Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

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Programs were sold, not subscribed to. They continued to work long after the company folded.

Being a mischievous teenage hacker didn't land you in prison.

Software makers gave a shit about how much RAM and how many CPU cycles they were using. Disk space was sacred.

The technocrats weren't always a given. At least hacker-hippies that resented corporate control gave us an alternative; we could be living in a completely proprietary world. Compilers and even languages used to cost money, I shudder now when I see a proprietary language.

Once upon a time, computers did what you told them to without reporting you to the stasi, Google, or a number of marketing firms. Now that kind of freedom is obscure and hard to access for most people.

Software used to not hide all the options to "protect me from myself".

Computers used to be bigger. I love my office computer, but you gotta admit, fridge size and even room size 1401 style computers are pretty damn cool. I'm planning to buy a fiberglass cooling tower for a big-ish computer for a project this summer...

There used to be killer apps and amazing innovations but now its just ads and single function SaaS leases. At least open source projects are incredible, still. There are a few amazing commercial software products though. It's the future, after all.

Thats enough grumpy ranting for the minute, I'm sure I'll have to append this.

(P.S. remember when computers didn't have an out-of-band management system doing God knows what in the background?)

>> Software used to not hide all the options to "protect me from myself". I agree this is not for for us power users. However - ten years ago I was the free pc support for extended family and distant friends. Constantly removing 5 toolbars from IE and all sorts of adware, spyware, pre-installed crap ... Now it's years ago I had to resolve anything. So at least this "protecting people from themselves" is really working out great.

Not that long ago I built a gaming computer for my girlfriend's nephew. He asked me to help him with a problem and when I opened up Chrome to google it defaulted to Yahoo search. He said it has been doing that for a while and he didn't know why. Those days are unfortunately not over.

The in-laws' computer had a similar issue, in that it was getting a bunch of shady popups piling up from the bottom right corner (Windows notification popups), where eventually it would cover 1/4 of the screen. Tracked it down to Chrome, and sites that were allowed push notifications. Took a minute to purge the allow list, turn off the prompt to ask for notification permissions (non-technical people tend to click on "ok" or "yes" on most dialog boxes).

But overall much easier than the old days of having to manually remove malware and/or reinstall the OS.

>Being a mischievous teenage hacker didn't land you in prison.

On this note: Hacking, cracking and phreaking were done purely for curiosity sake. Even virus developers did it just because they could.

There was a sense in the community of pushing the technology to its limits.

Nowadays hacking, cracking and all the 'black arts' are for pure profit. Being it private or government...

>Once upon a time, computers did what you told them to without reporting you to the stasi, Google, or a number of marketing firms. Now that kind of freedom is obscure and hard to access for most people.

Remember when you could note the number of sent/received packets in your network connection properties before going to bed, and wake up in the morning and see exactly the same number?

> Once upon a time, computers did what you told them to without reporting you to the stasi, Google, or a number of marketing firms. Now that kind of freedom is obscure and hard to access for most people.

Varoufakis answers the question here[^1]. Use subtitles, translation is acceptable.

Yanis pointed out any new "successful common" (e.g. building societies) gets privitized. The most widely known example he points at, is the internet.

He also point out, that this is nothing new. Happened in the 19th century as well.

[^1]: https://youtu.be/JfGgRf0JPr8?t=1761

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_(mythology)

The first computer which was mine (completely mine) was a Gameboy. Like, the original, classic Gameboy, whatever its name is. We also had a 80286 PC, and compared to that it was 'small'. This was back in 1991 or so. I also had a 'smartwatch' which had a Nintendo game (one. Yes, one game): Tetris. You also had Palm computers back then. Everyone has a 'small' portable/mobile computer with networking these days, but back then portable/mobile computers existed as well. They just didn't have networking, were very limited, etc. Piracy existed then as well. Back in the days you could study a chip by putting it under a microscope. The Soviet Union made VAX clones via such way. Today with EUV I don't think that's possible anymore.

> Being a mischievous teenage hacker didn't land you in prison.

This is describing a time before many readers of HN were alive, let alone programming. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown documents when the US started cracking down in the 80s.

The UK had a similar incident in which a PRESTEL account belonging to Prince Charles was hacked in the late 80s, resulting in the Computer Misuse Act 1990.

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