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Comment by snakeyjake | Hacker News Reader

Windows 2000 came on a CD... and a floppy disk.

The CD was a globally-legal image, and export-controlled strong crypto came on the floppy in countries where it was allowed.

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-2000-high-encryption/...

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How hard would it have been for a "rogue state" to get a copy of that floppy? I understand that times were different, you couldn't just PGP encrypt it and attach a 1.44 MB blob to an email, sending it at 24 kbps. You couldn't just upload it to an anonymous filesharing site.

But today it seems fundamentally obvious that once a single copy is leaked, it's all over... was that not true in 2000?

Of course all that stuff was leaked (and there were anonymous filesharing sites). The whole export-grade crypto thing was a legal fig leaf.

It was all extremely silly. Debian took a different approach: before 2005, they put all crypto packages in a separate "non-US" archive, hosted in the Netherlands. American developers weren't allowed to upload there. That way, Debian never exported crypto code from the United States, it only ever imported it.

Yep, US export restrictions ended up spurring foreign investment in crypto like Thawte (founded by Mark Shuttleworth) and SSLeay (later forked as OpenSSL).

I believe OpenBSD (based in Canada) was in a similar situation.

There was a story of a hundred programmers taking the program PRINTED ON PAPER to a conference in Sweden to type it in again, because somehow export of binaries was forbidden but not the printed version of it. Is it true? Which event organized this?

The PGP source code was published as a book so that it could be exported under the theory that the first amendment beats ITAR. https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/BookPreface.html

> A book comprised entirely of thousands of lines of source code looks pretty dull. But then so does a nondescript fragment of concrete -- unless it happens to be a piece of the Berlin Wall, which many people display on their mantels as a symbol of freedom opening up for millions of people. Perhaps in the long run, this book will help open up the US borders to the free flow of information.

This is beautiful.

Gnutella, including popular clients like LimeWire, were released around the same time as Windows 2000. People were doing decentralized filesharing of files larger than 1.44 MB just fine in 2000.

Filesharing at that time was just wild, by the way. It was far too easy to set up your client such that you were sharing the entire contents of your computer with the whole internet. More often than not, this was done by the kids in the family on the same machine where mom and dad had their work stuff plus their private finances.

So of course the files were leaked. If you were intending to share something illegal to distribute outside the US, you could easily get plausible deniability just by sharing everything on your computer and feigning ignorance.

eDonkey and eMule was fire during those years.

with dc++ and a fiber network connecting major universities in Germany at 10MegaBytes/s, it was more than fire. I remember downloading the entire ** trilogy in minutes.

Back in those days you didn't even need to be on LimeWire or eMule to look at the contents of someone's home PC. I remember around the late 90s/early 2000s, when I got DSL. This is before consumer grade routers became a common thing in the household. So most people had their PC connected directly to their DSL box. Browsing through windows share on other people's home PC was one of this easiest things to do.

> a copy of that floppy

Mostly off-topic, but your use of rhyme is reminiscent of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up863eQKGUI

We were sharing lots of 3-7MB files peer-to-peer at the time :D Napster, Limewire, Audiogalaxy, etc. Plenty of public FTP sites all over the place as well.

Even in the late 90s, 128kbps ISDN connections were not unheard of, and 256kbps DSL was rolling out as well.

Damn, Audiogalaxy! That takes me back! A simple Windows client for downloading (and well uploading), and to search and download you go to their website, login and add stuff to your queue (although I barely remember what the website looked like). Sooner or later someone with the files you want would come online and your computer would begin downloading from their computer..

It was. People were sharing pirated software on BBSes 40 years ago! Downloading a floppy might take an hour. In the 90's, I knew kids who got jobs at ISPs just so they could run warez FTP sites off of the T1.

Oh man, a T1. That brings back memories.

Serial Port recently tried to set one up!

https://youtu.be/MEda7SQxh18

Yes! In the early 90's, anyone with a T1 was almost god like. Most local ISPs were still connected with 56k or maybe fractional T1 lines.

Fast forward to 2000: T1 lines were still being used, but ADSL deployment was growing like wildfire. Some providers were legendary for offering synchronous DSL with extremely few limitations, for a fraction of the cost of a T1. That's what really kicked off a new generation of distributed file sharing. Nothing today compares; the dark web is a tiny blip in the ocean that was the 2000's file sharing scene.

dark or deep web? Because the dark web is HUGE. But the deep one not so much.

I'm skeptical. In terms of actual usage, there are many, many more people online today. Many people are sharing torrents over their broadband connections: entire movies, all seasons of show. We won't even get into the piracy of books! I think the piracy scene today is much bigger.

There is more bandwidth used today, but there was so much more shared material before. The most heinous illegal shit you could imagine would just float over the network through your node. Your dad's QuickBooks files were downloaded by strangers, along with your family photos. Corporate records, lists of social security numbers kept on a hospital computer. Anything you could imagine. It's vastly different today; the content you can get is curated, only select things get put onto services, and takedown notices often get them dropped. Nothing was taken down back in the day, nobody was watching, and there was no filter. I saw things at 17 that no kid today could possibly get access to. The nature of file sharing today just isn't an open tap like it used to be. You have to try hard to publish or retrieve stuff today; back then it was almost accidental.

A few years before that plenty of people were downloading 30ish floppy images over modems to install Slackware or SLS.

In 2000 there was absolutely nothing stopping you from connecting to an FTP server and uploading whatever you wanted, other than time and bandwidth.

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