 Welcome to the annual DEF CON convention. This meeting was held in exciting Las Vegas, Nevada from July 9th through the 11th, 1999. This is video tape number 43. Text files, G files, and log files, remembering the 1980s through ASCII. I guess I'll begin talking. You all know this is text files of the 1980s. Should I talk with this, sir? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. Hey, we're going in the hallway. You're missing an incredible speech by a master of ceremonies. No, it's not going to work. Okay. Anyone want to figure out which of these makes this stop feedbacking? Either one. Do you want another one? Turn either one off. I'll tell you where to put it. They did the schedule around. They just didn't want to tell anybody, and that's fine too. My name is Jason Scott. A lot of people know me, well, people who do care, know me as the sysop of the Works BBS, which was a text file BBS from, well, there's two works. There was 1986 to 1988, when my dad found the big phone bill, and then 1989 to about 1996, it was run by a kid named Dave Ferret, who screwed the code up so bad, and he ran, and that's when I think most people started to learn about it. That's when it became a CDC board, and I was just kind of sysop emeritus. Before that, there was a golden streak of about 1982 to about 1986, where I was known as the slipped disk, and I can see by the sea of faces. I was forefront in your lives. Anyway, but right now, the main project I do besides my regular job is working on a site called textfiles.com, which I hope some of you have browsed, or if not, basically what I've been working on is, I'm trying to collect thousands and thousands of text files from the 1980s BBS scene, and assemble them in a somewhat cohesive manner, separated by somewhat arbitrary topics with descriptions that'll cause you to want to get to them. It's going along pretty well, and I said, what the heck? I hope to speak at DEF CON about it. Maybe I can get some more people who are interested in it. Today, I'll be talking mostly a little bit about the site and a little bit of reminiscing and a little bit about why I really got into the whole business. I'm one of these guys who is really anal, which you'd find out if you went to the site. I have my speech kind of out in front of me, so I'm one of these guys who's going to keep looking down. I'm sorry about that, but I'll try to make eye contact as much as I can. Just to get an idea, to me, there's a difference between having a computer and having a computer with a modem. It makes a big difference. I just want to call out a year and go back down and just hold up your hand if you had a computer with a modem in that year. We'll just go back, and I'm sure we're going to get some low numbers here. But anyway, but 1995, who had a modem? 1994, let's get down 1990. 1988, more people came in. 1985, now we're starting to... 1982, all right. And a couple of people apparently want to eat BBS. 79, there you go. In 2005, you went back into a unit server considered a computer? Well, I mean, it's a computer, but it's not... It wasn't mobile. It's out of my scope, you know? In other words, for me, what I'm talking about are like, you're a kid or a guy, you got a modem, you log in. Okay. That's what I'm talking about, too. But yeah, I mean, basically, if you dial in. Because I mean, what I'm dealing with here are dial ins. Well, that's not entirely true. And sometimes you serve... I didn't pay for it. I used to rant about that $10 a frigging hour and more if it was $1,200 bought. Thank you. So I used to go on, I used to go download all of Moira's stuff, download all the Insight for Pedia. That was a real jerk. Anyway, so basically, some people might wonder, maybe some, why I got into textfiles.com. Basically what happened was a while ago, I was kind of sitting around on my computer. I'm one of these guys who just kind of browses randomly for hours on end. And I suddenly wondered, you know, what ever happened to some of those old guys I used to know and all the BBSs that I knew? And hey, I'll bet there's some really great site out there and I can learn all about what happened and everything. So, you know, booted up Alta Vista, stuck in Sherwood Force II, stuck in the history of K Cool Dudes, stuck in stuff about Count Nibble. And to my surprise, there was like nothing. There was just this dearth. Occasionally there'd be a little frack magazine mention of somebody, but I don't know, it was like there was nothing. I was just astounded. There was absolutely nothing. So I went back to my dad's house, grabbed my old text file collection. I started kind of building things up from there. And, you know, right now I'm sitting at about 18,000 text files are online. I've got 45,000 left to look at. And that's that I know of. There's actually a few people giving me CD-ROMs and 50 Meg archives by mail. You know, basically for me to sort through. And so it's actually, I've pretty much got my years set. I don't think I'll be doing much else this year because it's really, you know, important to me. And actually, you know, he's just saying hi. Hello, hello. The, well, you know, a lot of people might say, great, so you looked up Sherwood Forest 2 and you got nothing. Why didn't you just go back to Slash Dot and be done with it? And for me, there was actually three main reasons why. Number one, I'm really into subcultures. I think subcultures are really fascinating things, all the different people. You have the people who know what they're doing, the battles, everything. And 1980s, especially, and even now into the 90s, there was this very special time that pretty much a vast majority of how this subculture communicated is digital and was saved. And if you know where to find it, if you get it from, you know, garages. I mean, there's kids now, people like me and stuff. We got a stack of 5.25 inch floppies. In fact, actually, I brought one. Just in case, in case anyone has never seen one of these, because they kind of phased them out. Look at it. It's flat and it's weird. It's floppy. It's a floppy disk. Note that I also have the second notch, because I wanted it to be double-sided. It has 143K aside on an Apple II. Actually, more if you took out the... I did not pay the $45 for the disk density that they sold in the back where you go, kachankre, that's for some guy in office supply who's living in a guy from the office supply business living in a Rubin now. But anyway, yeah, I just went back and grabbed all my old stuff and put it up. And, you know, a lot of people have that and a lot of people do have this past. So that was one reason. The other is that I really like to read. I really like reading. I like just picking up lots of books and just reading them all. And for me, with the text files, I'm reading all this... Some of this stuff is really fascinating. Some of it's really badly spelled and boring. But even then, when it's a rant by some kid, he's 13 and he's talking about he's the master of the universe and this other kid, he sucks. All he ever uses is a Commodore 64. He is a dork. I hate him. Don't pay attention to him. He's not a leak. I can't buy that kind of drama. So, you know, I actually do honestly enjoy this stuff. This isn't a means to an end. It is the end for me. I mean, it's basically what I like. And the third one, which is actually the more emotional one, is that it is my childhood. I was born in 1970. And my father gave me my first computer. It was a Commodore PET, which I actually still own. Rockin' 8K of memory. Yeah! To set drive and a little 5-inch screen that's kind of not happy now. Triple E port. Yes, which I never got to use because I had no idea what the hell that thing was. It was just the thing. But you could flip it up like a car and put a little car hood thing. And the thing just flipped up and there's your board. You can't do anything because you're a foolish kid. And then we moved. We moved up to an IBM PC XT with a 2400 broad internal modem. His dad took from work. Not bad for you two. It was good. I was Mr. Elite Boy. People forget the board wars. People forget these... People, back when it was like, dude, we're 2400 only. Well, no, the thing is 2400 only. They weren't going to let the riffraff with the 300 broad acoustic modems on. They wanted it, you know, 2400. You want to get those couple dozen characters a little quicker, especially good for wears. I think that continued up... I don't know if it actually made it up to 28.8, but it definitely made it up to 19.2 that you had 19.2 only trading boards. I think after that, pretty much everyone had it, so it really wasn't that elite. You raising your hand for something? No. It did happen for a while. Good. I like being corrected because I'm being a historian, and if I sit there and go, yeah, it was this, if I read it out of Stephen Levy's Hackers or something, and it's just kind of sitting in my mind, it's complete crap, I want to know. That's very important to me, because if I'm speaking from a position of authority on that file, I don't want people who weren't there to look at it and think, that's the way things were. If I'm doing it wrong, I really don't like... I like being corrected. So correct me if you... No, that's not the way it was. I've actually had several screaming phone calls that way. But yeah, from about 82, I was running a PCXT. Hey there. I missed that, but I do know what you're talking about. I did see it mentioned on things. 16.8 HST, that was the question. That was the 16.8 HST. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the funny part. You have all these people who are arguing because they have the most badass transport protocol on their system. And you... Forget you. You would... So... Well, that's the thing. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I... Okay. Yeah, so... What I call the model of history there is that people... When people speak from... Basically from a position of authority and they're speaking about this is the way it was, especially in a published medium. I don't like the idea of someone being turned off. They read five, six files and they're like... They read my descriptions like, this guy has no clue. Now I like to track people down. A lot of people from that time have come to me and I've said, is this how it was? I'm just an interviewing guy. Hopefully asking them questions. But most of them really didn't expect to be asked, which is kind of nice. Most of them are like, oh, that's the old stuff. So, just to... Just to clarify, when you say text file, especially the people who were born in, you know, 85 and so on who, like are here now, you say text files, they're like, yeah, great, what? What's text file? Who cares? It's not a binary file. That's great. So I just wanted to define what a text file was as I see it. The way I see it, when BBSes were around, you had BBS messages on some of the people. And you had files. You could upload and download binary and text files. And some people had facts, granted many of them illegal, but, you know, they had facts or stories or something that they thought was more important than the board they were on, particularly. And they had something they wanted to pass on way down in the Apple subboard somewhere. It was some file, some hack, some story, some exploit that would basically, you know, had to get out there. So they would write it as a text file, put it up into the file section, and people would download it. And so when I say a text file, I'm talking about, and so you get into the classic text file, which I want to mention, a lot of people call me old school. And I don't particularly like the term because people seem to use it for everything that they weren't a part of. And I go on, you know, I'm browsing a lot of sites and people go, dude, I remember old school, 92 back when it was just us and the VGA cards. And, you know, and they're being honest. I mean, you know, it's seven years ago. Of course it's old school to them. Somebody suggested classic. So I don't know. Maybe I'll use classic from now on. It's a classic hacker. But once again, then you get guys these calling me an embryo. And that's about that. But the, you know, for me, the classic text file, I don't have any slides, but if you can imagine. Basically, if you had a text file, the classic G file, and G file, as far as I can determine, comes from Apple software that had general files where you could download, you know, and they would stick all their text files into the general file section. And they won't start calling them G files into T files. And then people start adding Zs at the end and all. What the hell. But the, for the, for the text, for the standard text file, you know, you get downloaded off the Defcon BBS. You know, it's 64, it's a 64K Apple. I actually have a BBS set where the guy proudly claims, he's got an Apple 2, 48, got the 80 column card in. He's got two Apple 2 disks with Mac cell discettes. This is part of his system features. Is I'm using Mac cell discettes in the disk drive. Anyway, so you're on the Defcon BBS and of course, you just want to get on. So of course, you're constantly breaking into chat and dark tangent gets up from watching Wargames and lets you on. And you, you go right to the file section through the BBS section. This is going to be more kids. So you go right to the file section, you get this big, you download one. How to hack Defcon. And it's got a big square at the top. It's got this big text graphic square made of equal signs and dashes, later, you know, you get ampersands and stars and stuff. And it says, how to do it by Nightwing or, you know, on these incredible names that kids used to come up with. The mad phone man. Skate the skin head. Backage in 003 of the Knights of Fargo 4a. I heard the reason that he called that. And this may be crap, but this is one of those stories that kind of goes up. I'd love to be corrected. Supposedly the Fargo 4a group, where a group of phone freaks who, one day, connected to Fargo's main center for their Directory Assistance Operators on Alliance Teleconference, which I'm sure they didn't pay for, and using a bunch of keyboards, just like talking on the phone like this and saying, look, we're over at this office and we're doing this and we want to, you know, it's very important. And just social engineering these people, they convinced them that it was a test day and that, oh, the other center will be taking over for the day. So we wish for you to go home so that you'll, you know, because you have to do some testing on your equipment. And they did it. And they, supposedly that's what it was. They were blown away, they got them all to leave for like a few hours, and there was no Directory Assistance in Fargo because they were all gone home. Anyway, that's more about BIOC later. But so yeah, you have the big old huge, big old huge square with the text graphics and then right underneath it, the disclaimer. And you have the classic disclaimer, just, you know, the author will not take any respect to informational purposes. That's a little bit big for these kids. The author will not, the author will take no responsibility for this file. It was like boilerplate, you know, but I don't know of any cases where that ever came into play. I mean, maybe I missed one. Oh, do you know of one? I don't have the methods, but I mean, but what I'm saying is, yeah. um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, uh, anarchy for fun and profit. Yeah. And, uh, except it was the disclaimer said that, uh, he actually took responsibility for everything he's done. Yeah. Right. He never got in trouble. He's very sad about it actually. We had a very, very, he and I are, very old friends. He was obsessed up on the works and he's actually rather ashamed of that file than you'd ever knew. I mean, ashamed of that file and he really doesn't want it to get out and so it's really been a big issue for me because I really don't want to be the role of sensor. I hate that. I hate going on to a place and it's like here's a file but we're showing it free for historical purposes but we can't show you what's in it because it's you know you won't be able to handle the ingredient list you know and I just I hate being that it's just not the role I like. So in terms of that one I do know that that's veggie personally never got any problems but that a lot of other people were a problem including a Hartford BBS operator who went to jail for a short period of time because of an overzealous Hartford prosecutor who said and dragged him on over that text file and that veggie called him in jail and said I'm really sorry because by that time our BBS the works BBS had deleted the file we deleted it long before because he looked at this is stupid stupid file to have up so we got rid of it and I didn't even know about that. You had a question sir? What about the Frack Text File and Log archive? Are you speaking of the Phoenix project? The OLD Phoenix project well I have currently the three 200k text files the 200k log file examples that they did I ran into Mr. Bloodaxe yesterday and had a nice chat with him and he said why are you doing really good work do you want all of them and I said yes I would like all of them so hopefully he'll give them to me because he said they you know it's been long enough the product is dead let's let's just you know give it out and so yeah that I mean believe it or not I get really excited about stuff like that I'm really like an archaeologist like recently about two months ago I was kind of wandering around in some place called the Chavin BBS Chavin.com in their FTP section they had Apple Box they a lot and I couldn't get them down there was like some weird thing I talked to the guy who was on one of their little mugs they had and he said oh hey let me give them to you and so he uploaded them and I had about 20 soft docs these just to mention soft docs are basically text files that were transcriptions of manuals so when you pirated something you also include the soft docs so you know you press control to make the control fire and um and suddenly I went from 20 to having 700 like cat fur docs and the 80 docs and everything and I was excited it was two in the morning I'm supposed to go home I'm gonna go work the next day I'm like no I'm gonna stay here I'm gonna stay up all night totally screw up my schedule I'm gonna go and make all these text files go up and I had forgotten that's a lot of what it was for me back in the 80s a lot of it was like I'm on the South Pole they have so much bomb shit I'm gonna take it all and I didn't you know nothing to read or trade it was just I'm gonna get all the files um so yeah well anyway after this glaring then you had the stuff usually at the bottom there were six billion greets I just wanted to mention that as well greets out to this coldest bbs they rock they've got the stuff that actually goes on now actually quite a bit that that standard thing but when I say text file that's what I'm talking about I'm not talking about source code or stuff although now I do ask for bbs messages and log the files and things like that for historical purposes so unfortunately text files.com is really expanded in its um mission to the point now that I mean I'm gonna probably need a staff what's up oh sure the shirt no it's okay it's it weeds out the unfaithful ones I can I can see who'll sell me out for this shirt yeah man I'll buy the tape it'll be okay so yeah oh man so um okay historically historically let's let's see if you go with my theory my theory is I was trying to find the original text file what's the original text file you have my idea my theory this book is called steal this book it was written by a gentleman named abby hoffman who also went by the name Barry Fried when he was running from the government for several years before he let himself in the book is basically a call to smash the state it's basically a a list of ways to rip off the system rip off the bell rip off uh telephones rip off um supermarkets get printed for free go out and do stuff and the thing with abby was abby was a really funny guy this was a chicago seven dude who brought that pig in and he was you know he always he um he mentions in the book that you know there are people who people who know theater without politics or politics without theater are doomed in both and that's chosen a lot of his stuff he has this real um um it's just a really light attitude about the whole thing hey we're going to smash this system yay and um like I said you know a lot of people think abby makes some cringe and horror and stuff but interestingly enough abby was part of a small part of a little zine called the youth international party line which was a newsletter of the yippies the youth international party and it was basically very political but it also had a lot of things and how to rip off the phone company uh big thing back then was the war tax that the phone company was actually taking an extra little tax to pay for um i think it's the vietnam war might have been a different war moving on and then the blinded and it didn't go away and everyone was like ah we will get free phone service because of this and um you actually see a lot of that you know you see that stuff with like touch tone you know and they still charge for touch tone even though it's cost them less to have touch tone um right they charge for stuff that it helps them so but anyway so this youth international party line about um a lot of the stuff was basically these text files on it about how to do different things the phone code every year hey let's get the phone code out and um yes i'm so sorry no it's okay one other piece of business the best part about working for this msa is just think you want to and don't come to you i think i'd like oh they're here thank you here's my resume we know um anyway so he went from yipple and um al bell who was his co-editor said you know let's really go for the technical side now he was like no let's go with the political side so al bell broke off and started tap the technological assistance program and some people are open have you heard of tap was it a tap a really is that it you haven't heard of tap there's a guy named the fixer freaking dot is cool dot net um and he has digitized all the issues of yipple and tab and put them on a cd rom for like 10 bucks with like 500 text files that no looks like a couple text about a thousand text files on it really nice deal um i i tried to get him to come and he wouldn't come but um it's a really fascinating fascinating um magazine it really had a really good sense of humor that was kind of duplicated in 2600 to me see 2600 are all those young snotty upstarts that were trying to push off tap and tap had a whole problem with a fire and um the editor at the time i think it was Tom Edison at the time and then it was Cheshire catalyst um basically said okay i think we're done here my apartment got burned down and so you know for me i'm claiming mr. Hoffman is the father of the text file um we'll we'll see if that holds up over time um so um i don't know why when i was a kid i really wanted text files only i think the reason why was because i had a pc and a lot of the boards were apples so i didn't have any use for these wares i didn't have any use for the commodore boards i was one of these kids who get the bbs list and just go down it sequentially you know oh this board it's a police board they're talking about something okay i'm on you know this board is unix this board is this is on commodore board i don't care i'll just go down them all i love them yeah i got a question uh are you posting are you having a posting file for characters that's like a cct on world files the closest i have that's that's yeah you're starting to get to these basic basic architectural problems i've been running into um right now all of my files are ascii except i have a lot of ibm files with that idiotic second 128 characters with the little lines and the little stuff that they did incredible stuff with but oh screw everyone else and um i have ansy files because i had ansy files but i don't have any c64 files i don't have i don't have any ansy music i don't have any i don't have any of those and i you know i feel i really feel like it's outside my area i am so close but i'm a taskie i don't have to think about that forever that's the one that had bob in it didn't it that was the s team yeah which i don't have like again i start to feel after a while like the record store with the computer software and you got the kid with the six pierce things he's like yeah i guess it's compatible you know after a while i'm like i can't look at it even you know i can look at ansy and i can look at the ibm graphics i can't look at the other stuff i don't have anything there i'm sure eventually we'll have the text files dot com testing lab what if it's been transferred to ask i got my hands on it because i give a lot of my stuff from outside so if somebody took it and took the time to do that like the apple docks this guy had it on a unix box so he took them from a whole ton of apple disks he did that conversion work and i was benefiting off that conversion work and thanking him for it so you know that's about as close as i get um but um yeah so basically as far as i can tell i was just taking text files because it was the one thing i could take and after a while i just really started digging them and i had like files and files and interestingly enough back when i was 13 everyone i put them on was called the works it was a the works this kind of text file the works this kind of text folks that always want to run a board called the works and um it was actually only three or four later three or four years later that i actually ran one so um just to mention what some of those bbs's were i'm just gonna grab three because i mean i call hundreds and hundreds some of them just sank into obscurity after seconds after i went on them some of them you know i was on for years and years and i absolutely loved um first bbs you never forget the first bbs you were cosysop on when the guy gave you cosysop access and you were helping the run the show and for me it was a place called the restaurant at the end of the universe very original name and it was run by a gentleman named mr i o who one day named the place to outland and renamed himself the outland and he was a member of a text file writing group called the neon knights slash metal communications who were a group of metalheads and i was at his house once he was in new jersey and i was at his house once and the blade and the battalion came over his kids and you know i grew up in uh less chester new york which is not exactly the hood and so i never saw much of anything i was like this quiet little kid working the thing and these two kids come in but it was a little short but the battalion was this big guy jean jacket smoking section just super supreme and metallica shirt and they were just like talking to this that you know talking to the outland who was a clean cut punk he was a very tall guy and i'm like kind of worried i mean these guys are huge and they live the world dude computers free and they run over and they're typing away oh we're dissing this guy and stuff and i was just blown away i guess that was my first really start to learn that there were a lot of different people you see that here unbelievable groups of people around um but basically the outland who was this clean cut kid would write some of the most heinous files i think none was more famous ones was how to kill santa claus dead followed by a sequel how to kill the easter bunny dead because how to dead files were very popular um another way you know basically it was get a fat seeking missile and blow the fat fuck out of the sky you know when he comes down cut off his reindeer's legs they won't be able to fly and he was like ah i think a bad i mean he says quiet guy i think that's where he lived his his um because his room had nothing in it and he was just like a bed and desk he was a very very quiet state but when he got on that computer he was a different guy um one day he just took the bbs down called him up dude bbs is down he's like yeah i was like why he was like it's doing really well so took it down because why not go out at the top very nihilist very nihilist kid he actually wanted a file called random senseless violence actually no it was it was a derivative of random senseless violence because a bunch of people were random senseless violence that was a very popular title um all i would i remember you know you try to remember those ones you're really really stuck in your mind was one of his suggestions one of his helpful suggestions was go to somebody's house and ring on the doorbell and tell him you need to make a phone call um or you need to borrow something and they'll bring you into the living room and when they go to get the thing you asked to borrow whip out your golf clubs and smash everything the whole file was full of stuff like great thanks i'm gonna use that tomorrow that was great so that was the restaurant at the end of the universe um neon knights were like the small elite guys and no communications was anybody who writes the neon knights and asked to put up a file and they didn't like it and they said fine we'll just put your file out as metal communications like death slay a lot slayer lyrics a lot of stuff like that um there was a little board i called in chicago called the utopia bbs which was basically this apple board but i mentioned it because it was written in basic at the time um and so big kind of an interesting thing that's going away is the whole mods scene not mod nothing idm music files but mods mods was how weird can we hack the code and still have you sort of be able to function on it as a bbs how many spinning cursors how many thing of the days how many bizarre title screens trivia online tennis can we stick into this thing in basic and uh and every time you called the utopia bbs i mean i called about once every three or four days during the peak every time i called it was completely different i'd log in and it would just go hi you're walking down the street and boom there's an explosion and santa claus falls on your head and so yes i'll type in your password and i type in my password go no not yet here's a little more and i would tell you a bit more and i go hey the message in the base is this and the best part i think was at the one of them one of them i have that log actually you know when you log into a bbs you gave it your info your name your phone number your blah blah blah for whatever if you wanted to and at the end they had call this bbs call this bbs call the slip disc my phone number because it would just feed you back your phone number out of the file scared the crap out of me it was two in the morning um and they were around for a long time they were actually part of a scene of chicago bbs and a lot of people think that i'm from chicago because i talk about them so much there was the glue ball there was the greek inn there was utopia and there was the south pole and the south pole was the most violent place you could imagine they had one purpose in life how many bomb piles can we make fascinating that was their thing self-defense self-reliance on an apple too and uh yeah so so you know there was ripco never got on the ripco believe it or not i really wanted to but i never got on the ripco yeah yeah i tried to go to ripco.com and call and you know hey download same thing with mindvox boy there was a there's atlantis for you maybe one doesn't remember mindvox it's gone i mean it was just you know it rose up patrick crouba said hey you know i'm from legion of doom we're going to build this beautiful thing it's pantheon to the old times we're going to bring it back and it went up and they had financial problems and they went away and if you go to their site it's like blank sorry nothing here go away very very sad um but they're going to give me stuff so i like but one of the best parts about wedding text files is getting letters from people who were there and they look for their own handles and they find them on my on my site what i wanted to do in the first place and they go oh and there was one guy i thank you so much for what you've done for i was barney badass creator of the b files he created a file where he complained about the female companions to dr who it was called tits on the tARDIS i have that file and i have his other one how to win a bitch war a fame war but he called it a bitch war because it was a b file so it was barney bad ass's bitch war b file and um he went on i found out somebody mentioned a story to me that he went on to join a punk band that only had one release in germany and then they use that song for a minute made commercial and they got a whole bunch of money and they just retired that was the end of that and now he works for a record company in chicago and he's a happy guy so he's like wow you see that's that's what's missing for me i guess um you know even though everything a lot of the stuff is maybe not illegal but a lot of stuff involves illegal acts or stuff somehow you still want the curtain call you still want to you like i was bar occasion 003 thank you you know that was the guy that's great you know and you want to do that even here you know you're like oh you know about kevin bolson and there's kevin bolson you know you there hello hi that's great you're a great guy that's great yeah um you know that's that's that's great stuff you know and unfortunately that's not always realistic that's not a very realistic thing uh some of these people just drop out drop out um um i'm thinking of for instance crackawicks who was one of my favorite guys he was this apple 2 uh game cracker he basically cracked idea um apple game so that you went from being able to he couldn't copy it too it's a file thanks so he wrote text files he wrote text files about everything he was doing it wasn't just yo were the apple mafia school you we made it it's ours we rock he said yeah i did it here's how i did it he did things like build cards for the apple 2 and break into the program and rewrite the the uh the contents and he told you everything he did and he wrote it me and he just sent it out and that's a great kind of guy in any place you know because a lot of people they just go yeah i got talent you know i think dildog is very similar to that actually he's like yo hey yeah i did it was great here here's how i did it thanks i'll be off here do another magic um that's nice i really like that and um so um you know oh the third place okay i actually want to show you this one who remembers showered forest 2 yeah okay four or three people oh man wow okay i do have a use in life okay shared forest 2 was an apple bbs it was obviously it was shared forest 1 i didn't ever went on to that one that was in new york city shared forest 2 is in 914 and um because you know you were you were part of the posse by your area code you were the 914 you were the 212 you were the guy um shared forest 2 was basically a freak board but that's where a lot of you saw a lot of the names i started seeing in the 90s in these hacker books you know like uh the legion of doom and um you know let's move or we're doing this in 40 columns you had an option when you posted message you put them in a square put a square on your message that way people would have to see it and um i have i have some logs from that it's just great it's just these things i need karatica that's it i need karatica send me mail hey i want to pass on a karatica story because i know the guy who made karatica jordan mechner who's actually his his brother went to my school supposedly again that didn't improve to me but supposedly jordan mechner programmed karatica so that that idiotic mountain in the background when they're going back and forth you know the image in your mind's okay guys going like this going in this thing in the back is the mountain well supposedly it had a random number generator and one out of 100 000 times the mountain would explode it would actually run lava and go boom why would he do this so a kid would be playing it and it would go boom and he'd call his friends guys it blows up it blows up watch it it would never happen again he could never prove it he'd go to his grave and play karatica it would never happen again so i can't i can't verify that story exactly jordan mechner's actually going on to do some really neat stuff prince of persia and murder on the rand express which tanks but really rocks um hey big guy um his brother was the model for karatica and prince of persia he took eight millimeter film and would follow him in a car while he ran and then he just traced it pixel by pixel on his parents projection tv wacky the the uh so anyway showed force two was basically this big freak hangout and it had bach agent 003 who like i said i'm a bach agent is probably my top five guys i would just love to make just to go thank you because most of what he did most of the stuff was these 40 column uppercase lies um at the time you know a lot of it was a lot of it was like made up a lot of it was like well first you got to get the code to cosmos thanks um and he was the guy who said he wrote 80 column properly spelled um the basic the basic telecommunication series one through eight one through seven one through seven it was supposed to be an eight nine ten never came out and they were just well written here's everything about pay phones here's how they work here's what it's about starting everywhere from like how the operators do things to how it works to what it does and he just data jumped and it was really nice and he wrote a bunch of files he actually transcribed people number one he wanted people to know about yippo and he transcribed number one i have it online um and he uh you know he wrote a bunch of stuff i asked him his age because i'm an inquisitive little jerk and he was 17 when i was 14 so i'm 28 now so he's probably 31 somewhere doing something um and uh i've never seen him online i haven't seen any reference to him i think i've almost tracked down cracker it's i tracked down count nibble who was a really talented guy um who wrote the count leger series he wrote fun with coca no uh fun with he wrote fair he was the guy who wrote fun with random senseless violence mr. shim your briefcase opening pal um and a bunch of other stuff like that his trick because he wrote incredible stuff turns out the guy was in college when everyone else was like in 12 and 13 he was in college and he was bored his crap and he was just writing these incredible things and these discographies and everything so now he's like in his late 30s and he's bitter you can't really talk to him about much about anything i try to talk to him if it returns my my messages but he did take my text files and did refer to me as a link that says if you're into this kind of stuff i'm like well thank you um anyway so shared force two had level one level two and level three access level one was like you're just there you can't really post level two was your regular level three was elite level three was really elite and you had a choice you know either you were given level three access or you could buy it i bought it it was 10 bucks i was told again i was told by someone who knew them that i was the only guy who bought it so he like called up the guys what am i doing with this i'm an idiot said that them but they gave me access to i really wanted the text files they're always upper level text files they want buy buy buy buy buy so i took all them home um when it went down it wasn't by its choice somebody came in and said you're done um it was actually really to be a sting board by the end that was a big thing sting boards they were boards run by their cops and they were bust you ask you for wares and stuff um yeah so um you know but while i was preparing this speech i looked up and i said nine four three five nine one five one seven because you dialed so many times it's 15 years later i'm like calling the number right out of my butt you know it's really amazing how the brain works that way you just boom you know because you just remember the name so much um oh and the third one dark side of the moon now dark side of the moon was trying to describe to people what the the the pull of the dark side of the moon was it's very hard the humor was very hard to to explain to people but when you went there they're a little opening string just said dark side of the moon home of peace love and strudel their phone numbers 408245 spam and this was like an 84 and uh you they had um they were an AE line they were an ascii express line um apple express was basically this ascii express was basically this apple terminal program they had a little file transfer thing to it which of course automatically got turned into piracy central people was transferring everything back and forth it was very simplistic and in fact there were bugs there were bugs there were back doors there were problems and on the on the dark side of the moon all these problems were gone it turned out they had rewritten the whole thing from scratch to look exactly like it did except when you hit space bar it was a zippy quote and you could like transfer all these other things they they don't all this work and it was very transparent and um one day they and people would send messages to each other on this file transfer thing by naming the file this massive ass message what happened to the way this tristan fart and stuff you know where the heck is this going i can't believe this file is still here this is crusty um and uh one day they announced they're going to be a bbs they thought oh my god they're going to destroy this beautiful thing because i really love log on that place late at night bbs turned out to rule um it was written called waffle software and it was written by the sysop and um a lot of people now know the sysop of of dark side of the moon i think he doesn't make it too much of a secret that he's now the proprietor of rotten dot com um very very interesting fellow um great guy unbelievably great guy and the bbs rule i remember being on the on the computer with him and i was like you don't have this uh you only have like two kinds of editors on it and i was like you don't have this editor you should add it in someday and he said wait and he went pound pound pound in front of me and now the editor was one of the editors you could choose he built it modular he built this whole thing up he put it to to unix i still want it um and um they were the home of a place called anarchy incorporated which was very um basically a place that just they wrote as many text files as they could just hundreds and hundreds of these crazy text files about going on how to rip off kmart um roofing roofing going on the roof how to do it um how to make how to make bugs break dance i think was one of the by daredevil it involved really hurting the bugs by the way he really had to hurt the bug the bug didn't want to break dance it wasn't in it wasn't in the genetic programming basically it took its legs up and spun it um but they were you know that's the thing a lot of these text file writing groups they were always writing really really cool things just out of their heads just spouting and um you see that a lot in groups like uh cdc um you know cdc was a text file writing group for years and years they're becoming known more as an applications development house security consulting firm but originally they were text file writers they know wizardry docs and durable feed bomb and then how to do this and that and a lot of the files have that really kind of either had a um you know basically like a lot of really funny files in fact one of their files is one of my top 100 text files the cdc number 200 where is it the cdc number two higgedly piggedly big fan hanatious mega macadalicious you can't even come close to jump back k boom boom boom boom boom file a great file you'll read this thing if you came from that period and they break references to a lines and bbs is not actually with the legend of demon seed seems to have come from the glorious massive monster truck that will destroy you we need to be somebody who was so elite he became one with the network and people who are laders will die and have monster truck tracks across them and nobody on the why that's great stuff i mean this isn't a mythology but these guys build in either files there's other groups i have um what's really funny is when you have a text file writing group that goes on for about 15 years um there's a group called ux you and sweeten i found that they're like 700 files yeah i never heard of them boom i got 700 files file like number 600 is like i'm in my apartment and there's this family that's moved in upstairs and oh my god they're so loud and i don't want to leave the apartment because it's a good rent and it's really sucky i don't know what to do they scream all the time i don't know what's up with the kids that's the file they pushed that one out that was their new release that week like wow you are old you are so old um yeah so anyway so um you know in terms of tixwells.com is a oh um in terms of a couple files um that i had here i have one called very other pitched frequency generator or how do we know your teacher is written by captain um i actually built this actually i hired a kid to build it i had no idea how to do this i hired it and it worked it worked um i don't recommend one thing actually there's a lot of bomb information on my site and i it's always been a big issue for me because you know i i've had people write to me you will cause people to die you will be responsible for their deaths i want you just to know that when you go to bed at night and i actually got that guy one guy i got him to oh by the way you get some of the most amazing email when you're going to say it like that dude your files are so old get some new info thank you some people write me text files they sent when when they sent me no one paragraph one paragraph dude so i got tixwell for you imagine me meeting this guy to con or something coming up and do that text file for you you get a free haircut you go into your hair salon and you sit down and they they cut your hair so when she finishes get up and walk out because she's going to be some small chicks she can't stop you so can you put this up thanks i think glorious glorious people just you know they're touched by it and also i just wanted to mention one one very special text file it's a posting if you answer a trivia question correctly you could post and everyone would see the post that day like wow i answered the trivia question correctly and now i have all the time in the world to post i will do whatever i want i haven't posted in a long time here except for this insult that i put in a user bulletin that originally went to the success op of mitronet but the main reason i haven't posted is because i don't have much to say most of the time gotta fix that i want you all to know i have buffing messages and we'll edit them and send them as g files later ha ha ha ha i have fucked with the boce system before i reprogrammed the gis program my school's pathway to say fuck you and you ran into it most of scared some student shitless i had all this all i have also been tapping into phone lines spell that oh any um with my trusty testing phone that i ripped off a mobbell repair van i break into conversations and say this is a tnt you are no longer a preferred customer so you are going to cut off service motherfucker scared them shitless too need a visa or mastercard number to buy a new computer will trade send email this is me i wrote this when i was 13 years old thank you you know i'm mentioning this because there's a lot of kids you're running through now the so-called script kiddies raves pups i see a lot of terms like that and where people are just going like oh god he's young what the shit can and the problem is is a lot of these people are just us younger and when you're young you need juice you need you need the mac you need to be able to go to your friends and go look i can do this i'm with you i'm cool as you i can make this happen and that makes a lot of people say very stupid things in public places because they wanted everyone you know basically that thing is a big cry for help going everyone love me on this bbs please because i damaged things i could be your friend need credit card used to be people post credit cards and bbs is what's up with that thank you um and the point is i'm just saying people get better they do they heal they learn they learn that you don't always have to claim you took down the internet for people to pay attention to you and so um at defcon i didn't really you know i didn't get a chance to cross pollinate with a lot of people i mostly stayed with my friends because hey i haven't seen these people in years but a couple times i tried to talk to people and it was like and i tried but i'm really trying to willing to and i'll definitely be here next year and i hope more of that happens if i can i don't know if defcon could really make some sort of a um um set up for that really if they could make up some sort of a way for people to just go hey hi hi i know i'm 40 years old and you're too but we both really love computers and that's really cool and you know fine you want to blow shit up and i'm working for some isp but i you know i understand where you're coming from i hope there's more of that um there's probably some of it going on but um anyway so um let's see you don't know about other subcultures there's subcultures you know the subculture there's people a lot of people say one of the themes i get from people who are my age is basically man things have really gone downhill those were the golden days we had everything things were great and the fact is is believe it or not i don't believe that i think things are better than they ever were um um there was actually where they think douglas rush cough and they said when was the best time to live and he said right now tomorrow if possible because right now i have my top 100 text files a wired article about me and the entire concept of the speech on this floppy disk and that rules that's absolutely great um i actually have a hundred of these and i'm just gonna you know give them to people yeah exactly here and not yet that'll be crazy it looks like a looks like a cattle auction um but but you know basically it's that thing you can you can sit there and and give somebody um it took me like four years to get a good collection of three thousand text files and even today there was somebody downloading three thousand text files in about two minutes over like a t three line just suck and that's it hundreds of hours of the work of all these people boom it's on some zip disk he doesn't even notice it you know his his his win pad is a word pad program is bigger than it and it's you know he's got it he's he's happy so you know for me technology is just getting better and better better transport mediums i was so afraid that all this text files from the 80s and the 60s now i got 70s text files 80s text files a bunch of 90s text files i have an entire alt drug section which i'm not too pleased about but it wasn't something so i figured they thought they were in the 80s so um but but uh you know people are logging on boom you know and now you've got it somewhere and so stuff that was in the danger of disappearing it's not going to disappear now i did my part i was the i was the schmuck who said okay look everyone here it's back again take a ticket and it's digitals right so put it everywhere and i love that i just give it away free i i there are places that give out text files but it's usually porn ad porn ad porn ad box file porn ad porn ad click on the porn ad look on the third page there'll be something luscious blank type that in and maybe you can get another box file the urin box plans hey the urin box plans what a load of crap um i know the author but i'm not going to reveal who the author is i don't think um hint i mentioned him previously in the speech and um but people download it like it's real you can't build it it's supposed to kill the person on the other line people don't read it it says you know you can make the other guy know and there was another one called the blotto box run by blotto left oh wow everyone knows what the blotto box is that's great the blotto box was one of the only boxes that required a honda generator you were supposed to hook the honda generator up to the central office and run like a motherfucker as fast as you could away from the large global fire that was behind you what a great image great image but it was just because blotto people would joke on blotto land about um king blotto um oh hell king blotto weird ass guy um people would go oh there's a blotto box oh we're gonna blotto box him oh let's get the blotto big joke and someone said eventually where's the blotto box i'm at the blotto box and uh you know someone broke the file which was essentially yeah it destroys an entire you know local exchange so area code it's more potent than i thought you could take out utah generator that's just hysterical south east what and sometimes i took it seriously i read an article about them actually taking the seriously targeting uh so they took that sometimes over and they charge him to destroy area code right i mean well the thing is a lot of times you know not as much now but a lot of times back then the federal agents and the secret service they always came off like uh they just came off like mycen and fedemines about these things you know it was like oh my god oh my god oh my god this apple two they prior to character you know you got a lot of that you were just like oh my god we gotta find out oh no no no no no it's fair c theory go whatever you got 14 3 you know 14 14 you old kids like four or five of them none of them got the apple tree with the 80 column card so he's the elite one they all go around him and yeah these kids are gonna you know i mean i agree yes they'll change the world but probably right not then maybe a little later you know that feeling is kind of funny all these kids always 14 year olds at the time escaped the skinhead and so on now they run isps and they're like you know yes i control the internet for my local area dude k-cool dudes oh yeah supposedly k-bye was a was a construction of uh okay bye k-bye and became k-cool k-rad and i think that still shows up now that's the thing there's no that's part of why this is actually a concern on my part about no sense of history you know this whole zeros for o's this whole l's become ones four becomes a these hack bolt and board systems these kids are like yeah i'm being really cutting edge i'm thinking 83 i had that kid was saying yo dudes i've got you know bolo bolo i've got the abode of the world see how i was pretty cool robota williams if everyone knows she looks like she's on the cover of the soft porn adventure she's a little mama right in the hot tub so yeah anyway yeah good references i'm sure everyone's with me there um oh one other file that's what noting i didn't put in here sex was satan by psycho it was actually so popular that cdc just took it because it was it was great um this file this this is like one of these classic files that you know i'm i'm here and there's senators here and they go why are you distributing this and i'm like historical perspective two lines well three lines she tied me to the bed with these handcuffs she had whipped off a fucking cop she proceeded to spank me and kept calling me bad boy then the little info took out a lighter and set my cock on fire and told me not to smoke oh those were times of majesty where have they gone um because i believe this is the file that calls to all the reverie to call um cdc a bunch of sick that they didn't even they were just they were distributing house at that point you know distributing along um what are you calling me a bad name you are calling me a bad i'm sorry i have nothing but extreme respect for this like i respect what the because it's very funny it's a very funny sick file it's a wonderfully funny sick file it's really entertaining to read but it's one of those things where decontextually i have a lot of problems with there's um you know like i think i mentioned before i won't censor i'm really not into that i don't want to take away you're right so yeah but i mean it sounds very hokey and crusty and constitutionality and but basically it's because i don't want to be the guy who says no you're not ready for this it's not you know it's not my place i'm trying to be like hey this is what i think it was about and a lot of kids i'll sure they log on they go they want the newest infos they download in 1982 files and they take them home try the blue box i can just build it i got all the plans i can build it knock knock what yeah yeah blow in 2600 down there is that working but um yeah no um but the uh the the um the um the oh anyway um no so so i just can't see myself in that position um and it's caused me a bit of problems there's a file on there called the jew file but a gentleman named the jolly roger and i'm ashamed of the file i really hate it i i don't i don't like this file it's a really abhorrent thing um he's just it's just a big old racist rant and um but you know it's just like uh it's it's horrifying but i put it up i called a racist rant and hope for the best and i hope someone doesn't go to and go you're a white supreme they start thinking i believe everything on the site i'm not i'm a librarian i'm essentially a librarian so um so just one other one other point i wanted to make i'm pretty much wrapping up here i'll take questions quickly and you know that kind of stuff which i'm sure why are you still up there um but i just want to mention because i actually have some of the crowd here um being somebody who's seen things historically there's a thing i call the hammer and the hammer is basically this force the force is because when i'm working with this files now i see them again i see files of people talking about bad things that happen to them there's a thing called the hammer and i'm not demonizing anything here but to me the hammer is when um um the press often or mass media or stuff say there's something really bad going on here and that's when you know the shadow of the hammer is over you and then the hammer lifts when the public says there's something that has to be done we've heard there's these horrifying things happen and then the hammer comes down basically when the force is in control the government and other police forces and will do citizens just go oh we got to eradicate bang bang bang and they're just going down and you got kids who are like what and they're just being busted and waited or they're being told something or they're being fired because they saw something to do with it or something and this happens this has happened it was happening now with the web page busts but it was happening in 92 it was happening in 85 it was happening before that and way back when when they were seizing calculators because they were possible phone hacking boxes and then parading them out and putting it out on tables and going look look at these tools he's used to destroy everything and i just um was just responding basically to to say you know like that makes me be nervous and i just wanted to say just to the group of def canta to um realize that we have a very precious thing here we have a bunch of people who really care about technology and not just take some of us look at it as a gun and some of it look at it as a lifting force and some of us really care and i think even the guys who the environmental control idiots in their hearts they love the environmental controls they're just a very abusive relationship but you know these they'll get better they got better i'll get better i hope um and i just want you know basically i'm just saying if you see people and you see they're more like you not to be turning on them and going you suck because i've got six of this and you've got five of that i paid 600 for the blue thing and you've only got the old two hundred dollar thing because a lot of that and and that's just to me that you can do better than that anyway so having said that piece um i'll take any questions if somebody goes any yes i do have a dot nfo section basically dot nfo files were parts of the pirate zipped files a gentleman named toast from canada gave me most of them like 2000 basically it's call our place here's what we're working on we cracked this it's whatever from micropost i have those i have files about how to crack which don't apply much anymore but i mean you know that kind of stuff like i said i got the crackwitz files back from 84 85 um you know that that once again for me it's always it's always about the text it's never about the wares it's about what were people like around the wares why did they use the wares so i have a lot of that i have a lot of you know basically so yes i do have stuff and it it's you get into the bbs long ball or anything like that yeah i mentioned that basically i will accept bbs logs message logs stuff like that um hopefully the phoenix project is sending a good access goes to send me a bunch of stuff which i'll put up you know and like i said don't charge yes sir oh who wants my url w w w dot text files dot com oh come on with an f don't worry text files ph will be registered very soon after this talk i guarantee probably make fun of me that's right porn site the white house guy'll find me yeah more hits for me in my porn um i also want text files dot org it's a very i got text files dot org because it wasn't taken and then the company owns text files dot com just gave it up i said thank you grabbed it and that's it somebody owns text files dot net but um yeah so yeah i i um i also on cow dot net if anyone actually feels like browsing it um anyway um any other one of the things i'm really into is i like taking pictures of really really beat up arcade games yeah you know these arcade games that they converted you get like miss pacman and boom it's galaga boom it's this boom it's terminator two boom it's whatever and then pull boxes and just beat the shit and like people just like stick there i got one box i mean it looks like someone took a flamethrower to it it must have been in the most amazing bar with the most amazing chain smoker just like oh god oh god i mean it's burn somebody took a um returned the jedi arcade game and turned it into a lucky seven poker game with like 25 buttons it was a mahjong game i just loved like i like that weird stuff just that weird people i also own a checker a 1978 checker marathon taxi cab that's why i drive around it and um so i go into that too fine that's more about too much about me anybody else you know if you've wandered in at the beginning of the conversation but um no i basically i'll go into that very quickly once again it's not my area in terms of like i have ascii files if people have converted things from other formats to ascii files like ebbit to ascii i have ansi files i don't know what to do with them i just have them i like there's another site and unfortunately i don't have the link i have a number of sites who i really respect sites who have really comprehensive cool things there's an ansi group who just kick ass they wrote a CGI program that converts ascii into gifs so you can just look at them don't need anything just look at them there's another guy you've caught a fed you've talked to the wrong guy about it you've caught a fed sir is he of a legal size limit or do you have to throw him back it's a thousand dollar fine you know a thousand dollar fine and they seize all your gear oh it's five years in jail too fishing game really frowns on that i put some of your size fed oh you're the one who wants to fuck my feet aren't you just if you don't want to give it to somebody who cares they didn't pay for them behind the camera let me just throw it where's the fed this you're the fed you're not the fed you're the fed the gentleman by the way i need to make a general announcement the gentleman in the yellow hi man good to see you why don't you turn around turn around start walking towards that door and find out if that's okay then just hang loose we're doing some staff stuff over the radio so you guys could enjoy it too so you can understand the sheer chaos i have to put up with while i'm up here the the gentleman in the yellow hard hat would you mind stepping up please come on come on and tell us who you are he's the director nsa tech and concert no come on up it's okay we won't bite you you just hang those two we'll be right with you yeah someone catheter uh and to make sure uh they actually drip through the carotid please tell us who you are i promise you some uh some some some uplifts here thanks please for putting me on the spot no worries i'm uh writing stuff for Linux world and um basically i wanted to find out how security on Linux is improving for getting worse and uh he thank you sir you scared him off good job basically if anyone would like to opine on that subject who actually is a credible source please make sure that you see him i would really appreciate it if you're not a credible source and you waste his time we have a bag of doorknobs