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Trying to make sense of CompuServe server hard disk images
- pronoiac 8y agoThey find some accounting details, rather than something more interesting.
- bahmboo 8y agoI don't understand the downvotes, it's an accurate summation of the [edit result of his work]. The journey [edit: up to and including that result] was an interesting read.
- chx 8y agoWait a minute there's a public archive of Compuserve data noone has any clue what it is? What if it's PII? It wasn't that long ago to make this a non-issue.
- jboy55 8y agoCompletely scary, what a massive security breach just casually thought of as a digital challenge.
- shawnz 8y agoI wonder, who is responsible in a case like this? Is it the current owners of CompuServe for not clearing the PII before trashing the machines?
- icedchai 8y agoThis is very common. I've bought machines at auction with databases on them.
- neilv 8y agoYes, though not as bad as it used to be, IME. It seems a lot of ordinary people now know to pull or wipe drives before disposing of a computer. I've acquired over 100 used computers, and, once I saw how common leaving data on them was, I began always very promptly DBAN-ing any disks, and wiping SSDs. If it has a non-SATA interface, I destroy the medium. Similar with some kind of wipe of smartphones. Besides wiping the disk/device seeming a responsible and considerate thing to do, it avoids remote yet severe liabilities.
- opless 8y agoYou know that you can't truly "wipe" SSDs, right?
- detaro 8y agoIt's not that simple. A secure erase should wipe all blocks (and since it is done by the firmware, physical blocks, not logical ones), but there have been instances of buggy drives that don't actually do it properly. Some SSDs also transparently encrypt all data written, and the key is replaced on a wipe command. Even if they don't wipe the data fully, it's now unusable, if the encryption works correctly. Quite old SSDs might not support any of this.
- chx 8y agoI thought all SSDs support ATA password.
- detaro 8y agoI don't think ATA password necessarily means the drive content is encrypted, or helps you fully wipe a drive you obtained from somewhere else.
- veeti 8y ago> Even if they don't wipe the data fully, it's now unusable, if the encryption works correctly. Unfortunately, you can't trust the SSD firmware developers to have their shit together [1]. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/crucial-samsung-solid-state-drives-busted-encryption/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/crucial-samsung-solid-stat...
- gowld 8y agoThe no longer existent corporate person is responsible. Same as if a real person copied all your info, published it, and died.
- shawnz 8y agoThey do still exist though, and they are a subsidiary of Verizon. So is Verizon responsible even though nobody at Verizon had anything to do with it? Does the person who redistributed the data have any responsibility?
- nathan_long 8y ago> So is Verizon responsible even though nobody at Verizon had anything to do with it? Imagine if CompuServe still existed, but they had undergone 100% employee turnover in recent years. They'd still be liable, right? It seems to me that when Verizon bought CompuServe, they calculated that its assets minus its liabilities totaled less than the purchase price and hence it was a good deal. If we treat leakable data as a legal liability, it should send the right financial signal - eg, maybe as a company you don't want to collect much.
- rkagerer 8y agoAs much as I'm fascinated by this work and the author's tenacity, as a past user of CompuServe I'm quite alarmed at the prospect of my data falling into the hands of a random tech junkie blogging on the internet. Verizon, if you're out there - please get a handle on this breach before my lawyers call you.
- icedchai 8y agoYes, I was a CompuServe user back in 1988. I'm very concerned about my teenage "CB" chat logs falling into the wrong hands.
- ghaff 8y ago:-) Although I was no longer a teenager and don't think I ever used chat, it's hard for me to imagine just about anything in my early online presence that would cause me more than very mild embarrassment today. Yeah, someone should have scrubbed these. But it's hard for me to get too worked up.
- CamperBob2 8y agoEh, buy the ticket, take the ride. Don't type anything on a keyboard today that you don't want to see on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. I learned that lesson at 300 baud, long before I had ever heard of CompuServe, but that didn't stop me from forgetting it a time or two when I got my CS account. So if there's anything in this archive that would embarrass you, well, at least you're in good company.
- zeveb 8y agoPast Senate and current Presidential candidate Robert Francis O'Rourke felt a need to apologise for his adolescent fiction, which he posted online. You might be surprised what you posted back then. I know that when I've gone back and reviewed my own history I've been surprised what I posted for posterity as a kid. I didn't understand that it'd be out there for the rest of my life.
- CamperBob2 8y ago
- neilv 8y agoPerhaps the CompuServe PII wasn't covered by modern 'privacy' policies that have users 'consent' to the company doing whatever it wants. A big company might be vulnerable to class action from a bunch of people who are tech-savvy and affluent enough to have been using Compu$erve.
- reaperducer 8y agoWhat if it's PII? If anyone finds data for 72167,7570, send a copy back to me.
- ramses0 8y ago...but seriously... I think I still remember my "license plate" number for prodigy.net, which I think was 7 digits alpahnumeric. I've very occasionally searched for it thinking there was maybe an archive or footprints from "those days" but nothing has ever come up. Quite literally the transition of physical paper => digital forums => internet (pre-crawlers/pre-archive) => where the data could have been lost before it had a chance to be "modernized".
- threeio 8y agoI dropped so much cash on compuserve as a kid... ugh the pain and realization when my folks figured out what it was..
- DanBC 8y agoFor people who don't know what the costs were like, here's this page from a 1988 Whole Earth catalogue giving some pricing information. http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7 http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7 Compuserve $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers". The Source $8 per hour. Delphi $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following. BIX $9 per hour.
- ceautery 8y agoCompuServe charged more if you connected at a higher baud rate, like $12.80 per hour for 14.4k... I think - I haven't worked there for 22 years, so my memory is hazy. There was also an ecosystem of apps to script connections to minimize time you spent online. You'd pick the forums you wanted to scrape new messages from, fetch them in one session, compose replies offline, and post the replies in a second session.
- dmix 8y agoThat's cool. Was there any data caps?
- pavlov 8y agoOn a 14.4kbps connection it took more than 10 minutes to transfer a megabyte, so the hourly billing rate was enough of a cap.
- ghaff 8y agoIt was the same thing on private BBS systems. There were a bunch of applications and scripts that basically let you go online, do your business as quickly as possible, and hang up. I remember I primarily used a system running PCBoard and Qmail was the software that let you do most things offline. ADDED:Private systems didn't (ever?) have a time charge. The bigger ones usually still offered some lines for free users but offered preferred access for subscribers.
- jboy55 8y agoI wonder if twenty years from now, someone will be archiving one of the big email providers. "In the early 21st century, there existed large cloud 'email' organizations. Here I found a trove of 'hard disks' images from one of the companies, HotMail. I've been digging around and look at these email addresses, it appears this image contains all the 'email' for around 10k users. Here is one where a couple users with the usernames 'joesmith' and 'andreasanchez', engaged in playful romantic flirting. Although by digging further in the emails it appears one of them, 'joesmith' is newly married to 'andreasmith'. Here is thier wedding invitation. Fascinating digital archeology"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- behringer 8y agoOf course that's exactly what will happen. If you put your data in the cloud, it's one day going to be publicly available. If you don't like that, you should consider running private servers for your data.
- C14L 8y agoOr encrypt your data before uploading it to "the cloud" (aka, somebody else's computer).
- epanchin 8y agoEncrypting something today is no guarantee that it’ll still be encrypted in 20 years. If you encrypted something in 1999 with 56-bit key DES, your data is no longer private.
- PhasmaFelis 8y agoReminds me of the bit from Cryptonomicon, which as it happens was published in 1999: > [Randy] has pointed out to Avi, in an encrypted e-mail message, that if every particle of matter in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer, and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096-bit encryption key, it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe. > "Using today's technology," Avi shot back, "that is true. But what about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are developed that can simplify the factoring of large prime numbers?" > "How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?" > After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the after image of a strobe: > I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
- blattimwind 8y agoImagine trying to find or even implement exploits against such a system: > The CompuServe system used non-standard PDP-10-based hardware along with a custom version of TOPS-10. As a result, booting it in one of the available emulators is next to impossible. But I hoped the disk images could be attached to a standard TOPS-10 system as secondary disks somehow. Especially when all those manuals weren't freely available...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmix 8y agoGEnie seems to be another online service lost to time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEnie
- ghaff 8y agoThere were a lot of them although Compuserve was at least one of the biggest. (It's the one I used.) There were also BIX, AOL, DELPHI, and Prodigy, and others that aren't popping to mind. There were also a vast number of small BBSs ranging from a system in someone's bedroom to commercial--though still relatively small--operations, some of which became early local ISPs. At the time, one mostly preferred to make local calls because of the expense of long distance.
- zepearl 8y agoOut of core context: the article mentions "The Digital Antiquarian" ( https://www.filfre.net https://www.filfre.net ) which in turn has an article about the game "Wing Commander" ( https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/from-wingleader-to-wing-commander/ https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/from-wingleader-to-wing-comma... ) => this is funny: > At the beginning of August, Snell unceremoniously booted Chris Roberts, the project’s founder, from his role as co-producer, leaving him with only the title of director. Manifesting a tendency anyone familiar with his more recent projects will immediately recognize, Roberts had been causing chaos on the team by approving seemingly every suggested addition or enhancement that crossed his desk. Snell, the brutal pragmatist in this company full of dreamers, appointed himself as Warren Spector’s new co-producer. His first action was to place a freeze on new features in favor of getting the game that currently existed finished and out the door. (Chris Roberts is the one creating the game "Star Citizen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen - I was one of the first buying/financing the game in 2012, but I admit of having lost interest while waiting for the "final" version to be released...)
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y agoI too am a founding backer, also totally lost interest.
- the_fonz 8y ago"Digital archeology" isn't the right term, "digital preservation" falls under archival science, whether formally or informally.
- bahmboo 8y agoExcept preservation on its own is not very useful. You need some sort of understanding of the data on many levels hence "archeology" (that may not be the best term but I think it gets the point across).
- andrewf 8y agoI saw one of the CompuServe PDP-10 clones running at VCF West last year in Mountain View! It's this one on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CvBwt5nfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CvBwt5nfg