01-26-2019, 08:49 PM
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| The Once and Future 'Net |
| |
| by D!99y Dud3 |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Gr33tz, ya phun-lovin' phreaks, and welcome to another riveting issue of the
D!99y Philes! In this episode, we're gonna take a quick romp through the annals
of online history, and then I'll get to my point, if it so happens that I come
up with one in the course of typing this here tome.
As some of you old pharts are probably distinctly aware, it started with dialup
text-based bulletin bored systems, or BBSes, in the mid to late 1970s. These
systems eventually evolved into so-called online services like CompuServe and
America Online by the late 1980s. By the mid 1990s, the Internet, and
particularly peer-to-peer networks like PowWow and WinMX, were all the rage, to
say nothing of Usenet and the World Wide Web.
In the past two years or so, a handful of large Silicon Valley corporations
such as Faecesbook and Goolag have decided that the Web belongs to them rather
than to you and me. Every day, we hear of yet another scandal involving one of
these slimy companies. One is selling our personal information, including
our private messages, for a quick buck. Another one is "de-monetizing,"
"de-platforming," or otherwise selectively defecating on users for their
political or moral beliefs. Evidently these shitlords believe that their
dominant position in the tech industry gives them the right to tell you what
you can and cannot say on your own phucking taxpayer-created network. It's so
bad out there now that some of us are retreating to the aforementioned dialup
BBSes (now on telnet), while others are encouraging everyone to build their own
websites instead of depending on Silly Valley for a "free" platform. Yet others
are writing free software to put old school tools in the hands of the masses.
There's a rising sentiment among 'Netizens that the World Wide Web under the
domination of the globalist, cultural Marxist technocracy has failed to
deliver on its promise to liberate information and give everyone a voice.
Which brings me to what I've been up to since our last installment. Last
spring, I set out to write a simple, no-frills text-based BBS in PHP. Due to
unfortunate circumstances, I had to shelve that project and never got back
around to working on it again.
More recently, I've been chewing the fat with a shady character by the name of
Trix Malone, who runs a Web forum. Malone is a staunch advocate of the old
school Web, which naturally entailed everyone owning their own website. Some
years ago, she ran a highly successful and well-known Web forum for conspiracy
theorists. That forum still exists today, but appears to be in decline
under new management. Nowadays, Malone operates her own forum, which she
describes as being more or less a personal sketchpad for writing down her
thoughts for her own amusement. She told me her ideas for an ideal "dream
site." Interestingly, what she described was rather like an HTML version of
the desktop peer-to-peer applications that were ubiquitous around the turn of
the century.
I got to work on building Trix's dream website software, and came very near to
finishing it, when I realized that my own fondest Internet memories revolved
around actual peer-to-peer networks. P2P certainly tied in with my original
goal of creating a non-Web-based, self-hosted platform that would be beyond the
reach of the tech giants' heavy-handed censorship. It also eliminates many of
the inherent limitations of HTTP, and circumvents home Web server port blocking
by ISPs. So I switched tracks and started adapting all of the code from the
first two projects to that end. The new project is being written in PHP-GTK2
and occupies a middle ground between the austere terminal-bound BBS I started
out to build and the colorful dream website package that Trix suggested.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this phile gripped you more than a muddy old river or reclining Buddha,
please re-upload it to as many BBSes as you can. Danke schoen! Oh, and tell
them you stole it from one of these fine boreds:
Agency BBS Borderline BBS
Sysop: Avon Sysop: Balzabaar
telnet://agency.bbs.nz telnet://borderlinebbs.dyndns.org:6400
Interstellar
Sysop: Trix
http://sectual.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
