alt Hacker NewsOn a whim I watched my favorite childhood movie last week, Hackers. It's goofy in some ways, but man it captures the "wild west" feeling of early and mid 90's internet. It was just you, a slow connection to anywhere, and open ports all over the place. Right after I watched it, I dusted off an old hub, connected a few external usb-to-ethernet adapters to my work PC VM's, and now run them through an OpenBSD packet filter. For no reason at all other than to feel that again: me, watching packets, having total control. Hitting a wall and having to read a manpage.
I don't really have a point I guess, other than even after being steeped in a dead internet for years (with a slow decline spanning at least a decade arguably) I need to approach what I think is the internet in a completely different way. As in, not at all besides what is absolutely required for work. We're ants in a jar now, not cowboys like we used to be.
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There are retrocommunity sites. DOS, OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS), Amiga (Apollo Vampire), Mavericks Forever. Amiga is quite alive community. If I am to write game, I consider this platform. Steam game will be lost in 100.000 games, and Amiga game will be noticed.
There is I2P. They have been disabling scripts for ideological reasons, so there were many websites without scripts. I have used quite exotic Charon web browser from Inferno OS in I2P. That was 15 years ago. Don't know how it's now.
There is RetroNAS and plenty of other software to enrich home network.
That movie is ridiculous and still great. At least as a nostalgia pump.
And the red box references and pots patching and such were true enough, even if everything else got hilarious hollywood treatment.
"Let's echo 23, see what's up"
May I suggest you to look into mesh networks? I am a huge fan of Reticulum. Using it feels like being a pioneer, the scene is very welcoming.
The pitch: it is network-agnostic. The same mesh network runs on the Internet or through LoRa radios or any other physical layer than allows the exchange of data packets. It scales from private networks to global meshes. It's the wild west. People are excited, and eager to grow further.
https://reticulum.network/