 Anyway, my name is Jason Scott, I want a place called TextFiles.com, which is a website dedicated to, well it's official mantra is we are the official place for Bolton Board System texts of the 1980s. Now to make that work, if you use one of these, this was that era. Basically what happened was, by its very nature, Bolton Board Systems had a lot of text files on them where people traded and the nature of the distribution channel was that you had single line phones and so basically it was very slow as compared to today. So as a result, there were a lot of files that people kept, but when the internet came along, the real push was for things that were aimed already up on FTP sites and internet. So we have a real huge amount of text files that were created after, say, 1993, 1994 and not as many that were created from the 80s or even the 70s or the 60s. So I was really concerned about that stuff going away and so I started taking my text file collection, I started taking text file collections of others and putting it together. When I spoke last year I had 9,000 text files with a bunch in the inbox. Now I'm at 23,000 text files, I'm not stopping and luckily most of the important ones, the ones that people usually think of, are up on there. Now what I'm talking about today is less about what the history was at that time and more about what it's like to run TextFiles.com because I'm a solid sitting duck target for some very interesting groups of people and you know, I figured that'd be somewhat amusing. What I'm doing is I'm actually technically a file archive, I like to think of myself as a librarian, I'm really not writing my own stuff except for the comment on stuff that's already written or I am you know, putting together things by my own weird little classification system so people can download it quicker. One thing I do find is that people have some very distinct ideas about what they want so I started putting archives of the sections together and I can see very quickly what people like. The number one search on my engine is how to make LSD. Every month, every month 30 to 40 hits how to make LSD. Now one of the other things that's very interesting about my site is because I have 23,000 text files currently numbering around 500 to 600 megabytes of text you get some pretty wacky search matches so my referral log can really clear your sinuses. Now I would have preferred just being some quiet little thing off in the corner you know doing my little work, bringing it up, making sure people knew about it and sending it out there but life isn't like that on the internet anymore. The thing that well basically in an ideal world, okay a lot of people come up on panels and speeches like this and they spend a long time going I think freedom is very good and I'd like you all to agree with me and they spend a lot of time telling you basically that that freedom is good well yeah I believe freedom is very good too but what I'm worried about with the people who don't recognize that they don't that they're against some things which freedom would actually you know cover because they have an old their own agenda. One of the little themes that has always gone through bulletin board systems and it's effective now are the twin towers of bombs and drugs as long as bulletin board systems have been in existence and certainly today boys, adolescents and older like to blow shit up and like to smoke shit up it's I you know I like to call it the Beavis and Butthead Syndrome yes exactly I now I do understand that I do have some dark portions of my past when I was 13 years old I was busted in my school for selling ASCII pornography I'm sure you all have similar skeletons in your closet the the basically we were printing out a file on my system called angela.art and we're just printing it and selling it for 50 cents a pop to the highest that ever wanted it this was quickly discovered by our crack security force at my school and I was hauled into the principal's office and that's why first when we came up against the 30th figure where I really didn't think I was wrong on an issue of expression basically he was like do you know how wrong it is what you're doing and I said no and he said you know don't you think this is wrong and I said being an ass I see a bunch of letters and numbers sir I don't know what you see I actually I lost it but I used to have when I got the tension I had a little slip that said you know selling of erotic art images in school or something or whatever the dumb little trumped up charge was there was actually another one I sure learned two years later I'm in my class and there's a call oh you know Jason please come to the main office and so I come to the main office there's my mom there's the principal there's a man in a suit this wasn't good man in the suit comes out from the it's as I'm from the FBI this is definitely not good we found out you were selling natural glycerin plans to kids 50 cents a pop turns out one of the kids had dad was a cop dad wasn't pleased dad found in his kids no book called the FBI FBI FBI said where'd you get this I said some board in Illinois I don't know and they said okay don't do that again which was surprising not 14 man figure they could really kick my ass but they didn't um and why was I doing that you see the thing is when you see kids doing stupid stuff like this you go why are they doing that I felt a sense of power here I was I had the magic stuff the magic recipe that would blow shit up it was my power I didn't have a car I didn't have you know a girlfriend I had I had I had my way I could blow shit up if I wanted to I could blow that kid up who's yelling at me I'm watching you I could blow you up you know and I think that's what you see a lot of you go you find these kids and these kids have six billion bomb plans you're like what are you doing you little nut and it turns out that I mean that's I think that at the core that's what some of them do my site like I said that and of course drugs now normally I wouldn't even care I wouldn't even you know I mean it's popular and I wouldn't have been bothered with it but um forces have come into play which I'll talk about later which actually starts to get in my way um the the there's there's so much stuff on my site um that with these brutalist subcultural things that came back um let me um real files that's one of my favorites um somebody came out with a file oh well okay um you familiar with the book real men don't eat quiche yeah you see it's a thing and now the book is kind of falling it was like it was published in like 1981 real men don't eat quiche and it was a very easy idea to rip off basically you make this list and you say real men don't do this real men don't do this for humor well obviously this was an easy thing to rip off of so the real pirates guide came out by red by rabbit rasta and I said this you know you real pirates use this channel they don't uh they only pirate off these kind of systems they pirate they don't put their name on things they didn't crack yada yada this led to people going the real pirates guide to the real freakers guide the real anarchist guide um the the uh what was it some really wacky one um the real couriers guide you know you have these ones where these people are bringing out these files and eventually there is this weird subcultural group of files that represents something that's really not there anymore in that context that's what i'm trying to save when i'm saving the bomb files i'm saving that cultural need by kids to portray power by going to some library or better yet just grabbing the anarchist cookbook copying out a few things putting their name on it going yeah and that's you know that's what that's what you get now this scares parents this scares authority figures because they think these kids are going to make it and i'm my attitude is if you like blowing stuff up go into pyrotechnics because you will blow up neat stuff for money you'll get a name for yourself you'll be in the movies i mean you lose fingers but you'll be really you get these people so let's see most of when jigsfalas.com came out it was you know a lot of people liked it and i got a lot of thank yous like a lot of people coming up from the shadows who you know we're really happy one moment let me turn this off shut up anyway so take off the bag i'm speaking right now gotta talk to you later anyway okay um the first major clusterfuck with textfiles.com came on late April last year when a couple kids decided that we're going to blow our entire school up speaking of course of the let's see it's had many names i like columbine tragedy columbine event the you know basically you know the happy twins going nuts and what happened was was that the satirical forces in our country were well at work well well ahead of schedule the trench care.org domain was registered eight hours after the tragedy we wouldn't know anything about that and a site a site came up basically with a very satirical look at it now the nature of satire is satire is more biting the sooner it happens you've had cases in the past i can think of national lampoon where they would actually broadcast the speeches of the president and have somebody sitting there ripping on him as he's talking you know it adds some flavor but at eight hours afterwards people didn't like that so um i'll just recount it because you'll see you'll feel emotions well up in you when the thing says you know a world of bullets 150 dollars assault rifle 200 dollars black trench coast 75 dollars look on your classmates faces priceless and so on you see now it's a year later and you're like oh man and imagine it's that day well they included a few links including the van huesen who told them to stop you know basically the site had to say oh go here well they linked to me the way that i found this out was one morning i woke up and being the nerd that i am checked my referral logs mostly because my hits had really grown you know i mean it was like a bit of a hit usually that means oh i got slash dotted or somebody pointed out to me somewhere else well i'm getting all these hits from trenchcoat.org and i'm thinking oh no what what has happened um so i go to trenchcoat.org and i'm even doing i'm like oh so at the bottom it helps the links explosives with a purpose right into my explosives directory with a collage of the crying kids right next to it i'm like i am so fucked i am so fucked they're gonna discourage me so i pulled off the explosives director i didn't get rid of it i renamed it to incendiaries my theory was if you're so young you don't know what incendiaries is i protected you incendiaries i don't want that and i put this well as you might know when you go to the site i put up another one of my little break it's for the hard things about freedom of expression and i'm hurt by this and yada yada yada and all that well people would link to text files dot you know the link to text files dot com people would go to the they hit the directory and then they would link up they would um you know figure out hey you know let's go up to the top of the site and they would find my email address i was the only email address you could find trenchcoat.org for some reason didn't have any email address the first couple of days i don't know why um so i got some great mail you are sick you are the one that should be shot you don't fit in and now you take it out on people that are athletic and who are of a different race and you make way to what happens in colorado everyone has problems you make fun of this kind of thing these problems could get bigger for you because although people may have teased you for being a trenchcoat nerd they will not tolerate you at all if i know you were the one behind this garbage people like you are the reason people died in colorado all those trenchcoat assholes should be shot it isn't the jocks that are the problems it's people like you who can't get over your fallacies and blame it on others who like you who don't fit in now everything split that i that's a typical one um that one actually has periods which is really nice i bet people are bugging the shit out of you right now aren't they i thought it was funny who the fuck are you are you a part of these bitches who are the trenchcoat hoes or are you just a dot smear person thanks dude so you're not the trenchcoat mafia i've been looking for these people ever since i heard about this and you had to do this i'm mad i wanted to talk to them i feel the same way they do one third of the files told me to die one third of the mail you know told me to die and i'll read one or two more because they're extremely entertaining explain to me very quickly how i should die for for being in the trenchcoat mafia one third um said dude nice sigh and then he found text files that come that way one third and i'm not kidding this and this is this is what was kind of interesting really was one third wanting to know when the trenchcoat mafia was coming to their school you know you forget that shit i don't know if any of you experience this was where a rumor comes through school that something really bad is going to happen at three o'clock and you wake up and you're like dude something's going on at three o'clock and like why aren't you like nah it's not gonna happen at three o'clock i don't know but i'll tell you at two fifty eight teachers talking you're like i don't think that he's gonna be talking for much longer but i'm watching the clock i don't know what was it the world was going to end at two that was like my school when i was 159 man i was like i don't want to die in science class this sucks um the uh well the well basically i have to assume that the rumors went around these schools i'll do the trenchcoat mafia is coming to us next you know anyway so so that was that was a relatively unpleasant experience um one of the uh i did actually get a few um just i got one or two intelligent ones i'll just read up one very quick intelligent one dear jason i realize the openness of your website is based on many of the liberties the u.s population takes for granted i like how well organized your site is but i have to tell you the bomb building messages are way over the line i've worked for defense contractors most of my working life and the things you bring to bear for the general public should not be known there are secrets in a sense unclassified secrets but still things anyone with the savvy could find you haven't committed a crime but i do believe that there is a certain faction of people in the general population that will respond to your website in manners other than email you should consider these people when you release the kind of information that you have presented for anyone's consumption the world is a much smaller place than you might believe and we are getting closer all the time either we find ways to live with each other or what some of us will be killed by people who've learned what they know from people like you just something to think about i actually wrote to him and he actually said we actually got i got him to agree to disagree to go dig that but find whatever you gotta do so you know that was that was i did get some of that but a lot of it was it that that glorious one-line message why doesn't it work i want to learn how to make bombs anyway so you know it's funny when you open yourself up like that i can only imagine what it must be like for the crew at 2600 or called the cow anybody who's particularly high profile and the most amazing email that must just sewer into their lives from all over the world i can't imagine i'm speaking for myself but i can't imagine any time in history where somebody has said could you know hey you i like your trade teach me that trade which translates to dude teach me to hack you know they must get six billion dude teach me to hack speaking as the the main email contact for cult of the dead cow i can say yes and we're actually planning on compiling the list of some of the best including the guy who want us to hack space ghost because space ghost was mean to him kill space ghost so benny gooselyn if you're out there i'm talking about you so um not all of the uh that that was a very interesting one because it ripped things apart um on ways of the bombs again i don't want people to make this stuff if somebody typed a three instead of a five eight years ago i don't want you to lose your fingers i don't want that um it's actually rather interesting i you know once again conspiracy theories abound but there's actually a very interesting post on amazon.com from William Powell the writer of the anarchist cookbook it might be him it might not be him he's a cia guy he's made of he's a cyborg you know you don't know but basically the idea was you know he said i wrote it when i was 19 i was going to berkeley i just went down to the library copied some munitions manuals i copied this i copied that i thought i could smash the state i grew up i got a wife i got a kids i teach kids now that thing was a mistake i contacted my publisher the publisher said bite me they owned the copyright i didn't it's still published today don't buy it please don't buy it that's interesting i don't you know i have no way to know if this was actually him or if it wasn't but there you go now there was another um interesting problem that i didn't really entirely think through when i put text files.com together which of course was copyright some of these files are transcriptions of copyrighted materials um i don't know which ones are and which ones are obviously a lot of kids trying to really get some street cred has some juice we just go out and copy something that they saw somewhere and say put in here by the dark overlord you know that's it um so i don't know but um i've gotten a couple copyright related threats over the past year um there's the okay there's the crank and the jerk who wants to hear the crank first okay well i see it's a it's a crank your tie all right fine so we'll go with the crank first so i can get through him very well this one people have abstained maybe they want to hear a different story that would be bad oh sorry take my flow sorry sorry the the uh the the crank is a um well he he wrote to do okay what he did was he wrote to everybody down the line on my domain and you do a domain trace whereas it located who hosts it right to this guy right to this guy right to this guy just keep going down he wrote about he wrote a genius a genius of a letter um which you glance on it and it glanced at it and Emma says you owe me 20 million dollars if you glance at it we look a little closer and what he's saying is i had copyrighted material that i put on the internet for download a book i wrote and i asked people to pay me when they downloaded it well it was downloaded many many times and i wasn't paid that's money i am owed so i have withdrawn my book from the internet and anyone with that book on the internet is violation anyone who downloads it owes me money that's money that i owe you know and it's you know quotes the Magna Carta goes all the way down you know and he talks about you know his his right but i see that you have done this you have written to my you know my beautiful book and you are causing these copyright violations you can get out of trouble out of how much you owe me by simply sending me 50 dollars for the book apparently other people have gotten this black calling systems got this a bunch of other people get this but what was funny was i didn't have the book he among the things he sends to everybody registered mail to everything was a copy of the text file that he was citing with a highlighted part somebody wrote the book by the way is about individual freedom but the the book um it's like the supreme law the rule of individual freedom the file he was referring to was where somebody wrote a rant on individual freedom and somebody posted that to use net and that person said this is a pretty good rant on individual freedom it reminds me of this guy's book i have and he had highlighted that by me printing his his theory and i got into his mind it was a stinky place was i provided a place where somebody who knew how to make copies of his book um could be contacted you see you could go to my site reach this guy who a pirate so i'm fomenting piracy so i so yeah so he was the crank he was glorious my boss you know at that time i was foolish enough to host text files at work don't do that i actually lose a very large amount of money on text well 300 bucks a month isn't a large amount of money but i lose 200 bucks a month on text files i don't sell things or text files i don't sell cd bombs or t-shirts or stuff because i feel that makes me a target because one thing if someone goes you you whatever and if i go ah you know i'm losing money on it as opposed to i only made three grand in t-shirts last week i'm barely breaking even um you know then maybe they'll have something to go after me that's why there's no text file cd rom or um t-shirts just we'll make t-shirts for you excellent no problem so one day i did work um and a somebody called my my old work because i still had the domain hosted there says some dude called about the secret service that was the message oh yeah i start yeah so i start i start going and checking i call him up i go what the hell are you talking about dude secret service guy number thing okay i mean because she wasn't really equipped to take that kind of a call um and i call and he left the message on by my voicemail that i keep with their uh six one seven cow town you know you huge rent the secret service so i called him okay this this um this is when i first met the gentleman who i cannot name except to say his name is bruce goldberg um bruce bruce and i had a wonderful wonderful conversation here was bruce had an article had he'd written he'd written a number of articles for us a today time newsweek in 1990 he had written an article and i had the article up somebody transcribed the article and they put it in my put in my news section and it was his um he and i talk okay this is where it was it was very interesting i don't want a while too many people who um might fall along with this guy i'm just saying so if you agree with what he said to me fine okay he was very nasty about it that's all i'm saying basically we we talked for about two hours that was very interesting in itself he didn't like my side of all that much um he said you have stolen my property this writing is how i make my money you have stolen it from me and distributed it to people i think you owe me money for stealing my property in this country the copyright law states that for every copyright violation you can be fined up to 20 000 or go to prison would you want them to go to prison i could have the secret service come and seize your computers if you can't pay me this 20 000 per file downloaded this is where the secret service came in he loved that secret service that secret service man they were in his garage soaking up the weapons putting on the stuff waiting for his word to go in and kick my ass now what's funny of course was that the domain was hosted in a different place where the computer was by this point so he would have been like but he did this not only to me he did this to one of my mirrors too he actually called up and went secret service secret service and the conversation i can i can i can actually summarize one hour of the conversation you stole my property i understand you think that sir i think you should get it back how did you define getting it back sir uh you should find everyone who downloaded it and make them delete it sir i can't do that you must but i can but i want my property back sir i'll delete it off my drive that's not good enough hour you don't want to hang up on the guy but i mean i'm in hell i'm in hell i'm just sitting there dude i i i and eventually i said i think we have to get the lawyers involved because we have this this is what lawyers are for right or at least independent arbiters he says i stole something i say i don't dudes come in argue but eventually one loses he loses a lot of money i lose a lot of money lawyers get rich ironically the article was about bringing people together online vaulting board systems anyway so as soon as i mentioned lawyers he went lawyers suck lawyers suck so he wrote to me one last file one last little kick in the ass before he disappeared into the the even and i think it's worth mentioning his words jason i wanted to tell you that i don't plan on doing anything about your theft and unauthorized distribution of my copyrighted work so long as it ceases i'm not going to call the cops or anything not going to take any sort of action what you're doing is wrong wrong wrong but you already know that you're pirating copyrighted property which is just as serious as pirating software and you know where that leads your computer systems can be seized statutory damages of twenty thousand dollars for violation even prison i tell you this because you seem like a black guy even though my wife thinks you're strange i talked to her first before he came on the phone you've done an impressive job archiving early computing documentation and more a lot of the material was obviously created in the spirit of collectivism i wouldn't mention that one of bruce's really big ideas was if you want to put a document up on your site you should you must you should contact the original author and get written permission from him to redistribute the file how am i going to do that with how to fuck up your parents dinner party by the ninja so i read your dinner party anarchy file i was very impressed i think that it should really reach a wider audience i'm with text files dot com and if you sign this release here we can proceed with i think the next phase in your name i saw an awful lot of articles that had clearly been reprinted from magazines and newspapers i'll tell you this sooner or later you're going to get your nuts in a vice it isn't a matter of weather but when you don't need to worry about me you need to worry about gannett and times mirror and other media corporations with lots of money and attorneys that have people like you and me for breakfast what do you think a disney lawyer pitbull is going to do once he has his teeth in you i saw several stories in your archive from newsweek in washington post built on by the same company you could have dozens of articles from that one corporation if not hundreds that makes you a significant target you seem like a reasonably smart person in his late 20s with some interesting career prospects whatever your career plans a stink in a federal prison will screw you uh you're making a stupid mistake that can have very serious consequences for the rest of your life and the lecture leave my stuff alone and i'll leave you alone he then proceeds to talk about his life i was in bbs his blah blah blah blah i only mentioned that because he says i did this i wrote i wrote this thing he wrote a column about computing called body language using the pen name of quasi modem i've been using that name for 15 years and although others are now using it i was the first years i know all that stuff is on this too too bad you'll never get your hands on any of it talk about his thread is that i'll never hear from him again thank you mr go back give me my property anyway um one other interesting aspect of um the internet that has come out is um actually what inspired me originally for text files was i did search for an old bulletin board system i loved called shallered forest 2 which shallered forest 2 was in new york it was um up in uh near nyak it was it was a nice floor i liked it very much it was the home of bioc agent 003 which a lot of other people well maybe they know maybe they don't know bioc agent was one of the best writers i'm still searching for him i can't find the guy but well you do your best anyway so i did a search on the web figuring i'll find the shallered forest 2 uh you know users of shallered forest 2 support page let's all get together and talk about how great times nothing not a thing not a mention of it not a mention of the boards around it not a and i was like it's gone it's not there it's not on mine that scared me that scared me because it means very much to me i this is my niche this is where i live i live in this i have a part of me that has this hobby of keeping track of the past and trying to remember all the important things that happened back then because a lot of things that we're dealing with right now up to the minute are things that were evident there i mean there were there were people destroying other people's stuff there were there were people indicating that you know these bulletin board systems are going to change everything law enforcement i have a beautiful file from the law enforcement agency the danger of bbs is you know beautiful article where he's just these things are called trends of even oh it's wonderful single line comodo 64 oh no anyway actually what am i one of my greatest oh the the shameful confessions are coming out this time there were a couple boards i had to get on and i i love them i got on them and you know i did my posting but then it would be busy for days and days and days and three o'clock in the morning it would come and it's still be busy and i couldn't anyway so sometimes i would call up the operator and i i need to reach my friend really badly for something wrong i need to reach my friend and she and i go she'll okay sir i want i need to emergency bed so i need to get through sir i need to get through and she'll go okay sir let me try sir there seems to be something wrong with the line oh really well i'll try again later click to all those people i knocked off i'm so sorry i had to read the nine new messages and the freaking board so you know that was that was this little those but see those are the memories you don't really encounter busy signals as much anymore you know like yeah no no no no once you're on you don't really encounter so i'm actually i guess you get the 404 isn't that yeah you're trying to buy a friend who's only has one phone line and you have to use your phone yeah use the emergency breakthrough on your buddy in fact let me think really somebody oh that's right mogul who was a co-contributor maybe a co-contributor to my site tells me told me this that we were we were having this deep confession one day in the swedish elite he told me that he knew that his i hope this was mobile this actually might have been ah it doesn't matter i guess but i don't want i don't want i don't want to ascribe this to the wrong person he had a program set up where if he could not get onto his bulletin board system it would buy one by one call all of his friends in conjunction so their call waiting would kick in and then he would be able to get back on because he knew it had to be one of them try no call john no call john that's shameful but it's very very very creative so you know i guess that's part of the fun um so since i come out with this site i wanted this site to be the kind of dream site i've always wanted where when i was searching for sheriff force to like stumble along text files dot com holy shit and just want to download it and it's very funny because i see people who do this i see people who feel like i do they come onto my site boom wget wget wget wget wget i mean they just rip it they just go in and they're just boom all night i think the proper term is leech leech yes they leech yes they leech they leech worldwide so to fix that i started like i said compressing archives um i made the mistake or make a mistake i have made the decision where i put up a link to a archive of the entire site in one archive luckily my isp is dumb i remember talking to these guys and they were like hey what is your site about your popular site because i warned them i'm gonna have a popular site you might get some phone calls just like me no what's it about i go bbs's and they go what's that this is an isp so pretty good 207 bag tar gz file i'm going this is the whole site suddenly my usage went from i think it's i'm really using 700 or 800 megabytes a day of text downloading it shot up to four gigs a day and it's still there right now as we speak i mean this poor thing is just it's a 46 and it's just the day i was slash dotted a glorious day and i always remember it i remember going over to the computer and the light this drive light was on and it was on and i remember i was like doing some stuff and i kept glancing on the display of light stayed on for eight straight hours never blinked once just the whole time i mean this was a 46 i'd gotten out of the trash and it was just pump on um so that did tell me that i had tapped into something that people were interested in so that that was a good sign right there so i didn't actually keep up with it now like i said i wanted this dream thing of like oh and here they all are here's all the text files and i'm trying to actually increase it by saying here's articles written by the original people about their text files and really giving some real um perspective to it well there are an entire other range of kids in the world who are part of the same breed that used to go on to sites and claim they had credit card numbers they didn't uh we'll go on and talk about the bulletin board system and try to charge for access like little snake whale salesman we'll grab 40 or 50 of my files or have 40 or 50 files i won't claim they got them for me and put them up on their site porn banner porn banner porn banner three files porn banner porn banner porn banner wears three links mp3 mp3 mp3 hacker roms here links it's like i mean you can't blame the kid for being industrious you know but i'm just thinking what the service you're doing you know i'm saying you're giving this shit out for free because i want people to have it and you gotta make you do five cents per click because you want somebody to have an old file no no context just cool bomb files and um they're actually i guess that's more me going tut tut you know i'm i'm i'm live in the store and i'm laughing at the little store down the street that sells them for it's the deep linkers i have learned to hate the deep linkers are the people who have my entire site up on their site and each link actually links to my site and yanks them off text text as wears text text as something that somebody says i'm gonna rip them they can't even spare the bandwidth for text three k text files and they're gonna rip them off from me they're gonna they're gonna they're going to uh they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna burn they're gonna burn a couple of the sites you know like this idea refers because it's always kind of interesting the ones that scare me are the ones while there was one kid he had a site up that was just anti police police suck the police are like the police suck the police suck go here to find recipes to blow up the police the full words a librarian does not want to hear is blow up the police and pointing to you so that that i wouldn't know anything about that no you wouldn't know a damn thing about that i used to run a bulletin board system called the works bbs this was in 1986 that i started it oh my god you've heard of it oh i see what you wrote okay i started a bulletin board system in 1986 based on a um a pc port that i've written of a bbs program called waffle which was originally on a board called the dark side of the movie 408245 spam and um which should be up anytime again soon where where is he where is he resurrect that baby where is he so anyway uh i know where you live uh this is up i'm glorious this up the so it was originally a port of waffle and it went to other software i ran it for about two or three years my father and i had a little bit of a falling out that ended in that line being shut off and me living the boston i thought that line was free dad had a ibm purchase line i loved it more confession on tape my father had a um what do they call the guardian system it was a callback system you dialed in their computer and their computer would hang up on you and it would call back the number attached to your user account and then validate you so ibm provided my father with a phone line for free well the bills didn't come to my father the phone line was in the name of ibm corporation arm on new york so i started with a few couple long distance calls because i couldn't remember code for that day you know i made a couple calls one month nothing happened but a few more calls six months later alliance teleconference calling everywhere fuck that code it's like that ibm behind me ibm eventually tallied it and pulled my father into arm thing i said sir why did you make eleven thousand dollars worth of calls you were calling over for dial-up dad came home that was that for that phone line so the bulletin board system went down about a month but a year later year or two later i got into conversation with a young gentleman who sounded very young who i knew through another bulletin board system named dave um and i put my i had software that i'd written called ferret pbs and he took it people started calling him after that it became dave ferret and he put up the works and that's the works that most people know i think it was a cbc board for a while there was a bunch of other things it was my original board was where a very young person named ski would come on and the other board had that ski became a cosysop and he grew up to be a very nice little boy um they all come from somewhere i tell you he changed his name too too much more loving name i guess anyway um so for me you know there was there was a part of this that i you know i i had that was my little part that might be the stake in all this and so i collected text files i was a text file bbs so that's where the original collection came um what i built the current one now um i'm going to shift gears just for my the last part of my my talk here um unfortunately or fortunately depending on if you're a junkie or not um the the uh the major shift in computer usage has unfortunately almost primarily become the need to understand politics to some degree um i was never a big fan of watching laws being made and watching the whole process the whole sausages analogy you might want to eat them but you don't want to know how they're being made and and as a result i've had to keep my eye on laws that are coming out every few years now there are laws well there are proposed laws they're going through the house that just make me shit my pants um they have great names too i mean they have those names that you can't stand up against these names um the one i'm specifically thinking of is um what was it the anti-terrorism defense act i mean you know what are you gonna stand up and go that sounds really fine you don't need to be going after terrorism you know well the person who's behind this is young lady the young lady a nice lady called bian feinstein she was the mayor of san francisco for a while i heard a rumor this is just a rumor she passed a bunch of she's i'll explain about her whole gun position too but apparently she was busted for bringing a gun on airplane her one of her people had like a gun walked through it anyway i i heard that i haven't found that i was going crazy trying to find that article just before now but i will spread that horrible rumor about her she's had a number of interesting laws obviously she has passed an important legislation like the white zinfidel grape week act of 2000 which declares january 21st through 28th of 2001 to be national grape white grape zinfidel week in recognition of all the things that god thank god children rest easy in their beds she has things that she believes very strongly and she doesn't want to see babies explode we'll really get this out unless you do she doesn't want to see babies explode so how do we prevent the babies from exploding well let's make it so that nothing in the world can explode how do we make it so nothing in it don't talk about the exploding the first part of explosions is don't talk about explosions the second part of explosions i'll talk about explosions so she started to go after um she put up this thing where she said you can't discuss bomb making on the internet and people in congress said what the fuck are you talking about of course they can talk about that so she had to morph it a little bit so again you can't discuss this stuff with the intent to harm so now it's that kind of past people said well okay that's fine so that one actually got through and got killed in committee um she did this again um she keeps trying to do it her and orn hatch sometimes you'll see orn hatches name attached to it sometimes it's her name but it really has her stink about it she had a um law where she didn't want guns in churches i love that one she's also constantly trying to have everything reclassified as an assault weapon because they finally had something you know you can't have assault weapons she's trying to have everything if something could potentially be used for an assault weapon she wants it banned steak knife steak knife and um so so she doesn't you know that that's her approach now fine i've always been afraid of that that eventually oh the most important thing about all of her laws that the real the real curly nitrous burning part of the engine of her law is that they always have these unbelievable bowel loosening sentences attached to them because it's one thing to go all that that damn law you know they say i can't drive with my shoes off i'm gonna drive with my shoes off i might get you know to get but one of them um put up bomb making information with intent to distribute um 20 years uh 10 000 fine something like that um an enormous amount of time now what what position does that put me in that i've got you know anarchy for fun and profit and the person i could argue but now i'm not talking about oh i got in trouble i'm talking 20 years for that you know the idea here is that the initial the initial solution is you know go into go go into surfing just turn off that computer and get the hell out of the house um which i don't obviously want to do so i've been kind of just kind of running the site that is important to me that the files get out i don't want people to use them i just want people to have them i want text files to become worse again i want them to become this thing this block that people trade and keep and things people said some very funny wonderful things some horrible things some nasty things all this wonderful human discourse i want it saved preserved referenced contexted i have kids who are i'm thinking of course of mr ohm who is this kid he was 15 at hope um and i you know came in there and i was introducing myself to cheshire because i was like that guy and they go oh he's the text files com guy mr ohm was 15 years ago whoa i learned all my freaking from you that makes me proud i said don't build the blue box don't do it um the blotto box perhaps the urine box we already mentioned the blotto box last year the blotto box was a box that would destroy an area code the urine box the urine box is the one that would kill the person that the urine box would kill everyone in the line and the blotto box would blow everyone up but it was the only box that involved the Honda generator one of my favorite minds was Wendy's when the blue sphere of electricity shoots from the exchange to run like hell i smashed the state nobody can dial Hoboken um anyway he um now i thought that i always i always like worried about the bomb info i knew i was always like risking something being there but then um i did not expect oh maybe i should have that the focus would kind of move away from bombs because nobody's killed anybody in the news and major massacre in the country for enough thing that the country's kind of yawned and moved on but drugs i didn't expect this whole anti methamphetamine thing um there was a there was an act that diane's been trying to get through for some time um the methamphetamine anti proliferation act of 1999 at least it's named what it is um let's stop methamphetamine from getting everywhere and once again she moves into her little thing of like let's get people to stop talking about them let's get people to stop talking and she actually it doesn't really say methamphetamine it says illegal drugs and it says you can't have now once again this has changed in the last week but the original intent of the law was you can't you can't have information on how you can't have information on the use you cannot discuss the use you cannot link to a site that does any of these things in all those cases 20 years could you imagine 20 years for linking to high times well that's the thing now they changed this that the other thing in the past week they've gotten rid of like the linking part and it was adhered to a bankruptcy act so it's bankruptcy act bankruptcy act drug uh proliferation anti act empowerment of women act actually is on there too and then more bankruptcy so it's this heinous griffon that the the congress has created so i don't know if we'll go through it if we might go through it if we kill it or whatever and so many or whatever but this is the you know this that day today weird ass let's go after this big crazy internet thing um just drives me up the wall so that's part of why i made the entire site downloadable but i really don't think that's even that's enough protection um i would i expect that maybe someday i might be shut down somebody might come up with some really cool excuse and the political thing of the day and somebody everyone loves will die of metanphetamines and they'll go we have to get rid of these and they'll go for me um i did one little piece of political angry whatever um you know that wonderful art and i'm going it starts with st e i always pronounce it wrong where you put messages into pictures yeah i took one of my metanphetamine recipes and put it in diane feinstein's picture and put it up on my side say the recipe works the passphrase is first amendment and it's an idea encrypted and yada yada it was it was like 10 minutes download the tools do it oh yay i'm an activist so i did that but i don't think you know man that's not really where i want to be i am concerned that someday it's going to be me and the little friggin sue with like some a clu lawyer e f f lawyer random suit over here saying i should be killed i should go away for the rest of my life for how to fuck up your parents parents to your party let me think of another another grand classic what's what's a really um how to kill santa claus dead how to kill santa claus dead with its sequel how to kill the easter bunny dead thank you neon knights dead the neon knights the neon knights um and no communications so yeah another fine group that has disappeared bunny lust bunny lost sex was saving was one of my favorites i want to say that's that's the file oh you're called cdc a bunch of sickos for yeah that's right i want that in front of me at a congressional hearing anyway so so unfortunately you know realism where is its ugly head i'm always touched by the stories the guy who's going i fought up against the government my life was destroyed i lost everything i own i thought the government you should fight the government too and i'm like dude oh you know i don't want to be that guy i don't want to be that guy i'm just a lot of calmest so my next solution was well i'm in the middle of work of working on this project while i make copies and give them to people why don't i turn text files calm into aware you can't give away 5k files anymore it's too small the world where people are downloading four megabyte files to listen to mariah carry would you imagine rip some 13-year-old out of 83 bring him here and go yeah we just don't want to make fun do four megabytes holy shit what is it what did you put it on what who what did you put it on four megabytes four megabytes four 160 64 strapped together with duct tape yeah baby the part of the defense computer the you know it's just this incredible you know nobody pays attention to the little text file so you gotta make it big you know and people like they download the 400 megabyte asf a fight club you know you want to get their attention you go here's a rare song you can throw a CD world in so i did now once again i said i'm not selling text files dot com cd ones i'm giving them away in very sharp what i'd like to do is thank you what i what i'd like to do is i was doing this before but nobody was listening now they listen i was trying to find a cd one burn give it to the guy and go you go for it um put on a waste box that there's no virus put on it their text files they never know right you know in a world where there's auto run anyway um the the uh the the idea here is i want people right now with this cd contains and again this is this is part actually of why i love that i was born when i was born because um from a time when one of these things um let's just use the apple example 160 k per side um and to get the second side you had to make a notch in the sink there were single sided and there were double sided floppies double sided floppies were fuck expensive compared to the same double price um you know verification and all that but people figured out very quickly that all the single sided was wasn't the greatest second side so what they would do is they would make a notch here you could flip it over you could use a second side as if it was the first side double was that 420k on one of these floppies when we switched over 360 360 360 yes okay 180 i about your knowledge of the old times, the ancient knowledge. So anyway, so when you compare that to 640 megabytes, class gas, cheap ass tricks to get more, but, you know, I mean, this is incredible to me. I still am at wonder, you know, just, I love this. I love that people were able to put all this crap on little plastic pieces of shit. I knew that I'm starting, I don't like the phrase I'm starting to feel old. I felt a little weird in a computer store when I saw, you know, the new Ray-Man adventures, free magnet inside. It was a computer game, put a free magnet inside of the main character. Hey, shit! They fixed that little magnet problem. So, you know, this to me, you know, I just love this. I love that, I love the business card, the sized ones that can fit the 200 meg. Boom, baby! My life, right there, on the card, flip it over. So, what's on here is the currenttextfiles.com site, the thing that identifies itself as the DEFCON remix, because it's really cool to give some lame-ass little file you typed up two seconds before you burnt it with bad spelling to say, look, it's my stuff. It's all of textfiles.com as it currently stands. It's all of seam.textfiles.com, which is a site run by Mogul, which is where after a while, I got really tired of people mailing me and going, dude, new version of my zine is now out. It was just driving me nuts, so he took that over. So the new, it's like a collection as of three days ago, of all the newest links to all the newest EZs. And my inbox, which would make a heart and marine cry it's 600 megabytes of stuff. By the way, if you donate me text files, and I should actually make a call for that, I love getting donated text files. Don't sort them for me before they come in, except for if you can, delete all the fracks, because people send me like, I've sent you 80 megs of text files, and you know, it's almost all frack. I got frack. I got all the fracks. I went to frack.com and got all the fracks. This is not lost knowledge. I got them. So other than that, you know, don't sort through them because it takes me a lot of time. Just give me all the stuff. I got these tools, go through all of them. It's really great. But as a result, the inbox is massive. So it's the entire inbox. If I were to just stop doing text files today, which I am not, you could take this file, unpack it in your directory, and you have the site. You could theoretically continue my work. It's really boring. But you could. But it's out there. It's turned into a where. It's a 566 meg tar GZ. Throw it up on a file sharing thing. Throw it up on some decentralized thing. Dude, I got 420 Genesis Robs. I got Fight Club. I have every major text file ever made in the 19, there's those great commercials with that one place where they go, what kind of, how's your room service? We don't have room service. How's this? We don't have that. You have towels, no. Do you have any movies? Do you have every movie in every language ever made? That would be my dream. We're just someone who goes, hey man, what's that file over there? That little 700 meg file. I could download that right now. Oh, that's every text file made by every bulletin board system ever. That's what I'm shooting for. I'm shooting for that. So I want people to take this. I don't care what you do with it. It's not really that important to me that you complete my incredible work, you know, the half-finished, you know, portrait of Ali Bell that I am constructing out of a mountain. I don't need, you know, you don't have to do that. All I want is, you take it, you shove it in a drawer, you shove it somewhere, you put it on a hard drive, you stick it in the MP3 directory, you don't care. It's there, it's saved, it's preserved forever. And that's what I'm all about.