8 ms·
I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up unicode characters and upload pirated g
by slowmotiony 5y ago
I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up unicode characters and upload pirated games and movies there to share with each other. The only way to open those directories was to specifically type the exact path in unicode, simply double clicking on the folder in filezilla or windows explorer resulted in a error. Sometimes the admins themselves couldn't delete them and just left them there. Good times.
- technothrasher 5y agoI remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.
- vletal 5y agoI do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set of credentials suffice?
- p_l 5y agoSome were open for uploads by design, in spirit of sharing things - essentially use the free space left after maib purpose to provide friendly mirrors for things like new projects etc. I recall using Archie to find copies of open source software at the ending edge of that era. Some also were used as submissions for projects, long before sites like sourceforge started. Especially since plonking a bigger source dump on newsgroups wasn't exactly well received.
- jorvi 5y agoSometimes people should be able to do nice things without it getting abused, no? In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have something called a ‘buurtbieb’ aka a ‘neighborhood libraries’, which is a weatherproof cabinet where people can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood can borrow. Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet to store candy, but why would you?
- jumpkick 5y agoWe have these throughout many neighborhoods in my city in central Florida, USA. We’re a college town so I just assumed it was somehow connected to that. Neat that it’s an international thing!
- dividedbyzero 5y agoMunich, Germany has them as well
- Liquid_Fire 5y agoIn the UK these are commonly set up inside old unused telephone boxes - you can find them in many villages/towns, e.g.: https://nothingintherulebook.com/2018/11/03/british-phone-box-libraries/ https://nothingintherulebook.com/2018/11/03/british-phone-bo...
- neutronicus 5y agoHere in Baltimore, MD, too, although the focus is mostly on kids books
- evandrofisico 5y agoHere in Brazil we have those on bus stops.
- yawz 5y agoGreat to hear these little neighborhood libraries are international. We have them here where I live in Colorado, US.
- Kon-Peki 5y agoIndeed. The zoning code for my town specifically calls them out (as allowed, with no permits necessary).
- theandrewbailey 5y agoCan confirm neighborhood libraries are a thing in Pittsburgh (USA).
- mbeex 5y agoI think, you don't get the full grasp of "early, friendly internet". Very few people do today. In my bubble - programming, for example, young people can't even imagine that there were times when you could focus on _things_ instead of writing layers of security code around them.
- hardware2win 5y agoI think you make it sound as if that was good, but it was straight naive or irresponsible
- 0des 5y agoIt was a different time
- beowulfey 5y agoSure, in today’s world. That’s like saying it would be naive and irresponsible for me to go outside without a life preserver today despite an unforeseen catastrophic global flood drowning the lands 10 years from now. It was a different world, with different expectations and frameworks.
- ysavir 5y agoThe GP is saying "I miss the days where I could easily exploit people" and the response was "I miss the days where we respected each other enough to not exploit each other". It wasn't naive or irresponsible, but reflective of a time with more trust, cooperation, and good intentions.
- throwawayHN378 5y ago
- mbeex 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
- bfuller 5y agoi was 13 when my public upload folder started getting messed with, sad day
- wanderer_ 5y agoYou guys should read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. It's a classic.
- TameAntelope 5y agoThe fact you believed it would last is proof we still can have nice things. :)
- totetsu 5y agoWearz were very nice things.
- egfx 5y agoIt’s Warez.
- throwaway787544 5y ago"wah-rez"
- jkhdigital 5y agoWait what? It’s pronounced like the city in Mexico?
- AdamH12113 5y agoI've heard a lot of people pronounce it like that, but I'm pretty sure that's not correct. It's clearly the English word "wares"[1] with the S replaced with a Z, similar to "hackz" and "cheatz", which were also common in that era. I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original word behind it. [1] A synonym for "goods" or "products". See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wares https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wares
- jholman 5y agoIt's not a synonym for "goods", because only one type of thing was ever "wares"; software. It's just for dividing up the sections of your piracy BBS into, like "filez" (files, multi-kilobyte textfiles full of instructions on how to make bombs etc), "imagez", "warez", etc. Anyway, by 1990, in the piracy circles I distantly associated with, it was quite common to pronounce it like "juarez". Sort of semi-ironically, like, it's obviously the wrong pronunciation, but nonetheless everyone uses that pronunciation on purpose. So, what could be more correct than "the thing everyone does"? Of course, pronunciation only happens in meatspace (or at least it did back before MP3s and before YouTube and so on), and of course I'm talking about clusters of teenagers separated by thousands of km. We had "meetupz" or "meetz" in my city, which is how I know how "everyone" pronounced it... but it's certainly possible that in most cities/whatever there was some other pronunciation rule.
- sen 5y agoWe did the same thing using the character for a non-breaking space, I think it was ALT+0160. It would sort last in the list, and just be an effectively-invisible entry unless you were really paying attention. Combined with an exploit we had to change users on the FTP servers behind most dialup ISPs hosting (the free couple Mb hosting you’d get with your dialup account that very few people cared about or used), meant we had pretty much unlimited file hosting, filling random families web hosting with hidden folders full of mp3s and warez.
- paskozdilar 5y agoI remember making secret directories on my Windows desktop by using a transparent icon and ALT+255 as filename. Good times.
- ale42 5y agoI was doing the same on MS-DOS, keeping "secret" files on a floppy disk with a directory having a name ending with an invisible Alt+255... it was even impossible to look inside it with the Windows 3.1 file manager.
- vishnugupta 5y agoThat exact memory crossed my mind as soon as I saw that U + <number> in the title :-D. Fun times indeed!
- kingcharles 5y agoYou too, huh? This was my first foray into the "dark" side of the Internet as a kid, pre-Web, hanging out with pirates on IRC and get "hired" to go around the early 'Net and fuck up people's upload folders by creating hidden directories we could load with our group's warez. ^H^H^H^H
- moogly 5y ago_vti_cnf