Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023)

cultdeadcow.com

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This was actually announced/released last year. It is absolutley fascinating and deserving of HN (IMHO).

> Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-ﬁrst, networked application framework.

Website: https://veilid.com/

Overview: https://veilid.com/docs/overview/

Slides from the Defcon presentatino: https://veilid.com/Launch-Slides-Veilid.pdf

Code: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid

Man, the website really needs to be updated then. I checked over a year ago and it still has this

> The code for VeilidChat will be available on Gitlab in the coming weeks.

I have seen other similar tools/tech on hn

https://briarproject.org/

https://github.com/berty/berty

There were 1 or 2 more like these but don't remember there names.

I know MaidSAFE started out this way in 2006, but I think the I had a crypto digression https://maidsafe.net/

Its a crypto grift

Sadly it looks like it. Wasn't always that way, having started in 2006!

veilid is meant to be a bit more general purpose than briar or berty, which are primarily chat apps. veilid is more similar to freenet in some sense. note: veilid does not currently support bluetooth transport.

Defcon Launch party was fun too!

Has VeilidChat (or anything else running on top of Veilid) been released? The page for that (https://veilid.com/chat/) says its code will be released “in the coming weeks”; the whole Veilid site looks unchanged since its initial publication back in 2023.

Edit: ah, some bouncing around through their FAQs found a repo for it that has commits within the last week/month: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat - looks like “hand this to your non-technical friends” is still a very long way away.

unfortunately most of their up to date documentation is on discord. there is a channel there with a list of active projects. this one caught my eye: https://github.com/cmars/distrans/

There's more than a little irony in a group complaining about the commercialization of the Internet putting documentation/information on Discord

it's a bummer and limits my engagement with the community. however, it seems to be working pretty well for the people who are most involved and the community is pretty active. personally, i hope some of the use cases move to veilid chat once it is available. worth noting that their target audience is "normal humans", so being on discord may be helping them engage with that audience.

> documentation on discord

Disgusting.

I have been looking for solid example code to play with building stuff on top of Veilid, but I’m absolutely unwilling to waste time on that shit chat platform tbh.

Not sure how up to date these are, but they also have docs hosted at https://veilid.com/docs/

there is a lot missing

I had high hopes for Veilid when it was unveiled (ha) but I stopped hearing about it soon after it was published online. Veilid Chat didn't really seem to work once I found the source code and except for a few "hello world" networking programs I haven't seen anything use the protocol yet. The official website doesn't seem to be getting any updates anymore.

A shame, because this has a lot to offer, in my opinion.

I think it basically released before it was ready, to much fanfare. Not an undeserved fanfare, but a premature one.

I think the concept is solid and they're still actively developing it, but it's not really something end-users can play with yet.

The issue as I see it is free open source software can't normally compete with commercial simply because it relies on the good will of developers to contribute. People need money to live, most of us can't dedicate hours a day to working on something like this. For every 20 devs you can get to do this theres a 1000+ working for the commercial equivalent.

We need a paid, non corporate model, not free.

They're still updating it regularly, but it hasn't grown nearly as fast as they wanted it to. Last I heard they're working on doing nightlies and weeklies for release too. I don't really think that matters as much as just having a good release schedule and tools that leverage it.

love cDc but they drop more projects than google - people just remember the ones that stick/stuck

Wow. Today I learned CdC and ACiD are still a thing. ;-)

Thanks for posting this. Even though slightly old, still timely and relevant.

Similar to the cDc but instead of hacking it goes after culture and religion is the Church of MOO which I think came out of the same bbs/usenet and irc era of the Internet if you could even call it that http://www.textfiles.com/occult/MOOISM/

31337 and 1337 are prime. Doesn't get any more 1337 than that!

what a great username to go with this comment

CULT OF THE DEAD COW.

TODAY. TOMORROW. FOREVER.

The web needs more sites hosting raw .html pages formatted as plain text decorated with ASCII art with zero regard for mobile. I say this with complete sincerity.

You can support mobile with ASCII art if you render at different widths and use a HTML+CSS wrapper for media-queries! I have a whole proposal about this: https://gwern.net/utext

Love the thinking here. Thanks for the research and suggestions.

It's not even that much of a problem for me on mobile after zooming out just a tad. The green on black is really what makes this page for me.

No cookies, no frameworks (no JS at all really), plain unobfuscated html. Amazing!

Still waiting for an LLM to communicate exclusively in this format.

What about accessibility?

That's what 8-bit text to speech was for, played from the PC Speaker for maximum effect. It sounded like Stephen Hawking choking on vodka, but that somehow fit the mood.

> It sounded like Stephen Hawking choking on vodka

I'm probably way, way overthinking this, but this seems philosophically quite deep and interesting, much like "what is the sound of one hand clapping" (ignoring Bart Simpson's masterful destruction of the ancient question).

Looking forward to your zine publication.

Wouldn't raw html be better for accessibility than a JS framework? Saying this as a non-front end dev.

Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII art: no.

  aria-hidden=true

Not present on the page in question, though.

If done correctly it doesn’t matter. SSR can yield an accessible HTML page and you won’t notice the difference. Client-side JS can adapt the web site to your needs -a personalization that is hard to achieve in static.

When was the last time... Or rather, when have you ever seen a framework-based page with accessibility done correctly?

I have seen many sites scoring well on various accessibility metrics. There’s no inherent technical limitation of frameworks that would make accessibility impossible, even when dealing with text to speech. We will see many more next year with EAA coming into effect (and many European companies do care about compliance).

Despite regulation I don’t Believe it will actually get implemented even governments have regulations around audio accessibility for education in particular, for years now, and still nothing moves.

Accessibility of this page is pretty bad as far as I can tell, but not because it's plain HTML. And if I understand correctly you can mark ASCII art as an image (role="img") with alternative text too.

Not everyone has to access everything.

Oooh good point. W3c accounts for it, and it's not that tough. Just a case of putting in the raw html:

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H86.html

Fuck accessibility. We're hackers, if it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.

Use HTMX.

HTMX is cool but not necessary for static html pages..

I prefer to use HTMX in place of other frameworks, but if you don't need a framework at all, even better!

Sorry :(

The project website has more information https://veilid.com/

I went to the launch party they had during defcon, it was a lot of fun. I like that Veild is oriented toward being an application framework. In the same way that we have things like libsodium to use cryptography in our apps without being a master of it, we need frameworks/libraries to help build privacy oriented apps as well.

I'm amazed that CdC is still around. I remember dialing into their BBS, Demon Roach Underground, in the mid 80s. That was nearly forty years ago!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Roach_Underground

One of their members had presidential hopes a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/it-tu...

The phone number is seared into my brain for life, I think.

I can't remember my girlfriend's phone number, but the number of BBSs I called 30+ years ago? That's stuck in there until the day I die.

Can’t remember the last time I called Ripco or Lunatic Labs but I still know their numbers better than any other phone numbers, including my own.

RaT CiTY in Seattle had 24-666-47 and that'll be in my brain forever too...

Oh man, does this bring back memories. I loved BackOrfice. I installed it on the network at the University where I was a student. I had a friend call me on a payphone from a vantage point where he could view the layout of the computer terminals being used by students doing research. At first, I would open the cd trays of a couple of the computers and he described the students confusion as they kept closing the trays that would open again moments later. After sharing a good laugh, I popped up a dialog on one of the computers with a message similar to:

> Hey, I am the guy at station #7. I think you are really hot. Want to go out tonight?

Then, I sent similar messages to other stations until we were nearly in tears laughing at the chaos we caused. Ahh, those were good memories.

That sounds like a crummy thing to do to the people in the lab.

The internet was different back then. We used to put trojans into image files which we distributed through a fake dating site peofile. For shits and giggles. We never did anything “serious” just stupid things like opening CD rom drives or moving their mouse around. We’d UDP “nuke” teacher computers. We’d use open networks, and download warez… all sort of silly stuff.

Looking back on it… well a lot of it obviously wasn’t cool at all. I’m just happy that my “teenagers do stupid things” happened in a time where the internet crime was basically not taken serious unless you hacked a bank.

It's just a different kind of bullying.

It wasn't meant as bullying and certainly wasn't seen that way back when I did this. It was mischevious practical jokes that people laughed at. The world we live in now is not as happy of a place. I feel bad for youth of all ages growing up in the world we have now.

Labeling practical jokes as bullying really kind of waters down the idea of actual bullying, where emotional or physical harm is caused to someone over a long period of time. Let's not let bullying be the new "trauma."

Woah. A blast from the past from the era of l0pht, shmoo, and w00w00.

I'm wondering how they defend against tor's problem where large % of nodes are malicious.

More doc:

https://veilid.gitlab.io/developer-book/index.html

They gave a great presentation on veiled for us at BSides Orlando last year. At the afterparty, I had a chance to discuss the protocol with Paul over some drinks. They've really thought through the design and he had answers for almost all of my what-ifs.

The amount of people in this comment section, on "Hacker News", that are completely oblivious to one of the most iconic groups of hacker culture is... depressing. I wonder how can we spread more zeitgeist about it to newer generations?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow

I dunno, but maybe try being informative instead of critical that losers like me never got the memo?

I'm sorry if it felt critical or condescending, it certainly was not the intent. If anything, I just want people to experience that coolness the same way I did.

A frequently overlooked issue about Gen-X online culture is that it was always have on gatekeeping, snobbism and hierarchy.

It is not surprising that newer generations don't know it, because at this time, people did the most to keep things on their small clubs of initiated folks, newbies NOT welcome.

Frankly, millenials and zoomer have a far more open and welcoming approach, and probably their culture will survive better because of that.

The world was a smaller place back then. At the onset of this culture, a lot of it was built on avoiding the costs of reaching out to the next city (toll phone calls).

Their culture will be derided and discarded, just like all those before them.

have on = heavy on.

They recently became a member of PQCA, too.

Disclosure: I work for LF, assigned to PQCA.

https://pqca.org/#members https://veilid.org/ https://github.com/pqca

I watched them unveil Back Orifice at defcon in the late 90s. Those were fun times.

Also check out https://freenet.org. Ian is going to launch in a few weeks if all goes well.

I think Veilid is closer to https://iroh.computer/ than Freenet. That said, I'm watching all three extremely closely.

This is kind of exactly what I’ve been looking for, and have shared at various times features of on hnews and elsewhere. Nice! Thank you!

It borrows some of its marketing directly from Urbit, which HN famously has a bias against.

This brings back so many BBS memories!

That beautiful phosphorus green...

The demo VeilidChat app doesn't lead anywhere, but there is a gitlab.

I haven't tried it yet.

https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat

edit: I did, I failed to build it with "version solving failed.", I am not learning how to debug Dart builds right now

edit2: well, build.sh finished with some installing, but I still don't see any binary. Eh, other day.

There is a discord, which kinda misses the point.

Think this is something they'd be trying pretty hard to self-host.

This feels like it would have been edgy and cool 30 years ago.

I don't know if you're talking about the design or content. But on design... So Cult of the Dead Cow has literally been around for 40 years.

And this is what their "pages" looked like before the web, when ascii on TTY was all you had.

Ironically, however, the first actual web page of theirs IA has, in 1998, does _not_ look like this, they didn't actually think at that point it would be edgy and cool to make the brand new web look like an ASCII tty.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980209125729/http://cultdeadco...

It actually wasn't until 2019 they decided it would be maybe edgy and cool to make their webpage look like an ascii tty from 1990.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190530041326/https://cultdeadc...

I remember reading the text files section of cDc's page back in the 90's. There was some sick and twisted stuff in that collection. Thanks for the flashbacks?

Not the page design, the method itself. "Bovine mother?" Come on.

The CDC was formed at an actual cow slaughterhouse. Know your history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow

Yes, I got it, thanks.

FYI: Cult of the Dead Cow is a hacker group that has been around since the 80s. Hell a number of members actually have testified in congress before (i.e. the CdC members that were also part of L0pht).

one of them went beyond testifying in congress and just became a politician

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beto_O%27Rourke

Oh damn I didn't even connect that O'Rourke was Psychedelic Warlord.

Holy crap, that is a surprising connection between two names I individually knew in a social graph.

> L0pht

Oh man, that reminds me of NTLM passwords: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0phtCrack

Especially to those of us who were edgy and cool 30 years ago.

What have you done lately?

Quite a lot, thank you!

edgy!

Weren't these the guys who released BackOrifice back in the day? It was a simple to use remote control trojan with a nice GUI... had a blast with it :P https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice?wprov=sfla1

As a kid, I attached it to some shareware game and sent it to a friend, letting it lurk. I called him up a few days later. And then once we started playing the game, I waited for a suspenseful moment to suddenly play back a loud scream .WAV that I uploaded previously. My friend jumped out of his chair and screamed himself and ran out of the room.

He eventually came back, hyperventilating, and sat down to try to tell me what happened, only for his CD tray to start opening and closing at random. He ran away again, swearing about his haunted PC...

Eventually he told the school principal, who sat us down and made us explain what modems and trojans and ports were. Then he asked us if we knew what an orifice was, and how that was connected to ports... sigh, the kind of discussion you never wanted to have with a grown-up.

We were young. The internet was young. Things were wild and free and not so hypercommercialized and buttoned down yet. Google wasn't around and Apple was for homework and Hypercard. Microsoft still had flight simulators in Excel. Good times...

> to a friend

I think with my friend I pitched it more like "I tricked you for your own good to show you not to trust random EXE files"... though I don't think it was quite that altruistic a prank. :p

I recall another similar trojan (perhaps a little later) was Netbus, both showed up a lot when volunteering on an IRC help channel to help diagnose and walk victims through removal.

Around that time, maybe a little bit earlier, I was a Sun nerd surrounded by other Sun nerds, but this worked for Linux too: We'd FTP into each other's machines and upload things like .au files of lonely whale cries into /dev/audio for an endless supply of WTF Moments.

Oh the good times in the Un*x lab (Mostly AIX, sigh) in my first year of Uni.

Telnet (What? SSH in 1995-6? nah) to friend's workstation

DISPLAY=0:0; export DISPLAY

xwininfo -root -all

*find some candidate window or control*

xkill -id XXXXXX

(or just fire a perl oneliner to allocate the sum of memory and swap, and then repeatedly scan it in a random pattern. But that wasn't me).*

And `talk`, the best chat client created ever.

My friend pulled a similar prank on me a few years earlier than that. Involved different tech like BBS software, ZMODEM file transfer, and Sound Blaster command line utilities but same effect. I nearly died.

He was a pioneer :D The granddaddy of us script kiddies.

The BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon (https://legendreddragon.net/) was how I learned about everything from protocols to sex to RPGs. Such an innocent time. The media was afraid of Doom corrupting the youth.

I was curious about how you'd learn about sex in an RPG and followed your link (it's a slow day :) ).

This is hilarious, and reasonable tasteful, all things considered:

https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Lay

https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Pregnancy

https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Venereal_Disease

https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Children

It’s worth reading their new book which is a history of the group. The chat was launched at defcon last year at their birthday party and there will be more this year.

I didn't know they wrote a book! Just bought a copy. It's probably gonna pwn my ereader now, but worth it for the lulz.

[deleted]

yer mom. haha

Is this in reference to tucows?

No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow

TUCOWS for those that don't know was an acronym for "The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software" (fun fact; let's please have a bit more fun on orange site the debby downer thing here is something sometimes).

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