[HN Gopher] Textfiles
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Textfiles
Author : the-mitr
Score : 120 points
Date : 2024-01-20 13:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.textfiles.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.textfiles.com)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Great site. Jason Scott is a pretty influential chap.
|
| My fave is the Goatse Files:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22997724
| kleiba wrote:
| He also made some great documentaries, as I'm sure a lot you
| guys will know, amongst which: - Get Lamp:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Lamp - BBS: The
| Documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary
| ghaff wrote:
| They're both great. Get Lamp also has an Infocom-specific cut
| and BBS really captures a lot of interviews with often pre-
| Web creators and other information that would otherwise be
| pretty obscure at this point. BBSs were sort of a niche at
| the time and, while there are a couple memoir-type things
| (and the textfiles archive of course) there aren't a lot of
| authoritative sources for the history especially if you don't
| have a lot of context to make sense of what is out there.
| shpx wrote:
| This guy is just a bad person. It's a classic case of someone
| going so deep into understanding something that it detaches
| them from reality and their humanity. You understand the
| general structure of the Web (hotlinking) and how to "mv" which
| took you months or years of concentrated study to learn and set
| up, and you forget that under normal circumstances you wouldn't
| give in to your sadistic urge to show children a picture of a
| man's asshole.
|
| And then all the other psychos, like you, come to the retelling
| of the story to fantasize about doing it too.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> And then all the other psychos, like you, come to the
| retelling of the story to fantasize about doing it too._
|
| Well, isn't that special?
|
| I guess you were one of the folks that got goatsed. Not my
| fault.
| inciampati wrote:
| These files remind me of my personal nightmare of unawareness
| learning about the world through the early web. It was awash in
| these, many of which I read in many forms, including text and web
| conversions. It was so hard to know what was real and imagined.
| You could say that that's still true, but I'd argue we have more
| power than ever to know. The information content of our
| communication systems is just fantastically higher. From 8 bits
| to the moon.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Kinda makes me think of applications of Deep Learning research
| atm.
| notRobot wrote:
| Ahaha, I discovered this website as a teen and actually learnt a
| lot about sex and sexuality from text files on it. Fun stuff!
| 6c696e7578 wrote:
| There are certainly worse places on the internet
| keepamovin wrote:
| Just want to note that Google Chrome headless recently landed
| support for correctly rendering text files. Prior to this, when
| in headless the file was not rendered, and IIRC was simply
| downloaded, unlike what happens in regular headful chrome.
|
| As a workaround before this fix, I created a secure document
| viewer that used pandoc and latex to template layout the text
| file in correct form. We intercepted the navigation request /
| download request to a text file and passed it to the secure
| viewer to be rendered using latex and pandox -- most complex
| pipeline ever for displaying ASCII!! hahaha :)
|
| Interested readers can find the latex template here^0 and the
| overall projec this was part of, here^1 :) haha :)
|
| 0:
| https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/blob/e437155fb582cc...
|
| 1: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
| bicx wrote:
| Hah, found this for the content of armstech.txt [Jane's Fighting
| Ships 1990-1991 (Specifications of Warships)]:
|
| ```
|
| From: Janes Copyright <copyright@janes.com>
|
| To: "jason@textfiles.com" <jason@textfiles.com>
|
| Sender: "Ward, David" <David.Ward@janes.com>
|
| Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:38:46 -0600
|
| Subject: Unauthorised hosting of Jane's Fighting Ships data
|
| Dear Mr Scott,
|
| I bring to your attention that your website (www.textfiles.com)
| is hosting information that is the copyright of IHS Global
| Limited.
|
| Whilst I understand that the textfiles.com site is not hosting
| this data for any monetary gain you will, I am sure, understand
| that copyright exists over this data and that IHS Global Limited
| has a strong interest in ensuring that the data is available only
| through its own channels and through its own brands.
|
| The data in question is from the 1990-1991 edition of Jane's
| Fighting Ships and can be found in the text file 'armstech.txt',
| which is located at the following location on the textfiles.com
| site, http://www.textfiles.com/fun/ armstech.txt.
|
| As stated earlier, the data held within this file is the
| copyright of IHS Global Limited, owner of the Jane's Fighting
| Ships publication and brand, and is available only to its
| subscribers; by hosting this data and making it free to download
| you are in breach of international copyright laws.
|
| I therefore ask you, as proprietor of textfiles.com, to remove
| this data from the www.textfiles.com site and any associated
| mirror sites within the next 7 days from the date of this email
| and confirm your action by reply. Failure to take action may
| result in this matter being placed in the hands of the IHS Global
| Limited legal team and further action being taken against you.
|
| Yours sincerely, David Ward
|
| David Ward
|
| Head of Production Operations
|
| IHS Jane's
|
| IHS Global Limited, Sentinel House, 163 Brighton Road, Coulsdon,
| Surrey CR5=
|
| 2YH, United Kingdom
|
| Phone: +44 (0)20 8700 3874
|
| Email: david.ward@ihsjanes.com<mailto:david.ward@ihsjanes.com>
|
| Web: www.janes.com and www.ihs.com
|
| ```
| xenophonf wrote:
| I thought data itself couldn't be copyrighted. I wonder what
| the original file contained.
| ghaff wrote:
| It probably depends what was in the file other than just
| specifications. In any case, probably not worth fighting
| about.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Many think otherwise and will pay a lot of money to make that
| true.
| jsploit wrote:
| Original content:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090502094347/http://www.textfi...
| arch-choot wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22995008
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > TEXTFILES.COM has been online for nearly 25 years with no ads
| or clickthroughs. If you feel like donating to its roughly $1200
| yearly upkeep: Paypal or Venmo.
|
| Performance-wise, this doesn't seem like a $100/month site,
| considering it's only simple HTML and text files.
| TehCorwiz wrote:
| It's probably outgoing bandwidth costs.
| mmcdermott wrote:
| It probably gets mirrored a lit too, given the target
| audience.
| ghaff wrote:
| As I recall, Jason asks people not to do wholesale site
| copies in general, but I imagine a great number do.
| 0xEF wrote:
| You imagine correctly. I cruise open directories
| regularly, usually looking for books to add to my growing
| collection (note: books I will actually read/use),
| generally taking only 2 or 3 books with me when I leave
| the site. At least once a month, I head to an OD I like
| to grab a new book or two only to find the host shut the
| gates because it got posted on r/opendirectories and a
| bunch of people did pointless site rips, as though
| they'll read 40k pdf files or whatever. I often wonder if
| they do it because data caches like that are small
| currency on other parts of the Internet, sort of the way
| you had to maintain an ul/dl ratio to stay on a well-
| maintained BBS back in the day. Who knows.
|
| They're certainly not rehosting the libraries in any
| useful way, I can say that much.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think a lot of it is just that many people have a
| pretty deeply ingrained data hoarding impulse where
| collecting files--any files--for themselves is the end
| goal.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know if it's always hoarding. A lot of stuff on
| the internet simply disappears. Especially when it's
| hosted by a single person, or an org that might not be
| around in 3 years, or they get takedowns (whether legal
| or not).
|
| If you find something you'd like to keep accessing,
| downloading it all in advance can be a smart move.
| ghaff wrote:
| So download specific items as the parent says (and as you
| suggest). But reflexive "download it all just in case"
| probably isn't helpful especially if it's just for you.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with downloading stuff that you want,
| even maybe site sub-sections. But a lot of the time it
| turns into just doing a mass download.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Given it's mostly text, it's curious there's no content-
| encoding applied to HTTP responses. Would reduce bandwidth by
| something like 70-90% in most cases.
|
| Though it's hard to say what's the best configuration without
| understanding the hardware context.
| bombcar wrote:
| Above it's noted at being north of 300gb, most cheap cloud
| providers will give you quite a bit of bandwidth for a
| 300gb server.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Might be a point to self-host something like this. The
| value of the project is its extreme longevity, and the
| half-life of external hosting services is probably
| something like 5 years.
| surteen wrote:
| That site hosts a lot of historical material that many "budget"
| providers would probably balk at and kick you off their network
| without much recourse. Having a good relationship with a
| provider that knows you and will go to bat for you can cost
| some money. That said, $100/month is not terribly expensive for
| dedicated hosting.
| Solvency wrote:
| Couldn't you just host all of these files on Github under the
| pretense of readme files? Would they throw a fit at this?
| LukeShu wrote:
| $ rsync --dry-run -a --stats
| rsync://rsync.textfiles.com/textfiles ./textfiles.com
| ... Number of files: 866,935 (reg: 826,831, dir:
| 40,083, link: 21) ... Total file size:
| 319,889,987,473 bytes ...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ah ha, that explains it. Thanks.
|
| Even on Digital Ocean, that would be $50 for the 500 GB of
| block storage, another $20 for keeping a backup, and ~$6 for
| the actual droplet for hosting. And then some extra bandwidth
| costs, if people try to bulk-download. Adds up.
| Solvency wrote:
| 38 year old. I used to go on here as a teenager and even then I
| felt like Gandalf pouring over a mysterious, powerful, and
| ancient text resource. I was enamored by the "hacking McDonalds"
| file and wished it were't obsolete even at the time of reading.
| blooalien wrote:
| https://www.grammarly.com/blog/pore-over-pour-over/
| a_gnostic wrote:
| Search for Michio Kaku
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Between bash.org and textfiles, a big chunk of my youth was
| archived through our logs and zines. Because of Jason, I'd hung
| onto everything - logs, pictures from meetups, web designs,
| source, and plenty of dumps, emails, news stories, and recordings
| that covered a bit of the history behind some events around the
| turn of the millennium with the intent of turning them over one
| day, but lost pretty much everything in an unfortunate beer
| accident in my 20s.
|
| It didn't feel like counterculture, just that everyone else was
| wrong, you know?
| joshcsimmons wrote:
| This is beautiful - thank you for posting this. I was jettisoned
| back to my past immediately. I instantly recognize familiar
| filenames browsing the site.
|
| Seriously this made my day. I had completely forgotten about this
| (it was a big part of my life...)
| botto wrote:
| I really like this talk Jason Scott did at defcon about being
| sued for 2 billion dollars
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74g7wSTYUso
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(page generated 2024-01-21 23:01 UTC)