Samsung have been showing off pre-release versions of their new Galaxy S26 range. It’s all pretty same-old predictable
changes (and I’m still not really looking for anything to replace my now-five-year-old mobile anyway!), but one feature in particular – one that they’re not even mentioning in their
marketing copy – seemed interesting and innovative.
You know those polarising filters you can use to try to stop people shoulder-surfing? Samsung have come up with a software-controlled one.
Demos show the feature being used to black-out the screen at a 15°+ angle when entering a PIN or password, but also show how it can configured on an app-by-app basis to e.g. black out
notifications so that only the person right in front of the screen can see them.
I assume that this black magic is facilitated by an additional layer between the screen and the glass, performing per-pixel selective polarisation in the same way as a monochrome LCD
display might. But the fact that each pixel can now show two images – one to a user directly ahead, superimposed with another (monochrome) one to users with an offset
viewing angle, is what interests me: my long-cultivated “hacker mentality” wants to ask “what I can make that do?”
Does the API of this (of this or of any similar or future screens?) provide enough control to manipulate the new layer? And is its resolution identical to that of the underlying screen?
Could “spoilers”, instead of being folded-away behind a <details>/<summary> or ROT13-encoded, say “tilt to reveal” and provide
a physicality to the mechanism of exposure?
Could diagrams embed their own metadata annotations: look at a blueprint from the side to see descriptions, or tilt your phone to see the alt-text on an image?
Can the polarisation layer be expanded to provide a more-sophisticated privacy overlay, such as a fake notification in place of a real one, to act as a honeypot?
Is there sufficient control over the angle of differentiation that a future screen could use eye tracking to produce a virtual lenticular barrier, facilitating a novel kind of
autostereoscopic 3D display that works – like a hologram – from any viewing angle?
I doubt I’m buying one of these devices. But I’m very curious about all of these questions!
An RM Nimbus was not the first computer on which I played Game of Life1. But this glider is here symbolically, anyway.
I can trace my hacker roots back further than my first experience of using an RM
Nimbus M-Series in circa 19922.
But there was something particular about my experience of this popular piece of British edutech kit which provided me with a seminal experience that shaped my “hacker identity”. And
it’s that experience about which I’d like to tell you:
Shortly after I started secondary school, they managed to upgrade their computer lab from a handful of Nimbus PC-186s to a fancy new network of M-Series PC-386s. The school were clearly very proud of this cutting-edge new acquisition, and we watched the
teachers lay out the manuals and worksheets which smelled fresh and new and didn’t yet have their corners frayed nor their covers daubed in graffiti.
I only got to use the schools’ older computers – this kind! – once or twice before the new ones were delivered.
Program Manager
The new ones ran Windows 3 (how fancy!). Well… kind-of. They’d been patched with a carefully-modified copy of Program Manager that imposed a variety of limitations. For example, they had removed the File > Run… menu item, along
with an icon for File Manager, in order to restrict access to only the applications approved by the network administrator.
A special program was made available to copy files between floppy disks and the user’s network home directory. This allowed a student to take their work home with them if they wanted.
The copying application – whose interface was vastly inferior to File Manager‘s – was limited to only copying files with extensions in its allowlist. This meant that (given
that no tool was available that could rename files) the network was protected from anybody introducing any illicit file types.
Bring a .doc on a floppy? You can copy it to your home directory. Bring a .exe? You can’t even see it.
To young-teen-Dan, this felt like a challenge. What I had in front of me was a general-purpose computer with a limited selection of software but a floppy drive through which media could
be introduced. What could I make it do?
This isn’t my school’s computer lab circa mid-1990s (it’s this school) but it has absolutely the same
energy. Except that I think Solitaire was one of the applications that had been carefully removed from Program Manager.
Spoiler: eventually I ended up being able to execute pretty much anything I wanted, but we’ll get to that. The journey is the important part of the story. I didn’t start by asking “can
I trick this locked-down computer lab into letting my friends and I play Doom deathmatches on it?” I started by asking “what can I make it do?”; everything else built up over
time.
Recorder + Paintbrush made for an interesting way to use these basic and limited tools to produce animations. Like this one, except at school I’d have put more effort in4.
Microsoft Word
Then I noticed that Microsoft Word also had a macro recorder, but this one was scriptable using a programming language called WordBasic (a predecessor to Visual Basic for
Applications). So I pulled up the help and started exploring what it could do.
And as soon as I discovered the Shell function, I realised that
the limitations that were being enforced on the network could be completely sidestepped.
A Windows 3 computer that runs Word… can run any other executable it has access to. Thanks, macro editor.
Now that I could run any program I liked, I started poking the edges of what was possible.
Could I get a MS-DOS prompt/command shell? Yes, absolutely5.
Could I write to the hard disk drive? Yes, but any changes got wiped when the computer performed its network boot.
Could I store arbitrary files in my personal network storage? Yes, anything I could bring in on floppy disks6
could be persisted on the network server.
I didn’t have a proper LAN at home7
So I really enjoyed the opportunity to explore, unfettered, what I could get up to with Windows’ network stack.
The “WinNuke” NetBIOS remote-crash vulnerability was a briefly-entertaining way to troll classmates, but unlocking WinPopup/Windows Chat capability was ultimately more-rewarding.
File Manager
I started to explore the resources on the network. Each pupil had their own networked storage space, but couldn’t access one another’s. But among the directories shared between
all students, I found a directory to which I had read-write access.
I created myself a subdirectory and set the hidden bit on it, and started dumping into it things that I wanted to keep on the network8.
By now my classmates were interested in what I was achieving, and I wanted in the benefits of my success. So I went back to Word and made a document template that looked
superficially like a piece of coursework, but which contained macro code that would connect to the shared network drive and allow the user to select from a series of programs that
they’d like to run.
Gradually, compressed over a series of floppy disks, I brought in a handful of games: Commander Keen, Prince of Persia, Wing Commander, Civilization,
Wolfenstein 3D, even Dune II. I got increasingly proficient at modding games to strip out unnecessary content, e.g. the sound and music files9,
minimising the number of floppy disks I needed to ZIP (or ARJ!) content to before smuggling it in via my shirt pocket, always sure not to
be carrying so many floppies that it’d look suspicious.
The goldmine moment – for my friends, at least – was the point at which I found a way to persistently store files in a secret shared location, allowing me to help them run whatever
they liked without passing floppy disks around the classroom (which had been my previous approach).
In a particularly bold move, I implemented a simulated login screen which wrote the entered credentials into the shared space before crashing the computer. I left it running,
unattended, on computers that I thought most-likely to be used by school staff, and eventually bagged myself the network administrator’s password. I only used it twice: the first time,
to validate my hypothesis about the access levels it granted; the second, right before I finished school, to confirm my suspicion that it wouldn’t have been changed during my entire
time there10.
Are you sure you want to quit?
My single biggest mistake was sharing my new-found power with my classmates. When I made that Word template that let others run the software I’d introduced to the
network, the game changed.
When it was just me, asking the question what can I make it do?, everything was fun and exciting.
But now half a dozen other teens were nagging me and asking “can you make it do X?”
This wasn’t exploration. This wasn’t innovation. This wasn’t using my curiosity to push at the edges of a system and its restrictions! I didn’t want to find the exploitable boundaries
of computer systems so I could help make it easier for other people to do so… no: I wanted the challenge of finding more (and weirder) exploits!
I wanted out. But I didn’t want to say to my friends that I didn’t want to do something “for” them any more11.
I figured: I needed to get “caught”.
I considered just using graphics software to make these screenshots… but it turned out to be faster to spin up a network of virtual machines running Windows 3.11 and some basic tools.
I actually made the stupid imaginary dialog box you’re seeing.12
I chose… to get sloppy.
I took a copy of some of the software that I’d put onto the shared network drive and put it in my own home directory, this time un-hidden. Clearly our teacher was already suspicious and
investigating, because within a few days, this was all that was needed for me to get caught and disciplined13.
I was disappointed not to be asked how I did it, because I was sufficiently proud of my approach that I’d hoped to be able to brag about it to somebody who’d
understand… but I guess our teacher just wanted to brush it under the carpet and move on.
Aftermath
The school’s IT admin certainly never worked-out the true scope of my work. My “hidden” files remained undiscovered, and my friends were able to continue to use my special Word template
to play games that I’d introduced to the network14.
I checked, and the hidden files were still there when I graduated.
The warning worked: I kept my nose clean in computing classes for the remainder of secondary school. But I would’ve been happy to, anyway: I already felt like I’d “solved” the challenge
of turning the school computer network to my interests and by now I’d moved on to other things… learning how to reverse-engineer phone networks… and credit card processors… and
copy-protection systems. Oh, the stories I could tell15.
I “get” it that some of my classmates – including some of those pictured – were mostly interested in the results of my hacking efforts. But for me it always was – and still
is – about the journey of discovery.
But I’ll tell you what: 13-ish year-old me ought to be grateful to the RM Nimbus network at my school for providing an interesting system about which my developing “hacker brain” could
ask: what can I make it do?
Which remains one of the most useful questions with which to foster a hacker mentality.
Footnotes
1 I first played Game of Life on an Amstrad CPC464, or possibly a PC1512.
2 What is the earliest experience to which I can credit my “hacker mindset”?
Tron and WarGames might have played a part, as might have the
“hacking” sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And there was the videogame Hacker and its sequel (it’s funny to
see their influence in modern games). Teaching myself to program so that I could make
text-based adventures was another. Dissecting countless obfuscated systems to see how they worked… that’s yet another one: something I did perhaps initially to cheat at games by
poking their memory addresses or hexediting their save games… before I moved onto reverse-engineering copy protection systems and working out how they could be circumvented… and then
later still when I began building hardware that made it possible for me to run interesting experiments on telephone networks.
Any of all of these datapoints, which took place over a decade, could be interpreted as “the moment” that I became a hacker! But they’re not the ones I’m talking about today.
Today… is the story of the RM Nimbus.
3 Whatever happened to Recorder? After it disappeared in Windows 95 I occasionally had
occasion to think to myself “hey, this would be easier if I could just have the computer watch me and copy what I do a few times.” But it was not to be: Microsoft decided that this
level of easy automation wasn’t for everyday folks. Strangely, it wasn’t long after Microsoft dropped macro recording as a standard OS feature that Apple decided that MacOS
did need a feature like this. Clearly it’s still got value as a concept!
4 Just to clarify: I put more effort in to making animations, which were not part of
my schoolwork back when I was a kid. I certainly didn’t put more effort into my education.
5 The computers had been configured to make DOS access challenging: a boot menu let you
select between DOS and Windows, but both were effectively nerfed. Booting into DOS loaded an RM-provided menu that couldn’t be killed; the MS-DOS prompt icon was absent from Program
Manager and quitting Windows triggered an immediate shutdown.
6 My secondary school didn’t get Internet access during the time I was enrolled there. I
was recently trying to explain to one of my kids the difference between “being on a network” and “having Internet access”, and how often I found myself on a network that wasn’t
internetworked, back in the day. I fear they didn’t get it.
7 I was in the habit of occasionally hooking up PCs together with null modem cables, but only much later on would I end up acquiring sufficient “thinnet”
10BASE2 kit that I could throw together a network for a LAN party.
8 Initially I was looking to sidestep the space limitation enforcement on my “home”
directory, and also to put the illicit software I was bringing in somewhere that could not be trivially-easily traced back to me! But later on this “shared” directory became the
repository from which I’d distribute software to my friends, too.
9 The school computer didn’t have soundcards and nobody would have wanted PC speakers
beeping away in the classroom while they were trying to play a clandestine videogame anyway.
10 The admin password was concepts. For at least four years.
11 Please remember that at this point I was a young teenager and so was pretty well
over-fixated on what my peers thought of me! A big part of the persona I presented was of somebody who didn’t care what others thought of him, I’m sure, but a mask that
doesn’t look like a mask… is still a mask. But yeah: I had a shortage of self-confidence and didn’t feel able to say no.
13 I was briefly alarmed when there was talk of banning me from the computer lab for
the remainder of my time at secondary school, which scared me because I was by now half-way through my
boring childhood “life plan” to become a computer programmer by what seemed to be the appropriate route, and I feared that not being able to do a GCSE in a CS-adjacent subject
could jeopardise that (it wouldn’t have).
14 That is, at least, my friends who were brave enough to carry on doing so after the
teacher publicly (but inaccurately) described my alleged offences, seemingly as a warning to others.
15 Oh, the stories I probably shouldn’t tell! But here’s a teaser: when I
built my first “beige box” (analogue phone tap hardware) I experimented with tapping into the phone line at my dad’s house from the outside. I carefully shaved off some of
the outer insulation of the phone line that snaked down the wall from the telegraph pole and into the house through the wall to expose the wires inside, identified each, and then
croc-clipped my box onto it and was delighted to discovered that I could make and receive calls “for” the house. And then, just out of curiosity to see what kinds of protections were
in place to prevent short-circuiting, I experimented with introducing one to the ringer line… and took out all the phones on the street. Presumably I threw a circuit breaker in the
roadside utility cabinet. Anyway, I patched-up my damage and – fearing that my dad would be furious on his return at the non-functioning telecomms – walked to the nearest functioning
payphone to call the operator and claim that the phone had stopped working and I had no idea why. It was fixed within three hours. Phew!
I just needed to spin up a new PHP webserver and I was amazed how fast and easy it was, nowadays. I mean: Caddyalready makes it
pretty easy, but I was delighted to see that, since the last time I did this, the default package repositories had 100% of what I needed!
Apart from setting the hostname, creating myself a user and adding them to the sudo group, and reconfiguring sshd to my preference, I’d
done nothing on this new server. And then to set up a fully-functioning PHP-powered webserver, all I needed to run (for a domain “example.com”) was:
After that, I was able to put an index.php file into /var/www/example.com and it just worked.
And when I say “just worked”, I mean with all the bells and whistles you ought to expect from Caddy. HTTPS came as standard (with a solid QualSys grade). HTTP/3 was supported with a
0-RTT handshake.
As part of my efforts to reclaim the living room from the children, I’m building a new gaming PC for the playroom. She’s called Bee, and – thanks to the absolute insanity that is
The Tower 300 case from Thermaltake – she’s one of the most bonkers PC cases I’ve ever worked in.
I’m not saying the plain-text is the best web experience. But it is an experience. Perfect if you like your browsing fast, simple, and readable. There are no
cookie banners, pop-ups, permission prompts, autoplaying videos, or garish colour schemes.
I’m certainly not the first person to do this, so I thought it might be fun to gather a list of websites which you browse in text-only mode.
…
Terence Eden’s maintaining a list of websites that are presented as, or are wholly or partially available via, plain text. Obviously my own text/plain
blog is among them, and is as far as I’m aware the only one to be entirely presented as text/plain.
Anyway, this inspired me to write a post of my own (on text/plain blog, of course!), in which I ask the question: what do we
consider plain text? Based on the sites in the list, Markdown is permissible as plain text, (for the purposes of Terence’s list), but this implies that “plain text” is a
spectrum of human-readability.
If Markdown’s fine, then presumably Gemtext would be too? How about BBCode? HTML and RTF are explicitly excluded by Terence’s rules,
but I’d argue that HTML 1.0 could be more human-readable than some of the more-sophisticated dialects of BBCode (or any Markdown that contains tables, unless those tables are laid-out
in a way that specifically facilitates human-readability)?
As I say in my post:
<-- More human-readable Less human-readable -->
|-----------|-----------|-----------|------------|-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|
Plain text Gemtext Markdown BBCode HTML 1.0 Modern HTML RTF
This provocation is only intended to get you to think about “what does it mean for a markup language to be ‘human readable’?” Where do you draw the line?
Over the Christmas break I dug out my old HTC Vive VR gear, which I got way back in the Spring of 2016. Graphics card technology having come a long
way1,
it was now relatively simple to set up a fully-working “holodeck” in our living room with only a slight risk to the baubles on the Christmas tree.
For our younger child, this was his first experience of “roomscale VR”, which I maintain is the most magical thing about this specific kind of augmented
reality. Six degrees of freedom for your head and each of your hands provides the critical level of immersion, for me.
And you know what: this ten-year-old hardware of mine still holds up and is still awesome!2
The kids and I have spent a few days dipping in and out of classics like theBlu, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, Raw Data,
and (in my case3)
Half-Life: Alyx.
It doesn’t feel too heavy, but this first edition Vive sure is a big beast, isn’t it?
I’m moderately excited by the upcoming Steam Frame with its skinny headset, balanced weight, high-bandwidth
wireless connectivity, foveated streaming, and built-in PC for basic gaming… but what’s with those controllers? Using AA batteries instead of a built-in rechargeable one feels like a
step backwards, and the lack of a thumb “trackpad” seems a little limiting too. I’ll be waiting to see the reviews, thanks.
When I looked back at my blog to double-check that my Vive really is a decade old, I was reminded that I got it in the same month at Three
Rings‘ 2016 hackathon, then called “DevCamp”, near Tintern4.
This amused me, because I’m returning to Tintern this year, too, although on family holiday rather than Three Rings business. Maybe I’ll visit on a third occasion in
another decade’s time, following another round of VR gaming?
Footnotes
1 The then-high-end graphics card I used to use to drive this rig got replaced
many years ago… and then that replacement card in turn got replaced recently, at which point it became a hand-me-down for our media centre PC in the living room.
2 I’ve had the Vive hooked-up in the office since our house move in 2020, but there’s rarely been space for roomscale play there: just an occasional bit of Elite: Dangerous at my desk…
which is still a good application of VR, but not remotely the same thing as being able to stand up and move around!
3 I figure Alyx be a little scary/intense for the kids, but I could be
wrong. I think the biggest demonstration of how immersive the game can be in VR is the moment when you see how somebody can watch it played on the big screen and be fine but as soon
as they’re in the headset and a combine zombie has you pinned-down in a railway carriage and it’s suddenly way too much!
4 Where, while doing a little geocaching, I messed-up a bonus cache’s coordinate
calculation, realised my mistake, brute-forced the possible answers, narrowed it down to two… and then picked the wrong one and fell off a cliff.
HTTP/1 may appear simple because of several reasons: it is readable text, the most simple use case is not overly complicated and existing tools like curl and browsers help making
HTTP easy to play with.
The HTTP idea and concept can perhaps still be considered simple and even somewhat ingenious, but the actual machinery is not.
[goes on to describe several specific characteristics of HTTP that make it un-simple, under the headings:
newlines
whitespace
end of body
parsing numbers
folding headers
never-implemented
so many headers
not all methods are alike
not all headers are alike
spineless browsers
size of the specs
]
I discovered this post late, while catching up on posts in the comp.infosystems.gemini newsgroup,
but I’m glad I did because it’s excellent. Daniel Stenberg is, of course, the creator of cURL and so probably knows more about the intricacies of HTTP
than virtually anybody (including, most-likely, some of the earliest contributors to its standards), and in this post he does a fantastic job of dissecting the oft-made argument that
HTTP/1 is a “simple” protocol; based usually upon the argument that “if a human can speak it over telnet/netcat/etc., it’s simple”.
This argument, of course, glosses over the facts that (a) humans are not simple, and the things that we find “easy”… like reading a string of ASCII representations of digits and
converting it into a representation of a number… are not necessarily easy for computers, and (b) the ways in which a human might use HTTP 0.9 through 1.1 are rarely representative of
the complexities inherent in more-realistic “real world” use.
Obviously Daniel’s written about Gemini, too, and I agree with some of his points there (especially the fact that the
specification intermingles the transfer protocol and the recommended markup language; ick!). There’s a reasonable rebuttal here (although it has its faults too, like how it conflates the volume of data involved in the
encryption handshake with the processing overhead of repeated handshakes). But now we’re going way down the rabbithole and you didn’t come here to listen to me dissect
arguments and counter-arguments about the complexities of Internet specifications that you might never use, right? (Although maybe you should: you could have been reading this blog post via Gemini, for instance…)
But if you’ve ever telnet’ted into a HTTP server and been surprised at how “simple” it was, or just have an interest in the HTTP specifications, Daniel’s post is worth a read.
Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called “Half Life 2”. Are you sitting comfortably? Then
I shall begin.
…
What is meant to happen is a guard (spoiler alert – it’s actually Barney in disguise) bangs on a door, the door opens, he says “get in”, and then the game waits for you to enter
the room before the script proceeds.
But in this case the door sort of rattled, but didn’t open, and then locked shut again. So you can’t get in the room, and the gate closed behind you, so you can’t go do anything
else. The guard waits forever, pointing at the locked door, and you’re stuck.
…
If you watch the video, when the door unlocks and then opens, there’s a second guard standing inside the room to the left of the opening door. That guard is actually standing very
slightly too close – the very corner of his bounding box intersects the door’s path as it opens. So what’s happening is the door starts to open, slightly nudges into the guard’s
toe, bounces back, closes, and then automatically locks. And because there’s no script to deal with this and re-open the door, you’re stuck.
…
So this kicked off an even longer bug-hunt. The answer was (as with so many of my stories) good old floating point. Half Life 2 was originally shipped in 2004, and although the SSE
instruction set existed, it wasn’t yet ubiquitous, so most of HL2 was compiled to use the older 8087 or x87 maths instruction set. That has a wacky grab-bag of precisions – some
things are 32-bit, some are 64-bit, some are 80-bit, and exactly which precision you get in which bits of code is somewhat arcane.
…
Amazing thread from Tom Forsyth, reflecting on his time working at Valve. The tl;dr is that after their compiler was upgraded (to support the SSE instruction sets that had now become
common in processors), subsequent builds of Half-Life 2 became unwinnable. The reason was knock-on effects from a series of precision roundings, which meant that a Combine
security guard’s toe was in a slightly wrong place and the physics engine would bounce a door off him.
A proper 500-mile-email grade story, in terms of unusual bugs.
Got to admit, this is really cool and something I can see myself using a lot. So I installed the prerequisites:
brew install asciinema
npm install -g svg-term-cli
Then I gave it a go. I needed to use asciinema rec -f asciicast-v2 myfile.cast to record my screen into Asciinema‘s version 2 format,
because the new version 3 format isn’t yet supported by svg-term-cli (but there is at least an asciinema
convert command if you record in the “wrong” one).
Then I ran cat myfile.cast | svg-term --out myfile.cast.svg to convert that terminal recording into an SVG: I happened to be in a directory containing the source code of FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, so recorded myself running an 11ty development server with npm serve:
I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.
I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.
“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”
…
I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.
I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the
Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular
Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…
Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to
19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!
Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.
Way back in the day, websites sometimes had banners or buttons (often 88×31 pixels, for complicated historical reasons) to indicate what screen
resolution would be the optimal way to view the site. Just occasionally, you still see these today.
Folks who were ahead of the curve on what we’d now call “responsive design” would sometimes proudly show off that you could use any resolution, in the same way as they’d
proudly state that you could use any browser1!
I saw a “best viewed at any size” 88×31 button recently, and it got me thinking: could we have a dynamic button that always
shows the user’s current resolution as the “best” resolution. So it’s like a “best viewed at any size” button… except even more because it says “whatever
resolution you’re at… that’s perfect; nice one!”
Anyway, I’ve made a website: best-resolution.danq.dev. If you want a “Looks best at [whatever my visitor’s screen
resolution is]” button, you can get one there.
1 I was usually in the camp that felt that you ought to be able to access my site with any
browser, at any resolution and colour depth, and get an acceptable and satisfactory experience. I guess I still am.
2 If you’re reading this via RSS or have JavaScript disabled then you’ll probably see an
“any size” button, but if you view it on the original page with JavaScript enabled then you should see your current browser inner width and height shown on the button.
A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It’s ultimately
uplifting, I feel, but it’s full of bitterness until it gets there. I’ve pulled out a couple of highlights to try to get you interested, but you should just go and read the entire thing:
…
And so the entire Web sort of congealed around a tiny handful of gigantic platforms that everyone on the fucking planet is on at once. Sometimes there is some sort of
partitioning, like Reddit. Sometimes there is not, like Twitter.
That’s… fine, I guess. Things centralize. It happens. You don’t get tubgirl spam raids so much any more, at least.
But the centralization poses a problem. See, the Web is free to look at (by default), but costs money to host. There are free hosts, yes, but those are for static
things getting like a thousand visitors a day, not interactive platforms serving a hundred million. That starts to cost a bit. Picture logs being shoveled into a steam
engine’s firebox, except it’s bundles of cash being shoveled into… the… uh… website hole.
…
I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”. I don’t want to know how much code
wasn’t actually written by anyone. I don’t want to hear how many of my colleagues think Whatever is equivalent to their own output.
…
I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said,
but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”
This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a
significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the
same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?
Nobody seems to appreciate that if you can make a computer do something entirely on its own, then that becomes the baseline.
…
Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.
Clearly this all ties in to stuff that I’ve been thinking, lately. Expect more
posts and reposts in this vein, I guess?
Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They
were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.
One of the first ISPs I subscribed to had a “standard services” list longer than most modern ISPs complete services list!
ISPs twenty years ago
It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:
I don’t remember which of my early ISPs gave me a free license for HoTMetaL Pro, but I was very appreciative of it at the time.
ISPs today
The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what
their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:
Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service3
The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a)
you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting
for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.4
Are we getting a bum deal?
Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of
the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.
Would you even want those services?
Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my
dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a
fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!
Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded
one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where
you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can
guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal
home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.
But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup
access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder
that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet,
nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.5
A page like this used to be absolutely standard on the Website6
of any ISP worth its salt.
Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised
by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.
And that makes me sad.
Footnotes
1 ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies
of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was
much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!
2 ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although
they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.
3 These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming
service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.
4 Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the
dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper
and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse
customer service, to boot.
5 The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if
you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular
turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that
it’s what their customers want.
6 I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but
you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).
Some time in the last 25 years, ISPs stopped saying they made you “part of” the Internet, just that they’d help you “connect to” the Internet.
Most people don’t need a static IP, sure. But when ISPs stopped offering FTP and WWW hosting as a standard feature (shit though it often was), they became part of the tragic process by
which the Internet became centralised, and commoditised, and corporate, and just generally watered-down.
The amount of effort to “put something online” didn’t increase by a lot, but it increased by enough that millions probably missed-out on the opportunity to create
their first homepage.
I wanted a way to simultaneously lock all of the computers – a mixture of Linux, MacOS and Windows boxen – on my desk, when I’m
going to step away. Here’s what I came up with:
There’s optional audio in this video, if you want it.
One button. And everything locks. Nice!
Here’s how it works:
The mini keyboard is just 10 cheap mechanical keys wired up to a CH552 chip. It’s configured to send CTRL+ALT+F13 through
CTRL+ALT+F221
when one of its keys are pressed.
The “lock” key is captured by my KVM tool Deskflow (which I migrated to when Barrier became neglected, which in turn I migrated to when I fell out of love with Synergy). It then relays
this hotkey across to all currently-connected machines2.
That shortcut is captured by each recipient machine in different ways:
The Linux computers run LXDE, so I added a line to /etc/xdg/openbox/rc.xml to set a <keybind> that executes xscreensaver-command
-lock.
For the Macs, I created a Quick Action in Automator that runs pmset displaysleepnow as a shell script3, and then connected that via
Keyboard Shortcuts > Services.
On the Windows box, I’ve got AutoHotKey running anyway, so I just have it run { DllCall("LockWorkStation") } when it hears
the keypress.
That’s all there is to is! A magic “lock all my computers, I’m stepping away” button, that’s much faster and more-convenient than locking two to five computers individually.
Footnotes
1F13 through F24 are absolutely valid “standard” key assignments,
of course: it’s just that the vast majority of keyboards don’t have keys for them! This makes them excellent candidates for non-clashing personal-use function keys, but I like to
append one or more modifier keys to the as well to be absolutely certain that I don’t interact with things I didn’t intend to!
2 Some of the other buttons on my mini keyboard are mapped to “jumping” my cursor to
particular computers (if I lose it, which happens more often than I’d like to admit), and “locking” my cursor to the system it’s on.
3 These boxes are configured to lock as soon as the screen blanks; if yours don’t then you
might need a more-sophisticated script.
![Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q23u/2025/08/hotmetal-pro-6-640x396.jpg)
