I 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.

The fact you believed it would last is proof we still can have nice things. :)

You guys should read The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll. It's a classic.

i was 13 when my public upload folder started getting messed with, sad day

Wearz were very nice things.

It’s Warez.

"wah-rez"

Wait what? It’s pronounced like the city in Mexico?

I'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

It'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.

> It'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.

Citation needed there.

I have always assumed it came from fleamarkets where people selling pirated VHS films and knock-off Rolexes would be described as “selling their wares”. Changing the s to a z was an obvious step in 90s internet culture.

Okay, so my citation is, I was there, I was a (fringe) participant in pre-internet piracy culture, starting in 1990.

Pirate BBSes would have various "goods" (in the sense you and GP mean) available for download, including images (hint: some of them may have involve ladies), text files, and software. Sometimes there would also be sections for various art media created by users, such as .mods or ASCII art or poetry or whatever. Those various "goods" would never be all slopped together, they'd be divided into categories. And the category called "warez" would never, ever, have anything in it other than pirated software.

I agree that the s-to-z thing is just classic hacker/leet culture, though it's not internet culture, because it predates the people in question having internet access. I'm saying that the "wares" that becomes "warez" is not "wares-as-in-goods", it's "wares-as-in-softwares". It's pluralized even though "software" is a non-count noun, because then it fits with "files", "images", and so on. And yes, ultimately the "-ware" in "software" is from the sense that you and GP are talking about; I'm saying that the etymology is not directly from there, because otherwise all the other kinds of pirated stuff would also be "warez", and it never, ever, was.

I'm not sure how you are missing it, but hardware and software both etymologically have ware (as in a manufactured article, product, or merchandise) built-in to them. Without ware, there would be no hardware or software, or warez. The root of these words, also silverware, cookware, courseware, Tupperware, Corningware, etc., indeed is "ware." And wares is merely the plural of ware.

I too never seen "warez" used to refer to anything other than pirated software. You make a good point about the derivation; it probably is directly from "software". Adding a superfluous Z to the end of a plural mass noun was also a characteristic of l33tspeak, as I recall.

> I think the "wah-rez" pronunciation came from people seeing the l33tspeak and not recognizing the original word behind it.

I think it was explicitly luls a lot of the time. I saw "warez" spelled as "juar3z", etc, a lot.

To be fair, L-thirtythreet-speak pronunciations can be quite confusing!

This reminds me, my friend and I were the only people we knew who'd even used the internet in the late 90s so no one was around to correct us, and 3 of the apparently incorrect pronounciations we had agreed on were:

- war-ehz

- gee-aw-cit-eez

- jif

oh my god rapidshare was hot garbage

I 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?

I 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.

It makes me sad to think of all those simple little services we used to run on *NIX machines, like `finger` and `whois`. You'd never want to disclose that information now, but at the time it was quite nice to be able to see if a friend or colleague was around with a simple network query.

I remember when I could connect to nearly any server on the internet on port 25 and manually type the commands to send an email.

.

You can still submit mail to virtually any mail server using telnet. I just tried it on Gmail for curiosity, and it did work!

I dunno. Everyone fairly-publicly shares their entire friend network and what they had for lunch, now, usually under their real name.

It’s like how when I was a kid, nobody in our neighborhood locked their doors at night. There was no need. Until there was.

I think you make it sound as if that was good, but it was straight naive or irresponsible

The 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.

Reminds me of a few years ago, when I accidentally exposed my Domoticz install to the internet without authentication. I've had missed something in my Nginx config with X-Forwarded-For headers. After about a week or something apparently a foreign visitor came by my install and decided to have some good fun. Turning my lights on/off at random times. It took me about 3 days to realize what have happened, but in the mean time he didn't just destroy my install and only mess with me. Which was really sweet, because nuking the system would be far easier than opening the webpage every night.

That was a good and fun security lesson though and now I always check outside security with a mobile hotspot.

I think this takes the crown as the least-charitable interpretation of a comment that I've ever seen on HN.

"There are villages on the countryside that are safe and friendly, everyone knows each other, people don't even lock their door."

- "Man, those idiots are naive and irresponsible."

1 I didnt call any1 "idiot"

2 it s not like other people cant go to those places, thus it is kinda irresponsible

Sure, 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.

That's like saying it's naive and irresponsible to gooutside without locking your front door when you live in a tiny remote village with 40 other people you've known for your whole life.

Not really, in your example theres no way any1 appears and even if he does, then your friends protect ur stuff

Meanwhile internet aint remote village

Point is it used to be

Do you know of any tiny remote internet villages left? There has to be a few

It was a different time

Some 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.

Sometimes 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?

There’s actually coordination around these things: https://littlefreelibrary.org/

We 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!

In 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-bo...

Munich, Germany has them as well

Here in Baltimore, MD, too, although the focus is mostly on kids books

Here in Brazil we have those on bus stops.

We have them in Toronto, ON. We call them LLLs or Little Lending Libraries. There are actually quite a lot of them.

We have them out in the 905s too. I've seen quite a few of them here in Durham Region.

Usually called Little Free Libraries in the US.

(The name is a little weird, because regular libraries are also free...)

The word "public" in "public library" is load bearing, you can't replace it with "regular", hence your confusion.

Private libraries (mine for example) are not free, as in beer or otherwise.

True, though to be fair most people never get to use private libraries. Or they used a library at their University that was technically private, but that gave access to the public as well. Public libraries are ubiquitous and very normal, while private libraries are the exception.

In America, public schools all have private libraries, reserved for attending students. (Maybe some operate as public libraries, but I've never seen nor heard of it.)

Furthermore, public libraries are not necessarily free. In America they virtually are all; fees only for late returns. But this is not globally true; in some parts of the world, libraries open to the public charge a fee for checking out books, or even require a fee for entry.

It's a normal elision, yes, we all picture a public library when we say "library". But "free library" isn't redundant or weird, because "public" is a modifier of library, not a trait.

People tend to call their personal library a "book collection" or the like, but it's a library, in just the same way that a Little Free Library is.

So most people who read have at least a small private library, whether they think of it in those terms or not.

There are two libraries near me that aren’t free - they charge an annual “membership” fee. One even operates more like an old blockbuster when it comes to newly released books. They charge a daily rental fee! It’s 25¢ a day, I believe.

FWIW "Little Free Library" is a trademark and its owners have been aggressive in its defense. I don't know what folks should use as a generic name.

Buurtbieb - in English, roughly pronounced as b-eew-rt-beep.

It's a literal translation of "neighbourhood library", it alliterates, and it sounds cute. (Keep the "beep" part short for that).

Just keep using it as a generic name. They've already lost the generification war. Are they seriously going to track down and sue neighborhood libraries?

Good luck getting a jury to enforce the trademark.

It seems bizarre to me that someone could trademark such a straightforwardly descriptive name.

Yeah, but if you take a book from a LFL, you own it. With a public library, you merely borrowed it.

Obligatory "Free as in beer vs. free as in freedom" comment. I have pulled stuff out of small community bookshelves that would never have seen their chance in a "professional-run" public library, both bad and good.

I always took it to mean “no really this is free, take a book!”

In Puerto Rico there are quite a few of these on the sidewalk and despite the rains they are generally always stocked with books. There are bars on everyone's windows and doors, but books piled up on the street.

there's one down the street from me but instead of books it has canned food. It says "little free pantry" on it. It must have been around for a while because the neighborhood it's in has long sense been gentrified and is populated with very well-off residents vs the working poor that use to live there.

Great to hear these little neighborhood libraries are international. We have them here where I live in Colorado, US.

Indeed. The zoning code for my town specifically calls them out (as allowed, with no permits necessary).

I've also seen many of these at bus stations near Victoria, BC.

Can confirm neighborhood libraries are a thing in Pittsburgh (USA).

I remember making secret directories on my Windows desktop by using a transparent icon and ALT+255 as filename. Good times.

I 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.

We 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.

You 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

That exact memory crossed my mind as soon as I saw that U + <number> in the title :-D. Fun times indeed!

_vti_cnf