Net.Weirdness: AI and Aliens

"[A] compendium of some of the tastiest parts of the Net." Yes. Yes, I am here for this, for the "gnarly edges to the global data-mushroom." What has survived for 25 years? What got copied by the Internet Archive? And what has completely disappeared? Let's find out!

Schwa Corporation, posted to Facebook in Nov. 2011

- AI -

Telnet: debra.dgbt.doc.ca 3000
"Humanity got ya down? Wanna spend some time in scintillating conversation with a machine? Telnet here and chat with an Artificial Intelligence bot."

Still online? No.
Does anyone remember it? Yes! Maybe?
"Another useful source of government information is the Communications Research Centre gopher at EBRA.DGBT. DOC.CA. In the directory called 'open government project' is a section on Supreme Court rulings. Located here is a transcript of the recent Rodriguez case. This site is well worth watching because it is planning to have addresses of MPs, Senators and Supreme Court Judges available shortly. Other directories of the DEBRA.DGBT.DOC.CA site provide documents of Industry Canada as well as access to other government gophers such as those at Natural Resources Canada, Statistics Canada and the National Library of Canada. And in these are listings of services as well as full-text documents."
Source: Access to Government Information
By Richard Malinski, Chief Librarian, Ryerson Polytechnic University

Anything like it now? Yes! There are enough to warrant a Top 7 of 2020 list, no telnet necessary. 


- Aliens -

Schwa Corporation
Web: http://www.scs.unr.edu/homepage/rory/schwa/schwa.html
"Be protected! Aliens are among us and you may have already been abducted and not know it. How can you be helped? Schwa has all the answers (and the products that go along with them)."

Still online? No.
Archived? Nope, seems it was offline by April 1999
Remembered? Yes! Wired has an article from 1994 on Schwa, with a bit more information, and Wikipedia has various updates, and Laughing Squid captured some of William "Bill" Barker's second phase, alaVoid, but sadly it seems that Bill Barker is offline, again.


Paranet Information Service
Mailing List: infopararequest-at-scicom.aphacdc.com
"Paranet Information Service is standing by with up-to-the-minute info on alien infiltration, weird sightings, odd happenings, and other extraterrestrial events."

Still online? No.
Archived? No, but yes.
What? There was a Paranet BBS, and there's this snapshot of old discussions, captured on the Internet Archive.
Anything like it now? Plenty, but it seems like a lot of alien/ UFO discussions get muddied (or polluted) with racists, so it's hard to link to anything that doesn't include a lot of that junk. Surfer beware.


UFO/Alien/Space Pictures
FTP: Vab02.larc.nasa.gov
"While we wonder about government cover-ups, NASA has been archiving UFO pictures right under our noses! FTP on over there and see grainy and blurry evidence that aliens are among us."

Still online? No.
Archived? Not quite. The Internet Archive captured the web presence of vab02 from 1997, but the Vehicle Analysis Branch (VAB) of Langley Research Center (LaRC) doesn't appear to have much in the way of blurry UFO pics, though it does have a page of Advanced Launch Vehicles & Planetary Flight, including some pictures of (identified) spacecraft.
Anything like it now? I'm not sure what Vab02 had back in the day, but quite recently, the U.S. Navy declassified and confirmed leaked three videos of UFOs from 2004 and 2015, and before that, the NSA released older documentation of unidentified flying objects that came to light thanks to the work of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy.

Tom Jennings: Gardening in Cyberspace

Jennings (left) at ROFLcon 2, by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
The FIDOnet logo ought to be attributed to (jm)

Tom Jennings turned down a lucrative gig or five, including a job in Cupertino, for freedom to make things the way he wants to. That includes FIDOnet, a file-transfer protocol for BBSes, and The Little Garden (TLG), the world's first Internet Service Provider (ISP) based on the "toasternet" model (private, Internet-connected networks built from bizarre mixtures of old hardware and software).

"[I]t's kind of fun to thumb your nose at the business creeps by doing their job better than they do. I take my anarcho stuff very seriously that's why I don't compete. I just work around them. I do stuff that they're NOT going to do, and hopefully, I do it well. So far, this has proven to be a good thing."

The anarcho stuff included the '80s queer skatepunk zine Homocare, which Tom archived on his website, Sensitive Research (SR-IX), which he's still updating. There you can find more of Tom's code, comments on old tech, artwork, writing, and his AMC (American Motors) and Rambler page. If you want to read more about Tom, Jason Scott wrote a nice article on his weblog.

But other things referenced by Will Kreith in this article are gone: The Little Garden (both the ISP, and the Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that the ISP was named for), and the reference to "the 'gold rush' of business on the Internet" in 1995 is humorous, in that it was years ahead of the Dot Com bubble (and burst).

Cyberspace for 25¢

In 1991, Wayne Gregori wanted to bring the internet to the people, and not just the usual computer people who were already on BBSes. He and his wife, Jill, realized they could put coin-operated computers in public spaces that were used by a wider range of people, and thus the Internet Café was born. By 1995, there were a few more, like the @ Cafe, one of New York City’s first internet cafes

And Finnish capital Helsinki’s internet cool...

Helsinki CompuCafe video from 1995 from Larri Helminen on Vimeo.

Gizmodo covered the weird, sketchy history of internet cafes in 2015, including Wayne's role in the start of all this, and how they became centers for gamers, allowing people to play the newest games on the newest computers. The internet café was replaced by the gamer café. But where's Wayne?

His bio on Speakerhub lists him as "a technologist and entrepreneur that has the rare talent of translating the complex world of Bitcoin and blockchain out of the abstract and into concrete, real world examples in a fluid and entertaining manner."

In 1995, Wayne said "for some people SF Net is sheer entertainment, for others it is the support network they never had, and still for others it is simply a way to get a little closer to people and make life more enjoyable." SF Net filled that for a while, but not for the long haul.

The website for his coin-op internet access, SFnet.com, was captured in 1996, when it offered the chance to "build your own eccentric online world by accomodating the odd-balls and free-thinkers who frequent the cafes and bars in your area." But by 1997, it was reborn as a rental and room-mate finding service, and the next year, it had a similar logo but was now a database to webpage integration service. For a while, it was associated with a "sales intelligence exchange," before going dormant for years. In 2011, it was reborn as the San Francisco Resource Link Network, but that didn't last, either. The domain was for sale for a period, and now it's home to the Secured Finance Network.

Bye-Bye Bozo!

"Every day, hundreds of people are using e-mail for the first time. It's wonderful to have your friendsonline, but unfortunately, there are a lot of bumbling new users and obnoxious Net weirdos who'll obtain your e-mail address and start to bug you. We've developed a few surefire methods to get rid of these time-wasters and keep them from clogging up your mail box."

Ad from PC Magazine, Nov. 21, 1995

We may take email filters and spam traps for granted now, but Eudora is specifically mentioned as "an intelligent e-mail system" that includes filters to auto-delete messages from certain users, akin to a Kill File, Twit List or Bozo Bin for USENET. WIRED also mentions The WELL's Bozo Filter in a 1993 (digitized?) article, and the bozo filter lives on, at least in the Free Dictionary.

If filters don't work, or aren't hands-on enough, Mark Frauenfelder suggests replying to chain emails with mutated copies. In case you missed this period of the internet, this was a thing in the 1990s, and have returned in 2020 as a way to share recipes and spread uplifting news (though not everyone welcomes these), instead of reviving chain letters with offers of wealth and threats of death from the early digital age.

And a suggestion for the clingy i-buddy who won't take your lack of reply as a subtle hint to bug off, Mark suggests sending a "mail-bomb" with something dull you find online, "like a deadly dull 100-page government policy document about railroad land use," as a way of distracting someone. This was also the time before increasingly large (online) email storage, when a 20mb attachment could also be considered a "mail bomb" in that it would fill your inbox and prevent you from receiving or sending any other emails.

Eudora was retired in 2006, replaced by Thunderbird, a collaboration between Qualcomm and Mozilla. In 2019, the number of global e-mail users amounted to 3.9 billion, which is a good chunk of the 7.7 billion people on earth that year. Gmail is globally the predominant email provider, with a few other major providers vying for a cut of that (broadly ad-sponsored, free to end user) market, which is primarily web-based. Desktop (or laptop) clients are still common for business users, but often paired with web clients. Automatic spam filtering is a given, and Gmail sorts emails into categories by default.

Most people treat this as a positive thing, simplifying their lives and decisions, but important emails can get automagically tossed into a bozo bin, such as political emails. If you want more control over your email, you'll have to pay for it. But it's still free-free to send mutant replies and policy documents.

Net.Bozo Field Guide Part 2: (retro) tech review

One way to identify those ten net bozos was by their tech. Looking back, you may have forgotten (or never known) some of those systems, so let's reminisce about the internet portals of 1995!

Hacking the Gibson -- "Rabbit, flu shot, someone talk to me!"

I mentioned some of the now-obsolete tech in the prior post, but let's dig deeper here:

• newbie: "AOL e-mail address, uses Performa system bought on Sears credit card." In 1995, AOL was still trying to pitch the idea of the internet in general, as seen in this ad, back when they were offering 10 free hours. Seven years later, AOL would be giving away 1,025 hours for 45 days, then up to 90 days free. And in 2004, Sears was bought by Kmart in an $11 billion deal, which might sound significant, until you see how much Microsoft spent in the mid-2000s. And that Performa? There were a number of models available in 1995, and the following year, the Performa 6360 was pitched as a low-cost multimedia Mac, shipped for just $1,499.
• knowbot: "Sun Workstation, T1 Internet connection. Claims to have taught Ed Kroll everything he knows about the Net." A Sun Ultra 1 workstation was definitely more significant than the newbie's Mac, but it was about 18 times as expensive as the Performa 6360, at $27,995. I didn't find a price quote for a T1 in 1995 (and the cost would vary from market to market), but this 2017 article states that connection starts at about $250 per month and can be as much as $1200 per month.
• t.m.n.h. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Hacker): "[What they claim:] Sun SPARCbook bought with
  stolen credit card number [What they ACTUALLY have:] Tandy 386 bought by parents for X-mas." That's a radical 640-by-480 resolution, for a mere $11,950 for the SPARCbook workstation-class notebook. The Tandy was about 1/6th that cost, and not terribly portable.
• floodgater: "Uses coin-operated computer at the Laundromat. State-of-the art robo-posting software." I can imagine that in much of the world, this sounds very dated, but you can still buy coin-operated computers. I imagine that t's far more common to find free WiFi in laundromats now.
• crotch potato (AKA the erotic neurotic): "SLIP-connected Mac II running Newswatcher for instant decoding of binary images." The Mac II was officially discontinued 5 years before the Handbook, so it'd be a second-hand box in 1995.
• techno shaman: "Potato-Battery powered PB 540C with tribal tattoo-covered pointing pad carried around in a pouch hand-macramed by Balinese tribespeople." That's the PowerBook 540c, and the potato-powered bit was probably a joke, but it's not unfeasible.
• .sig the destroyer: "Any pure ASCII terminal. Avoids Mac and Windows like the plague, cause styled text is .sig's worst enemy." I'll wimp out on this challenge, and leave the image of a pure ASCII terminal to your imagination.
• bitraker: "Toshiba laptop." $500.
• techno hippie: "Homebuilt 386 built from DigiKey parts. Runs off of solar power or cow-methane gas generator." DigiKey is still around, and digging around their site, it looks like they still sell computer parts. I think that homebuilt PCs are a bit easier to make since 1995, if nothing else for the extensive online communities of homebuilders and modders.
• net.spider: "PowerPC, PB 540C, Sony Magic Link, 28.8 modem. Working on building a toasternet in basement." PowerPC ("RISC is good"). Magic Link is an early PDA, "but it's not [just] that." 28.8 modem was a snapshot of a period between 14.4 and 56k. Toasternet is another bit of old jargon, referring to a network of inexpensive, low-powered computers, or "toasters."

There you are, up to speed on the tech of yester-year!

Net.Bozo Field Guide

Who's out there, poking away at devices, connected across and around the world via The Information Mine? Gareth Branwyn helpfully categorized 10 key categories of Net Bozos, with their attributes on handy front-and-back cards, so you could clip and review these, should you wish.

Three of card illustrations, over a hastily made vintage pattern,
sourced from a 1950's Franciscan Atomic Starburst Patterned plate

Are these bozos still found online? More or less:

• newbie: no longer needs AOL, and probably doesn't buy The official America Online Internet Guide, but they're still online, still falling for get rich quick scams, and this tag is still understood. "Still has a life offline. Can answer daily e-mail in one sitting." This kinda stings ;)
• knowbot: yeah, still prevalent, but definitely not by that name. "Internet expert" is probably a fitting tag/ put-down as anything. Instead of writing "read the fucking manual!" it's "do your own research!" or linking to LMGTFY.
• t.m.n.h. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Hacker): still around, and this tag would be understood, but the term "hacker" has been sullied by so many surly youth who download "hack packs" of pre-packaged tools that "hacker" is generally agreed to be someone who breaks into a system. Before this, the exploratory hackers of old tried to coin cracker for those who would maliciously break into systems.
• floodgater: this sounds more like sad, lonely people who thought the internet would be a connection to other people that they couldn't find offline. They still exist, still seeking someone to listen.
• crotch potato (AKA the erotic neurotic): less than a decade after the Handbook was published, the joke that the internet is for porn was set to music, with puppets. The need to have special software to decode images is so far behind us, but this isn't the only really dated bozo category. Yes, crotch potato is a fantastic tag and could be used much more, but it's so much easier to be access porn now than in 1995.
• techno shaman: I feel like Gareth was more tuned into or focused on certain corners of the internet, giving them greater representation than perhaps justifies a tag. Check out the old index to archive of alt.* newsgroups for an idea of what some people valued and stored. Still, this is another sign that the Happy Mutant Handbook was right up my alley.
• .sig the destroyer: Another reference that died shortly after the publication of this book. Signature blocks haven't completely gone away, and live on both in some forums, and emails. To be honest, I'm surprised that Kibo wasn't mentioned here.
• bitraker: like a muckraker, but on the internet, and they still exist. But instead of browsing through Usenet, The Well and AOL, they probably use Google Alerts to have new information about whatever beat they cover.
• techno hippie: "First colonists of cyberspace. Been around since the Homebrew days, when Whole Earth Review the bleeding-edge of cyberculture mags. Likes to listen the Dead while navigating c-space." This is another part of the history of the internet, with another focus on The WELL, and it references Hackers. But it also circles back to virtual conferences, which are a hot topic in 2020, for very different reasons that there were virtual conferences in 1995.
• net.spider: "takes pride in being everywhere on the Net at once." That's a lot harder now, but there are definitely sources for original content that gets spread elsewhere, and being the first to know is something some still take pride in now. It feels a bit like trying to be a Renaissance person now, when the are so many more topics to know, let alone master, than there 25 years ago. But the thing that irks me is the tag. One of the first internet indexers, or web crawlers, was renamed Spidey in 1995. In other words, human "net spiders" were already being replaced by bots by then. In 2019, 37.2% of all traffic on the internet last year wasn't human.

Updating this list of internet characters is on my to-do list, once I finish my review of the Happy Mutant Handbook. But up next, I'll look at the tech of these ten net bozos, and how you can block a bozo in 1995.

your.name@here

This is a topic that hasn't aged well. In the age of inundation by spam and scams, search for "email spoofing" and the majority of pages are something like How Spammers Spoof Your Email Address (and How to Protect Yourself).

Email spoofing is about as old as the internet, because the internet was built as an optimistic space among like-minded geeks, not opportunistic scammers.

Speaking of scammers, there are sites and services one can buy to spoof emails (and text messages, and phone calls). But can you still telnet to a server? Yes! It's not straight-forward, but you can still learn how to use the telnet client in Windows Vista, 7, 8, or 10, or how to get telnet for MacOS in Mojave or High Sierra. And once you're telnetting it up, here are 5 more fun things available via telnet, at least as of 2014. In addition to connecting to BBSes.

Better Living Through Silicon

"Computers bore Happy Mutants. They do a half-assed job at sending signals to your eyes and ears, while the real world can send ultra-high resolution data to all of your senses. So why is everybody sitting around in front of these lousy boxes all day, staring at blocky pictures and typing out chunky-looking text?"

My initial response was "oh shit, Handbook, you have no idea." May 2020 is a very different place from any point in '95. Let's pretend that COVID-19 isn't the only change in the world.

The Process to end all Processes is back!

First, no love for Smell-O-Vision? Anyway, screen resolution has come a long way in 25 years. Check out PC TV, and watch the future, as of 1996:

If you want to geek out on the details, check out evolution of desktop Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), from 1995 to 2020, or reminisce at length over the history of computer display standards. In short, the blocky visuals of the 1990s have been replaced by optical resolution, pixels so small that the screen appears to recreate reality ... in 2D. But we live in 3D, so why aren't we watching 3D? Well, that has a lengthy history, too.

"OK, what about the inputs?" asks the mutant of the past. "Are we still banging away on keyboards?" Yes, and we're poking screens now! And computers are listening! All the time! Isn't that great? "Sure, sure, future person. But what are you doing with all that?" Well, lots of things. There's still a lot of staring at screens, but also talking to (and shouting at) people around the world! How great is that? And artificial life is still an active and evolving (harhar) field!

Onwards, into the retro-future of Better Living Through Silicon!

Billboard Liberation Front

"Picture this: you're driving, it's 8 A.M.. coffee is clutched to your chest as you amble toward work in a stupor. You look up, and a billboard for a radio station that used to read 'HITS HAPPEN—NEW X 100' now reads 'SHIT HAPPENS—NEW EXXON.' Whoa! That snaps you out of your trance."

That's one example of the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, who have been modifying, mocking, and manipulating public-facing media since 1977. My favorite:

Laughing Squid has a copy of the BLF's press release, celebrating AT&T's collaboration with NSA in 2008. In 2015, the truly vast scale of that collaboration came to light, a few years after the BLF had retired.

The good news is that the BLF's website is still up, hosting the guide "The Art and Science of Billboard Improvement" (PDF), so you don't have to write away to Processed World magazine and hope they have a copy (they stopped making new zines in 2005).

And despite the fact that the BLF is all for modifying corporate messages, they also realize that there's some schmuck whose job is to maintain those billboards, so they never paint or damage the billboard. Instead, to make it easy and safe, the BLF leaves instructions for the workers to restore the billboard to its original, boring state.

Hacking

"No section on reality hacking would be complete without a screed about computer programming, the original form of hacking. This essay is by Rudy Rucker, a contributor to the Great Work of the third millennium: building machines that are alive." —editors

Bold introduction, but he's an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. And he founded an ISP for punks and small businesses in San Francisco in 1998! (And his web portal is somewhat stuck in that era, referencing a  He's lauded by fellow cyberpunk founder William Gibson (who might have broader name recognition). Let's say it's a fitting preamble and leave it at that.

"A computer program is a virtual machine that you build by hand. Hacking is like building a car by building all of the parts in the car individually. The good thing is that you have full control, the bad thing is that the process can take so much longer than you expect it to. Are you sure you feel like stamping out a triple-0 z-ring gasket? And compositing the plastic from which to make the gasket? The hacker says, 'Yaar! Sounds like fun!' "

But in 2012, Rudy was looking decades back, before the age of computers with a certain fondness: "When I see an old movie, like from the '40s or '50s or '60s, the people look so calm. They don't have smart phones, they're not looking at computer screens, they're taking their time. They'll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we'll find our way back to that garden of Eden."

I realize that hacking or programming is not the same thing as living in the modern computer age, where there are endless feeds of information to the point of complete distraction. And I can recall people, even young adults, griping about the speed of communication and the implied obligation of instant replies, in the mid 1990s.

So let's instead focus on how far we've come in world of programming from 1995, when the way to start was take a course on C or buy a C compiler and start working through examples. Now, it's much easier to start coding, with online teaching platforms like Code Academy, and there's a broad push to get kids interested and involved in computer science at a young age, with online resources like Code.org.

"Hacking teaches that the secret of the universe need not be so very complex, provided that the secret is set down in a big enough space of computation equipped with feedback and parallelism." Programming can still open up windows to other worlds, once you understand the languages.