xianc78 @xianc78@gameliberty.club

Joe Biden’s America……

@Mr_NutterButter

Who Needs Facts
Inconceivable! Ya mean to say it was warmer in the 1930's!! But, Muh Goreball warming!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/who-needs-facts-andy/

If you want to know how a cool idea can crash to the ground, you can take a look at the lessons that were not learned in the 90s.

Enter Hotline, a really cool closed source program that could be described as a BBS for the dot.com bubble era. While this was before my time, I've used it while fucking around with old Macs and two articles by Salon in 1999 give a good summary of it. If you want to fuck around with it, you can download the clients here and read up some stories about it on the same site too.

It was developed for the Mac platform, ported to Windows, had clones that were compatible written for other UNIX platforms, and eventually had the protocol spec released by the original developers/rights owners when they abandoned it. In the late 90s nerd culture, this was big. I mean it was common for Mac game developers and whatnot to use it, along with companies doing Mac software development. You could upload files to it, chat, communicate with members, and of course news would be posted to the news board.

Because this was before the days of cheap VPSes, you would self host a server out of your basement and register it with a tracker. Then someone would join your server after finding it there and download warez, and maybe talk.

This meant that Hotline had a community similar to that of the Warez BBSes but with a more 90s Mac owner oriented focus, mostly because it started there. While the 90s Mac userbase was more insular and had a shocking similarity to the Amiga userbase down to upgrade boards and all, the 90s Mac userbase still did have the "high on their own supply" mindset the modern day one has.

What killed Hotline? Well while some blamed the Windows port for it, as it grew it gained a new group of members that wanted Warez and porn, and to download it. For them Hotline was a means to an end.

Inevitably, cancer began affecting what was the network. The same kind of "click these ads" shit that was commonplace with ad.fly and the like boomed there with server owners asking people to click on banner ads.

Of course, some old users were using it like Slack/Discord back in the day as a collaboration platform. But most people used it as a free program and as it turns out, nobody was going to pay $30 for a chat and warez program. At some point it got so notorious to some that there was a Is Your Son a Computer Hacker tier article (but unironic) made by some magazine.

But what killed off Hotline? Several things. First of all, it wasn't FOSS, which meant the protocol's future was forever in doubt. In fact, one person commentating on the whole fiasco straight up said, "if it was FOSS this could be solved". No really.

Second, the creator was your classic "autistic programmer" archetype. He sold out because he could only see dollar signs, regretted it, encrypted his former company's code and fled the country, and had his property raided by police looking for the code back. Meanwhile the new owners wanted to promote the collaboration aspects of a program clearly designed for warez.

The new owners of Hotline meanwhile released some shitty updates nobody liked, including Hotline 1.5 replacing "news" with "threaded news" and pissing people off because it was incompatible. On top of that, "news" was used as a shoutbox as opposed to a news area and the developers didn't get this. This was on top of updates being constantly delayed because of the soap opera with the programmer encrypting the drives.

To make matters worse, there's also what I said about shitty server operators. Just like private trackers and shitty warez forums, there were terrible admins who had strict rules and were anal about who could download content. It was also buggy and featured many exploits that were constantly abused and passed around by Hotline users, especially those who wanted to fuck over shitty server admins. There was also no encryption, which is comical for any sort of file sharing program in this day and age and was even at the time because KDX and the like was encrypted.

Of course the community quite honestly didn't understand solely why it was turning to shit (the fact it wasn't FOSS and stagnated probably made shit FAR worse), and it blamed those fucking Windows normies instead. This mindset was embraced by the developer of Carracho, which was Mac only. Needless to say Carracho isn't even talked about anymore nor does it have servers running because being Mac only crippled it's userbase for good. There was KDX which was allegedly from the same developers...but also paid crap and which died out because everyone else moved to different parts of the web.

Then of course Napster came out and that was the flagship for solely piracy programs. It went straight to the point: just search and download MP3 files for free. Everyone and their grandma ran it before being declared illegal scared off a few boomers, but the kids of the time just installed Limewire/KaZaA and the like and downloaded warez and MP3s there, before BitTorrent killed those off. There were clones of Hotline but most of them never were as popular as Hotline ever was. Hotline is now a footnote in internet history, talked about on forums once in a while.

But it's surreal to look at it years later and realize holy fuck, some of the same poor choices keep happening to this day with tech.

reminder that overpopulation is a myth.

> see post
> image is of tweet i disagree with
> the quote reply is something i agree with
> repost
> the post with this image is saying they disagree with the thing i agreed with
> realize i reposted thing i dont agree with
Im having a stroke

Beyond Meat being sued for misleading consumers about the protein content

https://www.rfdtv.com/story/46717059/beyond-misleading-beyond-meat-hit-with-lawsuit-over-protein-values

The Unicode Consortium, 2010: oh god let’s not get sued by Taito

The Unicode Consortium, 2015: still don’t want to get sued by Taito

The Unicode Consortium, 2017: ehhh Taito have tweeted it so we’re probably in the clear

https://twitter.com/TAITO/status/898524598127296512

#Bonfire looks quite familar and very nice actually

"What you can expect from the Bonfire beta"

https://bonfirenetworks.org/posts/beta_what_to_expect/

Cloudflare Had Another Outage

Cloudflare had another outage today, this one wasn't quite as bad as the one last year or the year before but still, for about 1 hour many of the websites using their CDN could not be reached by people today.

https://youtu.be/8EhzckmrlIk

Does The Vaccine Apparatus Actually Think The Acronym "Sudden Adult Death Syndrome" Will Make All These Sudden Deaths Seem Part Of The "New Normal?" https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/does-the-vaccine-apparatus-actually