talizorah

Usenet and the message boards being referred to are ‘proto-internet’ services. Think BBS, where your computer dialed into a service, and you could interact with that builiten board, the messages and users on it, as well as any files it had available for download.

Usenet had newsgroups that were very diverse and specific, and originally were just like message boards, but at some point, the major remaining Usenet servers started just sharing to each other, or maybe more appropriately, they would reference each other.

As someone mentioned before, it’s a protocol just like HTTP. There’s a bunch of servers all hosting webpages made in hypertext, and we just jump between them with links. Likewise, there’s a bunch of servers out there hosting newsgroups, but you have to find a gateway to get started. The reason there’s no ‘one’ company is akin to asking why all websites aren’t hosted/owned by one company.

If anything… It’s kinda like lemmy/fediverse stuff. You make an account with one instance, but since the protocols are the same, you can use your account on that one instance to talk to the whole fediverse network, multiple instances.

Why it costs is because at this point, it’s an archive. A huge archive, of not just text discussions, but also all the files that have been posted since a very long time ago. And just like the currently ‘free’ archive.org, it costs money to host all of that. Usenet is a bit less resource intensive than a modern website, so it can just basically sit… But they just ask that you pay to access it, pay to have an account. In this case, you’re paying to access a network that is separated from the rest of the internet at large.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for.

The door hacking in Deus Ex Human Revolution. Each one was unique, could be solved by skill (speed and precision) or with tools (consumable items found throughout the game). It was a mini puzzle game each time you tried to unlock something.

At the time, I loved it so much I tried to build my own version but it never went anywhere.

My company is a few years into an Infosys partnership. From the first meeting, we had people disappointed. All this time later we’re behind on every project, and spend more time arguing about payments and KPIs than actually getting work done.

It’s easy to say your KPIs are green when you don’t measure anything of value, and really easy to say we owe you for services when you have no proof of services rendered.

To learn they’re pretty anti-human and profit driven from the top down is just icing on the cake

There’s a commercial Linux client I was using called Insync and it was perfect. Only stopped using it because I switched away from Linux