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Comment by theresistor | Hacker News Reader

I miss having a world where the threat model of having your computer compromised wasn't "your entire life ends". Where a device wasn't assumed to be online all the time, and where every device didn't contain the keys to your bank account.

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You can meaningfully recreate this world today for a personal, non-work environment. For a PC, what do you really need a persistent internet connection for? If you have a Mac, create a couple of network locations, one "Offline" (all internet-connected network adaptors disabled) and another "Online." Keep a habit of leaving it at the "Offline" unless you really need to go online for something. This is what we did thirty years ago with dial-up.

You can, but what does it help? Modern OSes are architected assuming an always-online, the-world-ends threat model. Thus causes them to be heavily locked down, eliminating a lot of the customizability and hackability that older systems had.

And that’s not to mention applications. It used to be common for GUI applications to be scriptable and to support plugins!

It's worth experimenting with. Some things won't work at all, others will break in Fun And Interesting Ways. Some things will get much slicker though because they suddenly don't have network I/O anywhere near the UI, or because ads aren't sucking CPU any more. It's worth at least understanding where your common workflows are on that spectrum.

It might help your focus, if you're the type who is easily distracted with the web or by notifications. That extra bit of friction to switch locations to enable the network might be enough to get you to second guess whether or not you really need to look at that thing online.

I remember in the early 2000's getting a virus that made multiple long distance calls to Japan with my dial up modem and having to try to explain the charges to my parents.

that’s called a "dialer", haven’t used that word for a long time

I'm still curious some 24 years later what it was up to.

Many of those dialers were programs that offered access to porn. Had a friend that used one extensively for a month, until his parents received a fat invoice from the phone company!

With the old System Seven, though, you could write an app that could register to receive events through OS hooks.

Made keyboard loggers especially easy.

And fun extensions that would make clicky clacky sounds when you typed, a bell when you hit return.

No one was worried about key logging.

if you wanted a system-wide behavior you had to write an INIT ; extra credit to show it at MacHack Ann Arbor later

Kill Dean's Inits!

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