Rivaclaw🏳️‍⚧️ΘΔ @renbymon@computerfairi.es

Psst, hey: HACKERS ARE NOT TECH BROS. The vast majority of hackers never become tech bros. The ethics of hacking runs completely counter to that of tech bros.

Hackers make hardware do things they weren’t intended to do. They circumvent barriers. They string together contraptions that repurpose old stuff to do new things. Hackers aren’t that interested in money; they’re more interested in showing off their skills. They love to learn and make demos and create and share free tech that other hackers then build upon. All they want is acknoweledgement and the respect of their peers.

Tech bros are parasites. They’re greedy bastards who love to erect barriers between people and tech. They extract, addict, monetize. They turn everything fun and useful into a transaction, a dopamine trap, a subscription, a surveillance tool, an advertising outlet, and a vector to extract money from labor and suppliers.

Please don’t get them mixed up.

#hackers #hacking #techbros

back in the early 90s my parents brought home an ibm ps/1 with an internal 2400 baud modem. i assumed it was only for sending/receiving faxes.

one day my computer teacher (thank you mr. mckinney!) explained that the modem made my computer capable of dialing out to *other computers* and exchanging data with them. he printed off a five page ream of tractor feed paper titled "The 403 BBS List" and sent me home with it.

i stayed up until 3am that night, dialing every single board on that list using Windows Terminal, creating accounts, and exploring what BBSes were capable of. by the wee hours, i had a new terminal program (Terminate!), knew how to use the z-modem protocol, and had
pirated my first game 😅

one of the little mysteries i came across that night was FILE_ID.DIZ files. every board had them. every zip file had them. they were tiny capsule descriptions of what a program/game was, constrained to 45 cols and 10 rows of ascii. they usually also included some kind of nod to the piracy group that "released" the program.

most BBS software would extract the .DIZ file from the zip, and use that as a file area description for the program, allowing users to understand what they were downloading.

to celebrate this weird little historical curio, today kiki got a FILE_ID.DIZ packed into the zip 😆

in version 1.10 onwards every copy of kiki will now include a FILE_ID.DIZ.

if you haven't heard of kiki yet, check out the project page:
https://tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

and if you're new to the kiki community, please post to the #kiki hashtag so we can start building a little webring of kiki instances

#bbs #kiki #smolweb #smallweb #shareware

I've adorned my cassette emulator device with a hand whittled label. The top panel has some bumps from through-board solder pads, so nothing I can do about that. But overall it's alright, if you don't look too closely and/or judge too harshly.

#ZXSpectrum