AOL pulls Nullsoft file-sharing software WASTE (2003)
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IMHO (yours may differ) much of what we use the internet for, namely person-to-person or person-to-small-group communication, could be accomplished using such software, as an alternative but not a replacement for doing these tasks over someone else's website. Those websites have grown to such ridiculous size, backed by entire datacenters, that people refer to them as "services" and "platforms". But for the task of communicating over the internet, as the programmer saying goes, "There's more than one way to do it." With the gigantic websites run by other people, there's an incentive for advertising. Large audiences and easy access to them, not to mention the ability to eavesdrop and track behaviour. With small networks managed only by the participants using software they choose, that incentive does not exist because advertising is relatively infeasible. For example, the top commenter in this thread states he has been running a WASTE network for years. How does one inject advertising and track consumer behaviour on his network. The answer is they don't. And IMHO that's one reason why this category of software is so useful.
Anyone who has the link can access the file. There is no authentication. It's only as "secret" as the email you put it in, or the Zoom chat room it was dropped into, or the web page it is published in.
The shared links do not contain a secret at all. The base64-encoded part of the link is the file object's UUID! Look at it as you copy a shared link, vs. seeing it in the URL bar. It doesn't change as you edit the file, move it to another folder, or share it out. It won't go away until you've deleted the file! If you notice that someone has a link and they shouldn't have it, then you'll just have to copy-paste the content into a new document, and throw the compromised one in the Trash. Goodbye, revision history and all metadata.
Common use cases involve sharing to groups of people, you know, more than one person who might keep a "secret"? What if you've shared a link to 30 people, how do you ensure that 31 can't open it?
"Three men can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
As opposed to passwords, which people know are secret[citation needed], links are shared. I mean, Google Drive literally calls it "Sharing", so who will stop sharing after the intended recipients have got it?
Sharepoint and Google drive really feel like they have gone out of their way to make the permissions scheme as convoluted as possible, and it's never clear for me whether I've shared it in a way that permissions can propagate from those I shared it with or not. sometimes I can further share a received Sharepoint document without issue, other times I cannot, and I don't know what the difference is. some of my shared docs that are only shared with specific users can be shared freely apparently, other times when it gets shared further I get automated emails with access requests, even though the public access list is disabled/empty on both cases.
I really wish that the user:group:world wide model was the basis for these permission schemes and it was easier to just set people/groups and the specific actions they can take on a shared file/document. I get why the companies call it sharing, but it shouldn't be thought of as sharing, it should be Grant Access. I think it gives a better mindset for what you're actually doing, and the design should be around the idea you're giving access, not sharing, which is not the same thing to me.
I was rather shocked to learn that the mechanism for creating groups, in the sense of access control, is the Google Groups product, also known as collaborative forums, or one of Usenet's modern homes. And this feature works for individual users as well as Workspaces for Business. I just created a Google Group consisting of my three personal accounts, and I shared a Doc with them!
The three levels of sharing persmissions on Drive are: "View", "Commenter", and "Editor". The second level also permits "editing suggestions" which will prompt the Doc owner to accept or reject. These also have semantics for folders.
And then, there is a little options-gear where you can twiddle additional permissions for certain levels of access. In my personal account, they're permissive by default. Meh.
Because its remaining an issue enables "value extraction". Magic wormhole would work if people knew about it but somehow software that promotes itself by honest word-of-mouth has difficulty competing with software that is bundled with Windows or is made by the world's largest advertising corporation.
There is no release artifact that I can easily open and run on the github page.
To that end you can use a website like https://www.toffeeshare.com/ to send files directly to another person via your browser via a P2P connection, without an account.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
While I applaud the idea of decentralising Internetty stuff, there are all these massively overengineered monstrosities like Mastodon out there that have shit user experience and break down at scale at an exponential rate.
WASTE looks like it might be fun to run alongside "slow internet" services like NNTP and non-ad-heavy websites.
Fuck it, bring back Gopher!
Who is the third party when using software like WASTE. There is none. There is no "monetisation". A commenter thread has been running WASTE running since 2003.^1 There is no Bay Area-based "WASTE, LLC" or "WASTE, Inc."^2 that must, among other things, pay thousands of tech bros, remain "free", be allowed to operate in all countries and stay in business, let alone for 20 years.
WASTE predates "cloud computing".
1. Went from being top comment to being critiqued by tech bros.
2. Google, LLC or Dropbox, Inc. for example.
It's possible for its users to run their own Magic-Wormhole rendezvous servers but the author(s) hardcodes someone else's into the code!
In contrast, WASTE asked users to register with a dynamic DNS provider.
Are you sure you're not thinking of “whip the llama”? Specifically, on its ass?
- js.
that's a very good question ramgine. you might as well start with the wiki. i'm a bit biased because i wrote a lot of it but i just took a look after who knows how long and it still holds up. it even had a link to one of my open meshes, a project i started called Zer0share, but that's been moribund for ages or at least i'm not on it. you never know with a mesh it could still be chugging along...the thing is, meshes are private by design and by nature. waste has always been catnip for introverts, with its silent status box sitting quietly in the corner of a screen sometimes showing no activity for weeks. it's not even unusual for members to spend months, or more, pondering the admission of a new addition (once admitted one can't be expelled. the mesh itself needs to be rebuilt). but if you like, take a look at the Zer0share parent thread from Napsterites linked here. you may find it helpful.
http://www.p2p-zone.com/underground/showthread.php?t=19077
- js.
It is one of the few “professional” applications I’ve felt comfortable buying for extremely light hobby usage.
>You may use the discounted license if:
> - You are an individual, and REAPER is only for your personal use, or
> - You are an individual or business using REAPER commercially, and yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000, or
> - You are an educational or non-profit organization.
Oh, it actually seems pretty reasonable. At least as someone not involved in the DAW space. $60 for professional grade tools on a non-subscription looks like it's comfortable for someone to get into this.
If you think 60 bucks for a professional non-subscription heavy-duty media tool is good, DaVinci Resolve is going to blow your tiny wee mind - you can use the same tools they use to make stuff for Netflix, right there on your desktop, for *free*. If you want the extra features of the paid one (maybe you want to cut 8K video, or you really need neural network rescaling, or something) it's about 300 dollars. And that's it, that's you - you own a licence, it's yours, forever, including the upgrades.
At the money that Reaper costs, it's worth buying a copy just to help the folks out.
My license is good for 2 major versions (so for me, up to, but not including 7.0). So when 7.0 comes out I will gladly pay $60 again.
* Recording my practice to listen back * Recording music just for fun * Using it to play back songs I want to learn at different tempos and speeds (I play guitar at a church so this comes in very handy).
For example: I use Ozone to do a quick and dirty master on songs. The tool suggests running it on the loudest part of the audio. SWS provides an action that moves the playhead to the loudest part of a clip so there's no guesswork.
http://www.swatchclock.com/ and https://www.swatch.com/en-us/internet-time.html (video is worth watching)
Now it's just keeb
3:14 Pie time
4:20 Blaze it
11:11 Pocky time
I kind of miss it the ascetic and web 1.0 feel.
Not that we live in a capital-D dystopia, but maybe you get what I am saying.
On one hand, looking at the mass internet culture, the prevailing utopian culture was only possible in the way that jumping into the air is flying: true for a moment, but ultimately gravity (or in the internet's case, the Powers That Be) inevitably exerted itself as mass culture came to embrace the internet.
Tangentially, I suspect the fate of cryptocurrency is similar: to be embraced by the old guard only to have much of what made it special (especially, easy transfer of value across borders) undone, because it turns out banks and governments take KYC/AML law seriously.
But back to the internet, that utopia still exists. It's just not the prevailing internet culture any more. It's pushed into the corners under labels like "small tech" and "tildeverse". I sometimes use the term "Digital Amish" because the emphasis this community shares with the Amish is to understand the side effects of the technology you use and choose what to use and avoid in order to avoid undesirable side effects (e.g. feeding your life to an algorithm). In practice most of them are not quite that hardcore, but I use it more aspirationally since I think it'd be cool to get completely to that point.
The port number is the year, and then every web page you fetch will come from that year.
Huh and this was limewire was born!
The screams of a thousand mp3.exe's being obliterated into the void
In the short term there must have been folks unofficially hosting the installer, and probably substituting different bootstrap peers.
Quickly the protocol was reverse engineered and reimplemented, thanks to being text based, and maybe also due to users of IDA.
There is a spec for updatable torrents, I believe it embeds a pubkey and the creator can announce an update by broadcasting a signed message. But it's not widely used.
For which I'm ever grateful.
It’s not true of course, he can. Understatement.
It all boils down to the difference between the words "sharing" and "scamming".
Not to mention the fact that file sharing also has many practical applications, and doesn't pollute the atmosphere and cause cancer and lung disease by burning megatons of coal, unlike crypto.
Oh, and yes, you can be the middleman -- you seem trustworthy, I nominate you for de novo utopia money dude, enjoy your new, absolute power.
I'd love to begin using them again.
The revelations of domestic spying made it obvious how much collusion and voluntary cooperation was going on between the military, federal and local governments, law enforcement, and corporations, and how much people feared the state of unequal information dominance.
Remember, sharing mp3s helps the terrorists win.