Back in the day when we ran random exes, good times
Remembering the good old days of eSheep.exe and my dad freaking out that “It’s a virus!” because he saw “a black sheep come running up to the other one and hit it! It started bleeding!”
Dad, that’s a ram… The other sheep’s not bleeding. It’s blushing!
Embarrassingly recently a load of people were i worked (including me) downloaded from some sketchy website and installed a snow effect and christmas tree generator on our work PCs just added christmassy overlay over what you’re doing.
I shudder to think of it now
I remember I used to be subscribed to a mailing list for a programming language. A friend of the lead developer set the mailing list up for them at his university, and then went off and did his own thing. It was completely unmoderated. Some kid sent a “neat little proggy” his friend Dieter wrote. If the extent of my Internet usage wasn’t limited to free email through Juno, my entire hard drive probably would have gotten deleted that day lol
There used to be this thing going around on pre-smartphone phones (via Bluetooth, I assume) that showed a pocket watch closing and when it was fully closed, the phone shut down. We all thought it was hilarious to send it to as many people as possible and watch them panic. I don’t even know what format it was to look like a normal gif or video and do that. I certainly didn’t even care back then.
My guess is it was an actual gif that exploited some flaw in how the OS handled gifs and thus was able to execute code.
That would make sense. Thanks for coming up with an explanation. I did wonder when I thought about this earlier.
Or Bloover(?) The Bluetooth hacking app that could copy someone’s texts and call log
Back in the day it was innocent fun. I miss those days.
Our parents, 10 years ago “Don’t trust anything you read online!”
Parents, today: “I do my own research online!”
We were not prepared, as a species, for a device that let us come up with any opinion at all and find validation for it.
It used to be that when you had an opinion that was wrong, you’d say it out loud a number of times, and you’d notice that everyone around you would call you an imbecile and ridicule you. It would make you reassess yourself and grow as a person.
Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
That was an integral part of growing up and maturing. We don’t have a solution for it.
This exactly. I think theres a saying that goes “our technology far outstrips our actual intelligence”. Surprisingly smart phones & arguably the internet as well are both technologies that we are unable to manage responsibly as a species. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug
Back in the 90’s & early 00’s, if you were running around ranting about Jewish space lasers or kids being dissected in the basement of your local Pizza Hut, you’d be shunned, ridiculed and likely catch a visit from your local police department haha
Yeah. I firmly believe it will be a hurdle the human race cannot overcome. Technology advances faster than our own maturity. If you gave a room full of 4 year olds loaded guns, how long would they last in there?
That is us with the internet.
I think at least one would probably survive.
No way dude. By that point there’d be a bunch of guns with bullets left and only one kid. Kids hurt themselves on a piece of paper and crayons. No shot.
Of course, sometimes those ideas being ridiculed were “I don’t think our king, who claims Primae Noctis and whips anyone who looks at him, was actually chosen by God to rule. Gramp said he remembers when the king murdered the old king and skull-fucked him. Maybe we’re just victims of an inherently violent system?”
I see the Internet getting blamed for this shit and i want to offer a counter-opinion: the tech is different but the problems we have now are the same as we’ve had before: deregulation and corruption.
The Internet is incredible. Even good ol’ r was just as great a tool for learning about other perspectives as it could be an echo chamber. I learned so much about other people just by joining their /r/ and lurking, because I’m the type of person who’s interested in people. The Internet gave me the power to do what i do normally with people but on a larger scale. Perhaps the best critisism of the Internet is also it’s greatest strength, to give more people more range to do what they were doing anyway, for good or ill.
I believe though that when we criticize the Internets current state we are looking at a symptom, not a cause. I believe what we’re looking at is actually the fallout from the media deregulation and consolidation following the telecommunications act of 1996.
Ever since that time the people have increasingly been getting their “news” first in the form of
propagandaopinion pieces, otherwise known as otherwise known as VNRs. These press releases, written by increasingly larger, increasingly right-wing corps are designed to sway public opinion rather than inform, and they are very successful at their craft.The underlying problem in my opinion is that people are exposed to these lies and vitriolic ideas first from these sources. Combine this with a dearth of credible news sources so even one with the critical thinking skills of sherlock would have a hard time finding objective truth?
Well here we are
Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
I agree with everything you said except for this. Opinions are never wrong since they’re subjective, they’re just fucking stupid.
What if my opinion on peanut butter is that it tastes like apples.
Ironically, that mindset predates the internet.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Isaac Asimov
He died in 1992.
One year after the World Wide Web was made public. Coincidence?
I remember downloading what I thought was a no-CD crack for some game from Kazaa.
It was an app that locked my screen, opened a window, and systematically deleted every folder in my main C: drive before crashing. Then the screen went black and a message popped up that said “Thank god it’s only a game.”
The exe was an ad for some indie Doomclone FPS game where the levels were your computer’s file structure and the walls of the rooms would be decorated with the images stored in your folders. I shut down my machine after that. I was shaking for the next hour.
If anyone knows the game, I’d love to learn what it was all about.
Here’s a video of that .exe running:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=iIgpWGVvfjA&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Based bot
I think that was called “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” or something.
That’s the name of a recent, unrelated horror movie, not the game in question.
It was a pretty good movie, if you’re into horror.
I actually found it very sad. As a parent of a kid near the age of the main character, it was really painful to see her loneliness and isolation.
It was definitely a sad movie and not easy to watch at times. However, it was well written and acted, and considering it was the lead’s debut performance, that’s extra impressive. For me, it was one of those movies that’s enjoyable, yet uncomfortable. I think it was very successful in what it set out to do.
The game it was advertising is called “Virus: The Game” pretty sure danooct1 made a video on the advert & game.
I vaguely remember seeing a news article about something like that. I think it was a game where killing enemies caused files to be deleted from your computer. It was portrayed as some kind of artistic statement about digital possessions or something.
Someone in the forum where it was being discussed sarcastically said they developed a live action version called “playing baseball inside.”
It was a space invaders clone with files being the aliens?
The game’s called “Virus The Game”, if I’m not mistaken
Bingo! Thanks!
That sounds awesome
Did it actually delete everything
Internet absolutely was better 15 years ago. Everything is paywalled now and there’s constant disinformation. Algorithms feed you bullshit and people all post outrage bait to get attention. Not saying that stuff didn’t exist 15 years ago, but it’s absolutely become the dominant experience online.
Hardware has gotten better though!
Can’t even tell cause software has gotten so much worse
You can’t even Google shit anymore, it’s all AI written articles. I used to use Reddit for that with site:reddit.com but I wonder how long we will be able to.
People suggest using other search engines instead like Bing or DuckDuckGo, but the fact that they no longer support the “-” operator in search is annoying.
You forgot clickbait
I fucking hate the Internet outside Lemmy, Mastodon, and select discords.
And you can get rid of anything you hate, meanwhile porn loads in seconds.
I wouldn’t go back
When you see “Account created: 1997”.
“These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones.”
When you see “Account created: 1997”.
“These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones.”
I have boots older than some people that are posting on Lemmy today…
deleted by creator
When I first started my career I was in tier 3 tech support and to troll a colleague we put an mp3 in the startup folder on Windows. Every time he booted the computer to troubleshoot he lost his s*** trying to figure out why the music was playing. The dude ended up formatting C:
Precious memories.
I went to an internet café once. I opened regedit and went to Win98 colour settings. I swapped top and left border colours with bottom and right ones to make all windows and buttons look debossed. I left. That PC was “out of order” for two weeks afterwards.
That’s genius. I was always more of a screenshot-your-desktop-then-set-it-as-wallpaper-and-hide-taskbar-and-icons kinda guy but that one is so damn subtle it probably just leads to people thinking everything is normal except that it feels ever so slightly off, but they can’t put their finger on it. I like it a lot.
Fun fact, the forum post is now 17 years old.
deleted by creator
I like how you would download a totally random executable and run it. Not suspicious at all!
Oh we still do, we still do.
I used to wonder why my mom mistrusted online banking so much but looking back at the free programs I downloaded plus limewire it makes sense
Forums aren’t gone. They just were never really big to begin with. Reddit eclipsed all of them to the point that most forums were irrelevant unless they were highly specific (not like, a gaming or show community) or couldn’t be on reddit (straight piracy with linking, other stuff we won’t talk about)
They’re not even gone, just the communities that want them are fewer and far between.
We’re on a forum right now!
Technically, yes!
One thing that happened since I joined the feddieverse is that I’ve spend more time on the underbelly of the internet. Like, the other day I found someones blog. Not their tumblr or anything, their own personal blog.
It looked like shit and was filled with pointless entries but it was the internet in it’s rawest form
Yeah, specific forums for games or apps are still here, they’re just pretty empty unless there’s a big community for them. Some companies intentionally make forums their first and best place to get info, honestly.
When I was a teenager, a bunch of my friends online were tossing that around. I found a trojan and started sending it around as
cupholder.exebut making it look like I wasn’t the one who sent it… and just immediately logged in and opened their CD tray. Then started fucking with their system in silly ways.Ahh the good old days when even malware wasn’t that bad. Or maybe I was just a really stupid kid. At least I password-locked the trojan and removed it when I left.
I just remembered doing similar things. Sub7 is something that just came to mind and I can’t remember the last time I thought about that, been a long time.
Sub7 was the one, so many scripts at the click of a button
🤯
I view forums as the middle era of the internet.
Th early era was chatrooms, the middle era was forums, and the late era, which we are in now, is all social media.
I miss the middle era of the internet. Forums were a blast. You could really build a community with those things.
BBS predate chatrooms and are proto-forums.
BBSes predate the internet.
Depends on definitions.
1978 for BBS vs either 1974 for the publication of TCP itself, or 1982/1983 for deployment of the same TCP/IP we use today, or 1976 for X.25, or 1977 for the first actual live interconnection of multiple packet switched networks.
Perhaps better phrased: BBS predate the web (http+html) and the modern internet. Gopher doesn’t count ;)
Agree to all. How would you define the format of what you’re reading right now, some derivitive of a forum?
Social media.
I gotta say no. This is more like a collection of forums. There really is no following, no social aspect other than discussing the topic at hand. I am not promoting myself, I prefer annonymity over identifying myself. I do not think this counts as social media at all.
Disagree, politely… Not in the “OMG INTERNET DISAGREEMENT I HOPE YOUR MOTHER GETS FUCKED BY A HORSE!” way.
Reddit/Lemmy/Etc are nothing more than slightly more elaborate twitter with better filtering/catagorization. Social media all the way down.
But its its not a major issue, so its not like we need to invest time in a slapfight over whose wrong and whose right.
Nice to know it is a pleasant disagreement. But seriously, this is not social media.
-
Posting other peoples content instead of their own
-
Anonymity over identifiable.
-
Its not better filtering, it is distinct categories and communities, just like forums.
-
Persistent over breaking news.
-
There are no (or few) personal updates or status reports.
-
There is little to no social networking which is the hallmark of social media, like twitter, Linked In, Facebook, etc.
- Yes, like people often do on social media.
- You didnt have to use your real name on social media until relatively recently, and depending on platform.
- Yes, Like I said, filters.
- Both are persistent, and both have breaking news
- People who want everyone to know their personal updates, post them everywhere.
- There is tons of social networking on sites like reddit, Lemmy probably less so. but only because its relatively recent in the zeitgeist.
-
I am still active in several forums. They are great and have even more of a sense of community them they used to. People talk about the subject and even meet in person around the world.
I also host a forum for a different group. No ads either cause fuck that shit.
My wife called them invisible friends, even after we all met lol
More like 20 years ago
Nah, man, 2000 was like 10 years ago.
Nah, 10 years ago it was 1990.
Right, guys?
Yeah, I definitely wasn’t downloading and running random exes to see what they did 10 years ago. But I probably would have 20 or 25 years ago.
This image itself is almost 10 years old at this point.
I’m pretty sure we had this joke app in the mid 90s. I vaguely recall the joke would reference coke or similar.
A random EXE that does exactly as it says? That was rare even during the frontier fort days of the internet.
