Trying to make sense of CompuServe server hard disk images
medium.com
medium.com
the article mentions "The Digital Antiquarian" ( https://www.filfre.net ) which in turn has an article about the game "Wing Commander" ( https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/from-wingleader-to-wing-comma... ) => this is funny:
> At the beginning of August, Snell unceremoniously booted Chris Roberts, the project’s founder, from his role as co-producer, leaving him with only the title of director. Manifesting a tendency anyone familiar with his more recent projects will immediately recognize, Roberts had been causing chaos on the team by approving seemingly every suggested addition or enhancement that crossed his desk. Snell, the brutal pragmatist in this company full of dreamers, appointed himself as Warren Spector’s new co-producer. His first action was to place a freeze on new features in favor of getting the game that currently existed finished and out the door.
(Chris Roberts is the one creating the game "Star Citizen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Citizen - I was one of the first buying/financing the game in 2012, but I admit of having lost interest while waiting for the "final" version to be released...)
"In the early 21st century, there existed large cloud 'email' organizations. Here I found a trove of 'hard disks' images from one of the companies, HotMail. I've been digging around and look at these email addresses, it appears this image contains all the 'email' for around 10k users. Here is one where a couple users with the usernames 'joesmith' and 'andreasanchez', engaged in playful romantic flirting. Although by digging further in the emails it appears one of them, 'joesmith' is newly married to 'andreasmith'. Here is thier wedding invitation. Fascinating digital archeology"
Random example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/1683-Old-Historical-Handwritten-Let...
Says who? Do their ToS even address what happens if they're bankrupt?
It sounds like Apple can legally do whatever they want if they go bust: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/30810/what-happens-i...
I expect the same is true of all the other major cloud providers.
If you encrypted something in 1999 with 56-bit key DES, your data is no longer private.
> [Randy] has pointed out to Avi, in an encrypted e-mail message, that if every particle of matter in the universe could be used to construct one single cosmic supercomputer, and this computer was put to work trying to break a 4096-bit encryption key, it would take longer than the lifespan of the universe.
> "Using today's technology," Avi shot back, "that is true. But what about quantum computers? And what if new mathematical techniques are developed that can simplify the factoring of large prime numbers?"
> "How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?"
> After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the after image of a strobe:
> I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
If anything, the fact that brute-force still seems to be the most practical attack against DES shows that (symmetric) encryption lasts surprisingly long.
Verizon, if you're out there - please get a handle on this breach before my lawyers call you.
Neither did anyone else, which means it isn't going to matter in the long run for anyone who is just starting out today. If everybody has skeletons in their closet, no one does. And everybody pretty much does.
Remember that one of the two major parties in the US has willfully abandoned any pretense at moral authority by supporting Trump. The only threat Beto faces in that regard comes from his own party. The correct reaction would be for him to own his juvenile fiction, not apologize for it.
Yeah, someone should have scrubbed these. But it's hard for me to get too worked up.
Don't type anything on a keyboard today that you don't want to see on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow. I learned that lesson at 300 baud, long before I had ever heard of CompuServe, but that didn't stop me from forgetting it a time or two when I got my CS account. So if there's anything in this archive that would embarrass you, well, at least you're in good company.
If anyone finds data for 72167,7570, send a copy back to me.
Quite literally the transition of physical paper => digital forums => internet (pre-crawlers/pre-archive) => where the data could have been lost before it had a chance to be "modernized".
A big company might be vulnerable to class action from a bunch of people who are tech-savvy and affluent enough to have been using Compu$erve.
I've acquired over 100 used computers, and, once I saw how common leaving data on them was, I began always very promptly DBAN-ing any disks, and wiping SSDs. If it has a non-SATA interface, I destroy the medium. Similar with some kind of wipe of smartphones.
Besides wiping the disk/device seeming a responsible and considerate thing to do, it avoids remote yet severe liabilities.
A secure erase should wipe all blocks (and since it is done by the firmware, physical blocks, not logical ones), but there have been instances of buggy drives that don't actually do it properly.
Some SSDs also transparently encrypt all data written, and the key is replaced on a wipe command. Even if they don't wipe the data fully, it's now unusable, if the encryption works correctly.
Quite old SSDs might not support any of this.
Unfortunately, you can't trust the SSD firmware developers to have their shit together [1].
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/crucial-samsung-solid-stat...
Imagine if CompuServe still existed, but they had undergone 100% employee turnover in recent years. They'd still be liable, right?
It seems to me that when Verizon bought CompuServe, they calculated that its assets minus its liabilities totaled less than the purchase price and hence it was a good deal. If we treat leakable data as a legal liability, it should send the right financial signal - eg, maybe as a company you don't want to collect much.
> The CompuServe system used non-standard PDP-10-based hardware along with a custom version of TOPS-10. As a result, booting it in one of the available emulators is next to impossible. But I hoped the disk images could be attached to a standard TOPS-10 system as secondary disks somehow.
Especially when all those manuals weren't freely available...
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2janfrd&s=7
Compuserve $11 per hour, had "more than 250,000 subscribers".
The Source $8 per hour.
Delphi $6 per hour had a loyal but small (less than 10,000 users) following.
BIX $9 per hour.
There was also an ecosystem of apps to script connections to minimize time you spent online. You'd pick the forums you wanted to scrape new messages from, fetch them in one session, compose replies offline, and post the replies in a second session.
ADDED:Private systems didn't (ever?) have a time charge. The bigger ones usually still offered some lines for free users but offered preferred access for subscribers.
One of the things that kept me at the time on Delphi was 1) X-Files had a huge fanbase there and Chris Carter would regularly join the forums and 2) You could break out of the menus and get down to the VMS shell which is how I first learned something other than DOS/Windows.
I still racked up massive phone bills even with the offline readers.
I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, and the closest access numbers made the toll charges the greatest cost.
ADDED: BTW, in the early eighties, long distance rates were starting to come down but they were still in the tens of cents per minute so something over a dollar/minute in today's currency.
It was the first and only time I ever saw my dad visibly tremble with rage and turn red. ($400 80's bucks is a lot of 2019 bucks to spend on a video game.)
There were also a vast number of small BBSs ranging from a system in someone's bedroom to commercial--though still relatively small--operations, some of which became early local ISPs. At the time, one mostly preferred to make local calls because of the expense of long distance.