12 ms·

I was around in the early 90s on BBSs. One of the things that amuses me about people asking AI how to do bad stuff and all the handwringing about AI safety is

• bink 4y ago
  Shout out to Jason Scott and textfiles.com http://textfiles.com/directory.html http://textfiles.com/directory.html
  • alexsereno 4y ago
    Thank you for this
  • RGamma 4y ago
    This feels appropiately oldschool, thx
  • totetsu 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • zozbot234 4y ago
      Hindsight is always 20/20. What matters is that we live in a much freer and more open world today than in the 1980s and information of all kinds is vastly more accessible, often available for free. So these early predictions have basically proven quite accurate.
      • wkat4242 4y ago
        I don't know about that. In many ways the 80s felt a lot more free. Sexual morals were much more open, there was much less government- and corporate espionage on citizens. I liked society a lot more back then. Edit: Speaking about the Netherlands specifically. As I only left the country for the first time much later so I didn't have experience with other countries. Things were still pretty good in the 90s but after 2000 it feels like it got a lot more conservative. I can remember a few mainstream movies from the 80s like Flodder and Turks Fruit which would be classed as porn today. People also have become a lot more materialistic. Everything feels so "rubber tile" these days. Maybe this is because things are much more easily controlled and moderated online, I don't know. And of course the 80s still had since influence from the hippie era, which happened later there than in the US (pretty much everything happened later :P )
        • splistud 4y ago
          [dead]
        • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
          I disagree about sexual morals. We live in a time where everything that was kept locked away from "polite society" in the 80s is now celebrated and held up as morally correct and right. The only people deemed depraved today are those who adhere to a more traditional view, and that was absolutely not the way things were in the 80s.
          • wkat4242 4y ago
            I suppose I was never really part of 'polite society', being from Amsterdam in the 80s. I assume you refer to things like homosexuality which were already totally normal there back then. Transsexualism was a bit less common back then but I imagine this was also because the medical tech wasn't at the required level yet to really make a transition possible. But I wasn't really talking about those things. More about sexuality in general being a taboo in the media and popular culture.
• ghaff 4y ago
  From about the mid-80s to the mid-90s, after grad school, I was active on another 617 area code BBS (Channel 1). It was a mostly aboveground thing though pretty much all BBSs had dark corners you could peer into. Quite a few of the regulars on the main board ended up getting together semi-regularly in real life.
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  I got onto the internet in the second half of the 90s and as a rebellious teenager I, of course, started by downloading the various 'cookbooks' (anarchist, phreaking, etc) that were very easy to find through Alta Vista just to play cool and boast to my friends. I would not ask Google about those stuff today and I would certainly not dare downloading them for fear of triggering so many alerts and red flags. Today it would probably be possible to be jailed (in the UK) just for having this material on your computer.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    One Rumour I heard is that the ones about making bombs was actually written and published by the CIA and intentionally wrong.
    • mytailorisrich 4y ago
      Well, I was sensible enough not to try so I cannot say!
    • ganoushoreilly 4y ago
      Given they did this with terrorist literature, it wouldn't be surprising.
    • nonethewiser 4y ago
      I always assumed it wasn’t that hard to figure out how to make a bomb. That’s not to say it would necessarily be efficient or easy.
  • 0xGod 4y ago
    Why is the UK full of so many weak nannies and wannabe tyrants that your state can tell you what you can and cannot read over there?
    • nonethewiser 4y ago
      The baffling thing is how it’s defended.
• ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
  Same. I also remember totse which was such a fun read and there was this book on how to be a professional assassin. It was riveting. Now everyone is on the internet so I guess those days are never coming back.
• dstroot 4y ago
  I was only “hacker curious” back then. I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”? I know dumb question but I always wondered…
  • lagniappe 4y ago
    pronounced as "loft heavy industries"
  • sanswork 4y ago
    Loft.
  • abudabi123 4y ago
    I always wondered - was it pronounced “loft” or “low fat”? “elephant”?
• rco8786 4y ago
  Jolly Rogers Cookbook comes to mind
• jamesfmilne 4y ago
  Yup, I remember the Anarchists Cookbook, telling you how to make mortars, and napalm out of polystyrene & petrol.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    I feel like this isn’t so taboo though. Google returns a featured snippet for napalm ingredients. And you literally just told everyone how to make napalm right here. I think the edginess comes from the implication that there were people out there actually doing this. And perhaps that people read this when they were 14.
    • alwayslikethis 4y ago
      There are plenty of videos about women doing this in Ukraine to support the war effort.
• thrwawy74 4y ago
  1) I'm against restricting things behind technical know-how to select for "the right group of people" on principle. I'm not talking about then, but now. 2) I wonder if this magical period was only possible because it was reachable by a few, and this knowledge was not largely abused because of the entry fee. 3) AI is lowering the barrier to entry. The great equalizer, to see what we do with valuable insight ~ Politicians should fear computers more than disgruntled citizens. 4) I hope we don't see export laws changed to cover AI models like encryption was.
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    I kinda agree but technical know-how is probably one of the more "honest" ways of self-limiting something if only because freeloaders usually don't have the patience for anything too complicated And punishment for abuse is mostly non-existent
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    I think people don’t build bombs because they don’t want to. Not because they don’t know how.
• samstave 4y ago
  >>"Also, since BBSes required a lot of technical knowhow to get into" HA!!! I ran a BBS Warez Site out of my North Tahoe High School CAD lab on an everex step cube on a 9600 baud modem in 1991 I was 14. I was grounded for a MONTH for calling long distance into a BBS in San Jose CA in order to play "The Pit" and "Trade wars" and the phone bill was $926 and I failed to buy all the wheat in the galaxy and accidentally SOLD all my wheat failing to corner the market, but flooding it... Yeah, that was on a 286 with an amber monitor that I convinced my dad he needed a computer for his business... and then a 2400 baud modem was important... so I could play Populous with a friend over modem.
  • mackraken 4y ago
    Similar experience here. “Trade Wars” was amazing for the time and place. I’ve often wondered what happened to it and why someone hasn’t ported it (has it been?!)
• samstave 4y ago
  MONDO 2000 was Amazing! Its wear i learned the first of Jaron Lanier and UI/AI/etc whatever he was talking about at the time. Was later a long time subscriber to WIRED before they got too smug.
  • narrator 4y ago
    I've bumped into R.U Sirius a couple of times. Whenever I do I always congratulate him on Mondo 2000 and being so far ahead of the curve at the time.
    • samstave 4y ago
      Whats nuts is that my middle school Lake Tahoe Bus Station sold MONDO - and for a middle schooler, it was pretty expensive... I Think it was ~$7 or maybe $5.99 - regardless, it was NUTS in 1989/1990 F I cant even recall the time... But the sold it in LAKE TAHOE. IN 1990-ish! UHM, was also a subsccriber of 2600 and a total phreak (built blue/black boxes that fit into film canisters, and had an official captain crunch cereal whistle when it was released) We used to troll 411 (in the early US, you could call "411" for "information" and it would connect you to operator who you then ask "Connect me with [BUSINESS] or [WHAT IS THE TELEPHONE NUMBER WITH PERSON X IN CITY Y] So we wou;d have contests on how long we could keep the 411 OP online, and social engineer where they live, where work, how big call center, etc... we were like 14 years old and just doing this for laughs in 1988 or such. I also pulled the famous 'packing tape on dollar bill' hack (theft) to play video games ; So there was this 'hack' where you put a strip of packing tape (folded over itself such that the sticky parts are together) - you put them on a $1 or $5 bill\ You put the dollar into a vending machine at the post office to buy stamps. You buy the cheapest amount of stamps, then you YANK the dollar-in-packing-tape from the machine... You receive the stamps, the change from the yanked bill, take the change to the Safeway (grocery store) next door and you play the video games they had in them ; Defender and Contra. It took us $25 in stolen quarters from the post office machine vuln to this attack to beat contra. My buddy who I did this with is now EVP at Blizzard.
• spiritplumber 4y ago
  I miss that spirit, how do we get it back?
  • narrator 4y ago
    The problem with the tech incubators and hackathons and so forth of today is that it's only tangentially about having fun. Back then it was 90% fun and maybe a few random guys were trying to figure out how to start some sort of tech business. It was mostly hobbyists just screwing around. That sense of play and screwing around is what made it so magical. The last time I felt that kind of magic was when I attended an event called BIOcurious (Note the 'O' in previous word) where they showed complete novices how to use a minION device to sequence DNA with pipettes and reagents. It's the kind of thing that you need to be physically present for. The tech is not easy, but crazy powerful. With biotech gear getting cheap enough to be prosumer, maybe there will be that kind of extreme hobbyist thing forming around biotech? In a similar way, in the 80s computers went from things only big companies could afford to prosumer and even consumer devices and so all these people were getting involved just to see what they could do with these new magical devices.
    • spiritplumber 4y ago
      Was it in SF? I was there with a very derpy bioprinter that was basically a Solidoodle 2 or 3 with peristaltic pumps instead of an extruder :)
      • legerdemain 4y ago
        Maybe it was Counter Culture Lab in Oakland, which is a maker space with a focus on microbiology.
    • toofy 4y ago
      i think this is exactly it. the internet of old was mostly hobbiests. even the early blogs were mostly hobbiests whi just wanted to share their info and didn’t care at all whether it made them money. the profit motive creeping in changes the dynamic completely. btw i think this seems to happen with everything, i don’t think it’s limited to just technology—it happens with anything that transforms from fun hobby. this always seems to sap the energy from many of the most passionate.
• TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > ... various "text files" that would give instructions for doing various illegal or morally dubious things. I was there in the BBS era too. I remember one such text file explaining a simple mechanism to light up a bomb without leaving much trace of the mechanism used to delay the bomb blowing up: it consisted of lighting a cigarette in which a small hole was drilled. Then the text file was going into details, explaining which type of cigarettes to buy so that it wouldn't consume too fast / not get blown by the wind / etc. It was totally hilarious too.
  • 867-5309 4y ago
    can't forget the Terrorist Cookbook - that thing must be as old as the internet
    • aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 4y ago
      Are you thinking of the Anarchist’s Cookbook?
      • 867-5309 4y ago
        that's the one!
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    I feel like the concerning thing is that someone seemingly had direct experience with this. But you just reshared the information and no one cares. The info itself just doesn’t seem that terrible.
• joshxyz 4y ago
  Shit man okay now add that to my list of legitimate fears, AI getting their hands on works by the Paladin Press, haha.
  • zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
    My teen years were spent reading books from Paladin and Loompanics and browsing totse, erowid, and bluelight
• Convolutional 4y ago
  > There were some great magazines of the time like Mondo 2000, and the ethos was real techno-libertarianism, information wants to be free, and all that fun stuff. Everyone was coming off the high of the Soviet Union falling apart and believed that now human liberty would flourish everywhere. Louis Rossetto had this viewpoint 20 years before he launched Wired, and was smart enough to focus on the tech and tech people and tech business for the most part. The right-libertarian philosophy was doled out lightly and cleverly. Wired did try to make it seem that Silicon Valley was just a right-libertarian utopia, and made it seem everyone was of this mind - more than was the case. R U Sirius had similar ideas. I think it made things seem different than they actually were.
• strictnein 4y ago
  Bouncing around BBSs late at night in the 90s was just a blast. Sitting in the basement, hoping the parents wouldn't find you up at 3am yet again. Seeing what random "stuff" was available. Playing door games (TradeWars, LORD, etc). Finding a list of other local BBSs and calling into those and repeating the process.
  • alwayslikethis 4y ago
    I wish I had a chance to do that, but I was born too late. By the time I had consistent access to the internet (and learned English), the internet is mostly ruined already.
• illwrks 4y ago
  The anarchist cookbook... I remember downloading it and putting it on a floppy disk, I'm not sure I ever even look at it :D
• bane 4y ago
  I remember those days fondly as well. Compounded with growing up in a fairly rural area, the BBS world was an escape and exposure to people and ideas that would have never been considered where I grew up. There was also this feeling at the time that I'm finding hard to express or even really understand. There was of course the corporate tech world, exemplified very nicely by various magazines and shows like Computer Chronicles. But there was this other world of real techno-culture that seemed to be growing and compounding on itself. There was literature like the Cyberpunk genre, music like early techno and what we now call IDM, BBSs, periodicals like 2600 and Mondo and countless zines. Wired launched sometime in that era. Linux was the work of a single disaffected hacker. The early piracy and demoscenes seemed to give other artistic voices to this counterculture. Technomages were concepts on popular tv. Early ftp and gopher sites (pre-WWW) felt like the work of super l33t nerds. The USSR had just fallen, information wanted to be free, and communicating with people across the planet became something we could do daily, helping us find more of us. It felt like we were building towards something -- billions of minds were about to be unlocked by the commoditized availability of information, computation, and communication and making money was a secondary thought. And then there was a shift. I don't know when it was, but it felt like the shift onto the WWW allowed the Computer Chronicle watching corporate world to buy up, buy out, co-opt, and extinguish all of it. That nascent tech-culture of the BBS era wholly was unable to truly pivot to Web. Instead of connecting and growing us, it stole, fractured, and repositioned us away from those passions. The corporatists realized that we would never pay for things at the revenue they wanted, and slowly raised the temperature like frogs being boiled, with free services for advertising and entire generations of possible techno-culturalists were diverted from counter culture into optimizing ad placement. Instead of challenging people with new information and ideas, the populace was encouraged to build information echo chambers through which propaganda could be injected and money extracted. What we're becoming was not Hiro Protagonist, Y.T., or Case, but the cautionary "Fitless Humans" from Wall-E. I'm writing this on a site called "Hacker News" which uses the word "hacker" in a way that I would not recognize back in the 80s and 90s, to drive discussion about hyper growth startups. I think I'm going to go outside now.
  • ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    I refer you to Dr. Thompson's writing on "The Wave". Similar vibe to what you had to say here. https://genius.com/Hunter-s-thompson-the-wave-passage-fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-annotated https://genius.com/Hunter-s-thompson-the-wave-passage-fear-a...