RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116160637051672728

the question you should be asking yourself is not “what's the best way to verify the age of every single computer user on earth”

but rather “why the fuck are we trying to verify the age of every single computer user on earth????”

and the answer to that is: fascism
stop. complying.

This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.

https://dec10.uknet.net

I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.

One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.

I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.

So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:

https://dec10.uknet.net

And then follow the terse instructions from there.

In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.

I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...

Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.

** Update: I replaced all the annoying Guacamole stuff with a straight through path on a different machine. So it should work now and be more stable.

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering

(don't try this on a phone!)

It's cheaper to buy an AR-15 rifle than 64GB of DDR5 RAM.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/s/zqGWHpd39c

Does your ISP support IPv6?

Boosts welcome.

Let's remind everyone what a safe internet actually means. 🌐🌍

Share this & Spread the word!

#SaferInternetDay26 #SID

You can tell if someone is a computering supergenius if their solution to a difficult problem looks like nothing.

Lisp is six functions. Forth is 200 bytes. Unix is just tiny programs and text files. The original web is just a hacked SMTP server sending SGML files. And yet, it does *that*.

The huge, complex stuff--Windows, Java, the modern web--is all the work of mediocre thinkers with big budgets and too little time.

This is a damning article from the Wikipedia editors on GenAI articles written for Wikipedia: https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipedia-editing-what-we-learned-in-2025/

#ai

Letting AI agents run your life is like handing the car keys to your 5-year-old. What could go wrong?

I was marveling while reading this PCMag piece, which describes how to secure an agentic AI setup that essentially mimics malware: To do it's job properly, the AI agent has to be able to read private messages, store credentials, execute commands, and maintain a persistent state. How do you do that? You chase after it like you would your child.

"The important thing is to make sure you limit "who can talk to your bot, where the bot is allowed to act, [and] what the bot can touch" on your device, the bot's support documentation says."

https://www.pcmag.com/news/clawdbot-moltbot-hot-new-ai-agent-creator-warns-of-spicy-security-risks?test_uuid=04IpBmWGZleS0I0J3epvMrC&test_variant=A

This is an essential read from @pluralistic – well worth your time to understand the points he’s making fully as he’s spot on and the excellent analogies will make it easier for you to discuss the topic with others.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

#AI #capitalism #neoliberalism #tech #reverseCentaur