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A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto (1993)
- gw98 4y agoRead this a couple of decades ago. The cypherpunk in me is lazy and stupid these days. Better to take advantage of the world than hide from it. That is not to say you can't hide from it at the same time, where it matters. And you should corrupt the perception of yourself when required.
- superkuh 4y agoRest in peace, what.cd. You were the greatest musical library of your time.
- tshaddox 4y agoIt was seriously impressive. I wish I had a backup of just the website and library itself, even if the torrents and tracker were gone forever. The meticulous organization of the library was a thing to behold and a great way to discover music.
- cauthon 4y agoAbsolutely agree, I miss the staff picks and forums more than I miss the tracker.
- luckylion 4y agoYou can probably find the site code (gazelle) in a working version. The DB (sans user data) is available as well, it's called the 10th anniversary mixtape.
- crtasm 4y agoHere it is: https://twitter.com/whatcd/status/923941782253121539 https://twitter.com/whatcd/status/923941782253121539 site code: https://github.com/WhatCD/ https://github.com/WhatCD/
- jrochkind1 4y agoof any time up to present.
- Kiro 4y agoOiNK, the predecessor to what.cd, was even better IMO.
- rOOb85 4y agoI'd say oink was more ground breaking, buy what.cd absolutely dwarfed oink in terms of torrents. Oink will always hold a special place in my heart.
- Kiro 4y agoI think my memory may be skewed by the fact that I mostly used what.cd right after the demise of OiNK. So I remember thinking it was inferior and that I missed OiNK, which is probably not representative of what what.cd eventually became.
- pluc 4y agoand the branding was on point https://i.imgur.com/VbLasI9.png https://i.imgur.com/VbLasI9.png
- ValentineC 4y agoI still remember this article, and so many more: https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-greatest-music-collection-in-the-world https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...
- Beltalowda 4y agoFor a minute there I thought what.cd was back. I miss that site; it wasn't really a "private torrent tracker", it was a music community. I discovered entire genres of music I never knew existed on what.cd. Spotify is what.cd's mentally handicapped little brother in comparison.
- TheAceOfHearts 4y agoI discovered a ton of great music thanks to Staff Picks. Spotify recommendations are good sometimes but it really lacks the strong sense of community. There's no personal touch to Spotify recommendations.
- frenchie4111 4y agoStaff picks still make up a huge % of my personal listening
- kyo3 4y agoSame here, most of my musical taste stems from their picks in some form or another.
- z3c0 4y agoSpotify is a fantastic service hidden behind an increasingly unusable interface.
- Beltalowda 4y agoThe problem with recommendation systems is that they're overwhelmingly based on what you already know. I'm not really interested in that much of the time; there's lots of music that I "should" like based on liking similar things but that just doesn't "jibe" with me, and vice versa. And for entire new things it tends to gravitate towards the more popular "classic $genre" stuff within a genre. That doesn't mean it's bad music, but a jazz playlist with John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong isn't really very interesting, nor is a metal playlist with Metallica and Iron Maiden. The thing that what.cd offered was that you could discover things beyond that. And all of this is so subjective in the first place. I recently watched all of the Alien films, and I felt the third Alien film is the second-best (after the original), but the "rating sites" have it listed as the lowest-rated of all of them. I'm probably not the only one who likes the film more than the ratings would suggest, and this kind of stuff gets lost in these algorithmic recommendation systems.
- barneygale 4y ago> Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. There's some irony to this appearing on what.cd When OiNK was taken down there was a massive community effort to put a successor online within days. But we had to kick out an early staff member called "WhatMan" for trying to hijack the entire project and run it as his own kingdom, right down to changing the name from "Waffles" to "What CD?" while others were catching a few hours sleep between hacking at the code. Months of bitter disputes between the sites followed.
- gonehome 4y agoDid Waffles.fm come out of that? I didn't know they had some sort of shared history after the fall of oink.
- barneygale 4y agoVery briefly, yes. OiNK went down on Oct 23 2007, and Waffles launched on Oct 31. What followed within a day or two. The split probably happened around the 27th.
- pluc 4y agoI remember that split. Felt like Pearl Jam and Nirvana; two great things that existed at once but largely ignored each other apart from the occasional jab when you would ask them about the other. What.cd had Trent Reznor so Waffles can suck it
- barneygale 4y agoWaffles also had Trent Reznor - he uploaded his albums to both sites. I deleted his first upload of Ghosts I–IV because he messed up the ID3 tags ;)
- pa7ch 4y agoI would love to hear more of the history of those sites. I discovered Oink by being invited by a friend in highschool and then rode on waffles.fm until it was shut down too. I have so many good memories of those sites and I learned to develop better writing skills participating on those forums. It was one of the few places on the internet I ever felt active in.
- robbiet480 4y agoWhois.sc’s most recent screenshot is totally different, so this site has been recently updated. Is someone trying to bring what.cd back? I checked btw OiNK is still offline.
- popcalc 4y agoIt used to point to the Ulbricht legal fund page.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago> It used to point to the Ulbricht legal fund page. Interesting, goes to show lots of us had a common lineage from that time. Funny enough Silk Road also had a very healthy forum/community back then that kind of felt like Oink, too.
- boomskats 4y agoWhat.cd was one of the last few truly beautiful communities on the internet (that I know of). It was the best music discovery platform ever, and was what got me into listening to and loving music after years of disillusionment about the state of the industry and the music I'd been previously exposed to. May it rest in peace. At least I still have my favourite hoodie [0]. OP, for what it's worth, your post just inspired me to go make a donation to the EFF. [0] https://imgur.com/a/FORtyX7 https://imgur.com/a/FORtyX7
- fermentation 4y agoI remember spending a week studying for the interview. I felt so cool afterwards, like I was part of a secret club.
- cosentiyes 4y agoYou were.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- somedude895 4y agoI don't remember any interview, but I also don't remember how exactly I got in. Did they at some point switch to simple invites?
- ywain 4y agoThey had both, you could get invited by an existing member or you could do an interview on IRC to show you knew the basics of MP3 encoding.
- boomskats 4y agoAw, it was a little bit more to it than that. Not tons more, but I remember being quizzed on Nyquist frequencies and thinking that was pretty cool.
- vonseel 4y agoI spent many nights browsing what.cd and building up my collection in the early days. Somewhat off-topic , but I just posted this question on HN which is sort of related - how did early streaming sites build up their collections? Maybe the founders of Spotify were actually big uploaders on what.cd and already had many TB of albums?? (Semi-joking, I know this is unlikely, but I’m desperately curious for the answers to this mystery.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555150 Please comment if you have any thoughts as otherwise my curiosity is getting buried in the depths of hackernews!
- ninjin 4y agoDuring their closed alpha (or was it beta?), Spotify’s library consisted of some sort of superset of the (illegal) music collections of their staff. If I recall correctly, you would even get hits by searching for scene release groups in the search bar. Once this ended and they went legal, I left Spotify and never looked back as about half of my music library was gone overnight. It taught me a valuable lesson early on in life about subscription services and “not owning” your digital files.
- vonseel 4y agoThat’s interesting, I don’t think I’d ever heard about that before! Do you find there are lots of things you can’t find on Apple Music or Spotify nowadays? I guess I’m just not the type to really listen to a bunch of rare recordings, but maybe I would if I had access to them.
- ninjin 4y ago> Do you find there are lots of things you can’t find on Apple Music or Spotify nowadays? No clue really, I am more “forceful” these days in terms of requiring software to be open if it is to set foot on my devices. Bandcamp is great and it is where I get the majority of my music these days.
- vital_beach 4y agoYou've stumbled upon a door where your mind is the key. There are none who will lend you guidance; these trials are yours to conquer alone. Entering here will take more than mere logic and strategy, but the criteria are just as hidden as what they reveal. Find yourself, and you will find the very thing hidden behind this page. Beyond here is something like a utopia - beyond here is what.cd This is a mirage.
- Nas808 4y agoI really miss that site, I remember you could place a "bounty" for some rare/obscure song or remix and there was always someone out there who had a copy of it who was willing to share it to get their ratio up.
- jancsika 4y agoThe cycle of building, burning, and rebuilding the Great Digital Libraries of Alexandria (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, what.cd, redacted, etc.) has gotten old. At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation. There must be policy wonks here on HN who know the ins and outs of local/state/federal government, copyright law/fair use, etc. (I'm assuming the U.S. IP lobby is the 400 pound gorilla in the room.) What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts? What's an approach that could eventually be on a referenda or party platform? Does archive.org have any idea? Any other orgs have an idea? There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain. It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it. What's the reasonable legislation to say, "As long as the project does X and avoids Y, the project may archive Z" for all digital artifacts Z in some domain? Edit: clarifications
- WFHRenaissance 4y agoPiracy cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting regime. Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies. You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/info.
- nine_k 4y agoThe problem is not with copyright and patents per se. They were invented for a good reason: to promote creation of intellectual works, and to help keep them open, not perish in secrecy as in medieval times. The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.
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- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI miss w.cd but redacted feels like home sweet home.
- anthk 4y agoSoulseek and today's Nicotine+ did it better. But Jamendo, Magnatune and Free Music Archive has gems: - Diablo Swing Orchestra - Tab and Anitek - Revolution Void - Tunguska:Electronica Music Society - Tryad - The Peach Tree
- mastersummoner 4y agoI loved soulseek. Finding someone with interesting tastes and browsing their collection was great - found some artists I still love to this day that way, like Bogdan Racyinski (you don't turn down an album called Samurai Math Beats) and the Dresden Dolls.
- chatterhead 4y agoThank you, HTF.
- PostOnce 4y agoI listened to a new Drake song yesterday and he named-dropped Signal. "text me on the Signal, don't call me". If that isn't a sign that cryptography is finally mainstream, I don't know what is. What a time to be alive.
- DerekBickerton 4y agoYou can also delete the Phone app in iOS. Amazing how far we've come with alternatives. Plain old phone calls should be relegated to the dustbin of history (and SMS).
- selfhoster11 4y agoSure, as soon as we all agree on a single universal, FOSS-friendly, strongly end to end encrypted standard to communicate with. Oh, wait.
- sneak 4y agoThe same cryptography is used to prevent any iPhone from being able to install Signal or any other app if the government or manufacturer doesn’t want any particular device to be able to use it. It can also be used to remotely disable the application even if already installed. The cypherpunks were sadly wrong.
- dkonofalski 4y agoITT: A bunch of people lamenting the shutdown of what.cd doing exactly the thing that got it shut down.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dang 4y agoRelated: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15103085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15103085 - Aug 2017 (8 comments) A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524 - April 2017 (7 comments)
- rdl 4y agoI miss what.cd :( When they got killed (after OiNK and the others) is when I mostly stopped listening to new music.
- DerekBickerton 4y agoHere's what.cd on Wayback if anyone's interested and looking for some more context: https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://what.cd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://what.cd/ And the first snapshot from 2010: https://web.archive.org/web/20101021055418/https://what.cd/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101021055418/https://what.cd/ And the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD
- dmitryminkovsky 4y agoDoes anyone know the history of this domain after it was seized? I didn't expect to see it on the homepage. Did a double- if not triple-take.
- dewey 4y agoIt expired and someone was quick to pick it up, it hosted some weird piracy forum for a while, then the ross ullbricht legal fund and now it changed to that.
- digsfm 4y agoWhat.cd was really great and I find redacted to be a decent sliritual successor. Shameless plug; For people interested in curated music discovery and keeping track of albums you (and your friends) discovered/liked I'm building https://digs.fm https://digs.fm - you might find it interesting. Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
- soganess 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD Rest in peace old friend.
- quickthrower2 4y agoWhat is the 1993 electronic money being referred to?
- dools 4y agoThis begins with a number of assumptions which I rate as being variously either dubious or flawed. No wonder the cypher punk movement is such a mess.
- BLanen 4y agoCypherpunk is pure idealistic nonsense for highly privileged tech people with no knowledge of the world or history to allow them to just deny the existence of politics, sociology, and economics. It has never let anywhere except compliance to the status quo while pretending to not be part of it.
- batmanturkey 4y ago
- q-base 4y agoWhat inspired these "Cypherpunks"? I have become more and more interested in figuring out where these thoughts actually originated from? Are there any books or other resources that dig into this early "hacker mentality"?
- prox 4y agoGuessing here, but probably from William Gibson Neuromancer, where the term originates. You have the 1982 movie Bladerunner. And there is also the 80s blockbuster War Games, that deals with hacking. These all had a big influence in the time of BBSes and microcomputers and the rise of the PC. In BBSes you had lots of discussions and books and software.
- q-base 4y agoI was not aware of the origins of the term, so thanks for that. But then the question lurks; was the hackers inspired by the movies or was the movies inspired by the hackers :)
- prox 4y agoBoth probably! The movies made hacking look inspiring and hackers were a source of inspiration with movie makers/writers.
- deafpolygon 4y ago> Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Something I wish more people would talk about.
- sir-alien 4y agoThis will slowly but surely push many sites and systems like this onto Tor. Although Tor isn't perfect, keeping all Tor traffic in Tor on an onion address, does help mitigate tracking. For example, The Pirate Bay is on an onion domain which is going to make it rather difficult to track and shutdown now. Eventually what will happen is that smart people will develop something similar to Tor that just adds a layer to the internet where all traffic is privately transported with zero exposure while still being reasonably fast. I think the only thing that puts Tor at a disadvantage right now is speed.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoIn a sense, isn't it what is happening now ( and why some companies offer 'being able to search dark web' as a service?). I agree that speed appears to be the limiting factor now.
- CyanBird 4y agoTor recently has left a bad taste on my mouth, having state actors like the BBC (read: cghq) start up new tor nodes to use against their state enemies all the while debasing trust on it alongside its allies... I don't know, it just leaves a really bad taste, not that we are all unaware of how "inqtel and friends" have allowed the current worldwide software ecosystem to even exist... But still leaves a bad, bad aftertaste https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/08/as-uk-government-is-still-interested-in-banning-tor-bbc-uses-tor-to-get-around-russian-information-blockade/ https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/08/as-uk-government-is-stil...
- mavhc 4y agoSo your complaint is a system designed to circumvent state censorship is being used to circumvent state censorship? Did you only want pirates to use it?
- dewey 4y agoPeople who joined What through the interview process might enjoy this trip down memory lane: https://web.archive.org/web/20160615002925/https://www.whatinterviewprep.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160615002925/https://www.whati... I spent a lot of my time interviewing people and to this day I have a lot of friends from that time.
- azubinski 4y agoSo, cyberpunk is "high tech, low life" about. It's a kind of classical definition. And here comes the obvious question. What kind of "transactions" can those who live in low life have? Low life means you don't have any transactions at all. Cyberpunk is a nice niche of fiction, but too controversial in the continuation of this fiction into reality :)
- drexlspivey 4y agoYou are conflating Cyberpunk (a sci-fi subgenre) with Cypherpunk (a political ideology). The post is about the latest
- eggy 4y agoI heard Eric Hughes talk at the HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) conference in NYC in 1994[1]. Amazing talk on crypto and digital banking in the future and digital currencies decades before Bitcoin. I was juiced. I bought and started reading Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography. I was introduced to the J programming language and then APL, and I found this little treasure, "Mr. Babbage's Secret: The Tale of a Cypher and APL", and although no where in subject matter or as rigorous as Schneier's book, it was fun. It had old posts in newspapers where people shared secret messages. The book goes into Babbage's life and interest in these ciphers. It has APL code for the examples, which is great because of its conciseness you don't need pages of code to sift through in the book. However, it is written in a much less concise form with comments compared with modern APL. I moved away from crypto and into hardware hacking and circuitry. I got into robotics and left the cypherpunk world behind! Another talk at that first HOPE was on using the parallel port to control motors and other things. Eric Hughes gave a great talk. I know video was recorded, so it would be good to watch it all for fun and memories. Footnote: I had a chance to buy Bitcoin in May 2013 for around $124. It had just left double digits, and I was sweating buying 20 for $2500! My luck! [1] https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/cryptography-and-privacy https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/crypt...
- eggy 4y agoFound the videos for HOPE 1994, and the one with Eric Hughes. I found myself in the video at age 30! Still a good talk: https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/cryptography-and-privacy https://infocondb.org/con/hope/hackers-on-planet-earth/crypt...
- motohagiography 4y agoManifestos themselves seem to be an artifact of the era, a time where to be a hero of any kind still seemed within the realm of possible. Since then I've worked in the field of privacy, advising government agencies about how to comply with regulations that serve as a check on their public service systems being used as secret surveillance tools, and brokered as political favours by their DBAs and managers. It is both the most thankless and personally rewarding work in public service I think, and it's the only place left for courage in the bureaucracy. However, execs have got wise to it and parachuted in some compromised ball players into the top privacy roles, and I think the era of principled privacy advocacy in government has passed. We are about to see the effects of leaving those people with powerful technology without oversight. The manifesto was published in 1993. Here is what I can tell you first hand about privacy in 2022. Depending on where you live: - Your location and pattern of life is tracked 24/7 with an accuracy of a few feet, almost everywhere on the planet. - Your political affiliations and social media relationships are kept as part of a private "risk" profile by financial institutions. - Many of your vaccination records and dates ("hesitancy" info) are already in the hands of political opposition research firms and data brokers. - Platform companies do not keep consistent logs of who accesses your personal information (DMs, locations, affiliations etc), and there are networks of both domestic and foreign political operatives with agendas who regularly look up personal information about others and share it among themselves. - Your health records (abortions, std test dates, disease screenings, etc) are available not just to medical researchers, but also to "social science" and other policy "researchers" with political activist affiliations, and you cannot decline consent for "sharing" it with them. You are a data subject whether you consent or not. - Several government services use so-called "AI" and machine learning to create a pretext or paralell construction for policy decisions. And these are just a few examples. A modern manifesto would likely need to address basic human dignity, and not merely make an appeal to rights and other things paternalistically granted, but rather, it would need to address what you already have and are, what you must actively use code and intention to defend and take, and how you will be reduced to a liquified, neutralized, "person," on the level of a resource or indifferent animal to be managed if you do not. 30 years later, this manifesto is a relic of what we have collectively denied.