Internet Chaff Relay: The short-lived predecessor to Twitter

My first computer was a 486 system that my brother gave me some time in the early to mid 1990’s (most likely 1993 or 1994). It was running DOS, Win3.1, and OS/2.  My introduction to computer literacy was mainly driven by my desire to figure out how to run games on the system. I don’t remember all of the games, but two in particular were Spear of Destiny (a spin-off of of the shooter Wolfenstein) and NHL 93 (and EA Sports hockey game).  With this motivation to  learn about the computer, I quickly picked up new things.

On the grand scale of computing history, this was before e-mail caught up with postal mail in volume,  right around when Red Hat Linux was introduced, right around when  Mosaic released their web browser, and a few years before Apple had a product called “Mac OS”.

It wasn’t too long before I was introduced to the more social aspects of the computing subculture. A friend introduced me to the concept of Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and I quickly became hooked to that too.  The best way to describe the BBS scene is perhaps as a localized Internet. A BBS was a little system that someone would run from their home and you could dial into it. A whole subculture developed. A BBS would usually have functionality to chat, post messages, upload/download files, play games, etc.

Again, I must stress that I was a later-comer on the BBS scene. When I entered it, the BBS scene was probably somewhere slightly past its prime and starting its decline  (or, according to some, already well into it’s decline). My first modem was technically a 2400 baud modem, but that device was so quirky that I never really did  much with it. So very soon I jumped up to a 14.4 modem, which seemed fast at the time but is really unbelievably slow.

I called a bunch of BBS systems, possibly around 100 or more.  Many friendships formed through this medium, although they were probably not completely deep. I was pretty much a regular on the scene until 1999, when the scene had already pretty much died out. Where there were once hundreds of BBS’ in the Windsor area, at that point  there were only 5 or 10. Though I never really ran a full-time BBS, I was quite involved in the scene. I ran a couple of part time BBS’ and was co-sysop (assistant  admin) of at least 3 boards. I was co-sysop of Champagne’s Island, Genesis, and Eternal Dreams. I called many a number of system and was thoroughly immersed in the underground BBS scene.

For those interested, here are some of the BBS’ I called besides the ones that have already been mentioned: The Dynamite BBS, Windsor Footnote, Windsor Download, Czar’s Land, The Beacon, Second Sinister, Windsor ITC, Body Count BBS, The Abyss, Limbo BBS, Purple Haze, The Outhouse, The Kombatant, and The Swamp.

Just as things in the BBS scene began to fade away, I ran a low-resolution (ANSI/ASCII) art group which had five releases (one of which was released in my absence after I disappeared from the scene). There are so many other memories, aspects to this, much of which is probably not very well preserved or accessible. For all the efforts to relive the past, such as the BBS Documentary,  there are still large black holes in the records. Much of this past, even from the early to mid 1990’s, has simply disappeared off the map,  so to speak.  It might be a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others ways.  Some of it here will return back here and there, but for the most part it is gone for good. It seems enough hard drives have died or been erased and memories forgotten in order for much of this socio-cultural history to disappear. And anything that is unearthed will be a small sliver of the whole narrative of what went on.

While “cyberspace” certainly has evolved since then, many things for the better, there’s clearly something different now, and, I think, something lost.   But as a whole, I don’t think I’d go backwards if I could. Technological change changes us, and nostalgia aside, we are not the same sort of people that enjoyed in the BBS scene back in the 80’s and 90’s.

According to the news article, “According to an affidavit filed with the Sumner County General Sessions Court on Sept. 25, Shannon D. Jackson of Hendersonville, Tenn., allegedly violated a legal order of protection that had been previously filed against her when she sent a virtual “poke” to another woman on Facebook”.

Specs of the system

Processor: Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.60GHZ

1GB RAM

ArchLinux, is touted as a “simple, lightweight linux distribution”. And this seems generally true. It isn’t simple in the sense of being “dumbed down”, but rather in terms of being uncluttered and generally uncomplicated for a person of intermediate or advanced Linux experience. The installer is minimalistic, but rather effective. It could be a bit more usable and intuitive, but generally it is not at all hard to figure out.  I chose the “core” installer, which requires a network connection to fetch the packages you install.

ArchLinux uses pacman. I was not crazy about this to begin with, but now I find it to be a reasonably functional and handy package management system. I decided to use XFCE for my desktop environment, as I figured this would be the best desktop environment all things considered (the laptop only has 1GB of RAM). There were a concerning amount of loose ends after I retrived and installed the packages I wanted, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome with a bit of tinkering. I was able to get XFCE, my wireless network card, the built-in web cam, and what not working.

Some software I’ve installed:

Linux Kernel: 2.6.29

Desktop Environment: XFCE4

Web Browser: Firefox 3.0.8

Multimedia: Mplayer, Cheese (Web Cam) 2.26.0, Audacity 1.3.7, gimp 2.6.6

Office: AbiWord 2.6.8, GnuCash 2.2.9

Development: Python 2.6.1, GCC 4.3.3

Editor: vim/gvim 7.2

Other Software: FileZilla 3.2.3, Nmap 4.76, XPDF, Putty 0.60, freemind 0.8.1, sshfs 2.2

I’ve timed a few operations, and here are the findings:

From Reboot to Console Login Prompt : 25 seconds

XFCE Load: 11 seconds

Load GIMP: 7 seconds

Compile nmap 4.85BETA7 with GCC: 3.5 minutes

There are definately still some loose ends that need to be fixed up before I feel really comfortable with this setup, but so far so good! I’m having fun. I really haven’t experimented with other distros since I’ve settled on Ubuntu (which still is my distribution of choice for regularly-powered systems).  I will post some more about this in the future.

Here’s a summary:

• Socrates would have programmed in Assembly language
• Aristotle would have chosen C
• Plato would prefer C++
• The Stoics would have gone for PERL
• Descartes would be a Java guru.
• Kant would have chosen Python (my choice also)
• Wittgenstein would be a Haskell programmer.

The author also provides some interesting reasoning for these selections. It’s definitely worth a read.

Over one year, Twitter has grown 1382%. Facebook’s growth, while more modest, was still amazing at 228%.

What is also interesting is also how it shows how Twitter is appealing to an older segment of the population.

I know that’s old news, but I just thought I’d refer to some interesting quotes from that article.

On the influence of Fredrich Hayek:

“Hayek’s work on price theory is central to my own thinking about how to manage the Wikipedia project,” Wales wrote on the blog of the Internet law guru Lawrence Lessig

And again:

Wales has adopted Hayek’s view that change is handled more smoothly by an interlocking network of diverse individuals than by a central planning authority

On Von Mises:

He swears to have actually read Ludwig von Mises’s 10-pound tome Human Action

On Homeschooling:

Wales, whose wife Christine teaches their 5-year-old daughter Kira at home, says he is disappointed by the “factory nature” of American education: “There’s something significantly broken about the whole concept of school.” A longtime opponent of mandatory public school attendance, Wales says that part of the allure of Florida, where his Wikimedia Foundation is based, is its relatively laissez-faire attitude toward homeschoolers.

One of the best things Bruce has done is exposing security theater for what it is, an ineffective response and a waste of money. Bruce also communicates that most things in the news are so ‘exceptional’  that they generally are not the things we should be REALLY worrying about. The news media so often plays the role of “working up fear”.  Simply put, we become pliable when we fear things. For an interesting quote that outlines how economic fear is used to generate servitude, see Bruce’s most recent blog post, Economic Distress and Fear

Going back to 2006, Bruce wrote the following in an article called Refuse To Be Terrorized for Wired News:

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Whether or not you agree with Bruce on every single point, I think everyone would do well to interact with his advice about security. If this interests you, I suggest you take some time to peruse his blog and articles. His stuff is really thoughtful and I think it presents a good analysis of how security measures are best carried out. And his perspective is really in line with lessons which have been long learned within the cyber/computer security communities. Responding to “new threats” is something computer security experts have been doing for a long time.

I think it is often forgotten that one of the explicit strategies of most terrorists lies in provoking certain responses. Tactically, most of the benefit in terrorism for terrorist groups does not lie in the “payload”,  but what happens after the “payload”. If terrorism were just a matter of inflicting wounds, it would be a pretty futile endeavor. In terms of death tolls, as horrific they may be, they are actually quite small. Especially when compared with more “run of the mill”  threats to our lives.  We are far more likely to die from hundreds of other things,  but the thing about terrorism is that it gets right to our psyche, and intimidates us in ways that other things (car crashes, for instance) can’t. The devious and calculated nature of it gets to us.  Terrorism is a means to an end, an there are other more subtle and yet more important things (besides causing carnage) that terrorists gain from what they do.

In the aforementioned article, Bruce continues to outline how terrorists gain boldness through our reaction:

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

So, in planning a response to terrorism, people can’t let fear or panic guide them. Unless of course they wish to become more vulnerable.  Fearful and panicky people are rarely secure.   And so it is important to contextualize terrorism. Sure, we can come to grips the severity of the threat and the way it has impacted peoples lives, but it needs to be contextualized.  It is one of many threats, and perhaps not even the one that is most immanent in most Westerner’s lives.   I think the mania and rhetoric about this being a totally unique circumstance and people needing to be willing to give up liberties for the struggle is considerably overblown. And Schneier’s security-oriented analysis really shows how the typical response to terrorism (especially ’security theater’) is not even good for us in a utilitarian way.