[HN Gopher] Cult of the Dead Cow - Veilid (2023)
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Cult of the Dead Cow - Veilid (2023)
Author : dp-hackernews
Score : 164 points
Date : 2024-04-26 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cultdeadcow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cultdeadcow.com)
| 31337Logic wrote:
| Wow. Today I learned CdC and ACiD are still a thing. ;-)
|
| Thanks for posting this. Even though slightly old, still timely
| and relevant.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Similar to the cDc but instead of hacking it goes after culture
| and religion is the Church of MOO which I think came out of the
| same bbs/usenet and irc era of the Internet if you could even
| call it that http://www.textfiles.com/occult/MOOISM/
| HDPDV wrote:
| CULT OF THE DEAD COW.
|
| TODAY. TOMORROW. FOREVER.
| broost3r wrote:
| what a great username to go with this comment
| gryfft wrote:
| The web needs more sites hosting raw .html pages formatted as
| plain text decorated with ASCII art with zero regard for mobile.
| I say this with complete sincerity.
| nulbyte wrote:
| It's not even that much of a problem for me on mobile after
| zooming out just a tad. The green on black is really what makes
| this page for me.
| oytis wrote:
| No cookies, no frameworks (no JS at all really), plain
| unobfuscated html. Amazing!
| flipdot wrote:
| What about accessibility?
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Wouldn't raw html be better for accessibility than a JS
| framework? Saying this as a non-front end dev.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| If done correctly it doesn't matter. SSR can yield an
| accessible HTML page and you won't notice the difference.
| Client-side JS can adapt the web site to your needs -a
| personalization that is hard to achieve in static.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| When was the last time... Or rather, when have you ever
| seen a framework-based page with accessibility done
| correctly?
| Conlectus wrote:
| Raw HTML: potentially. Big blocks of undifferentiated ASCII
| art: no.
| garfij wrote:
| aria-hidden=true
| joemi wrote:
| Not present on the page in question, though.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Fuck accessibility. We're hackers, if it was hard to write,
| it should be hard to read.
| solardev wrote:
| That's what 8-bit text to speech was for, played from the PC
| Speaker for maximum effect. It sounded like Stephen Hawking
| choking on vodka, but that somehow fit the mood.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _It sounded like Stephen Hawking choking on vodka_
|
| I'm probably way, way overthinking this, but this seems
| philosophically quite deep and interesting, much like "what
| is the sound of one hand clapping" (ignoring Bart Simpson's
| masterful destruction of the ancient question).
| oytis wrote:
| Accessibility of this page is pretty bad as far as I can
| tell, but not because it's plain HTML. And if I understand
| correctly you can mark ASCII art as an image (role="img")
| with alternative text too.
| wddkcs wrote:
| Not everyone has to access everything.
| troyvit wrote:
| Oooh good point. W3c accounts for it, and it's not that
| tough. Just a case of putting in the raw html:
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H86.html
| deadbabe wrote:
| Use HTMX.
| colecut wrote:
| HTMX is cool but not necessary for static html pages..
|
| I prefer to use HTMX in place of other frameworks, but if you
| don't need a framework at all, even better!
| ganzuul wrote:
| Still waiting for an LLM to communicate exclusively in this
| format.
| gwern wrote:
| You can support mobile with ASCII art if you render at
| different widths and use a HTML+CSS wrapper for media-queries!
| I have a whole proposal about this: https://gwern.net/utext
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| Love the thinking here. Thanks for the research and
| suggestions.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Is this in reference to tucows?
| rmi_ wrote:
| No: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
| riffic wrote:
| _TUCOWS_ for those that don 't know was an acronym for "The
| Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software" (fun fact; let's
| please have a bit more fun on orange site the debby downer
| thing here is something sometimes).
| debo_ wrote:
| This feels like it would have been edgy and cool 30 years ago.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| FYI: Cult of the Dead Cow is a hacker group that has been
| around since the 80s. Hell a number of members actually have
| testified in congress before (i.e. the CdC members that were
| also part of L0pht).
| parpfish wrote:
| one of them went beyond testifying in congress and just
| became a politician
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beto_O%27Rourke
| Terr_ wrote:
| Holy crap, that is a surprising connection between two
| names I individually knew in a social graph.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Oh damn I didn't even connect that O'Rourke was Psychedelic
| Warlord.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > L0pht
|
| Oh man, that reminds me of NTLM passwords:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L0phtCrack
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I don't know if you're talking about the design or content. But
| on design... So Cult of the Dead Cow has literally been around
| for 40 years.
|
| And this is what their "pages" looked like before the web, when
| ascii on TTY was all you had.
|
| Ironically, however, the first actual web page of theirs IA
| has, in 1998, does _not_ look like this, they didn't actually
| think at that point it would be edgy and cool to make the brand
| new web look like an ASCII tty.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/19980209125729/http://cultdeadco...
|
| It actually wasn't until 2019 they decided it would be maybe
| edgy and cool to make their webpage look like an ascii tty from
| 1990.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190530041326/https://cultdeadc...
| debo_ wrote:
| Not the page design, the method itself. "Bovine mother?" Come
| on.
| wyck wrote:
| The CDC was formed at an actual cow slaughterhouse. Know
| your history
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
| shawn_w wrote:
| I remember reading the text files section of cDc's page back
| in the 90's. There was some sick and twisted stuff in that
| collection. Thanks for the flashbacks?
| realce wrote:
| What have you done lately?
| debo_ wrote:
| Quite a lot, thank you!
| realce wrote:
| edgy!
| debo_ wrote:
| <3
| reocha wrote:
| [deleted]
| glonq wrote:
| Especially to those of us who _were_ edgy and cool 30 years
| ago.
| josephd79 wrote:
| yer mom. haha
| dgellow wrote:
| The project website has more information https://veilid.com/
| solardev wrote:
| Weren't these the guys who released BackOrifice back in the day?
| It was a simple to use remote control trojan with a nice GUI...
| had a blast with it :P
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice?wprov=sfla1
|
| As a kid, I attached it to some shareware game and sent it to a
| friend, letting it lurk. I called him up a few days later. And
| then once we started playing the game, I waited for a suspenseful
| moment to suddenly play back a loud scream .WAV that I uploaded
| previously. My friend jumped out of his chair and screamed
| himself and ran out of the room.
|
| He eventually came back, hyperventilating, and sat down to try to
| tell me what happened, only for his CD tray to start opening and
| closing at random. He ran away again, swearing about his haunted
| PC...
|
| Eventually he told the school principal, who sat us down and made
| us explain what modems and trojans and ports were. Then he asked
| us if we knew what an orifice was, and how that was connected to
| ports... sigh, the kind of discussion you never wanted to have
| with a grown-up.
|
| We were young. The internet was young. Things were wild and free
| and not so hypercommercialized and buttoned down yet. Google
| wasn't around and Apple was for homework and Hypercard. Microsoft
| still had flight simulators in Excel. Good times...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| My friend pulled a similar prank on me a few years earlier than
| that. Involved different tech like BBS software, ZMODEM file
| transfer, and Sound Blaster command line utilities but same
| effect. I nearly died.
| solardev wrote:
| He was a pioneer :D The granddaddy of us script kiddies.
|
| The BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon
| (https://legendreddragon.net/) was how I learned about
| everything from protocols to sex to RPGs. Such an innocent
| time. The media was afraid of Doom corrupting the youth.
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| I was curious about how you'd learn about sex in an RPG and
| followed your link (it's a slow day :) ).
|
| This is hilarious, and reasonable tasteful, all things
| considered:
|
| https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Lay
|
| https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Pregnancy
|
| https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Venereal_Disease
|
| https://nuklearlord.fandom.com/wiki/Children
| mtillman wrote:
| It's worth reading their new book which is a history of the
| group. The chat was launched at defcon last year at their
| birthday party and there will be more this year.
| solardev wrote:
| I didn't know they wrote a book! Just bought a copy. It's
| probably gonna pwn my ereader now, but worth it for the lulz.
| justanother wrote:
| Around that time, maybe a little bit earlier, I was a Sun nerd
| surrounded by other Sun nerds, but this worked for Linux too:
| We'd FTP into each other's machines and upload things like .au
| files of lonely whale cries into /dev/audio for an endless
| supply of WTF Moments.
| gruturo wrote:
| Oh the good times in the Un*x lab (Mostly AIX, sigh) in my
| first year of Uni.
|
| Telnet (What? SSH in 1995-6? nah) to friend's workstation
|
| DISPLAY=0:0; export DISPLAY
|
| xwininfo -root -all
|
| *find some candidate window or control*
|
| xkill -id XXXXXX
|
| (or just fire a perl oneliner to allocate the sum of memory
| and swap, and then repeatedly scan it in a random pattern.
| But that wasn't me).*
| kevindamm wrote:
| And `talk`, the best chat client created ever.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > to a friend
|
| I think with my friend I pitched it more like "I tricked you
| for your own good to show you not to trust random EXE files"...
| though I don't think it was _quite_ that altruistic a prank. :p
|
| I recall another similar trojan (perhaps a little later) was
| Netbus, both showed up a lot when volunteering on an IRC help
| channel to help diagnose and walk victims through removal.
| freedomben wrote:
| This was actually announced/released last year. It is absolutley
| fascinating and deserving of HN (IMHO).
|
| > _Veilid is an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first,
| networked application framework._
|
| Website: https://veilid.com/
|
| Overview: https://veilid.com/docs/overview/
|
| Slides from the Defcon presentatino: https://veilid.com/Launch-
| Slides-Veilid.pdf
|
| Code: https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilid
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| Defcon Launch party was fun too!
| smusamashah wrote:
| I have seen other similar tools/tech on hn
|
| https://briarproject.org/
|
| https://github.com/berty/berty
|
| There were 1 or 2 more like these but don't remember there
| names.
| khimaros wrote:
| veilid is meant to be a bit more general purpose than briar
| or berty, which are primarily chat apps. veilid is more
| similar to freenet in some sense. note: veilid does not
| currently support bluetooth transport.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Man, the website really needs to be updated then. I checked
| over a year ago and it still has this
|
| > The code for VeilidChat will be available on Gitlab in the
| coming weeks.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Has VeilidChat (or anything else running on top of Veilid) been
| released? The page for that (https://veilid.com/chat/) says its
| code will be released "in the coming weeks"; the whole Veilid
| site looks unchanged since its initial publication back in 2023.
|
| Edit: ah, some bouncing around through their FAQs found a repo
| for it that has commits within the last week/month:
| https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat - looks like "hand this to
| your non-technical friends" is still a very long way away.
| khimaros wrote:
| unfortunately most of their up to date documentation is on
| discord. there is a channel there with a list of active
| projects. this one caught my eye:
| https://github.com/cmars/distrans/
| fullspectrumdev wrote:
| > documentation on discord
|
| Disgusting.
|
| I have been looking for solid example code to play with
| building stuff on top of Veilid, but I'm absolutely unwilling
| to waste time on that shit chat platform tbh.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Not sure how up to date these are, but they also have docs
| hosted at https://veilid.com/docs/
| khimaros wrote:
| there is a lot missing
| squigz wrote:
| There's more than a little irony in a group complaining about
| the commercialization of the Internet putting
| documentation/information on Discord
| khimaros wrote:
| it's a bummer and limits my engagement with the community.
| however, it seems to be working pretty well for the people
| who are most involved and the community is pretty active.
| personally, i hope some of the use cases move to veilid
| chat once it is available. worth noting that their target
| audience is "normal humans", so being on discord may be
| helping them engage with that audience.
| trustno2 wrote:
| The demo VeilidChat app doesn't lead anywhere, but there is a
| gitlab.
|
| I haven't tried it yet.
|
| https://gitlab.com/veilid/veilidchat
|
| edit: I did, I failed to build it with "version solving failed.",
| I am not learning how to debug Dart builds right now
|
| edit2: well, build.sh finished with some installing, but I still
| don't see any binary. Eh, other day.
| dustfinger wrote:
| Oh man, does this bring back memories. I loved BackOrfice. I
| installed it on the network at the University where I was a
| student. I had a friend call me on a payphone from a vantage
| point where he could view the layout of the computer terminals
| being used by students doing research. At first, I would open the
| cd trays of a couple of the computers and he described the
| students confusion as they kept closing the trays that would open
| again moments later. After sharing a good laugh, I popped up a
| dialog on one of the computers with a message similar to:
|
| > Hey, I am the guy at station #7. I think you are really hot.
| Want to go out tonight?
|
| Then, I sent similar messages to other stations until we were
| nearly in tears laughing at the chaos we caused. Ahh, those were
| good memories.
| uhoh-itsmaciek wrote:
| That sounds like a crummy thing to do to the people in the lab.
| devjab wrote:
| The internet was different back then. We used to put trojans
| into image files which we distributed through a fake dating
| site peofile. For shits and giggles. We never did anything
| "serious" just stupid things like opening CD rom drives or
| moving their mouse around. We'd UDP "nuke" teacher computers.
| We'd use open networks, and download warez... all sort of
| silly stuff.
|
| Looking back on it... well a lot of it obviously wasn't cool
| at all. I'm just happy that my "teenagers do stupid things"
| happened in a time where the internet crime was basically not
| taken serious unless you hacked a bank.
| uhoh-itsmaciek wrote:
| It's just a different kind of bullying.
| dustfinger wrote:
| It wasn't meant as bullying and certainly wasn't seen
| that way back when I did this. It was mischevious
| practical jokes that people laughed at. The world we live
| in now is not as happy of a place. I feel bad for youth
| of all ages growing up in the world we have now.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Labeling practical jokes as bullying really kind of
| waters down the idea of actual bullying, where emotional
| or physical harm is caused to someone over a long period
| of time. Let's not let bullying be the new "trauma."
| a_vanderbilt wrote:
| They gave a great presentation on veiled for us at BSides Orlando
| last year. At the afterparty, I had a chance to discuss the
| protocol with Paul over some drinks. They've really thought
| through the design and he had answers for almost all of my what-
| ifs.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I had high hopes for Veilid when it was unveiled (ha) but I
| stopped hearing about it soon after it was published online.
| Veilid Chat didn't really seem to work once I found the source
| code and except for a few "hello world" networking programs I
| haven't seen anything use the protocol yet. The official website
| doesn't seem to be getting any updates anymore.
|
| A shame, because this has a lot to offer, in my opinion.
| ganoushoreilly wrote:
| They're still updating it regularly, but it hasn't grown nearly
| as fast as they wanted it to. Last I heard they're working on
| doing nightlies and weeklies for release too. I don't really
| think that matters as much as just having a good release
| schedule and tools that leverage it.
| Retr0id wrote:
| I think it basically released before it was ready, to much
| fanfare. Not an undeserved fanfare, but a premature one.
|
| I think the concept is solid and they're still actively
| developing it, but it's not really something end-users can play
| with yet.
| beardog wrote:
| I went to the launch party they had during defcon, it was a lot
| of fun. I like that Veild is oriented toward being an application
| framework. In the same way that we have things like libsodium to
| use cryptography in our apps without being a master of it, we
| need frameworks/libraries to help build privacy oriented apps as
| well.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| The amount of people in this comment section, on "Hacker News",
| that are completely oblivious to one of the most iconic groups of
| hacker culture is... depressing. I wonder how can we spread more
| zeitgeist about it to newer generations?
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_the_Dead_Cow
|
| I dunno, but maybe try being informative instead of critical
| that losers like me never got the memo?
| klaussilveira wrote:
| I'm sorry if it felt critical or condescending, it certainly
| was not the intent. If anything, I just want people to
| experience that coolness the same way I did.
| elzbardico wrote:
| A frequently overlooked issue about Gen-X online culture is
| that it was always have on gatekeeping, snobbism and hierarchy.
|
| It is not surprising that newer generations don't know it,
| because at this time, people did the most to keep things on
| their small clubs of initiated folks, newbies NOT welcome.
|
| Frankly, millenials and zoomer have a far more open and
| welcoming approach, and probably their culture will survive
| better because of that.
| LastNevadan wrote:
| I'm amazed that CdC is still around. I remember dialing into
| their BBS, Demon Roach Underground, in the mid 80s. That was
| nearly forty years ago!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_Roach_Underground
| netsharc wrote:
| One of their members had presidential hopes a few years ago:
| https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/03/it-tu...
| RyJones wrote:
| They recently became a member of PQCA, too.
|
| Disclosure: I work for LF, assigned to PQCA.
|
| https://pqca.org/#members https://veilid.org/
| https://github.com/pqca
| UberFly wrote:
| I watched them unveil Back Orifice at defcon in the late 90s.
| Those were fun times.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Also check out https://freenet.org. Ian is going to launch in a
| few weeks if all goes well.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| I think Veilid is closer to https://iroh.computer/ than
| Freenet. That said, I'm watching all three extremely closely.
| seomint wrote:
| That beautiful phosphorus green...
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| This is kind of exactly what I've been looking for, and have
| shared at various times features of on hnews and elsewhere. Nice!
| Thank you!
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Woah. A blast from the past from the era of l0pht, shmoo, and
| w00w00.
|
| I'm wondering how they defend against tor's problem where large %
| of nodes are malicious.
|
| More doc:
|
| https://veilid.gitlab.io/developer-book/index.html
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(page generated 2024-04-26 23:01 UTC)