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How hard would it have been for a "rogue state" to get a copy of that floppy? I understand that times were different, you couldn't just PGP encrypt it and attac
by LeifCarrotson 3y ago
How hard would it have been for a "rogue state" to get a copy of that floppy? I understand that times were different, you couldn't just PGP encrypt it and attach a 1.44 MB blob to an email, sending it at 24 kbps. You couldn't just upload it to an anonymous filesharing site.
But today it seems fundamentally obvious that once a single copy is leaked, it's all over... was that not true in 2000?
- wmf 3y agoOf course all that stuff was leaked (and there were anonymous filesharing sites). The whole export-grade crypto thing was a legal fig leaf.
- pdw 3y agoIt was all extremely silly. Debian took a different approach: before 2005, they put all crypto packages in a separate "non-US" archive, hosted in the Netherlands. American developers weren't allowed to upload there. That way, Debian never exported crypto code from the United States, it only ever imported it.
- wmf 3y agoYep, US export restrictions ended up spurring foreign investment in crypto like Thawte (founded by Mark Shuttleworth) and SSLeay (later forked as OpenSSL).
- sillywalk 3y agoI believe OpenBSD (based in Canada) was in a similar situation.
- eastbound 3y agoThere was a story of a hundred programmers taking the program PRINTED ON PAPER to a conference in Sweden to type it in again, because somehow export of binaries was forbidden but not the printed version of it. Is it true? Which event organized this?
- wmf 3y agoThe PGP source code was published as a book so that it could be exported under the theory that the first amendment beats ITAR. https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html
- notpushkin 3y ago> A book comprised entirely of thousands of lines of source code looks pretty dull. But then so does a nondescript fragment of concrete -- unless it happens to be a piece of the Berlin Wall, which many people display on their mantels as a symbol of freedom opening up for millions of people. Perhaps in the long run, this book will help open up the US borders to the free flow of information. This is beautiful.
- semi-extrinsic 3y agoGnutella, including popular clients like LimeWire, were released around the same time as Windows 2000. People were doing decentralized filesharing of files larger than 1.44 MB just fine in 2000. Filesharing at that time was just wild, by the way. It was far too easy to set up your client such that you were sharing the entire contents of your computer with the whole internet. More often than not, this was done by the kids in the family on the same machine where mom and dad had their work stuff plus their private finances. So of course the files were leaked. If you were intending to share something illegal to distribute outside the US, you could easily get plausible deniability just by sharing everything on your computer and feigning ignorance.
- NL807 3y agoeDonkey and eMule was fire during those years.
- nurettin 3y agowith dc++ and a fiber network connecting major universities in Germany at 10MegaBytes/s, it was more than fire. I remember downloading the entire ** trilogy in minutes.
- nirav72 3y agoBack in those days you didn't even need to be on LimeWire or eMule to look at the contents of someone's home PC. I remember around the late 90s/early 2000s, when I got DSL. This is before consumer grade routers became a common thing in the household. So most people had their PC connected directly to their DSL box. Browsing through windows share on other people's home PC was one of this easiest things to do.
- hunter2_ 3y ago> a copy of that floppy Mostly off-topic, but your use of rhyme is reminiscent of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI
- rconti 3y agoWe were sharing lots of 3-7MB files peer-to-peer at the time :D Napster, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, etc. Plenty of public FTP sites all over the place as well. Even in the late 90s, 128kbps ISDN connections were not unheard of, and 256kbps DSL was rolling out as well.
- netsharc 3y agoDamn, Audiogalaxy! That takes me back! A simple Windows client for downloading (and well uploading), and to search and download you go to their website, login and add stuff to your queue (although I barely remember what the website looked like). Sooner or later someone with the files you want would come online and your computer would begin downloading from their computer..
- icedchai 3y agoIt was. People were sharing pirated software on BBSes 40 years ago! Downloading a floppy might take an hour. In the 90's, I knew kids who got jobs at ISPs just so they could run warez FTP sites off of the T1.
- fragmede 3y agoOh man, a T1. That brings back memories. Serial Port recently tried to set one up! https://youtu.be/MEda7SQxh18 https://youtu.be/MEda7SQxh18
- icedchai 3y agoYes! In the early 90's, anyone with a T1 was almost god like. Most local ISPs were still connected with 56k or maybe fractional T1 lines.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoFast forward to 2000: T1 lines were still being used, but ADSL deployment was growing like wildfire. Some providers were legendary for offering synchronous DSL with extremely few limitations, for a fraction of the cost of a T1. That's what really kicked off a new generation of distributed file sharing. Nothing today compares; the dark web is a tiny blip in the ocean that was the 2000's file sharing scene.
- Akronymus 3y agodark or deep web? Because the dark web is HUGE. But the deep one not so much.
- icedchai 3y agoI'm skeptical. In terms of actual usage, there are many, many more people online today. Many people are sharing torrents over their broadband connections: entire movies, all seasons of show. We won't even get into the piracy of books! I think the piracy scene today is much bigger.
- mgerdts 3y agoA few years before that plenty of people were downloading 30ish floppy images over modems to install Slackware or SLS.
- pdntspa 3y agoIn 2000 there was absolutely nothing stopping you from connecting to an FTP server and uploading whatever you wanted, other than time and bandwidth.