her dreams can become reality, I will be making all of textfiles.com downloadable in one huge file, for everyone who wants to save the site to have. Maybe the big smackdown won't come this time, maybe not the next time, but I am sadly coming to the conclusion that one day it will. Thanks for your help.
Unfortunately, it has been nearly a year since this little item was announced. In that time, I've had a Christmas, a bunch of travel, and a whole other bunch of the typical "life things" get my monetary attention, and after a while, when you're waiting for months and months for the holy grail of a piece of consumer electronics, you start to lose faith. The upshot is, as soon as this announcement came, I ended up cancelling my queue position.
Maybe later this year, I'll buy one, but looking at how we were treated, I'm sorry, this was one of the worst handled product introductions I've seen. Yes, I know the toughness of just jump-starting an entire production run of such a complicated item, but we were promised bi-weekly updates, and someone couldn't be bothered to write a simple "here's what's up" to everyone putting thousands of dollars up? Months would go by without a decent update. All in all, it left a very bitter taste in my mouth.
I wish the gang the best of luck, and I have no doubt they will be millionaires by the end of the year, but not with my money (yet).
As for Key CDs being out, maybe you should go talk to ID Software, since they had that too.
And fix www.fedora.org, will you? It's embarassing.