Two Decades of the Internet in Review

As sort of a historical review, I thought I would list those websites and services associated with "The Internet" that I have used over the last twenty years of being a cyberjunkie.

The first encounter with the Internet that I can remember is being given a pair of 5.25" floppies containing various shareware utilities that a friend had downloaded from 'The Internet'.
He was a retired optical engineer that owned and operated the local computer store. I can't remember the context or even what programs exactly were there, although for some reason I think there was a extended memory manager program I needed, but never managed to make work.
My PC at the time was a 8088 with 512K RAM. I still have the motherboard, but I have no idea what I did with the 1MB memory expansion card in question.

This was some years before I actually surfed the Information Superhighway. I read Neuromancer before I was ever connected to the Internet, which set the bar really fucking high for expectations.

1999 to 2019

IRC / ISP provided email.* : Changed ISP.
Webcrawler: Used until Google, which worked better.
Hotmail: Disliked M$, left after sale.
ICQ: Lifestyle changes.
Geocities: Lifestyle changes, never updated my pages after being sold to Yahoo!
IRC - DALNET: Inconvenience from the DDoS war.Wish some of those channels were still around.  
Yahoo Mail: Disliked GUI changes, and the removal of free SMTP access.
Google Search: Strongly dislike tracking, search results flooded with ads, and results quality fading.
GMail: Bad interface, slow to load, general dissatisfaction with Google.**
DeviantART: lifestyle changes on my part. Website still seems pretty good.
Ebay: Dislike interface.
Paypal: Nothing but bad experiences.
Metafilter: Still use, and still like.
Google News: What was a pretty good service gradually became worse and worse. No variety.
Hackaday: Gradual editorial changes after its sale have made it less interesting.***
Wikipedia: Dicks. Philosophical differences. Philosophical differences and all those dicks.
Youtube: Ads. Really bad suggestion engine. Its either Alt-Right Radicalization or Clickbait.
Amazon: Still using to buy non-local products. No interest in any of its other tricks.
Blogger: Just checking to see if this is being read.
Facebook: The feed tinkering, the tracking, and Zuck.
Tumblr: lifestyle. Generally enjoyed it, and its interface.
Netflix: Still using, but not as impressed as I once was.
Hacker News: Still using, still useful.
LinkedIN: Useless.
StackExchange: Dicks, and Boss Dicks.
Duckduckgo: Still using, wish the results were better, but GIGO, right?

With Web 1.0 long dead, Web 2.0 a festering shitheap, and Web 3.0 being the Panopticon, I am going to be curious to see how many items will be added to this list. Perhaps I will be able to extend this review, in another decade, on this service; but given the success rate of the above items, I fear not.

"Who will save your souls...from all those lies you told?"

                                               ---Jewel Kilcher

* My local ISP hosted its own IRC server, restricted only to its customers. I remember being shown the channel by my girlfriend, and holding my first chat. This still seems a cool idea, and I remember it as being remarkably populated by neighbors and friends.

**I understand the irony of complaining about this on Blogger.com. At some point, my animosity to Google will reach the point that this blog will be extinguished as well.

***Historically, a similar sort of 'en-boring-ing' as the 'Amateur Science' column in Scientific American underwent in the 1990s.

Ghostly Horde of IRC

This is an idea I came up with a few years ago, but there is no way I am going to have to time to ever implement it. Maybe some one else will run with it...

Back in the Day (Which I am informally defining as the late 1990's) I spent a lot of time on IRC. DALnet was my hangout of choice, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time socializing.
Predictably, I spent time on #science_fiction!
I am by nature a hoarder, and this mania extends to logfiles. Looking through my archives the other day, I found several hundred kilobytes of  channel logs for #nightspell and #vampyreinn.
Here was conversations with people long forgotten about, all have whom have aged, matured and changed over the last 15-20 years. Some have even died.
Most of the chatter is just that, chatter. But #Vampyreinn is a little different. It was billed as a freeform roleplay channel...so most everyone in it liked RPG's of one sort or another. In another context and a decade or so later, cosplaying might have been a really popular hit with us...but all we had was 16 shades of colored text, imagination, and download speeds low enough that even transferring the channel master list was a sit-and-wait operation.
/list, anyone?

Enough history. I have thousands of lines of dialogue and interaction as several dozen characters walked in and out of the eponymous bar, quarreled, boasted, lounged and fought with each other. Storys, events, and dramas. Demonic kings lounging on thrones, lone gunslingers brooding in the leather dusters, alien anthropologists hitting on earth girls, a queen of hell restlessly folding her blue wings.

What I would like is a horde of bots, each primed with its script from long ago. Text color set to dark gray, probably, and maybe a leading underscore on the nicks to prevent collisions with the living & active.
Romantically, the ghostly horde should log in at midnight; more practically perhaps to set the conversations to the twenty year anniversary of the original conversation.
They would not engage anyone else, merely act there roles, and then depart the stage again.
The unenlightened would be baffled at the grey ghosts...but those still on DALnet who remember the old lost friends, would be reminded of them.
My ideal prank. Baffles the unenlightened, and romanticly tweaks the hearts of the few, and sadly now, the old.

Of course, the logs would be undated, and on the next anniversary even more ghosts would crowd on the stage, with ghosts responding the ghosts, and younger ghosts trying to provoke reactions threaded through the real users trying to comprehend....and iterated again, and again, a rolling snowball of text, in time a notorious ghost channel rolling around the calender.

The Buzz and Chatter of Busy Motherboards

This  paper on acoustic sideband decryption attacks reminds me of working on my old 8088 and 286 systems. I've always liked ambient music, and pre-WinAmp, that was supplied by a battered boombox tuned to any of the available FM rock and roll stations. One of my favorite stations was on a frequnecy that was favored by the computers radio-noise; it would override a stastion with a chatter and rumble that was quite distinctive. I could hear RAM acesses as quite distinctive tones.

The interesting part, now that I think about it, was that a system with a clock speed of 4.77 Mhz was generating radio interference somewhere between 98 and 104 Mhz - all my favorite radio stations lying in that bandwidth. Perhaps it was actually being picked up by the radio circuitry after demodulation, as a amplitude-modulated wave affecting a poorly shielded amplifier circuit?

The more I think about it, the more curious I become. I have a box of 8088 motherboards tucked away, I wonder if I have all the other parts around to get one up and running? It would only have to boot, to run some basic tests - the POST RAM check should demonstrate the interference.