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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Great site. Jason Scott is a pretty influential chap.

My fave is the Goatse Files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724

He also made some great documentaries, as I'm sure a lot you guys will know, amongst which:

    - Get Lamp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp
    - BBS: The Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary

They're both great. Get Lamp also has an Infocom-specific cut and BBS really captures a lot of interviews with often pre-Web creators and other information that would otherwise be pretty obscure at this point. BBSs were sort of a niche at the time and, while there are a couple memoir-type things (and the textfiles archive of course) there aren't a lot of authoritative sources for the history especially if you don't have a lot of context to make sense of what is out there.

This guy is just a bad person. It's a classic case of someone going so deep into understanding something that it detaches them from reality and their humanity. You understand the general structure of the Web (hotlinking) and how to "mv" which took you months or years of concentrated study to learn and set up, and you forget that under normal circumstances you wouldn't give in to your sadistic urge to show children a picture of a man's asshole.

And then all the other psychos, like you, come to the retelling of the story to fantasize about doing it too.

> And then all the other psychos, like you, come to the retelling of the story to fantasize about doing it too.

Well, isn't that special?

I guess you were one of the folks that got goatsed. Not my fault.

My pillow is soft and I sleep well.

>This guy is just a bad person.

Do you have anything to substantiate this or are you just going to remain ignorant? Hotlinking was creating a massive bandwidth problem, this is a perfectly valid solution - you don't control content on other people's site and should have absolutely no expectation of such.

Do we agree that showing a 14 year old a picture of a man's gaping asshole is bad? If this image had "nearly a hundred thousand viewings" and 17% of MySpace's user base in 2009 was under 18[0], what's the math on that? These were people writing HTML for the first time and had the most basic understanding of it, they didn't know what IP or HTTP was, these were just kids trying to make their computer display a cool picture of a Grim Reaper to them and their friends. They probably didn't even understand the mechanism behind why pasting a link between some triangle brackets (which is already pretty difficult to figure out) into their page made it show the image or that bandwidth came from somewhere. And that's why he did it. They deserved it because they were posers, lesser intellects, that got on his internet after September 1993.

Why call me ignorant? I understand perfectly at the technical level what happened, but words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all. If your logic made you permanently imprint a shock image on thousands of impressionable minds you're not the hero. How much did it even cost to upload a 60kB image half a million times per month in 2007? $10?[1]

[0] https://statista.com/statistics/266881/myspace-users-in-the-... but it's of course the parents' fault for not reading the RFCs and realizing that sadistic web hosts were a flaw in Tim Berners-Lee's design

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-economics-of-bandwidth/

Don't let the others keep you down. Keep fighting and I'm sure we can take this Jason Scott guy down. I believe in you, and there's many of us.

Thank you for your service, sir.

>Do we agree that showing a 14 year old a picture of a man's gaping asshole is bad?

This is disingenuous. He didn't show them anything; they went looking and found something they didn't want. As they say, you can't go to shit's house and be surprised when shit is home.

>They probably didn't even understand the mechanism

Which is their problem, regretful as it may be. Or more realistically, it's their parents' problem.

>words like "hotlinking" and "bandwidth" and "solution" shouldn't come into play here at all.

That was the problem that started it, so they're absolutely relevant. Pretending that this doesn't matter is willful ignorance. No one was made to view anything.

lol

you sound like the guy who stole his coworker's milk from the fridge day after day and then complained when she swapped it with her own breast milk :)

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