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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in the 90s, people would hunt for FTP servers that allowed anonymous writes. Companies that didn't know how to secure servers would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.

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I used to 'accidentally' 'misconfigure' my servers and watch what would show up. When a new group found such a server, it eas usually first used for 'internal distribution' of thr latest releases, especially if it was an fxp-capable server. After a while when it got more busy (hitting rate limits, disk full) it was downgraded to 'end user distribution'.

So I got to watch the latest leaked movies without having to directly deal with (spend time on) being 'inner circle' :)

And other things. There was a subculture called the "WA" for a while that took over a handful of open FTP servers and posted nonsensical poetry during the 90s -- kind of a precursor to the FSM and a contemporary to the "Church of the Sub-genius"[1]. I've seen printouts of their "work" proudly posted on numerous college dorms during the mid to late 90s. The WA never became as big as either of the other satire religions, but I definitely remember their presence on a handful of tech-school ftp sites.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius

They could have made the world's first distributed remote file storage, parcelling out customer's files across 20 different servers. They just had to back up each file to multiple ftp sites and add new ones as their actual owners rooted them out. I'm sure availability would be fantastic, and the costs of running not-your-servers are pretty darn low.

Especially hidden down some deep directory structure, some directories even named .. and . to try to hide themselves.

I recall other folder names that would presumably make windows machines throw up when you clicked on them. Stuff with "LPT:" or "COM:" in the names.

Warez ftp sites used to use high ascii in the file names. Used to have that memorized.

> would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.

which could then be found by searching for "index of"...

It's been a while but I believe that's a response from Apache server not ftp.

... if only we had had search engines then. :)

I used to telnet archie.mcgill.ca to search the collected index of archive sites, back in 1991 or so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine

That still happens.

And then you could use FXP to transfer to another "pub" Usually most open FTPs had their /pub public writable and thus they were called "pubs"

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