Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
Meh - you can block ports inbound without state tables. I think you're ascribing purpose to what i imagine is a sclerotic and dysfunctional entity.
When i was 20, i was reflexively cynical, because it let me pose as intellectual without the burden of having to learn or think. As an adult, i find that pose very fucking obvious.
My interest was piqued by the concept of natting ip6, and why an isp might do so, and why cgnat might be disabled if you ask the isp to disable ip6.
...bb-but I thought cynicism was the same thing as experience![1]
No but seriously, I agree it is primarily "we can't be arsed to change our methods".
"Primarily" is not everything; the other 10-20% is the long tail of everything else. Europe is getting much harder on filesharing[3][4] because of business interests, and - despite the much better regulation - there's probably some "you shouldn't be hosting things on a residential connection anyways, pay us for a business connection peasants" like in the US[2].
Of course, all these ready-made restrictions are then easily adaptable for abuse (when's the next Chat Control proposal anyways?), so there's not much pushback from above...
Cynicism is easily a thought-terminating cliche, but it is unfortunately earned nowadays, especially as a coping mechanism for a feeling of helplessness against the usually stupid, sometimes malicious forces at play (Hanlon's Razor doesn't account for weaponization of stupidity).
Sure, but cgnat doesn't defeat filesharing, because of your STUN and your DERP and what-have-you.
It's common, at least in the UK, for residential lines to block smtp inbound. That's an ACL, which is operationally ~free. NAT does not serve the purposes you've outlined.
Some cynicism is warranted about, e.g. chat control, but it's better explained by good-faith desire to fight egregious crime coupled with low care for the privacy invasion. Other people have different values to you and me.
It's hard to reconcile an EU government in anyone's pocket with gdpr and dma, which afaics serve citizens and no big interests. Like most governments, the EU is somewhat fractious and incoherent, so it's not a given that everything they do is citizen-friendly. But i, for one, accept that law enforcement should exist; accept that this is inevitably a trade-off against citizen rights; concede that preventing the next bataclan is nigh-on impossible; and understand why some might, to that end, desire greater power to comb through conversations. I don't agree, but i also don't need to assume conspiracy. At heart, the problem is not that all government is evil - although you're welcome to that view - it's that thick pillocks vote without any consideration of nuance.
The biggest problem with BTv1 was the lack of per-file checksumming, and swarm merging (i.e. individual files have shared seeding pools across torrents). BTv2 specs the latter, but I think only BiglyBT actually implements it. Having both of those features from the get-go would've gone a LONG way to fixing the dead torrent problem.
> we should help them rather than let suicide become the way they escape from it.
> the answer should be to help them, change their circumstances where possible, and help them find another way through it.
You left that part out originally. You meant it implicitly, so I may seem pedantic, but this kind of thing must be said explicitly.
For example: the asylum system. Abolishing it's ubiquity was unarguably good, but then they just... stopped there, leaving many people in the lurch.[1] To paraphrase and oversimplify MLK, "presence of justice is much harder than absence of tension."
Generally the only account that keeps even with inflation is a CD, but of course that locks up your money for that duration, which would suck in an emergency.
> when it was the last time that I felt it to be slow
I only have an issue because I set a big disk cache (because data cap). 8gb is fine IIRC, but 24gb causes slowdowns on startups and new tabs. (Also much more of an issue on my older laptop than my newer desktop.)
> If people were, by default, expecting to pay for everything they use, spying on them would not be accepted.
The spying may have started with free products, but it has metastasized into every aspect of life, free or not. It always does.
> choose to be willfully blind to the spying
Many don't. They also, by and large, don't have a choice. Data brokers, Flock cameras, WiFi-based radar[1]. You really can only do so much as an individual before the only escape is being a hermit in a cave.
> The primary drivers of human mind, before self-purification, are greed, anger, and ignorance
Which then gets distilled into the only drivers of corporations. Corporations that then destroy all moral options for individuals.
Everybody from OpenAI to Micron to the US Government is actively colluding to keep things going. I would love for you to be right, but I'm cynical from the decades that have been spent insulating these companies from consequences.
It really does feel like this. But it can't go indefinitely. What may seem bleak today could look very different a year out. The velocity of this whole thing won't just apply to the upwards direction.
But velocity down probably will mean a meaningful recession, so there's that.
http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available (https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289)
https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...
https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/
https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294
https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine
https://defacto2.net/bbs
https://web.archive.org/web/20241210143429/http://sysopshub....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBD-U-9PIg