Bizarre tech tutorials from the early to mid 2000's

[ninturez0]

ninturez0 submitted a new resource:

Bizarre tech tutorials from the early to mid 2000's - what the fuck

information The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

i dont even know what to say about this shit, some of these seem legit but most of these text files are fucking weird. Includes a version of the Anarchist Cookbook for god knows whatever the fuck reason.

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[damienchampagne]

"The Anarchist's Cookbook" was super-popular in the 1990s. Anybody "edgy" or "punk" owned a copy of it, or had a photocopied copy of it, or a .txt file. The lock picking sections were widely circulated. It was big in hacking circles because of the phone phreaking and phone hacking sections. After a while Waldenbooks stopped selling it because it was massively shoplifted. So very logical and common to be found on a BBS or FTP site, even in the early 2000s. Nowadays the AC seems quaint, but at the time, most of it was stuff middle-class kids didn't know anything about. The FBI took it really seriously. There's a PDF floating around on the web that complies all the FBI documents on the AC, pretty easy to find.

 

[damienchampagne]

Also, not really weird set of files at all. Actually pretty normal for the time. There were few places web to look up this stuff. You would have to go to an FTP or USENET or private BBS server. There are a lot of files dealing with using "your new 1 Meg/s connection to download FREE SOFTWARE" and "How to host your WAREZ" and skimming registration codes off search engines, and cracks for software programs. Believe it or not, there was a time where you could use Yahoo or Alta Vista to simply look up a serial number for Windows 98 or XP. It took a while for the big companies to catch up on their DRM, especially as crews had been copying and cracking games for the Commodore 64 and PC (all platforms, really) since the 80s. And with the advent of the MP3 player, scoring free music was massive, so there are some files in this archive in that vein.
If this was lifted in its entirely from some old FTP or BBS site, then there were probably several users dumping stuff here. Families usually only had one computer, so teenagers might not want Dad finding a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook mixed in with his Excel spreadsheets, so better to upload it to the FTP where no one would come across it. Another reason why someone might come across an archive like this is that users would sometimes pay money to have access to a BBS or FTP server, so having a ton of sketchy files, especially about cracking software, making free long distance phone calls (incredible for accessing servers in the dial-up days), or tracking down warez and MP3s was a big selling point. Search engines weren't at the level they are today -- it was awesome to have all that specific information in one location.