unbibium

When I was growing up in the 1990s I called BBSes and they had these text files describing how to build strange hacking devices and programs, how to hack the phone system, and other interesting things of varying legality. Sometimes it was just ideas for pranks and exploitation at K-Mart or McDonald's. See textfiles.com for examples, if it's still up.

In the 2000s, there was a cable channel called TechTV, and a show called The Screen Savers which was basically about emerging technology and online culture, hosted by Leo Laporte. And there was a young employee of the show named Kevin Rose whose first big segment was about the port 139 exploit in Windows. He gained a reputation as "the Dark Tipper", with the kind of stuff we used to see in BBSes. And this was how I knew him for many years, as he expanded his role on the show, as the Screen Savers was replaced with Attack of the Show with him as host, and as he and his AotS co-host Alex Albrecht hosted the video podcast known as diggnation, despite Rose living in SF and Albrecht living in LA at the time.

As his career progressed he tapered off the "Dark Tipper" stuff despite the demand from the likes of me. He hosted a more explicitly underground show called thebroken with co-host Dan Huard. The intro had this kind of campy cyberpunk "heroes on the run" thing. He started the show with him and his co-host each opening a 40. They started strong with a street segment where they hacked WiFi and even broke first-generation WEP encryption. Then they had this weird segment where Ramzi, a "hacker" correspondent, just downloads Bonzi Buddy over KaZaa while crazy foreign music plays in the background. And after that, they describe how to get a free pizza by trailing a walk-in customer, writing down their name and order, and impersonating that customer over the phone while complaining to the manager.

man, what a scummy show in retrospect. But it was all stuff that '00s me was happy to let slide. Why shouldn't we all just break into encrypted WiFi? Why shouldn't we laugh at funny foreign man doing bad acting? Why not lie to minimum wage employees and franchise owners to steal pizza? Indeed, I was able to wash my hands of all this because I was too lazy to actually try this stuff.

His heart wasn't in it anyway, and he made two more episodes: a short "oops, all Ramzi" episode and an interview with Kevin Mitnick. For years, people clamored for him to keep the show going, and he always gave excuses like they couldn't get Ramzi back.

Eventually they put out episode 4, and their way of apologizing for the long wait was a two-minute sketch where both hosts stumble are incapacitated by marijuana. The rest of the show continued the theme of tacky fratboy culture. The campy cyberpunk intro had a strip club scene now, and strip club scenes are scattered throughout to break up the long technical segments. The first segment was completely illegal cell phone jamming with a "don't do this in America" fig-leaf disclaimer. After another Ramzi bit about removing DRM, they do a bit about hacking the X-Box 360 to play backups, which includes this part where they stand outside of a Blockbuster, in Blockbuster uniforms, and tell their audience send pirated DVDs back to Blockbuster's DVD-by-mail service as revenge for getting "fisted" by the brock-and-mortar stores. Boy that aged like milk didn't it. There were credits, and then 5 minutes of bloopers where they showed how hard it was to make the funny foreign man say "dat ass".

Rose and Huard also put out a serious tech show with none of the GTA shit called Systm, which I think only had one or two episodes. I can't find it on YouTube, but I remember they had a circuit diagram with a debouncer on the first episode. I may still have a T-shirt I bought to support the show. His production company, Revision 3 Studios, would go on to make other stuff.

At some point, Kevin Rose got on the cover of BusinessWeek in shabby clothes for a "dot-com kid gets rich" story about Digg. Rose hated the cover, and Digg's fortunes didn't last.

I lost track, but at some point, Kevin Rose resurfaced an "angel investor"... and he'd still appear on This Week In Tech every so often.

and then, I heard Kevin Rose did the Joe Rogan podcast. this was back when Rogan was just a comedian with a super popular podcast, a lot of MMA expertise, a few ill-considered opinions, but was still many years away from becoming a full-fledged tool of the alt-right.

And he spent the first twenty minutes talking about keto.

I don't know why that felt like a revelation, or what it revealed, but I knew that I was no longer one of what Kevin Rose was. The geek species had diverged, into nerds like me, and tech bros like him.

All the TechTV alums were early adopters of bitcoin, but most fell by the wayside, as it became known how impractical it was as a currency, how wrought with fraud and crime the industry was. A few years in, Leo Laporte lost the password to his wallet, and it became apparent that his story was more common than the successful cash-out. But Rose stuck with it, to the point that Laporte doesn't want to give him airtime right now.

and I wonder, was Kevin Rose really a cyberpunk gray-hat hero who stuck it to the Man, only to become one of the Man's tools of financial dominance? Or do his old thebroken episodes betray ethical blind spots that were always there, and society has just disintegrated enough that our latest generation of capitalist sociopaths can exploit them? Are those ethical blind spots endemic to tech culture, ever since those 1980s text files telling us how to steal services from phone companies and mess with K-Mart employees?

I have in my possession, 8-bit computers that are over 25 years old.

I have actually a massive collection in my parents' garage, twenty miles away. But I also have a fair amount cluttering up my apartment. Specifically, I have a complete working Atari 800XL with Atari 1050 disk drive, and a Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive. I grew up with both of these setups. I also have a monitor that works with both computers.

Now, I have the usual excuses for keeping them that collectors tend to have. But there's a unique one, in addition to all that.

Jason Scott made a BBS documentary, and I want there to be a BBS movie.

But, I have to accept that I can't make a movie, nor can I persuade someone else to start making one. I can write one or two scenes in a script, but that's about it. And, indeed, making a movie set in the 1980s is probably impossible for a low-budget movie anyway, considering how much has changed visually in the intervening decades. But one thing you'd need, that would probably cost a lot if you had to do it from scratch, is a pile of 1980s technology.

I can't seem to work up the will to throw this away. But I can't help but wonder if it would not only free up space in my apartment, but also space in my mind for other, better dreams.

Not that I'm face-blind, but I can't tell if DO has two horrible female friends or one.

It just occurred to me to compare the character to various Hollywood versions of the geek.

Densha Otoko has apparently grown up to believe that women are mythical creatures, and having a girlfriend is beyond consideration. He's a grown man who dresses like a 12-year-old, and can't control his breath when talking to a real woman. The only time I can remember this archetype being even attempted in a Hollywood movie is in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Because in Hollywood, nerds are not only more handsome than in real life, but they're also more brave. Sometimes, even pushy. Children are allowed to be nervous about asking women out, but adults never are.

But no Hollywood nerd's story was ever based on a real BBS thread. So from this, we can assume that the Japanese image that stems from this series will be closer to reality. And thus, Japan's reputation as being nerdier than America is secure. Little do they know, we ourselves have plenty of guys who dress like 12-year-olds, and know more about mythical anime women than real women, but Hollywood doesn't write about them... yet.

The commentary seems to complete the story in the case of the first CD. Such as, why was the sysop of CBBS/NW doing his interview in a bowling alley?

The sysop of CBBS/NW was upset when they closed down his favorite bowling alley in Oregon. So he bought his own bowling alley, on eBay, in Kansas, and moved there to run it. So that's where he interviewed.

Another evil thing I thought of when considering the Creative Commons license: one could make a version of this documentary that's exactly the same, but all scene changes are star-wipes.

Found while combing through textfiles.com:

1. "THANK YOUR PARTNER FOR THE GREAT TIME, AND SMOKE A CIGARRETTE (IF YOU DON'T SMOKE, DRINK A PEPSI!) HAVE FUN!!"
2. "When you talk to chicks, don't talk about boring things. Talk about exciting things: wiping out on your skateboard, surfing, getting totally blasted, you know, stuff like that."
3. "...walk through the same way she goes and it'll get crowded so you'll both have to turn sideways and when she does her tits will be against your chest.Step forward for an ever better feel. Oh what a feeling!"
4. "...get her in [forget to invite others] the pool and swim around, chase her a little bit *accidently* touching her in places. One of these times accidently [G-D forbid] undo her bathing suite, she might or might not notice." Nice touches: hyphen-blanking "GOD" and praising the file linked to in #3.
5. A straightforward list of pickup lines. Read as many as you can, as fast as you can, and don't stop for any reason.

The story of this part is also outside my realm of experience. For one, I was never a sysop, so I never had to purchase BBS software. And second, pay BBSes were rare in Phoenix.

There were four pay BBSes of note in the Phoenix area that I can remember vividly.

The first was APECS, a multi-line BBS that cost $2 an hour in the late 80's. I only got to enjoy about $20 worth, outside a "free week" where they opened up access to all the features for everyone.

The second was D-Base V, which was a homebrew BBS, and you paid for access to special features, such as "nukes" which you could add a message that would kick a particular user off the BBS for the rest of the day. People used those on me constantly. It had a profanity filter that would prevent you from typing swear words. And when you selected "Chat with Sysop" from the main menu, it would start up an Eliza-like program.

In the 90's, that's when multi-line came into its own. There were three boards of note: Sho-Tron (aka the Rock Garden), at 20 lines and 60¢/hr, Smorgas Board at 8 lines and 35¢/hr.

I have vague memories of a board called Crossroads that seemed to vaguely invoke the Internet, and a few others that may have been more business-based than I could comprehend at my young age. I think that I trained myself to just forget about any BBS that asked for money, as I was too young to earn my own money until well into my Internet years, and my computer was usually a few years out of date anyway.

Episode 2, being less of a technical/historical nature, and more of a sociological focus, is the one I might be more likely to show people unfamiliar with BBSes.

I wonder if they'd ask how that was different from the way the Internet is used today, but it became more apparent as it progressed that BBSes were more locally defined than anything on the Internet.

Even local groups on the Internet don't seem to bind so tightly. I think about the story of the woman who had the affair online, where the husband found out and they got into a fight, and dozens of people showed up to break up the fight and help her move out. Am I cynical, or would that never happen if, for example, the same thing happened to someone in t_h_e_m, or on Friendster?

The consequence of being a woman on a BBS never occurred to me. It differs from being a woman on the Internet, in that the SysOp could break into chat as soon as you typed a female name into the new user form. That totally baffles me, as it's so incredibly obviously anti-cool that it sounds like the first thing an old SysOp would tell a prospective SysOp never to do.

As an extra added bonus thrown in, title cards are only used for their intended purpose -- titles, not narrative. Splendid.

Know what I miss? The BBS interface. Know why? No fucking scrollbars and subwindows.

This is why I can't keep up-to-speed on listservs. I end up having to scroll through message after message, where nobody trims their quoted material so I have to play hide-and-seek for who said what.

Web message boards are a little better, but they seem to be so strictly thread-based that you can't just Read All New. And I'd like to see a web board that can be comfortably operated entirely with a keyboard.

Maybe I'll have to code it myself.