It was seriously impressive. I wish I had a backup of just the website and library itself, even if the torrents and tracker were gone forever. The meticulous organization of the library was a thing to behold and a great way to discover music.
You can probably find the site code (gazelle) in a working version. The DB (sans user data) is available as well, it's called the 10th anniversary mixtape.
I think my memory may be skewed by the fact that I mostly used what.cd right after the demise of OiNK. So I remember thinking it was inferior and that I missed OiNK, which is probably not representative of what what.cd eventually became.
I miss that site; it wasn't really a "private torrent tracker", it was a music community. I discovered entire genres of music I never knew existed on what.cd.
Spotify is what.cd's mentally handicapped little brother in comparison.
It did pale in comparison at first, but it has become a large and dedicated community on its own. Torrents, staff picks, collages, are all there and plentiful.
The people are great too. I went on their irc and mentioned how shocked I was I couldn't find a certain album by a random band. A user there asked which one it was and it took 90 seconds from the time I said the band/album to the user posting the torrent link. I had looked everywhere online and I didn't find the album. I'm a salty pirate who's been at sea for decades and I couldn't find this album.
Then this user not only finds it in flac, but is able to create a torrent, upload it and shared it in under 90 seconds. It still boggles my mind how he pulled it off.
I don't believe in magic, but this was magical lol
I wish I could meet that guy and befriend him or her :). These are the people I would love to chat with. Sadly, I’m not a member of redacted. Maybe I should try to get in.
I took the interview in the early days, and I "failed" because I didn't rote memorize whether 192 VBR MP3 would trump a MP3 V2 or something like that; "you look it up in the site rules" wasn't an acceptable answer. I get they want to exclude clueless humps, but at some point you're not testing for cluelessness but memorisation skills. That kind of turned me off.
They're selecting for the effort you'll put in to get in as a proxy for the effort you'll put in once you are in. Same way tech companies do leetcode. Has little to no bearing on skill. Only whether you are cut out for this sort of grind.
Yes, I understand it. In spite of uploading hundreds of torrents to what.cd I never remembered the exact rules/flowcharts of things as I just have a poor memory for these kind of things. To this day I can't even recite the full alphabet.
It's their site, they can do what they want with it. And I can have my opinions on the petty bureaucraticness.
I’d rather not listen to music for the rest of my life than do an interview to join a tracker. Not sure why, but I find the whole idea repulsively elitist; I suspect I’m not the only one.
You either do an interview or a member sends you an invite. It's a private tracker just like what.cd was. It's less elitist than most other trackers which are invite only and sometimes lock registrations completely. Unfortunately they have to keep a low profile and pick their members to avoid copyright trolls or being shut down entirely. The test isn't very difficult and there is a public page explaining everything one needs to know. It's more about showing some effort and making sure that you know how to act accordingly on a private tracker
The problem with recommendation systems is that they're overwhelmingly based on what you already know. I'm not really interested in that much of the time; there's lots of music that I "should" like based on liking similar things but that just doesn't "jibe" with me, and vice versa.
And for entire new things it tends to gravitate towards the more popular "classic $genre" stuff within a genre. That doesn't mean it's bad music, but a jazz playlist with John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong isn't really very interesting, nor is a metal playlist with Metallica and Iron Maiden. The thing that what.cd offered was that you could discover things beyond that.
And all of this is so subjective in the first place. I recently watched all of the Alien films, and I felt the third Alien film is the second-best (after the original), but the "rating sites" have it listed as the lowest-rated of all of them. I'm probably not the only one who likes the film more than the ratings would suggest, and this kind of stuff gets lost in these algorithmic recommendation systems.
I feel Spotify recommendations are pretty good for my account, but homogenous. They tend to stick the same type of music I’ve been listening to recently and it gets bland after a while.
Spotify is definitely not tuned for discovery. Thankfully, https://everynoise.com exists, which is what I use when I'm trying to find something different.
interesting. Has some flaws when I search for certain artists (nekrogoblikon definitely isn't folk metal or viking metal etc) but overall pretty fun to explore.
> Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society.
There's some irony to this appearing on what.cd
When OiNK was taken down there was a massive community effort to put a successor online within days. But we had to kick out an early staff member called "WhatMan" for trying to hijack the entire project and run it as his own kingdom, right down to changing the name from "Waffles" to "What CD?" while others were catching a few hours sleep between hacking at the code. Months of bitter disputes between the sites followed.
Very briefly, yes. OiNK went down on Oct 23 2007, and Waffles launched on Oct 31. What followed within a day or two. The split probably happened around the 27th.
I remember that split. Felt like Pearl Jam and Nirvana; two great things that existed at once but largely ignored each other apart from the occasional jab when you would ask them about the other. What.cd had Trent Reznor so Waffles can suck it
I would love to hear more of the history of those sites. I discovered Oink by being invited by a friend in highschool and then rode on waffles.fm until it was shut down too. I have so many good memories of those sites and I learned to develop better writing skills participating on those forums. It was one of the few places on the internet I ever felt active in.
I happened to join Oink just before it fell over, and when it went down I managed to find some of the former members on a forum saying "hey, let's go build a replacement right away." I was only a budding PHP developer in high school, but managed to jump in with the right folks at the right time and learned a lot working on that site.
Couple stories from memory:
* What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back".
* I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know
* Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community.
* I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since.
* Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?
> It used to point to the Ulbricht legal fund page.
Interesting, goes to show lots of us had a common lineage from that time. Funny enough Silk Road also had a very healthy forum/community back then that kind of felt like Oink, too.
What.cd was one of the last few truly beautiful communities on the internet (that I know of). It was the best music discovery platform ever, and was what got me into listening to and loving music after years of disillusionment about the state of the industry and the music I'd been previously exposed to. May it rest in peace. At least I still have my favourite hoodie [0].
OP, for what it's worth, your post just inspired me to go make a donation to the EFF.
Someone could explain me what did i miss? I started on Napster, went on with the usuals torrent portals and now a sad streaming user... What was different about this website?
It has everything in ever format you could want. Wanted small mp3 to fit lots on your small iPod mini - no problem. Wanted the highest quality mp3 possible, got that too. Want lossless? Got that too.
Nearly every bit of music added had multiple formats. It wasn’t just the big ones.
A request section that was super useful - due to how hard it was to seed on music torrent sites. (For waffles and what I was the only person two people invited that didn’t get banned for having a poor ratio.)
Lots of new music by new bands were uploaded by the bands so you got to find truly new music.
If you were an audiophile this was a must have site. Even tho people went on and on about “e**” (that was basically the name)
It was a very hard to get into music torrent site. They had a rule you could only use the first letter in public. They didn’t give out invites too often so it became really hard to get. Which is why I think those who did have it raved about it so music. It focused only on lossless formats of music.
Both What and Waffles were launched in the aftermath of the OPP shutdown. Oink was the only game in town when I first got into torrenting, save for a few small "scene" sites whose main claim to fame was releasing major albums a few minutes sooner than everyone else.
After OPP got shut down, both What and Waffles were stood up in a matter of days.
> What was a clone of oink, which was the first and blazed the trail for all to follow.
I was going to post the same, it had a very healthy community that was only rivaled by some very select/invite only alt.binaries on usenet--when Demonoid was strictly invite only it carried some of the weight, but my tastes in music changed dramatically around that time and I instead started to buy vinyl (2007?) in order to support a small niche sound since the music I was into was mainly artist/producer released.
It was supposed to re-lauch in '14 [0] but never did, but by then I had already a decent vinyl and mp3 collection because as I used to play around with DJing and had got to know lots of producers/artists on/offline; in short, it's a cold, hard and messy Industry but what's clear is that while producer led labels became a norm in that time and had lots of penetration, it suffered from the same issues that majors did in the end. White-label one offs and tests presses are a form of currency in dub-culture so it never went away, but it was a net loss monetarily speaking for most and really started to be seen as a business expense/marketing.
Producers were almost always also DJs or MCs (some were all 3!) and had to tour and link up with major artists or sponsors like RedBull, who built an academy for producers and covered lots of expenses for them to tour on special events and nights with specific clubs.
What Oink never really got right in my view because it was so early was the social aspect, a huge part of music-sharing was the commonality that we would run into those people who shared our tastes out at clubs/events. Even if it was a one off event it was still cool to put a name/face to the handle online who you share with and could relate with--that's the point of dubplates and test press. I've spent lots of time with my nose in a crate at random record shops in US/EU/UK and that feeling you get is unique and equally special as the music itself!
Cypherpunks/Bitcoiners were the first to actually try to do microtxs on Soundcloud [1] in order to monetize their work in an appreciating asset: hell, I got paid by a bitcoin whale (also a music lover) to try and spear-head this initiative when I told him about what music community I was a part of and even met with a few DJs from the UK coming to the US that month.
Sadly, it was way too early and most were in the middle of a tour so had to direct their attention to that and no one collected their funds, but overall seemed excited about the prospect of having a userbase serve as a patreaon of sorts on a platform they themselves could curate.
I spent many nights browsing what.cd and building up my collection in the early days.
Somewhat off-topic , but I just posted this question on HN which is sort of related - how did early streaming sites build up their collections?
Maybe the founders of Spotify were actually big uploaders on what.cd and already had many TB of albums?? (Semi-joking, I know this is unlikely, but I’m desperately curious for the answers to this mystery.)
During their closed alpha (or was it beta?), Spotify’s library consisted of some sort of superset of the (illegal) music collections of their staff. If I recall correctly, you would even get hits by searching for scene release groups in the search bar.
Once this ended and they went legal, I left Spotify and never looked back as about half of my music library was gone overnight. It taught me a valuable lesson early on in life about subscription services and “not owning” your digital files.
> Do you find there are lots of things you can’t find on Apple Music or Spotify nowadays?
No clue really, I am more “forceful” these days in terms of requiring software to be open if it is to set foot on my devices. Bandcamp is great and it is where I get the majority of my music these days.
You've stumbled upon a door where your mind is the key. There are none who will lend you guidance; these trials are yours to conquer alone. Entering here will take more than mere logic and strategy, but the criteria are just as hidden as what they reveal. Find yourself, and you will find the very thing hidden behind this page. Beyond here is something like a utopia - beyond here is what.cd
I really miss that site, I remember you could place a "bounty" for some rare/obscure song or remix and there was always someone out there who had a copy of it who was willing to share it to get their ratio up.
The cycle of building, burning, and rebuilding the Great Digital Libraries of Alexandria (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, what.cd, redacted, etc.) has gotten old.
At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.
There must be policy wonks here on HN who know the ins and outs of local/state/federal government, copyright law/fair use, etc. (I'm assuming the U.S. IP lobby is the 400 pound gorilla in the room.)
What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts? What's an approach that could eventually be on a referenda or party platform? Does archive.org have any idea? Any other orgs have an idea?
There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.
It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.
What's the reasonable legislation to say, "As long as the project does X and avoids Y, the project may archive Z" for all digital artifacts Z in some domain?
Piracy cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting regime.
Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies.
You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/info.
The problem is not with copyright and patents per se. They were invented for a good reason: to promote creation of intellectual works, and to help keep them open, not perish in secrecy as in medieval times.
The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.
Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extending up from your plot of land out to infinity. We might give this imaginary system a fancy latin name: the ad coelum doctrine.
In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial.
This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law.
Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.
The problem with this is that "intellectual property" rights are fundamentally unlike physical property rights to the extent that they directly conflict. I'm not even making the argument that all IP is evil or whatever, just that weakening IP doesn't have to harm property rights as an overall category due to the tradeoffs between different forms of property right.
Consider the interaction of the doctrine of first sale with copyright in [1]. This is a spot where that conflict exists; if I've bought a thing, preventing me from re-selling that thing (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) abrogates my physical-property rights. That SCOTUS decision didn't undermine property rights as a general concept so much as buttress it: the pro-IP formulation benefits a handful of rights-holders, while the pro-physical-property formulation directly benefits everyone who owns real objects. A kind of utilitarian calculus of property rights, I guess?
Similarly, consider DRM. If I can't break DRM on a DVD I bought, to play it on a computing device that I own (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) then I don't actually own my computer or the DVD. That's an absurd dilution of the common understanding of a right that you're correct is the cornerstone of Western societies.
It's kinda like zoning law, really: the current beneficiaries can scream about "muh property rights" until they're blue in the face, but the regime they're defending is the greater violation of those rights.
So, overall, no: if anything, current corporatized formulations of "intellectual property" rights are a direct threat to actual property rights, which are indeed important.
edit: forgot to add that if it's a civilization's-gonna-collapse argument, there's a case to be made that environments with robust physical property protections but weak/no IP protections are the ideal environment for societal development: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime
Let us assume for a moment that I agree with the following premise:
<<Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies
Right now that cornerstone is rather heavily tilted towards IP rights and puts Western democracies at an angle where they could easily slide into the ocean ushering the era ant self-respecting regime is trying prevent.
<<You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/in
It is not an either or. It is a spectrum with multitude of options in between. That you seek to put it as a simple binary choice is a failing rhetorical style and will not get you far in terms of arguments on HN.
Either I haven’t taken the time to comprehend each individual response to your comment or people are disagreeing with you solely for the sake of disagreement in defense of liberal democracy.
I personally solve it by abusing Google cloud storage. If you have a domain name you can get their enterprise account for $20 a month with unlimited storage. I have close to 100TB of stuff on there. Rclone crypt makes sure they have no clue what it is. Rclone mount shows it as a mounted drive.
I thought they did away with unlimited? Is that not the case? I have a google domain but stopped paying two years ago for other reasons, and recently when I looked into getting workspace again it sounded like you can’t get unlimited storage for $20 anymore?
Possibly, but for some reason I had the impression they were doing away with grandfathered plans too. Because my old google apps (free) account was force upgraded to workspaces maybe.
I think I had read you can request additional storage when you exceed the standard limit now. Maybe that’s what he means by unlimited and if you already had the data in googled cloud, well you don’t have to request from anyone (yet).
I think you're right. After doing some sleuthing, I found this:
G Suite Business is not available for new sign ups. If you have G Suite Business, your subscription and all related services will continue to function as they do today, until it’s time to transition to a new offering. We’ll be in touch over the coming months to identify your transition path.
Yeah! I had it on a personal domain for $12 for a year or two, then I went and joined the Army on a whim and cut all my subscriptions, but now I'm in a place where I want cloud storage again and can't find any good options.
I think it's possible you can get "unlimited" storage by signing up for one of their enterprise plans, but nowadays they make you request additional storage when you run out. I'm sure they don't throw a fit over 5-10TB, but I can imagine flags being raised when users on 1 user plans start requesting storage and they already have 100TB assigned.
I personally solved the creation of an online encyclopedia by copying Encyclopedia Britannica to my... shit, it's gone. Oh well.
C'mon, LARP a policy discussion: what are the chess moves toward public policy to keeparchives like sci-hub from being so easily burninated? Any policy discussion will do.
I'll go rewrite the relevant Acts of Congress in Rust if I have to.
> I'll go rewrite the relevant Acts of Congress in Rust if I have to.
Maybe start there - don't stick with a US jurisdiction. What was that country that was taken to the WTO and won against US copyright, and are now allowed to host any copyrighted material without penalty?
If you’re looking at policy/government solutions. Isn’t the library of congress already perusing this goal? Nudging it to expand its collection of digital works seems like a natural next step
> At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.
One reasonable thing I can suggest that everyone can do at the local level is to support your local library and any funding millages for them. As someone said, "If libraries were proposed afresh today, the copyright lobby would immediately shut them down and sue them". So it seems like a reasonable way to encourage archival of materials on a local level.
Going beyond that, I guess you could ask to talk to librarians at your local library about promoting open-access materials? I feel like they are much more likely to know about fair-use cases and methods and their intersection with copyright compared to the average reader here.
> As someone said, "If libraries were proposed afresh today, the copyright lobby would immediately shut them down and sue them"
This sounded somewhat reasonable so I did a quick search for history of libraries and copyrights laws in US. Apparently Ben Franklin started one of the first in the "egalitarian colonies" while a bit later the Continental Congress resolved that "nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."
And somehow we have both the laws and the libraries. And this site [below] is claiming that there are "unique provisions" to protect all sorts of knowledge repositories, ranging from "libraries, archives and museums under copyright acts in the U.S. and around the world".
If you look at the history around this - I think you're fairly confused.
You've picked some random quotes - but modern copyright law essentially started in England in 1710 with the Statute of Anne.
Some background context - Prior to 1710, there was a legal monopoly over publishing held by the Stationers Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Statione...). They were the only entity that could publish manuscripts and newspapers in England legally.
Authors themselves had no such rights - Instead they would be forced to sell their manuscripts and maps to members of the Stationers Company for a one time fee, and the Stationers Company then retained a perpetual copyright on them.
---
So when you see the quote "Nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study"... you need to understand that in this context they mean very clearly that author's work should be theirs - and that the copyright shouldn't go to a company who profits because of a monopoly agreement with the crown.
They weren't really saying "Copyright laws are a good thing" they were saying "Copyright should remain in the hands of the author - not be forcibly removed by the crown".
Further - and this is IMPORTANT - they decided that 14 years was plenty of time for a copyright. There should be no "perpetual copyright" like what was granted to the Stationers.
---
And yet.... here we are in 2022, with a situation that actually looks fairly similar to the 1500s. Large publishing companies control nearly all successful commercial publications. They've lobbied the government to increase the duration of those copyrights and trademarks to be nearly "perpetual" for all meaningful purposes, and they usually pay authors a one time fee for those perpetual copyrights.
If anything - I'd argue that modern copyright laws as they exist and are enforced today are a complete sabotage of the intent of those men you're quoting.
I was clearly using US (not European) jurisdiction. Also I didn’t parse that statement, merely showed that both topics were in development and discussion in tandem, in US. Finally, the existence of special provisions for libraries, etc. All of which shows that the two have somehow coexisted, and that quote of yours is hyperbole.
The US law is almost entirely based on the same set of laws that originated in 1710 with the Statute of Anne (down to literally the same 14 period).
The scope has been modified and changed (mostly in favor of extending the rights of copyright holders, and the duration of the copyright).
The two aren't co-existing. Modern copyright law doesn't actually say jack shit about libraries except for a minor footnote that allows libraries limited ability to "preserve" works that are no longer available for sale, even if they are within their period of copyright. Libraries operate almost entirely under the doctrine of first sale... which is also under attack in the US right now.
---
Have a good one, I don't think you have enough context on the subject to be worth discussing it with further.
To do it right we have to dispense with old ideas about why we’re doing it to whittle down what to preserve.
We don’t need to preserve every cat picture and vacation moment, just enough geometric and color data to replicate them. Same with text.
Deduplicate to an essential data model of knowledge and algorithms to boot strap that into a useful state.
Stable Diffusion runs in a browser on a phone. I have no doubt we can get a “bigger model” out of a tiny model and a few algorithms that will hydrate it and update its state based upon a context. But IT is too literal to serve “business” so we end up with the janky mess you called out.
So in summary; a rethink of our economic approach to keeping people busy, and compressed, deduplicated model that fits on a phone, with hardware and software that know to get what the user asks for out of this small hash.
I’m not that smart and figured this out. Asked a colleague with a PhD in math working at MS who was all wink and nudge at me. The “smarter people” know what’s up and want to be the first one there. Then under politically correct traditions it’s “their property.”
It’s not that hard to conceive; all information displayed on a machine is 2D geometry and games simulate 3D through well understood perspective and color theory. We just need a model that captures all the coordinates of our text and those perspective shifts and color compositions.
But to get there you need social change to avoid the loop you say you’re tired of but no one else does. Good luck.
> The cycle of building, burning, and rebuilding the Great Digital Libraries of Alexandria (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, what.cd, redacted, etc.) has gotten old.
That is the very cycle of Nature and the rise and fall of Civilizations upon which Human progress hinges on; I think its more apt to say that YOU got old, and keeping up got hard (it has for me too) because this is how it's always been in Nature.
I question if you are even familiar with the very core values of the Manifesto, let alone the works of all other Cypherpunks as this is at the crux of it's existence:
> We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s--especially for those of us who grew up here and saw it emerge and consider it part of our very culture rather than merely an interesting/lucrative career path--that eventually decayed into what it is now; the sense of enjoying and relishing these values were the norm when I first got into tech as a kid, now it's the exception and fringe for and it's cause is very the reasons that most have come to hate tech: it's become a dystopic land of Corpo barons (VC) tech lords (FAANG) who rely on IP and a crooked legal system to maintain it's supremacy.
Gene Kahn (RIP) said it best at the Senate meeting [0] and people would be wise to adapt and have Humanity flourish from the advance in Human knowlege and culture, instead brilliant men like him and Arron Schwartz killed themselves because of a few business moguls rather than being on the cover of Wired Magazine or on Forbes 30 under 30 for their efforts.
> I think its more apt to say that YOU got old, and keeping up got hard (it has for me too) because this is how it's always been in Nature.
Modern digital libraries of Alexandria have only ever been burned because of the imposition of artificial scarcity. In contrast, in nature DNA is being copied all over the place. Imperfectly, but at least the parts that matter are being shared widely.
> Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s
Bullshit. Cypherpunks don’t just exist in SV. Any cypherpunk who still cares about their principles would recoil in horror at SV that was there since circa 2015 ( and that’s being generous), let alone now.
> Bullshit. Cypherpunks don’t just exist in SV. Any cypherpunk who still cares about their principles would recoil in horror at SV that was there since circa 2015 ( and that’s being generous), let alone now.
I never said they did and I agree: what I did say is that is where it began and it's origins was in SV in the 90s [0] which is when I was a kid in CA and feel it's part of my culture as I grew up on the internet back then (hence my interest in tech).
I'd say at the end of the first crypto war things started to get dire so by the dotcom era in the 2000s the Corpo take over of the internet was in full swing--which is when Neal Stepenson released the seminal piece Cryptonomicon and outlined the vital nature of having a currency free from the control of nation-states, which is at the crux of the cypherpunk movement and one can argue really goes back to Alan Turing himself.
I'd argue it happened not in 2015, but by the time 'web2' was created that SV became the cesspool it is now, domain squatting made useless people into overnight millionaires rather that then invested in ever-more intrusive business models; though room 614A at ATT's facility in SF was a thing so...
If you want a real history lesson check this out [1].
> Gene Kan:
Correct, stupid auto insert... I still remember how crazy that was back then, especially during the whole Napster v Metallica feud. Aside from his interest in open source tech he was also an avid auto-crosser, too; I think he was super into Miatas.
The link about using the eth.limo gateway so it is resolvable on browsers like chrome/safari but .limo is not required on most web3 browsers. In either case the content in hosted on IPFS making it free and censorship resistant.
ipfs and other per to per systems sound like cool idea but
1 it isn't what he/she/them ask (ask for legislation and policies)
2 sound like something that faster than later will be heavily monitored, in the same way that bitcoin is now.
3 the web3 part which at least for ME now feel like mess of bad ideas, that doesn't solve real problems, and pyramid schemes financed by vc who can't care less about privacy.
>Exactly, the problem is asking for law/policy/regulation to solve the problem when it is the problem
One thing is privacy, another is copyright. You already have laws protecting your privacy, cryptography is a way of enforcing them. But if copyright law is a mess, it would be a good idea to reflect about how to improve it.
It's unlikely to ever happen as it would require a lot of political wrangling, but I think a system where you only gain copyright protection or the ability to sue for damages by submitting your work to a repository/archive would be beneficial (either for free or very low cost). Then when copyright has expired the archive can make the work available to the public
> What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts?
We need to provide funding for film makers, authors, artists, and other creatives who in return release their work under Creative Commons licenses. And we need to stop paying attention to movies and music that is not released under an acceptable license.
The problem is that governments (and others) can interfere with the internet. That's a technological problem that can only have technological solutions. Policy work is just asking our adversaries to please slow down while we build better defences. That can be useful, but it's not sustainable as a long-term solution.
Extend the concept of copyright deposit libraries to all copyrightable content? If you want copyright protection, you have to deposit your thing with the LoC who will look after it.
Copyright owners to pay the LoC a fee for upkeep of course!
> how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts?
You don't. Copyright is necessary for most people like developers to make a living. If some one like github can just rip off your code there is no market for developers, if there are no developers theres nothing for github to rip off.
The real issue with copyright law is the lifelong copyright destroys our ability to archive. Microsoft isn't making money off windows 98 there is no market for it, if I have an old game that only runs on windows 98 I am kinda shit out of luck. If some one releases a pirate copy of windows 98 because there is no legitimate market Microsoft legally has to sue them or risk losing their copyright not just for 98 but all windows.
We need to limit copy right to a reasonable length of time. Which then brings up the issue of what is a reasonable time? 10 years 20 years 2000 years? Businesses with the legal capabilities of Disney will always argue for the life of the author plus a million years and the rest of us don't really have the funds to compete.
Google tried it and they failed and they have more money than god. We need more money than god and the way to do it in this market is to make something we can copyright and then exploit that and after a life time of doing this we will have our money to start the legal battle, or at least our kids do. Will they act in the publics best interests and blow their wealth or will they act in their best interest?
When I wrote this [1] my principle dig was at the universities, who I
have long considered derelict in their duties to curate and maintain
the civic cannon.
Not a single academic had the courage to reply me (or the ability to
read the blatant, unsubtle sub-text). I cannot find a single
institution that still counts "the global public" amongst its
stakeholders. They are fully in bed with the likes of Elsevier and the
project to privatise knowledge.
I loved soulseek. Finding someone with interesting tastes and browsing their collection was great - found some artists I still love to this day that way, like Bogdan Racyinski (you don't turn down an album called Samurai Math Beats) and the Dresden Dolls.
You can also delete the Phone app in iOS. Amazing how far we've come with alternatives. Plain old phone calls should be relegated to the dustbin of history (and SMS).
The same cryptography is used to prevent any iPhone from being able to install Signal or any other app if the government or manufacturer doesn’t want any particular device to be able to use it.
It can also be used to remotely disable the application even if already installed.
It expired and someone was quick to pick it up, it hosted some weird piracy forum for a while, then the ross ullbricht legal fund and now it changed to that.
What.cd was really great and I find redacted to be a decent sliritual successor.
Shameless plug; For people interested in curated music discovery and keeping track of albums you (and your friends) discovered/liked I'm building https://digs.fm - you might find it interesting.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadsite code: https://github.com/WhatCD/
https://i.imgur.com/VbLasI9.png
https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...
That is not to say you can't hide from it at the same time, where it matters. And you should corrupt the perception of yourself when required.
I miss that site; it wasn't really a "private torrent tracker", it was a music community. I discovered entire genres of music I never knew existed on what.cd.
Spotify is what.cd's mentally handicapped little brother in comparison.
Then this user not only finds it in flac, but is able to create a torrent, upload it and shared it in under 90 seconds. It still boggles my mind how he pulled it off.
I don't believe in magic, but this was magical lol
It's their site, they can do what they want with it. And I can have my opinions on the petty bureaucraticness.
Maybe try this :)
Spotify recommendations are good sometimes but it really lacks the strong sense of community. There's no personal touch to Spotify recommendations.
And for entire new things it tends to gravitate towards the more popular "classic $genre" stuff within a genre. That doesn't mean it's bad music, but a jazz playlist with John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong isn't really very interesting, nor is a metal playlist with Metallica and Iron Maiden. The thing that what.cd offered was that you could discover things beyond that.
And all of this is so subjective in the first place. I recently watched all of the Alien films, and I felt the third Alien film is the second-best (after the original), but the "rating sites" have it listed as the lowest-rated of all of them. I'm probably not the only one who likes the film more than the ratings would suggest, and this kind of stuff gets lost in these algorithmic recommendation systems.
There's some irony to this appearing on what.cd
When OiNK was taken down there was a massive community effort to put a successor online within days. But we had to kick out an early staff member called "WhatMan" for trying to hijack the entire project and run it as his own kingdom, right down to changing the name from "Waffles" to "What CD?" while others were catching a few hours sleep between hacking at the code. Months of bitter disputes between the sites followed.
I deleted his first upload of Ghosts I–IV because he messed up the ID3 tags ;)
Couple stories from memory:
* What.cd started as a parallel effort around the same time, by a second group. I don't recall there being a significant motivation to have _two_ Oink replacements, just a lot of enthusiasm, and memes about "hydras" --- i.e. "you chopped off a head, but even more of us grew back".
* I remember us laughing at the "what" group for their name --- and supposedly hearing that they thought calling it "what" would act as a deterrent to being taken down, with a "confusing" name. But hey, they really took off in a way that Waffles didn't, so what do I know
* Waffles used tbsource (IIRC), which was a more standard torrent-site codebase to reach for at the time. It was fine, we made our customizations to it and did what we had to to get the site going. But What.cd's choice to implement a new tracker in Gazelle was a great contribution to the community.
* I miss the music discovery that came from the Waffles top-10 lists and from the forums in the community. Spotify has fully replaced music torrenting in my life (and probably many many others), but the community around music recommendations and sharing was so, so good and I haven't found something like it since.
* Helping stand up a music torrent site was a fun, probably ill-advised adventure of a young, pre-adult version of me. I've since professionally worked on DRM stacks on consumer media devices and on projects for the US Copyright Office, and had many good laughs about this trajectory. Karma, I guess?
Is someone trying to bring what.cd back?
I checked btw OiNK is still offline.
Interesting, goes to show lots of us had a common lineage from that time. Funny enough Silk Road also had a very healthy forum/community back then that kind of felt like Oink, too.
OP, for what it's worth, your post just inspired me to go make a donation to the EFF.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/FORtyX7
https://interviewfor.red
And the community - selective, passionate (again even snooty/elitist) and talkative.
I didn't know I liked atmospheric black metal until they showed me what it's about.
This comment just sums it up for me. You said it perfectly.
Nearly every bit of music added had multiple formats. It wasn’t just the big ones.
A request section that was super useful - due to how hard it was to seed on music torrent sites. (For waffles and what I was the only person two people invited that didn’t get banned for having a poor ratio.)
Lots of new music by new bands were uploaded by the bands so you got to find truly new music.
If you were an audiophile this was a must have site. Even tho people went on and on about “e**” (that was basically the name)
After OPP got shut down, both What and Waffles were stood up in a matter of days.
I was going to post the same, it had a very healthy community that was only rivaled by some very select/invite only alt.binaries on usenet--when Demonoid was strictly invite only it carried some of the weight, but my tastes in music changed dramatically around that time and I instead started to buy vinyl (2007?) in order to support a small niche sound since the music I was into was mainly artist/producer released.
It was supposed to re-lauch in '14 [0] but never did, but by then I had already a decent vinyl and mp3 collection because as I used to play around with DJing and had got to know lots of producers/artists on/offline; in short, it's a cold, hard and messy Industry but what's clear is that while producer led labels became a norm in that time and had lots of penetration, it suffered from the same issues that majors did in the end. White-label one offs and tests presses are a form of currency in dub-culture so it never went away, but it was a net loss monetarily speaking for most and really started to be seen as a business expense/marketing.
Producers were almost always also DJs or MCs (some were all 3!) and had to tour and link up with major artists or sponsors like RedBull, who built an academy for producers and covered lots of expenses for them to tour on special events and nights with specific clubs.
What Oink never really got right in my view because it was so early was the social aspect, a huge part of music-sharing was the commonality that we would run into those people who shared our tastes out at clubs/events. Even if it was a one off event it was still cool to put a name/face to the handle online who you share with and could relate with--that's the point of dubplates and test press. I've spent lots of time with my nose in a crate at random record shops in US/EU/UK and that feeling you get is unique and equally special as the music itself!
Cypherpunks/Bitcoiners were the first to actually try to do microtxs on Soundcloud [1] in order to monetize their work in an appreciating asset: hell, I got paid by a bitcoin whale (also a music lover) to try and spear-head this initiative when I told him about what music community I was a part of and even met with a few DJs from the UK coming to the US that month.
Sadly, it was way too early and most were in the middle of a tour so had to direct their attention to that and no one collected their funds, but overall seemed excited about the prospect of having a userbase serve as a patreaon of sorts on a platform they themselves could curate.
0: https://torrentfreak.com/busted-torrent-site-oink-prepares-i...
1: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/changetip-brings-bitcoin...
Somewhat off-topic , but I just posted this question on HN which is sort of related - how did early streaming sites build up their collections?
Maybe the founders of Spotify were actually big uploaders on what.cd and already had many TB of albums?? (Semi-joking, I know this is unlikely, but I’m desperately curious for the answers to this mystery.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555150
Please comment if you have any thoughts as otherwise my curiosity is getting buried in the depths of hackernews!
Once this ended and they went legal, I left Spotify and never looked back as about half of my music library was gone overnight. It taught me a valuable lesson early on in life about subscription services and “not owning” your digital files.
Do you find there are lots of things you can’t find on Apple Music or Spotify nowadays?
I guess I’m just not the type to really listen to a bunch of rare recordings, but maybe I would if I had access to them.
No clue really, I am more “forceful” these days in terms of requiring software to be open if it is to set foot on my devices. Bandcamp is great and it is where I get the majority of my music these days.
This is a mirage.
At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.
There must be policy wonks here on HN who know the ins and outs of local/state/federal government, copyright law/fair use, etc. (I'm assuming the U.S. IP lobby is the 400 pound gorilla in the room.)
What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts? What's an approach that could eventually be on a referenda or party platform? Does archive.org have any idea? Any other orgs have an idea?
There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.
It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.
What's the reasonable legislation to say, "As long as the project does X and avoids Y, the project may archive Z" for all digital artifacts Z in some domain?
Edit: clarifications
Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies.
You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/info.
The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.
In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial.
This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law.
Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.
Consider the interaction of the doctrine of first sale with copyright in [1]. This is a spot where that conflict exists; if I've bought a thing, preventing me from re-selling that thing (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) abrogates my physical-property rights. That SCOTUS decision didn't undermine property rights as a general concept so much as buttress it: the pro-IP formulation benefits a handful of rights-holders, while the pro-physical-property formulation directly benefits everyone who owns real objects. A kind of utilitarian calculus of property rights, I guess?
Similarly, consider DRM. If I can't break DRM on a DVD I bought, to play it on a computing device that I own (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) then I don't actually own my computer or the DVD. That's an absurd dilution of the common understanding of a right that you're correct is the cornerstone of Western societies.
It's kinda like zoning law, really: the current beneficiaries can scream about "muh property rights" until they're blue in the face, but the regime they're defending is the greater violation of those rights.
So, overall, no: if anything, current corporatized formulations of "intellectual property" rights are a direct threat to actual property rights, which are indeed important.
edit: forgot to add that if it's a civilization's-gonna-collapse argument, there's a case to be made that environments with robust physical property protections but weak/no IP protections are the ideal environment for societal development: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....
For instance, the World of Spectrum and lots of C64/Amiga sites offered lots of its games legally.
<<Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies
Right now that cornerstone is rather heavily tilted towards IP rights and puts Western democracies at an angle where they could easily slide into the ocean ushering the era ant self-respecting regime is trying prevent.
<<You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/in
It is not an either or. It is a spectrum with multitude of options in between. That you seek to put it as a simple binary choice is a failing rhetorical style and will not get you far in terms of arguments on HN.
edit: corrected first sentence
I think I had read you can request additional storage when you exceed the standard limit now. Maybe that’s what he means by unlimited and if you already had the data in googled cloud, well you don’t have to request from anyone (yet).
You had to do something by a certain date which has since passed so it's not much help now.
G Suite Business is not available for new sign ups. If you have G Suite Business, your subscription and all related services will continue to function as they do today, until it’s time to transition to a new offering. We’ll be in touch over the coming months to identify your transition path.
This was a $12/month unlimited storage plan.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en
I think it's possible you can get "unlimited" storage by signing up for one of their enterprise plans, but nowadays they make you request additional storage when you run out. I'm sure they don't throw a fit over 5-10TB, but I can imagine flags being raised when users on 1 user plans start requesting storage and they already have 100TB assigned.
How’d that go?
Enterprise is $20
C'mon, LARP a policy discussion: what are the chess moves toward public policy to keeparchives like sci-hub from being so easily burninated? Any policy discussion will do.
I'll go rewrite the relevant Acts of Congress in Rust if I have to.
Maybe start there - don't stick with a US jurisdiction. What was that country that was taken to the WTO and won against US copyright, and are now allowed to host any copyrighted material without penalty?
As far as a better replacement goes, we just need a good decentralized forum tool with moderation, and we will be set.
Link, please!
> Nudging it to expand its collection of digital works seems like a natural next step
Does the Google Books settlement with out-of-print publishers limit what can be done in this space?
One reasonable thing I can suggest that everyone can do at the local level is to support your local library and any funding millages for them. As someone said, "If libraries were proposed afresh today, the copyright lobby would immediately shut them down and sue them". So it seems like a reasonable way to encourage archival of materials on a local level.
Going beyond that, I guess you could ask to talk to librarians at your local library about promoting open-access materials? I feel like they are much more likely to know about fair-use cases and methods and their intersection with copyright compared to the average reader here.
This sounded somewhat reasonable so I did a quick search for history of libraries and copyrights laws in US. Apparently Ben Franklin started one of the first in the "egalitarian colonies" while a bit later the Continental Congress resolved that "nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...
And somehow we have both the laws and the libraries. And this site [below] is claiming that there are "unique provisions" to protect all sorts of knowledge repositories, ranging from "libraries, archives and museums under copyright acts in the U.S. and around the world".
https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-provisions-for-libra...
So that "someone"'s statement turns out to be merely a device to cast shade on the idea of copyright laws.
You've picked some random quotes - but modern copyright law essentially started in England in 1710 with the Statute of Anne.
Some background context - Prior to 1710, there was a legal monopoly over publishing held by the Stationers Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Statione...). They were the only entity that could publish manuscripts and newspapers in England legally.
Authors themselves had no such rights - Instead they would be forced to sell their manuscripts and maps to members of the Stationers Company for a one time fee, and the Stationers Company then retained a perpetual copyright on them.
---
So when you see the quote "Nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study"... you need to understand that in this context they mean very clearly that author's work should be theirs - and that the copyright shouldn't go to a company who profits because of a monopoly agreement with the crown.
They weren't really saying "Copyright laws are a good thing" they were saying "Copyright should remain in the hands of the author - not be forcibly removed by the crown".
Further - and this is IMPORTANT - they decided that 14 years was plenty of time for a copyright. There should be no "perpetual copyright" like what was granted to the Stationers.
---
And yet.... here we are in 2022, with a situation that actually looks fairly similar to the 1500s. Large publishing companies control nearly all successful commercial publications. They've lobbied the government to increase the duration of those copyrights and trademarks to be nearly "perpetual" for all meaningful purposes, and they usually pay authors a one time fee for those perpetual copyrights.
If anything - I'd argue that modern copyright laws as they exist and are enforced today are a complete sabotage of the intent of those men you're quoting.
I was clearly using US (not European) jurisdiction. Also I didn’t parse that statement, merely showed that both topics were in development and discussion in tandem, in US. Finally, the existence of special provisions for libraries, etc. All of which shows that the two have somehow coexisted, and that quote of yours is hyperbole.
The scope has been modified and changed (mostly in favor of extending the rights of copyright holders, and the duration of the copyright).
The two aren't co-existing. Modern copyright law doesn't actually say jack shit about libraries except for a minor footnote that allows libraries limited ability to "preserve" works that are no longer available for sale, even if they are within their period of copyright. Libraries operate almost entirely under the doctrine of first sale... which is also under attack in the US right now.
---
Have a good one, I don't think you have enough context on the subject to be worth discussing it with further.
We don’t need to preserve every cat picture and vacation moment, just enough geometric and color data to replicate them. Same with text.
Deduplicate to an essential data model of knowledge and algorithms to boot strap that into a useful state.
Stable Diffusion runs in a browser on a phone. I have no doubt we can get a “bigger model” out of a tiny model and a few algorithms that will hydrate it and update its state based upon a context. But IT is too literal to serve “business” so we end up with the janky mess you called out.
So in summary; a rethink of our economic approach to keeping people busy, and compressed, deduplicated model that fits on a phone, with hardware and software that know to get what the user asks for out of this small hash.
That’s what all the ML is leading to. It’s just like I said; IT is a boring industry to serve business traditions. Intentionally: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Bobby-Kotick-Wants-to-Take-...
I’m not that smart and figured this out. Asked a colleague with a PhD in math working at MS who was all wink and nudge at me. The “smarter people” know what’s up and want to be the first one there. Then under politically correct traditions it’s “their property.”
It’s not that hard to conceive; all information displayed on a machine is 2D geometry and games simulate 3D through well understood perspective and color theory. We just need a model that captures all the coordinates of our text and those perspective shifts and color compositions.
But to get there you need social change to avoid the loop you say you’re tired of but no one else does. Good luck.
That is the very cycle of Nature and the rise and fall of Civilizations upon which Human progress hinges on; I think its more apt to say that YOU got old, and keeping up got hard (it has for me too) because this is how it's always been in Nature.
I question if you are even familiar with the very core values of the Manifesto, let alone the works of all other Cypherpunks as this is at the crux of it's existence:
> We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s--especially for those of us who grew up here and saw it emerge and consider it part of our very culture rather than merely an interesting/lucrative career path--that eventually decayed into what it is now; the sense of enjoying and relishing these values were the norm when I first got into tech as a kid, now it's the exception and fringe for and it's cause is very the reasons that most have come to hate tech: it's become a dystopic land of Corpo barons (VC) tech lords (FAANG) who rely on IP and a crooked legal system to maintain it's supremacy.
Gene Kahn (RIP) said it best at the Senate meeting [0] and people would be wise to adapt and have Humanity flourish from the advance in Human knowlege and culture, instead brilliant men like him and Arron Schwartz killed themselves because of a few business moguls rather than being on the cover of Wired Magazine or on Forbes 30 under 30 for their efforts.
0: http://www.xcflabs.com/
Modern digital libraries of Alexandria have only ever been burned because of the imposition of artificial scarcity. In contrast, in nature DNA is being copied all over the place. Imperfectly, but at least the parts that matter are being shared widely.
> Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s
Bullshit. Cypherpunks don’t just exist in SV. Any cypherpunk who still cares about their principles would recoil in horror at SV that was there since circa 2015 ( and that’s being generous), let alone now.
I never said they did and I agree: what I did say is that is where it began and it's origins was in SV in the 90s [0] which is when I was a kid in CA and feel it's part of my culture as I grew up on the internet back then (hence my interest in tech).
I'd say at the end of the first crypto war things started to get dire so by the dotcom era in the 2000s the Corpo take over of the internet was in full swing--which is when Neal Stepenson released the seminal piece Cryptonomicon and outlined the vital nature of having a currency free from the control of nation-states, which is at the crux of the cypherpunk movement and one can argue really goes back to Alan Turing himself.
I'd argue it happened not in 2015, but by the time 'web2' was created that SV became the cesspool it is now, domain squatting made useless people into overnight millionaires rather that then invested in ever-more intrusive business models; though room 614A at ATT's facility in SF was a thing so...
If you want a real history lesson check this out [1].
> Gene Kan:
Correct, stupid auto insert... I still remember how crazy that was back then, especially during the whole Napster v Metallica feud. Aside from his interest in open source tech he was also an avid auto-crosser, too; I think he was super into Miatas.
The internet was/felt much smaller back then.
0: https://youtu.be/9vM0oIEhMag?t=99
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdmpAy1hI8g
Gene Kan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan
https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo
The link about using the eth.limo gateway so it is resolvable on browsers like chrome/safari but .limo is not required on most web3 browsers. In either case the content in hosted on IPFS making it free and censorship resistant.
Exactly, the problem is asking for law/policy/regulation to solve the problem when it is the problem.
In the words of Cypherpunk and EFF Founder John Gilmore:
“I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."
One thing is privacy, another is copyright. You already have laws protecting your privacy, cryptography is a way of enforcing them. But if copyright law is a mess, it would be a good idea to reflect about how to improve it.
In this case, where what we want is bulletproof hosting, we host the servers undersea. Microsoft's Project Natick has shown the way.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/project-natic...
Yet another reason why proof of work is unconquerable.
We need to provide funding for film makers, authors, artists, and other creatives who in return release their work under Creative Commons licenses. And we need to stop paying attention to movies and music that is not released under an acceptable license.
Copyright owners to pay the LoC a fee for upkeep of course!
You don't. Copyright is necessary for most people like developers to make a living. If some one like github can just rip off your code there is no market for developers, if there are no developers theres nothing for github to rip off.
The real issue with copyright law is the lifelong copyright destroys our ability to archive. Microsoft isn't making money off windows 98 there is no market for it, if I have an old game that only runs on windows 98 I am kinda shit out of luck. If some one releases a pirate copy of windows 98 because there is no legitimate market Microsoft legally has to sue them or risk losing their copyright not just for 98 but all windows.
We need to limit copy right to a reasonable length of time. Which then brings up the issue of what is a reasonable time? 10 years 20 years 2000 years? Businesses with the legal capabilities of Disney will always argue for the life of the author plus a million years and the rest of us don't really have the funds to compete.
Google tried it and they failed and they have more money than god. We need more money than god and the way to do it in this market is to make something we can copyright and then exploit that and after a life time of doing this we will have our money to start the legal battle, or at least our kids do. Will they act in the publics best interests and blow their wealth or will they act in their best interest?
Not a single academic had the courage to reply me (or the ability to read the blatant, unsubtle sub-text). I cannot find a single institution that still counts "the global public" amongst its stakeholders. They are fully in bed with the likes of Elsevier and the project to privatise knowledge.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
But Jamendo, Magnatune and Free Music Archive has gems:
- Diablo Swing Orchestra
- Tab and Anitek
- Revolution Void
- Tunguska:Electronica Music Society
- Tryad
- The Peach Tree
"text me on the Signal, don't call me".
If that isn't a sign that cryptography is finally mainstream, I don't know what is.
What a time to be alive.
Oh, wait.
It can also be used to remotely disable the application even if already installed.
The cypherpunks were sadly wrong.
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15103085 - Aug 2017 (8 comments)
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078524 - April 2017 (7 comments)
When they got killed (after OiNK and the others) is when I mostly stopped listening to new music.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/https://what.cd/
And the first snapshot from 2010:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101021055418/https://what.cd/
And the Wikipedia entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What.CD
Shameless plug; For people interested in curated music discovery and keeping track of albums you (and your friends) discovered/liked I'm building https://digs.fm - you might find it interesting.
Original Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32551862
Rest in peace old friend.