arcade79

Ah. A few years after you, then, there was a 16 year old Canadian out of #montreal (on IRC) who broke into my main server - on December '24 1998. He ended up rm -rf'ing it, and bragging about it on IRC.

I spent the next month tracking him down. He was fond of DoSing a Canadian ISP. He also, for some reason, fond of DoSing a computer lab at NASA. I tracked him through servers he had broken in at 13 different american universities, a couple of machines at NASA, one machine at fbi.gov, and a variety of others.

Coordinated with a guy at NASA, everyone but FBI was eagerly sending me logs from their servers, and the FBI+NASA looped in RCMP who got thousands of pages of logs from me. Both from servers he had broken into, and from the various IRC channels I monitored his activity from. The Canadian ISP he was fond of DoSing was also quite eager.

Around January 22nd 1999 (might have been a day before or after) the RCMP came knocking on his door. A few hours later (after being released after being interrogated) he got online and told me he would knock my servers offline permanently. At this point I had a phone number directly to the RCMP - and they paid him another visit.

Oh...

If those RCMP folks came knocking on your door around January 22nd 1999. Hi there. Long time. It was fun chasing you, but I didn't enjoy the rm -rf.

> I also pulled one of my sons twice from the same pond around that age

Norwegian here.

I rescued a girl one year older than me from a small stream/brook that had grown a bit larger due to rainwater when I was 7 years old.

Also walked to/from school alone from when I was 6 years old. I remember parents were allowed to walk us to school the first week, and then we were supposed to get there on our own. About 1km walk.

I'm very, very pro "let them walk to school on their own", and my daughter has walked to school on her own since she was 6 or 7.

I know Google started deteriorating. It was in 2008 or 2009. Up until then Google would return 0 results if it couldn't find a document with all the words you specified.

Then it started serving synonyms, attempted to correct spelling, and so forth. Instead of serving up that there was 0 results, it attempted to be "helpful".

For a while, you could enable "verbatim" search, but even that has gotten corrupted.

Their search quality has deteriorated ever since that change. It is sad.

Anecdotal, I know, but I was ghosted by Google back in 2004-2005 or thereabouts. Back and forth with a recruiter, who promised me that she would book phone screens. Then heard nothing. Pinged her repeatedly. Nothing.

A few years later got another Google recruiter after me. Ended up getting hired in 2008.

Looked up the previous recruiter. Her last day at the company was the day she promised she would book phone screens, or the day after (can't remember exactly, this is quite a few years ago). I can only assume she was suddenly let go.

Ever since, I keep wondering how many ghostings happen because the person holding the strings disappears for some reason, and there's a lack of system to follow up on that.

For me, it was kubuntu. Back in late 2005 or early 2006. The reason? They were always pretty good at shipping the latest KDE. I had grown tired of hoping someone would compile a new version for my preferred distro.

So kubuntu it was, and has been ever since. I'm currently looking into whether I should change to something else - as I've started growing tired of Ubuntu/Kubuntu after some 20 odd years.

I have no idea about this catalogue, however, looking at the article and how the image manipulation has happened - it looks very much like "repro" work back in the day.

Anything that large companies published in/as magazines, etc, back in the 80/90s first went to a design company. Then to a repro company for the "finishing touches" to make it look nice. Faces were touched up, photo artifacts was removed, everything was to look neat and tidy.

This looks so much like that. I wouldn't be surprised if Thermo Fisher still ran everything that is to be published through a marketing/repro cycle, who has tampered with this without realizing what it looks like.

It'll be interesting to see if any actual data has been changed, or just the presentation of the data.

My take: China is now producing cars of such good quality that companies are putting CT-scans of their cars online ..

Been driving Tesla the last 9 years .. entirely possible that my next car will be a BYD.

Uh; not the same as FreeBSD jails? But name conflict? That's just silly.

Leaving Google was the best thing I did, some 10 years ago. It reduced my stress level dramatically. I had no idea about how stressed I was at G. The release, when leaving, was immense.

Never ever, will I return to big tech.

However, having said that, never ever, will I regret having joined. It was an amazing journey.

> And now we are at a situation where nuclear escalation has already started (New START was not extended).

This is a massive understatement. Russia has announced, and probably tested, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik . This is basically Project Pluto reloaded, but now as a Russian instead of a US missile.

I remember reading about Project Pluto some 25 years ago or so. It was terrifying to read about. And now Russia has realized it.

Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline.

I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.

It won't get cheaper than solar though.

Nice, the L4 cache seem to be a newish addition. Love the detail about two filesystems with >10 exabytes of storage.

While reading this kind of articles, I'm always surprised by how small the storage described is. Given that Microsoft released their paper on LRCs in 2012, Google patented a bunch in 2010, facebook talked about their stuff around the 2010-2014 era too. CEPH started getting good erasure codes around 2016-2020.

Has any of the big ones released articles on their storage systems in the last 5-10 years?

Been a kubuntu user since .. 2006? 2007? Don't remember when kubuntu became a thing, but as soon as I tried Ubuntu, I went kubuntu. I believe it was 5.10 or 6.04 or something. :-)

Am growing tired of Ubuntu though. Just not sure where I should turn. I want a .deb based system. Ubuntu is pushing snaps too heavily for my liking.

Well, there was Ender's Game, it came in '85. Usenet did exist at that point, though. Don't know if the author had encountered it.

The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Going against the users like that would make me drop it like a hot potato.

The interconnects already exists.

> and it's not too difficult to make an opinionated and challenging chatbot

Funnily enough, I've saved instructions for ChatGPT to always challenge my opinions with at least 2 opposing views; and never to agree with me if it seems that I'm wrong. I've also saved instructions for it to cut down on pleasantries and compliments.

Works quite well. I still have to slap it around for being too supportive / agreeing from time to time - but in general it's good at digging up opposing views and telling me when I'm wrong.

Grew up with Duralex Provence as the 'regular milk / water glass' here in Norway. Never broke one by accident. Excellent glasses.

I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.

Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.

We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.

Worked wonderfully well.

Scary statistics from the US. Here's some anecdotal data from Norway (my daughter being the data, she's 11):

- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.

- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..

- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.

- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.

- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.

- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.

And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.

Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.

I mean; come on.

I'll note that phrack magazine predates the worm by 3 years. Wargames, the movie, predates it by 5 years. 2600 by by 4 years. Mitnick started having fun around 9 years earlier.

I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.

We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them.

Email, Usenet and IRC was great.

Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.

Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.

Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.

Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.

IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.

Sadly lacking a nice big table to lay out the metadata on.

All my random edits go through and stick around. Probably because they're relatively simple. A table with data up until 2020, and I update it with sources up until 2024? Never had it removed.

I seldomly add much beyond such things though.

What happens to the energy that did the useful work?

What I find truly insane is how we're "wasting" the hardware.

I ran a mailserver for thousands of people on a 486 DX 33Mhz. It had smtp, pop3 and imap. It was more than powerful enough to handle it with ease.

I had a Pentium 3 w/1GB of RAM, and it was a supremely capable laptop.

These days I have a a machine from 2018 or 2019, which I upgraded to 32G of RAM and I added an NVME drive in addition to the spinning rust earlier this year.. because firefox got (extremely, more than a minute to start the browser) sluggish due to an HDD instead of NVME.

Now, it's obvious that an NVME drive is superior, but it surprises me how incredibly lackadaisical we've gotten with resource usage. It surprises me how little "extra" we get, except ads that requires more and more resources. Sure, we've got higher resolution photos, higher resolution videos, and now AI will require vast resources (which of course is cool). At the same time, we don't get that much more utility out of our computers.

I have a Tesla, and up until Elon did a hitler salute, I was more then willing considering that my next car would be a Tesla too (my main annoyance being that windshield wipers was enabled/disabled on the screen on model 3s).

After the Hitler salute? Nope. No. Absolutely not. I want absolutely nothing to do with anything new that man ever comes up with again. Which hurts, given how much I've loved watching SpaceX launched, and how much I've loved watching Tesla get cooler and cooler.

It's a bit scary how much of what we "took as granted" in the 90s somehow "got lost and forgotten" by most people between about 2005 and 2020.

/oldfart