It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.
Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
Be sure to send them an email first, so that you can arrive at the proper time for them to give you a tour. It is very, very worth it. One of the best museum experiences so far.
Thanks to both of you for the info. I'm longtime Seattle and I had no idea. I'm still disappointed that the living computer museum was closed. Jody Allen is a decent person so was surprised she let that tiny line item expire from the spreadsheet, I digress.
+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.
What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.
Any time someone shows me something an agent did, the first question I ask is whether there's plausibly something comparable already in its training data.
Actually, no, my school believed in teaching us the mythologies of our own culture and those reasonably close to us. I didn't properly study greek mythos until my own free time later in life.
Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
They will of course but I don't think kids talking to each other was ever the objection to social media. Very arguably, kids coming together in these ad-hoc online spaces may very well be safer than mainstream social media, whether your complaint with it is advertising or the algorithm or adult content or child predators.
French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!
The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!
That's brilliant! You reminded me of a story from my childhood.
This one time my neighbor rang my doorbell. I answered on the intercom.
We talked for a minute and were then both puzzled. "Why did you ring the bell?"
"I didn't ring the bell. You did!"
Turns out we were both in our apartments, and an unknown third party downstairs had rung both our bells at the same time.
This was how I discovered the doorbell intercom also functions as "bus" where all apartments can talk to each other. (It also blares your conversation onto the street downstrairs, though.)
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.
They're just joking that whatever you want, the opposite will happen: if it's something you'd rather faded away, it will stick around. But if it's something you actually want to keep and find again, it will be lost.
Thank you for translating.
Reading the comment section of HN is again and again showing that we should never assume the other side understood what we meant.
I try not to restrict things so that I can walk into the room at any time and not have them hide shit. Then the few times I do see something I don’t like and ask him not to look at it there’s plenty of other stuff to watch so it doesn’t really cost him anything to humor me.
I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.
I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.
My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.
I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.
I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?
I felt the cold a great deal and preferred a higher temperature. The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.
> The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.
I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.
>not many households include children in the consensus process.
That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.
My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.
> I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself.
This is genius: (a) Treat your kid like an intelligent human being, and (b) don’t be a hypocrite.
It sounds like if you’d been my parent, maybe I would’ve respected you and taken your opinion seriously. As it is, I just quoted your anecdote (with link and attribution) in another venue where this HN thread got linked.
I will never forgive my parents for what they did to me when I was a teenager—allegedly “for my own good”. I thought I was smarter than they were. I was right.
When I had my computer mouse taken away because I got in school suspension (for getting domain admin in the local AD no less), I promptly learned how mouse control via keyboard worked.
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.
> I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.
However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)
Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.
https://olduse.net/
Experience legacy usenet in real-time.
You can subscribe to different start points and receive posts as they were sent, 40+ years ago.
Snap isn't a new idea but the motivation, to my understanding, is completely different. It was a technical limitation in the usenet days, both hdd space and bandwidth. Goodness I can still remember what one user on alt.binaries could do to our university network in the 90s.
I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.
I was there in the early 2010s and we did have older versions of AIM, netscape in an archive CVS (svn was the day to day system when I started). But then we moved to git and only stuff that had a designated owner got moved from cvs/svn to git so there was another round of losing old source code. And another in the migration to yahoo systems post merger.
> I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)
I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.
I ran a couple of very local BBSes late beyond the hayday in the 14.4-56k timeframe. That got me into BBS software, which got me into ANSI Art, which got me into associations with warez groups, and that got me into association with various hacker collectives. Had it not been for the BBS scene I probably wouldn't work in technology today.
I think I just start with this talk early, but it’s amazing how kids are willing to assume the best of intentions. “But why? Why would they do that?”, “Because suckering 7 year olds makes them money.”, “But why? That’s mean!”
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
Locking down algorithmic social media for kids/youth is an absolute no brainer for me. So many reasons, honestly. No regrets there, and they never had it so they didn't get addicted and don't miss it.
Maybe you're asking about the spotify chats though? It was challenging for me, yes. There were topics and discussions that moody kids would have that I now had a window into. It can be a bit scary as a parent to see that all without filters, but it was also an opportunity to check in with them and have conversations about it. Kids have all these feelings and conversations anyway, so it's just part of that age. My childhood was rough, so I'm just thankful it is not like that for them and they have people to talk to. As I parent of course I wish they'd come to me first, but I know I will never be their peer in that way.
I do wish I blocked short form video better, but that's more out of concern for their attention and my own aesthetic snobbery ;) I do significantly limit how much time they can spend watching it, and we all know its a "treat" akin to junk food. Sometimes they share it with me :)
Thanks for your reply. To me, kidhood is a developmental time where self-destructive habits have more time and malleability to course-correct. On the flip side it's a breeding ground for addiction.
I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.
In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.
Ohhhh.. I can just say that no parent makes it through the experience without regrets.
Also, it depends a lot on the kid, the relationship, etc. It was a fine line, these were important social interactions for them, but there was definitely risks to be made aware of and kids are famously bad at risk assessment.
So it was something I would monitor as best I could and check in with them on, but at some point you just have to trust them and hope any mistakes don't have overly severe consequences.
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
I actually love SoundCloud's timestamp based comments. It is pretty fun seeing someone's joyful reactions to a nice drop, beautiful vocals coming in, a brilliant lyrical phrase, etc. It's disappointing that this is not the primary mode of commenting on Spotify.
Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.
This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week.
To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.
What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.
If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)
When i was around 13 the local news did a story about a school system BBS, and I happened to have a pen in hand when it flashed the number on the screen briefly, and it turned out to be a dedicated line for teachers. The thing is teachers never actually used it and there was a very active community of kids that dialed in on their own number. They were on a time limit though and I eventually shared the teacher line with a lot of them so we could chat 24-7. It was one of the few multiline BBS’s at the time so it ended up being kind of an HQ for people trading pirated software and stuff after the number spread around. I don’t think school staff ever looked at it.
I did this in high school. I hosted an SSH server at home on port 443 so it'd get through the school's filtering, then tunneled in and connected with VNC.
Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.
Ahh, core memory unlocked. I did all kinds of stuff on the school computers out of boredom.
The most notable is probably cracking the admin password because I wanted to change the volume or something. (Seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time!)
The computers had all kinds of weird restrictions, including the panning being forcibly set way to the left to compensate for the school's crappy headphones -- a crime against humanity, you would surely agree, if you experienced it.
It took 30 seconds to crack, it was a short dictionary word and I remember being very disappointed with the sysadmin. But obviously I couldn't tell anyone about it...
Let me see what else... our school accounts had 200MB network storage, but this was too small for all the Portable Apps[0] I wanted to use. So I created some kind of "startup program" that downloaded and extracted them from my web server. I think it also changed the background and the Windows Theme...
I put knoppix on a cd and since the filtering was implemented via a proxy server that was entirely voluntary to use… also bypassed the filtering.
Once I burned a bunch of Linux boot cds with unreal tournament on them and took over a computer lab to have a lan party. That was fun until the lab monitor got spooked that his monitoring system showed all the computers as turned off when clearly the lab was full…
In our high school, you could install the Halo: Combat Evolved demo so we would play LAN across the whole school. They eventually caught on and started deleting Halo from all the computers, so we would just have the installation file on a flash drive, install it, and then uninstall it when done.
I can't remember exactly what I did but I think passwords for windows 2000 were stored in something called a SAM file. I managed to get a copy of it and brute force it on my home machine. Password was the schools phone number. Got access to the whole network, network drives, teachers files. I was paranoid so I didn't poke around too much :)
> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)
my son did this in 8th grade (last year) but I think it was a google slide deck. The teach asked all the kids in class to do a slide or something and then he figured out review comments or something and they all started a group chat more or less. I can't quite remember but he was very proud of himself when he showed me hah.
Yeah I was going to comment about this: how, for years now at this point, kids have worked around district-enforced security against chat sites/apps on their school-issued Chromebooks by using various Google Workspace apps and features.
It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.
The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.
"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio
ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"
I've been getting involved with LoRa mesh networking lately and there's a lot of that ham attitude there too but it seems to lean a bit more toward the hacker side of things, despite a healthy fear of the FCC enforcement mechanisms.
Considering the reach of a HAM radio, the limited frequencies, and the consumption of airtime while transmitting, someone needs to enforce etiquette.
Its also likely the older folk operating in HAM radio space, have a background in communication operations when HAM was a far more common communication device.
HAM is still awesome, I find it very interesting with the long distance, remote, communication challenges some people partake in.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
Except with ham radio, nearly everyone you encounter is that mod.
My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.
First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.
I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.
My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.
I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
I remember lobbies in StarCraft for maps that used some best match algorithm to recreate porn images with map terrain tiles such that the image would appear in the maps mini map. It was quite a lot of work to view a single, tiny image in all the wrong colors.
Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.
It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.
But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.
Anything on the internet will eventually be turned into a childrens' chatroom.
Do you allow them acces to your school's website? Guess what's under one of these forgotten posts about a singing competition from 2012. Do you let them access some math exercise platform? Does it allow sending people invitations to work together and also let you set group names? That's a chatroom right there.
I think the coolest one I've heard about is prison tablets that didn't restrict access to WiFi settings, so people would set up personal hotspots and use access point SSIDs for communication between cells.
As an adult, I used Google Sheets as a group chat among my friends. We had different employers with different internet restrictions. Before that we used a self-hosted Telnet chat server, until someone's employer blocked that.
It was a lot more fun than Discord, Slack, or any other dedicated chat client. With Sheets, we'd do fun little gags and bits in the spreadsheets. Everything ended up being really personalized and owned by us. Now we just send boring messages on WhatsApp. I miss the old ways.
And a bit weird for me that there are folks old enough to be nostalgic for things that still seem brand new to me. Occasional reminders that I'm older than I realize.
Not only kids. A few years ago I discovered my ex-wife was cheating on me. We went to therapy and she swore she didn't have any more contact with the guy. Later I found that she was using Spotify in exactly this way to communicate with her affair partner for months after she said had no contact.
I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc
My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.
His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.
The ingenuity of youth always makes me smile. It brings me back to my youth and the things we used to get up to, in retrospect it was a huge learning experience for me. Learning how to think outside the box, finding ways things could be utilized outside of their intended use, etc.
I was a teenager in the early 2000s and my parents were quite strict with when and how long I could use the shared family computer to access the internet.
I had my own computer in my bedroom, but the internet was only available on the family computer (256k via a PCI modem). I really really wanted the freedom to use the internet without a curfew, so I started researching how to connect two computers wirelessly... I ended up purchasing two 11mbs USB WLAN adapters for a few hundred dollars each(!) and paired them so I could share the internet connection. Wireless LAN was almost unheard of in those days, so my parents had no idea what I was up to.. although they eventually became suspicious when I stopped wanting to use the family computer yet insisting they keep it powered on.
I listened to This American Life from the first episode until they abandoned their mobile app. It was so easy for me to use it and mark things. I even emailed them about it; they said it cost too much to operate. It didn't make sense to me. I guess I will go back to listening to them again on Apple Podcasts. I even exported my playlist with data from their old app; not sure how I will sync with the Apple Podcasts app, though... Another challenge for Fable to solve, I guess.
These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.
Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.
A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction. You're saying that kids will always get around blocking software, unless it's coded by their family? That's a wild proposition.
"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."
i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
You can add links to posts and add meaningless query params in whatever encoding you desire. Usually long urls are truncated and you don't really see them when visiting the website. Larger data is done with images and videos.
I'm IRL friends with some people I got to know that way back in the 2000s. We went through many a mod raid and migration to a new obscure board together.
I went through this same experience moderating the comment section of a business news site nearly 20 years ago. I think they needed to find a site not blocked by the firewall in the school computer lab.
Ever tried joining an IRC channel on any of the many servers with lenient policies on moderation etc, based on the channels name/ description? Sort of a similar experience..
If you are not familiar with This American Life (or even if you are!) I suggest listening to this story instead of reading - hard to beat Ira’s delivery.
Canva is a group chat for students at the local school. The share function of projects as “channels”, comments for text, and slides a surface for sharing media.
you can just use Reader view/mode, most of the browsers have it nowadays (though still not excuse for using bad font, though I find it OK on this particular website)
When they started the laptop program in my junior high school back in the early 2000s we’d communicate via broadcasted network name. not just the nerds! Just like the OpenAI agents! Message dead drops and all
Sort of reminds me of "Party Lines" (No, not the selective ringing, multiple subscriber/line service) used by kids in the 1970s. "Party Lines" or test lines allowed multiple callers to dial in like a conference bridge. Seemed to be used extensively by kids to just chat or hang out via the telephone network.
“The moratorium on new kids needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. We need to be willing to destroy a rogue middle school by airstrike.”
Hang on, are our kids learning from AI agents? Do we have a child alignment problem? Do we need to put our kids in a sandbox. At this rate our kids are going to out live us, I for one, am panicking.
I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
I have been using Mastodon since 2019 across multiple instances. The things you are talking about happen very rarely in actual use, I've never once had a problem with any of them. The signal to noise ratio on mastodon is higher than any other competing platform I've used.
It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.
Well, if you wanna go with legal mandates, possible, but the mandate I mentioned up there more of social mandate, a social responsibility. And for the other replies above as I can’t reply to all, sessions can be done on parents pace online, this is not the 90s anymore, or through employments, or other means, and not participating for example can result on losing the family benefits they collect from the tax dollar. Again, these are just examples on top of my head, but the point in here that this should be the parents/custodian responsibility, if they lack knowledge or training, they get it, if they don’t want to, they get penalized, but it’s in noway the state to decide if your kids open the PC/phone at night or access this service or not.
We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.
> Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
The Onion predicted this in 2014: "Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4mMY2Kl3GY)
Reminds me a little bit of the agent improvised coordination schemes.
It goes back even further, to 1960s/70s-era phone phreaking. A lot of budding phreaks started out by finding miswired PBX systems and using their number-out-of-service announcement recordings as impromptu conference bridges.
Some of this is documented in audio, on https://evan-doorbell.com/ for anyone interested.
Wow, what a find! Thanks for posting this. It's funny that dial tones bring back the memories!
Yah a network where you could dial a number and get automatically connected to another phone anywhere in the US without any computers at all and not even a transistor being used! Crazy.
If you’re into this, and ever in Seattle check out the connections museum.
https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
The volunteers there maintain a bunch of functioning cool vintage equipment you can see in action and even use.
Be sure to send them an email first, so that you can arrive at the proper time for them to give you a tour. It is very, very worth it. One of the best museum experiences so far.
Thanks to both of you for the info. I'm longtime Seattle and I had no idea. I'm still disappointed that the living computer museum was closed. Jody Allen is a decent person so was surprised she let that tiny line item expire from the spreadsheet, I digress.
+1 to this! If you have any interest in telephones, telephone switching, or phreaking, this place is incredible. And the people who run it are awesome.
'Exploding the phone' by Lapsley is such an incredible book on the phone phreaks.
Thanks for the kind words! And it's funny, when I saw this story on HN my first thought was "loop arounds and talkable busy signals!" :-).
Thank you for writing it, I think about it often. It is so well researched and written, I could tell it was a labor of love :)
What the OpenAI agents did is basically how my class in middle school improvised a chat room. We renamed files in a chosen directory. It made me think that some of the reporting about the technical ingenuity shown in that incident was a bit overblown, at least on that point. I mean, we were able to figure it out as normal 12-year-olds.
Any time someone shows me something an agent did, the first question I ask is whether there's plausibly something comparable already in its training data.
Yeah but five years ago and LLM showing the ingenuity of a 12 year old would have been unbelievable.
to be "fair" are LLMs even 12 years yet?
We're trusting them to drive and go to war, so might as well treat them as 18+.
It's not real AGI until it gets depressed and develops an unhealthy relationship with prediction markets.
We need to get to work figuring out a digital version of booze to offer the coming AGI, it’s the humane thing to do.
12-year old soldiers exist too. (sadly)
12-year-old.... humans.
> I'll once again cut myself open to prove I'm not a computer
Becoming increasingly relevant every day now.
The onion is the prophet we needed but never knew we had.
And the seers voice shall bring them to tears
Might not be enough among replicants.
The Onion isn't satire it's just a dystopian Cassandara.
TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)
Whoever downvoted this has no love of curiosity and doesn't belong here.
Why? We weren't all taught Greek mythology in school, and there are plenty of other interests to explore thereafter
Actually, no, my school believed in teaching us the mythologies of our own culture and those reasonably close to us. I didn't properly study greek mythos until my own free time later in life.
The downvote is optional.
Sorry I guess I misread this as suggesting people should down vote the TIL comment, which struck me as gatekeeping.
No, I was suggesting that we should not downvote people celebrating that they learned something. Learning things is certainly most of why I am here.
But, like much of the internet, people here still use it as a "dislike" button, which is frustrating.
reminds me of hunting "secret" boards on gamefaqs in the 2000s
Came here to post this. Deer me later!
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Back in ~2001 I ran a fairly popular blog commenting system - back then most blogs didn't have built-in comments, so I offered javascript embeds to add them to posts.
One day performance started to go down rapidly, and within a few days my host got in touch about unusual CPU usage.
I tracked it down to a series of random blogger.com blog posts with colossal comment threads measuring in the thousands. Each post only got comments for a single day, and all of the comments were in Japanese. The blog owners seemed very confused.
Turns out Japanese schoolkids figured this trick out 25 years ago.
Life/teenagers find a way.
But surely, if we ask everyone to prove they’re at least 18, kids won’t find any ways to do anything the government(s) don’t like.
They'll find some other things to do. See the ending lyrics of this song for hints.
https://youtu.be/BkI6tKFMETE?is=D_nlcQQfrZC6_Sau
They will of course but I don't think kids talking to each other was ever the objection to social media. Very arguably, kids coming together in these ad-hoc online spaces may very well be safer than mainstream social media, whether your complaint with it is advertising or the algorithm or adult content or child predators.
I have seen something like this before but it was mostly spammers/scammers. Don’t think they were kids at all.
These were definitely schoolkids - I translated some of the posts and the majority were gossiping about boys.
that's pretty cute. They must be in their late 30s by now, I wonder if they still remember doing this
French kids started doing this in the 1930s with the talking clock (a French invention BTW). The clock was basically a busbar: callers were all connected to the clock. When it was not speaking the time (at the minute) callers could speak and be heard by others. And it was a free call!
The phone system had switched to digital by the time I started using it so I never got to experience this, but in exchange I could use Minitel!
That's brilliant! You reminded me of a story from my childhood.
This one time my neighbor rang my doorbell. I answered on the intercom.
We talked for a minute and were then both puzzled. "Why did you ring the bell?"
"I didn't ring the bell. You did!"
Turns out we were both in our apartments, and an unknown third party downstairs had rung both our bells at the same time.
This was how I discovered the doorbell intercom also functions as "bus" where all apartments can talk to each other. (It also blares your conversation onto the street downstrairs, though.)
See also: similar mid-20th-century Bell System phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beep_line
Discovered my kid doing exactly this years ago. We purposefully limited all social media, locked dowb devices etc, but life uh.. finds a way.
I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
Now they are older and are on ridiculous group chats with their friends. Pretty impossible to control tbh. At least they keep me up to date with the latest memes!
> I was impressed, just had the standard talk about how you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away and that you really have no idea who is on the other side of the screen, never share personal information, etc
This feels pretty level headed. My parents seemed to be of the opinion that the internet consisted entirely of pedophiles and me. Talking to anyone for any reason got me in a ton of trouble. All it meant was that I got really good at hiding stuff from them as a kid.
My parents gave me no such talk; I now believe that at least some of the "teenage girls" i chatted with were in fact not girls at all.
Thank you for the affirmation :)
> you have to assume everything you put out on the internet never goes away
Only applies if you regret posting it later. If it's something you want to find later, it will inevitably have bit-rotted and not been archived.
> Only applies if you regret posting it later
Not really. For example, something you posted on social media can easily get you turned down for a job you wanted. You'll never be told that your post is what caused you to lose the job, so you'll never "regret" having posted it, but your life was still negatively impacted by what you overshared. It doesn't even have to still be found online to have an impact on your life. It could be something scrapped once a long time ago by a data broker who used that data to flag your file in some way. Your info can still come up when people request targets matching whatever you were flagged for, even when the original content is no longer online. Even when the internet forgets, data brokers don't.
They're just joking that whatever you want, the opposite will happen: if it's something you'd rather faded away, it will stick around. But if it's something you actually want to keep and find again, it will be lost.
Thank you for translating. Reading the comment section of HN is again and again showing that we should never assume the other side understood what we meant.
This is my kids too, life finds a way. I've blocked Youtube, and yet I discovered they are watching their favourite Youtube creators via Spotify.
I try not to restrict things so that I can walk into the room at any time and not have them hide shit. Then the few times I do see something I don’t like and ask him not to look at it there’s plenty of other stuff to watch so it doesn’t really cost him anything to humor me.
I’m young enough that I remember my parents thinking games were going to make my eyes go bad, and old enough to remember my younger siblings being absolutely addicted to youtube. Everyone turned out fine.
I’m convinced knowing what they watch is far more important than making sure they don’t watch it.
My father blocked things from me, not internet based obviously because they weren't available. But things like fixing the heater so it wouldn't be set higher than what he considered reasonable.
I assume he's still alive, but I haven't communicated with him for years.
I... did you pick the first example of conflict that came to your head and there were many deeper problems, or do you think not being able to adjust the thermostat is some kind of huge red flag/worse?
I guess that depends on what temperature he thought was reasonable? Freezing is a temperature.
Put a sweater on instead of running the heat. Maybe I’m just an old fart.
I felt the cold a great deal and preferred a higher temperature. The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
For the record I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself. She finally got a facebook account because it was required to engage with her university courses. She was livid.
> The issue is not the temperature, it was that my preference was different to his and his solution was to force his preference because we disagreed on a point.
> Obviously it is not the only thing, but an example of using control instead of reason or consensus.
When the preference in question is temperature, not many households include children in the consensus process. Adults deciding that is quite normal with few grudges.
I don't know how to interpret "instead of reason". If you mean that literally, I strongly doubt the temperature setting was chosen without reasoning things through.
>not many households include children in the consensus process.
That was at least something I could address when I became a parent.
My daughter mentioned to me a few weeks ago that she was confused by the fact that all of her friends seek her out when they need to know the right thing to do. I told her it is because she has a moral compass that you can see from space.
My dad liked to say that if I wasn't happy with the temperature then I could start paying the gas bill.
> I did not forbid my daughter to use social media. I told her why I did not use it myself.
This is genius: (a) Treat your kid like an intelligent human being, and (b) don’t be a hypocrite.
It sounds like if you’d been my parent, maybe I would’ve respected you and taken your opinion seriously. As it is, I just quoted your anecdote (with link and attribution) in another venue where this HN thread got linked.
I will never forgive my parents for what they did to me when I was a teenager—allegedly “for my own good”. I thought I was smarter than they were. I was right.
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Did yours also do the fun “hide the power cords to important electronics” as a punishment? That was always my favorite /s
When I had my computer mouse taken away because I got in school suspension (for getting domain admin in the local AD no less), I promptly learned how mouse control via keyboard worked.
Feels like a rite of passage.
My dad took the keyboard and left the mouse. I did ok, it was annoying using char map to copy letters because there was no virtual keyboard then.
Ended up making common phrases and commands in a txt file.
> everything you put out on the internet never goes away
I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it) and there is surprisingly little information left which is easy to find now, 30 years later. I remember the web being awash in more contemporary technical minutia than I could read in a lifetime. Now, the vast majority of it seems to be flat-out missing or at least very well hidden/distributed.
I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
I'll do my duty and provide some links as a fellow spelunker (apologies if you've already seen some of these):
http://textfiles.com/directory.html (https://archive.org/details/textfiles-dot-com-2011 or use rsync for a local copy), plus he made https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary with the full interviews available (https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5289)
https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...
https://www.ipingthereforeiam.com/bbs/msgs/
https://mirrors.archeobits.com/bbs/archives.thebbs.org/ (https://archive.org/details/bbsarchives_2017 for a local copy)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29955294
https://archive.org/details/boardwatchmagazine
https://defacto2.net/bbs
https://web.archive.org/web/20241210143429/http://sysopshub....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klBD-U-9PIg
Thank you! Yeah, I'm well familiar with Jason Scott's efforts to archive/preserve/present BBS culture and information. I've been a fan of his work for ages.
The other links are new to me, thank you for passing them along. I'm particularly interested in that BoardWatch magazine archive. I didn't know that existed. Although now I have yet _another_ side project: figure out how to index and search it all!
I regularly mourn the photos of my early teens that were on MySpace and no longer exist anywhere
Same, but at the same time I'm glad data about me from that period of my life no longer persists.
There is non-zero chance it's on the tape sitting on the shelf in some unknown warehouse.
Rip my dignity in that case lol
What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.
The network was basically point to point serial, with a phone number for routing.
Some BBS hosts were quite sophisticated, running multiple computers and banks of modems to handle multiple user connections.
> I think it is more accurate to say, "everything you put on out on the Internet _might_ never go away." Because my experience has been, a lot already has.
Oh you are absolutely correct, and I agree.
However when parenting, one cannot help being drawn to hyperbole from time to time. I'd rather have them at least consider the worst case scenario. ;)
Just wondering what an internet archive for usenet groups might have looked like. Back then, it was cool to have messages have a finite time limit before going away. Snapchat isn't an original idea. Now, unless you're Snap, it's anathema for a company to think that willingly removing user content would be a good idea.
Usenet archives exist
https://olduse.net/ Experience legacy usenet in real-time. You can subscribe to different start points and receive posts as they were sent, 40+ years ago.
Snap isn't a new idea but the motivation, to my understanding, is completely different. It was a technical limitation in the usenet days, both hdd space and bandwidth. Goodness I can still remember what one user on alt.binaries could do to our university network in the 90s.
I worked at AOL in the early 2000s and let me assure you, a lot of it did go away. I tried to rescue the club caribe code and it got erased with the last mainframes before i could. They had a lot of stuff backed up on tape but it was in dire shape and most of it get deleted in a datacenter migration.
I was there in the early 2010s and we did have older versions of AIM, netscape in an archive CVS (svn was the day to day system when I started). But then we moved to git and only stuff that had a designated owner got moved from cvs/svn to git so there was another round of losing old source code. And another in the migration to yahoo systems post merger.
> I've been thinking about this quite a lot recently as I've been trying to dig up information about 90's era dial-up bulletin board systems. It was a scene I was deeply immersed in at the time (or at least, one specific niche within it)
Say more!
I'm working on a blog article about my adventures on toll-free BBSes before I had access to the Internet. It's about halfway done, and I hope to have it ready to publish soon, somewhere between a week and a year from now.
I ran a couple of very local BBSes late beyond the hayday in the 14.4-56k timeframe. That got me into BBS software, which got me into ANSI Art, which got me into associations with warez groups, and that got me into association with various hacker collectives. Had it not been for the BBS scene I probably wouldn't work in technology today.
I'd love to read it when you're done!
The might or might not is a critical part of why the panopticon works..
I think I just start with this talk early, but it’s amazing how kids are willing to assume the best of intentions. “But why? Why would they do that?”, “Because suckering 7 year olds makes them money.”, “But why? That’s mean!”
This just means, they are well raised.
Sounds like you accepted it but did not outright say whether you're content with it. Do you think it was a little silly now or do you still stand by it? Basically, if you were to go back knowing what you do now, would you have still locked down social media use for your kids? What would you have done differently if anything?
Locking down algorithmic social media for kids/youth is an absolute no brainer for me. So many reasons, honestly. No regrets there, and they never had it so they didn't get addicted and don't miss it.
Maybe you're asking about the spotify chats though? It was challenging for me, yes. There were topics and discussions that moody kids would have that I now had a window into. It can be a bit scary as a parent to see that all without filters, but it was also an opportunity to check in with them and have conversations about it. Kids have all these feelings and conversations anyway, so it's just part of that age. My childhood was rough, so I'm just thankful it is not like that for them and they have people to talk to. As I parent of course I wish they'd come to me first, but I know I will never be their peer in that way.
I do wish I blocked short form video better, but that's more out of concern for their attention and my own aesthetic snobbery ;) I do significantly limit how much time they can spend watching it, and we all know its a "treat" akin to junk food. Sometimes they share it with me :)
Thanks for your reply. To me, kidhood is a developmental time where self-destructive habits have more time and malleability to course-correct. On the flip side it's a breeding ground for addiction.
I guess I'd rather kid tries to screw life up while parent has more leverage to fix it. But you could argue proactive preventative leverage is even better.
In my mind I think if a person really wants to explore something, they will find a way. If kid is susceptible to social media addiction, it will find its way in. Yes, it's more dangerous when young. Conversely if it happens later in life they're on their own to combat it, without having learned through experience. That was my thinking. May not be accurate.
If you could do things differently would you be more lax or even stricter, or were your restrictions just about right in hindsight?
Ohhhh.. I can just say that no parent makes it through the experience without regrets.
Also, it depends a lot on the kid, the relationship, etc. It was a fine line, these were important social interactions for them, but there was definitely risks to be made aware of and kids are famously bad at risk assessment.
So it was something I would monitor as best I could and check in with them on, but at some point you just have to trust them and hope any mistakes don't have overly severe consequences.
I was surprised last week to find that Spotify has turned in to full on social media/youtube now.
I left Spotify off of screentime limits for my son so that he could listen to music or books at bedtime, and found him watching "podcasts" which have full youtube style pages with videos and comments.
This was/is a long standing feature request to block podcasts and video podcasts completely. Even worse two years ago unrated podcasts were available to kids. Not quoting the stuff I could find there. Highly unsuitable to kids.
You can turn off videos for your own account and likewise for your childs account.
Zawinski's Law* except now it’s a social media messaging app.
“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.”
What's the meme about Google products and chat features?
He’s never coming over Dario!
Callback to a post yesterday [1] regarding Google attempting to siphon a little heart-to-heart from a user’s search query. I actually think this is a fitting next-iteration of Doctorow’s term- even though the two cases here are entirely parallel, it does capture the general feeling of being chased all over the web and across multiple apps in attempt to just be a human capable of making decisions!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49870367
Nobody stops to think "why not" when it is so easy to add certain features to software these days. But everyone wants to capture peoples attention and adding messaging is one way to do it.
Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.
Comments are two years old, however.
I actually love SoundCloud's timestamp based comments. It is pretty fun seeing someone's joyful reactions to a nice drop, beautiful vocals coming in, a brilliant lyrical phrase, etc. It's disappointing that this is not the primary mode of commenting on Spotify.
FYI: you can turn off video content in the family account settings (not the parental settings).
Spotify had Podcasts before they got Audiobooks in.
On the topic of bypassing school restrictions.
Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.
This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.
What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.
If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)
When i was around 13 the local news did a story about a school system BBS, and I happened to have a pen in hand when it flashed the number on the screen briefly, and it turned out to be a dedicated line for teachers. The thing is teachers never actually used it and there was a very active community of kids that dialed in on their own number. They were on a time limit though and I eventually shared the teacher line with a lot of them so we could chat 24-7. It was one of the few multiline BBS’s at the time so it ended up being kind of an HQ for people trading pirated software and stuff after the number spread around. I don’t think school staff ever looked at it.
I did this in high school. I hosted an SSH server at home on port 443 so it'd get through the school's filtering, then tunneled in and connected with VNC.
Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.
I used to put Ubuntu on a flash drive and boot the computer to that. Not sure if it helped bypass website restrictions.
Ahh, core memory unlocked. I did all kinds of stuff on the school computers out of boredom.
The most notable is probably cracking the admin password because I wanted to change the volume or something. (Seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time!)
The computers had all kinds of weird restrictions, including the panning being forcibly set way to the left to compensate for the school's crappy headphones -- a crime against humanity, you would surely agree, if you experienced it.
It took 30 seconds to crack, it was a short dictionary word and I remember being very disappointed with the sysadmin. But obviously I couldn't tell anyone about it...
Let me see what else... our school accounts had 200MB network storage, but this was too small for all the Portable Apps[0] I wanted to use. So I created some kind of "startup program" that downloaded and extracted them from my web server. I think it also changed the background and the Windows Theme...
https://portableapps.com/apps - still online, I see!
I think these days kids just have their own laptops though. That's no fun at all :)
That reminds me of how in zoos they put the food inside hard to open boxes so the animals don't go insane from boredom.
I put knoppix on a cd and since the filtering was implemented via a proxy server that was entirely voluntary to use… also bypassed the filtering.
Once I burned a bunch of Linux boot cds with unreal tournament on them and took over a computer lab to have a lan party. That was fun until the lab monitor got spooked that his monitoring system showed all the computers as turned off when clearly the lab was full…
In our high school, you could install the Halo: Combat Evolved demo so we would play LAN across the whole school. They eventually caught on and started deleting Halo from all the computers, so we would just have the installation file on a flash drive, install it, and then uninstall it when done.
All I had was Doom II over IPX.
IPX was before my day, but interesting to learn IPX was the main protocol before TCP/IP got popular
terminal were the OG dark mode. Nice hack to get around that!
I can't remember exactly what I did but I think passwords for windows 2000 were stored in something called a SAM file. I managed to get a copy of it and brute force it on my home machine. Password was the schools phone number. Got access to the whole network, network drives, teachers files. I was paranoid so I didn't poke around too much :)
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Me and my friends used to do this in middle school/high school with Google Docs.
We would share a Google Docs link with each other and use it to communicate, and then pretend we were doing homework
> Hannah Chinn: And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.
: DD
My wife teaches middle school and during the pandemic a lot of kids were sending messages to each other via Google Docs and then deleting them. Unbeknownst to them was the revision history functionality (which I believe resulted in phone calls to a few students from the school principal)
my son did this in 8th grade (last year) but I think it was a google slide deck. The teach asked all the kids in class to do a slide or something and then he figured out review comments or something and they all started a group chat more or less. I can't quite remember but he was very proud of himself when he showed me hah.
Yeah I was going to comment about this: how, for years now at this point, kids have worked around district-enforced security against chat sites/apps on their school-issued Chromebooks by using various Google Workspace apps and features.
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It's fascinating to see these online communities develop.
See also:
- The Slate comments. Here an author profiles the regular commentors that disparage his articles, and it's surprisingly wholesome [0]
- Odd Lots Discord chat. Odd Lots is a podcast about the economy, and has a massive Discord that has an entire life of its own [1]. There are long substack posts profiling some of the most prolific users [2]
[0] https://slate.com/life/2026/09/comments-commenters-slate-fri... ( https://archive.is/vs8OD )
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/business/odd-lots-podcast...
[2] https://mypowergrows.substack.com/p/posters-in-profile-davie
Since Twitch chat is just IRC, if we add up the chats of offline channels, it might be the most active IRC community today.
Thats a pretty clever work around… sharing a playlist and using the comments on a podcast as group chat, not sure I’d have come up with that. the kids are alright I guess, good for them.
The kids only know each other as commenters on a video podcast which just stitched together trending TikTok videos. Since the only consumers of such content are kids whose parents ban them from social media, they got to know each other in that podcast's comments. When the podcast was taken down the kids, who all add each other on Spotify, see the other playlists of the other kids (one named "Chat here") and they go to the podcast in that list and chat there.
"The goal is just to connect with people. You have nothing to talk about. You don't know each other very well. You're just seeing each other and acknowledging each other's presence"
This right here is ham radio in a nutshell. These kids need transceivers and should give morse code a try.
I think the biggest attraction is the formation of the group with no established processes. Nobody telling you "This is how things are done around here". Exactly the opposite of ham radio
It's the beginning of the rebirth of Web 1.0!
CB radio then.
ham radio is the coolest technology in the world but sadly mostly allows you to talk to old people who have the same attitude as stack overflow mods - "you're doing it wrong"
It's basically a walkie talkie with people who really care about enforcing HOA rules.
I've been getting involved with LoRa mesh networking lately and there's a lot of that ham attitude there too but it seems to lean a bit more toward the hacker side of things, despite a healthy fear of the FCC enforcement mechanisms.
Considering the reach of a HAM radio, the limited frequencies, and the consumption of airtime while transmitting, someone needs to enforce etiquette.
Its also likely the older folk operating in HAM radio space, have a background in communication operations when HAM was a far more common communication device.
HAM is still awesome, I find it very interesting with the long distance, remote, communication challenges some people partake in.
>This right here is ham radio in a nutshell.
At least in my area, Boomers have done a great job gatekeeping amateur radio by making it so unpleasant to use that nobody under the age of 40 is willing to engage with that community.
I've bounced off ham radio at least 3 times in my life, each time repelled by grouchy senior citizens with too much free time.
Every generation has their Reddit mods.
Except with ham radio, nearly everyone you encounter is that mod.
My son had an interest in radios and what not, so our neighbor gave us all his old equipment.
First conversation was a very grumpy old man telling my 10 year old why he's an idiot and how the liberals and youth are ruining the country via not following unwritten rules in ham radio operation.
I've never seen my child lose interest in something so very quickly.
It is talk back AM radio without the presenter to moderate.
My actual ham radio club mostly chats on discord and email. We don't even show up much at the weekly nets. Radio is mostly for participating in events like pota, contesting and emmcomm.
I went on Spotify to check out these playlists. I very quickly found that they have “corn” playlists that abuse the fact that you can upload videos for podcasts. A few are a screen recording of a windows Home Screen with a tiny video player in the corner playing adult videos. I had a laugh, nature always erm finds a way
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I remember lobbies in StarCraft for maps that used some best match algorithm to recreate porn images with map terrain tiles such that the image would appear in the maps mini map. It was quite a lot of work to view a single, tiny image in all the wrong colors.
Not a secret example by any means of the imagination, but th talk of using a comments section as a group chat reminds me of a small website I came across which did exactly that. The people running it were on free hosting (so couldn't set up a forum script), but did have comments on their pages through Disqus or something like that. So, they basically treated the comments on each page as a forum, with comment subthreads as the equivalent to topics or discussions.
It was surprisingly active too. If this was a 'typical' forum, it would have been a really active one.
But yeah, if you don't have a forum, group chat or chat room, a comments section will do in a pinch.
Anything on the internet will eventually be turned into a childrens' chatroom.
Do you allow them acces to your school's website? Guess what's under one of these forgotten posts about a singing competition from 2012. Do you let them access some math exercise platform? Does it allow sending people invitations to work together and also let you set group names? That's a chatroom right there.
I think the coolest one I've heard about is prison tablets that didn't restrict access to WiFi settings, so people would set up personal hotspots and use access point SSIDs for communication between cells.
As an adult, I used Google Sheets as a group chat among my friends. We had different employers with different internet restrictions. Before that we used a self-hosted Telnet chat server, until someone's employer blocked that.
It was a lot more fun than Discord, Slack, or any other dedicated chat client. With Sheets, we'd do fun little gags and bits in the spreadsheets. Everything ended up being really personalized and owned by us. Now we just send boring messages on WhatsApp. I miss the old ways.
It’s a bit weird. I look back on such things with nostalgia, but at the same time I find it hard to imagine myself doing it again.
And a bit weird for me that there are folks old enough to be nostalgic for things that still seem brand new to me. Occasional reminders that I'm older than I realize.
Not only kids. A few years ago I discovered my ex-wife was cheating on me. We went to therapy and she swore she didn't have any more contact with the guy. Later I found that she was using Spotify in exactly this way to communicate with her affair partner for months after she said had no contact.
That's both really shitty and low-key genius.
I've seen this in a few apps! essentially all you need is an editable text field and some slightly social feature and a handful of kids will collude to use it to circumvent restrictions (of either screen time or school network blocks). Sleep apps, meditation apps, music apps, etc
My kids and their friends certainly spend a lot of time trying to get things to work. My 16 year old found some vpn client he could get running on his school laptop but he can only get past the filters by connecting to a particular gateway outside the United States (i have no idea how he figured out a client that can work nor the IP to connect to). He also showed me how he takes a thermos, puts his phone in it, pads with paper towels and then drops that in his lunch bag. When they go through the metal detectors and bag inspection (yes, includes lunch bags) they shake the thermos, nothing rattles around, and clear him through. Now he has his phone at lunch.
His HS (Townview SEM in Dallas) is ridiculous and run by less than the best to put it mildly so I don't really mind as long as he handles up on grades. heh once i was dropping him off to a line of about 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector. We went to a coffee shop instead.
Fuck. And people wonder why some people don't even want to have kids.
But those are all reasons to want kids!
The most of the comment, yeah. I was reacting to
> 50 kids standing in the rain in maybe 40F weather waiting to go through the metal detector
The ingenuity of youth always makes me smile. It brings me back to my youth and the things we used to get up to, in retrospect it was a huge learning experience for me. Learning how to think outside the box, finding ways things could be utilized outside of their intended use, etc.
I was a teenager in the early 2000s and my parents were quite strict with when and how long I could use the shared family computer to access the internet.
I had my own computer in my bedroom, but the internet was only available on the family computer (256k via a PCI modem). I really really wanted the freedom to use the internet without a curfew, so I started researching how to connect two computers wirelessly... I ended up purchasing two 11mbs USB WLAN adapters for a few hundred dollars each(!) and paired them so I could share the internet connection. Wireless LAN was almost unheard of in those days, so my parents had no idea what I was up to.. although they eventually became suspicious when I stopped wanting to use the family computer yet insisting they keep it powered on.
I grew up "doing computers" and skateboarding. Looking back, the similarities are endless in all the ways you mention above.
Both formed ones ways of thinking when viewing the world.
What a burn!
Ella: I think we just looked for podcasts that didn't have many comments.
Ira Glass: I see. So you picked NPR because it didn't seem very popular.
Ella: Yeah...
I listened to This American Life from the first episode until they abandoned their mobile app. It was so easy for me to use it and mark things. I even emailed them about it; they said it cost too much to operate. It didn't make sense to me. I guess I will go back to listening to them again on Apple Podcasts. I even exported my playlist with data from their old app; not sure how I will sync with the Apple Podcasts app, though... Another challenge for Fable to solve, I guess.
These always happen, whenever you try to block something, people will find an alternative, sometimes using email drafts with shared login to avoid sending an email and gets detected, other times console chats, and now comment sections, and others will follow. It’s why these things (allowing or disallowing to access the internet or PC or whatever) should be done at the family level, not the state, the state has no business to decide how to parent your kids.
Except that parents have no power whatsoever to effectively prevent kids coming into contact with harmful algorithms, sites eliciting dark patterns etc. Parents don't have power over multi billion dollar companies that have their stakes in harvesting the attention of kids. Only governments can blanket ban these things. At this point the responsibility should not be placed on parents but on companies.
A kid can follow a basic “todo list” tutorial and open a port on your home router then get friends to chat on that. In that case, how is the government enforcing a ban? We’re expecting some agency to do constant port scans on all its citizens to look for anything allowing writes?
The responsibility is on parents. We can try to push some aspects onto government but that will not reduce any responsibility of parents.
I'm not sure I understand the distinction. You're saying that kids will always get around blocking software, unless it's coded by their family? That's a wild proposition.
"I would say that I'm definitely a bit hard to get to know because I don't know a lot about myself yet. But I think if you do get to know me, you'll find out I'm a pretty cool person."
Such an excellent line from a young person.
These unaligned near frontier human agents have escaped containment and are out of control!
i think that's a meme. My youngest says this and follows it with "how does a missile know where it is? it knows where it is because it knows where it isn't..." and on and on and on and on.
so exhausting to listen to this but i think this is where he and his crew gets it. https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ
This is a great, somewhat vintage meme. Makes me happy kids still get a kick out of it!
>secret group chat, etc.
I have often thought about how I could put steganographic techniques into application in the comments I've left sprinkled around the Internet over the past decades, so while it looks like I'm commenting on some relevant topic, I've just given myself 64 bytes of read-only memory, or so, to stash some magic message to myself in the future.
Just a thought, though ..
Presumably it would say
You can add links to posts and add meaningless query params in whatever encoding you desire. Usually long urls are truncated and you don't really see them when visiting the website. Larger data is done with images and videos.
I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.
I'm IRL friends with some people I got to know that way back in the 2000s. We went through many a mod raid and migration to a new obscure board together.
This is the first thing that came to mind. I remember how frustrated I was when they started cracking down on this behavior.
I went through this same experience moderating the comment section of a business news site nearly 20 years ago. I think they needed to find a site not blocked by the firewall in the school computer lab.
Islamist terrorists have been doing similar things, starting with unsent emails in draft.
The Iranian revolution was due to messages spread on cassette tape. It's all Phillips's fault.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xR5rKr-p6lc&ra=m
...and the occasional director of the CIA to his girlfriends... la tee dah...
Peaches!
I can almost hear the next agent swarm furiously brainstorming how to most credibly steganographically write like middle schoolers.
First the chat agents, now the kids!
We clearly haven’t solved “alignment” for kids yet, what makes us think we’re going to be able to do it with agents?
It would be nice to have larger context windows for old geezers.
In some ways it reminds me of XKCD #1305 "Undocumented Feature" [0]
[0] https://xkcd.com/1305/
Ever tried joining an IRC channel on any of the many servers with lenient policies on moderation etc, based on the channels name/ description? Sort of a similar experience..
If you are not familiar with This American Life (or even if you are!) I suggest listening to this story instead of reading - hard to beat Ira’s delivery.
Canva is a group chat for students at the local school. The share function of projects as “channels”, comments for text, and slides a surface for sharing media.
Ironic that this is the same hack AI agents seem to be using now to communicate sandbox escape tricks to one another https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/openai-agents-discu...
The kids are breaking out of their sandboxes and are using discussion boards to communicate in secret. Sounds agentic.
This reminds me of the Block Chat story from Habitat Chronicles.
https://habitat-chronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of...
Reminds me of using Google Docs comments for project chat back in the day. Always find a way to make a tool work.
I really dislike the font on this website. It renders extremely misaligned at small sizes, or is that just my browser?
My browser too. Letters are all offset up/down by 1px:
https://i.imgur.com/1NDF3n6.png
Peak HN comment :-)
Show HN: I hated the really small font on this website so I coded a fix for it.
you can just use Reader view/mode, most of the browsers have it nowadays (though still not excuse for using bad font, though I find it OK on this particular website)
Just a lil' userscript.
When they started the laptop program in my junior high school back in the early 2000s we’d communicate via broadcasted network name. not just the nerds! Just like the OpenAI agents! Message dead drops and all
This text feels like it was written by 14 year olds. Im having a hard time following in text form. I assume because its a transcript?
Kids will turn anything into a chat room. My nephew has this Google doc all his friends use to chat in in school. They just type in the page.
Is he aware that administrators can see what they are typing?
https://www.gaggle.net/safety-management-google
It turns out so many kids are up to this sort of thing. Honestly, I would have been absolutely convinced they were bots.
Sort of reminds me of "Party Lines" (No, not the selective ringing, multiple subscriber/line service) used by kids in the 1970s. "Party Lines" or test lines allowed multiple callers to dial in like a conference bridge. Seemed to be used extensively by kids to just chat or hang out via the telephone network.
More info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy9zziwcV2w
Kids have done rogue. Stop the trainings!!
“The moratorium on new kids needs to be indefinite and worldwide. There can be no exceptions, including for governments or militaries. We need to be willing to destroy a rogue middle school by airstrike.”
The next generation needs to be paced.
Chat Here YC26
Gangnam style YouTube video comments and my GME fellows assemble!
In Australia, my kids are using Google Classroom and Pages as chat apps.
In Iran, we do this kind of thing a lot during our internet shutdowns.
Read the headline too quickly and thought it was about AI agents...
Reminds me of the old slashdot post from 25yrs ago that people still chat on
Remember the story behind firebase creation?
At last, it wasn't AI agents!
This is what misalignment looks like
Just like sid=trolltalk on Slashdot.
Stop giving ideas to agents...
the kids <---> agent axis is strong
My son at 11 was targeted by a pedophile on spotify's comments. Thought it was safe app to allow, just music/podcasts. nope.
Hang on, are our kids learning from AI agents? Do we have a child alignment problem? Do we need to put our kids in a sandbox. At this rate our kids are going to out live us, I for one, am panicking.
Now we know where the "rogue" AI agents got the ideas from.
Well now all the agents will have this in their training data, so expect them to come calling in the future :-) :-)
Now we have rogue kids escaping their sandbox :)
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Alternate reality: AI agents break their "alignment" and escape sandbox using Spotify comments. /s
Tell me again about how we need to keep children off social media....
They tried to impose age verification on OS
They are still trying to force that anti-privacy bullshit on everyone.
The problem is for-profit corporate social media.
Fediverse has never hired thousands of psychologists to gamify everything.
Fediverse hasn't added adverts to sell really seedy or blatantly illegal products.
Fediverse hasn't engaged in genocide in Myanmar or Rohinga, or anywhere else.
Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
But Facebook/Meta, X, and others definitely have.
Edit: for those of you who -1'ed it, where am I wrong?
I agree with your post overall, but it's worth noting that most frontends for fedi are still based on Twitter, Instagram, etc. You get similar dark UX patterns like infinite scrolling in feeds or displaying like counts on posts. It's also hard to not copy these things now because they're so normalized. If you intentionally designed the frontend differently, people may just dismiss it as weird and different.
You're wrong. The mental harm of social media has nothing to do with any of that.
> Fediverse doesn't run mass psychology experiments on unsuspecting users.
Only thing I ever hear about Mastodon is that you can't say or do anything without random other servers disconnecting you or random commenters yelling at you to add trigger warnings because you posted a picture of food. So I would say that being emotionally abused by German Linux users is in fact a mass psychology experiment.
I have been using Mastodon since 2019 across multiple instances. The things you are talking about happen very rarely in actual use, I've never once had a problem with any of them. The signal to noise ratio on mastodon is higher than any other competing platform I've used.
The biggest node in the fediverse is run by Meta.
I didn't downvote, but I am having trouble connecting your comment to the one you're responding to.
The whole social media and under-18 argument isn't a problem with all social media.
Its a problem with for-profit social media. The companies use gamification to addict and create terrible trends for everyone involved.
Mastodon, peertube, lemmy, and federated media doesn't do any of these gamblification, gamification, psychological attacks, and more.
To be fair, the techniques should be banned by the FTC for deceptive practices, for everyone. But the kids angle is what's being gravitated towards.
It was bad for kids even in the BBS days.[1] The things you mentioned merely made it worse.
Put another way, it's as bad as your kids texting with random strangers. I know in the last decade the focus has been on all the big tech addiction mechanisms, but people were warning against them well before those came into play.
[1] It was also great for some kids in those days. That doesn't take away from the risks.
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Good parenting. This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
I'll pretend for a minute that you are right and it's a parenting issue.
Now what? Apparently most parents are bad so what do you do?
You mandate parents to attend training and educations, in fact, this is done in many countries even before they get married let alone having kids. You make it the spotlight, the current hot new thing, that parents need to learn how parent, it’s mentioned on ads and TV or podcasts or whatever, a full campaign, instead of wasting all these money on political campaigns or corporate ones that brings nothing of value, or instead of funding entertainment industry with who knows say 10bn from tax payers, make it 5bn and the rest goes into teaching and training parents, not just for the kids, but also to be a good family, that’s an investment definitely worth it. There are many ways but obviously it’s the least priority, because it’s in the interest of the state to keep it like this, to justify later when laws are passed that violate people privacy and rights.
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
Do you advance to struggle sessions and incarceration for noncompliant parents?
You start with:
> This is not a technical or legal issue, this is parenting one.
And then go ahead by proposing it is enforced via legislation:
> You mandate parents to attend training and educations
Well, if you wanna go with legal mandates, possible, but the mandate I mentioned up there more of social mandate, a social responsibility. And for the other replies above as I can’t reply to all, sessions can be done on parents pace online, this is not the 90s anymore, or through employments, or other means, and not participating for example can result on losing the family benefits they collect from the tax dollar. Again, these are just examples on top of my head, but the point in here that this should be the parents/custodian responsibility, if they lack knowledge or training, they get it, if they don’t want to, they get penalized, but it’s in noway the state to decide if your kids open the PC/phone at night or access this service or not.
lmao or what?
We absolutely need to make efforts to limit kids' exposure to addictive social media mechanisms.
People aren't generally against kids using the Internet to communicate; they are against giant tech companies using children as a captive audience without regard to how their decisions might hurt them.
If kids are misusing a comments feature as a general-purpose chat room, good for them. They figured out how to manipulate the system instead of letting the system manipulate them.
Regardless, we need to regulate social media so that it doesn't harm children, and we need to do so without sacrificing the privacy of every adult (age-gates don't work).
This is why we need to rename "social media" to the more accurate "antisocial media". I think everyone reasonable wants kids to be social with each other.
Yeah, the Trump approach of renaming things to resolve complex problems has a lot of merit to it.
> Before I tell you about the first thing, I just want you to remember our brains were still developing when we thought this was so funny.
Are we seriously going to keep saying stuff like this to enculturate young people?
I used to love NPR (I suppose my brain was still developing), but it's offhand comments like this that show too much ulterior motive and keep driving me away from ever listening again.
This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR. The person who wrote that is a TAL producer, not affiliated with NPR.
Also, were you trying out some new vocabulary? enculturate is not appropriate in the context you used it, and it’s not clear what exactly you were trying to convey, other than your own grumpiness, which came through loud and clear.
"This American Life is an independent program, not produced or distributed by NPR."
TAL is independently produced, but distributed by PRX() for broadcast to NPR, and NPR is partially financing it by paying for the right to air it.
PRX also funded by Corporation for Public Broadcasting; this is all a somewhat incestuous, government financed form of independence.
Your information is out of date. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was disbanded in January.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/05/business/media/corporatio...
> enculturate
I think he meant inculcate as, presumably, an "eggcorn"...
I think “indoctrinate” is more likely.
In rereading it, I agree. :)
What is the ulterior motive?
This sounds like lightly self deprecating nod to something cringey done in their earlier career. What have I missed?
I don't get it, what's the issue with the phrase?