#also everything leading up to the metallica dmca claim (baby steps of online piracy!!!)

[hyperzstellar]

hi please infodump about technology and old web stuff ty

OIGHFJFF hello!!! I'm... I don't know what to say I feel like I've got to sort of like. be given something to talk about but I guess I can start off by how I initially got interested in these things! this post will be very long and I've tried to format it the best I can BUT here it is:

so to start off things my mom always noted about me that I was naturally inclined towards computers. I kind of learned how to type from a very young age too because she had me by her old pc (it was a win 95 plus) and had word open and just told me to write things. it was fun and epic as fuck but FROM WHAT I'VE BEEN TOLD. I kind of just left it open one day and it was open for daaays so the computer just... overheated to death though. this sound (skip to 0:36) is super nostalgic to me. makes me go back to when we didn't even have internet and we got internet connectivity by like... 2009 AFAIK. yahoo messenger and windows live messenger were still a thing!!! before the former shut down and the latter was (don't remember this clearly) integrated with Skype technologies around the time Microsoft bought out Skype and then it was done for after a year or so of this happening.

but fast forward to about 2012-2013. you're me and you're 10 years old, and you find a LOT of content about old pcs. mainly how they looked and sounded like, as well as people absolutely going batshit on command prompt and deleting everything (these are called destruction videos). sort of everything led to another and I found a channel that exists up to this day that was focused around viruses! and even until now I'm still very interested in them. my primary interest in computers (and extending to phones as well) is how the insides work. it's super interesting to be picking apart the 'brain' of a machine you basically feed it commands to execute... and of course the process is literally done in the blink of an eye. nothing we would ever properly notice (unless for x y z reasons your machine is slowing down)

moving on from this talk I'd like to talk about a really famous and notorious virus, the loveletter worm! also commonly called ILOVEYOU, it was written in visual basic script (vbs) and caused a lot of destruction. its primary way of appealing and spreading quick is because of its nature, like it kind of takes advantage of the user emotionally (social engineering) like. oh you got a love letter! (except it's a worm!)

how do you not know that? windows automatically hides file extensions unless a user disables the option from file explorer (I can't. remember it entirely rn I'm not even on pc but this is a thing, in older windows versions it was in folder options), so an unsuspecting user wouldn't know this is a vbs file and instead would think it's a text file, as it appeared to be when you'd download it from Microsoft Outlook.

what loveletter would do -and made it one of the most destructive viruses with over a million computers infected and probably I think billions in damage- was when executed, it would overwrite all files with a copy of itself. so like... you would lose important data (didn't overwrite .exes afaik, just images and text files etc), which at the time was a Very Bad Thing. still is if you get a nasty ransomware. it was also very simple code wise if I remember correctly, which was a reason why there were so many variants of this.

overall I feel like old school viruses have more personality to them. like there was only one recent virus that did have attributes (mostly destructive ones but there were also annoying but harmless viruses) pertaining to old school viruses BUT as of late, especially with how bitcoin has become very lucrative and mainstream like an 'untapped' gold mine (bitcoin farmers die challenge), most viruses fall under the ransomware category, where all your files (not critical ones) are encrypted and under X amount of time you'll need to pay Y amount of btc to a specific wallet, unless you wanna lose your files. one in specific was so bad (I think it was wannacry? I cannot remember for the life of me) that Microsoft, a few years prior to ending Windows XP updates as it'd reached end of service, put out an update/security patch for said operating system. that's obviously like... big news, but also shows the magnitude of the problem.

um that's all I had to say personally!!! if you do want to check out videos not only about viruses and stuff but also computers in general I would suggest Enderman (has really cool experiments like installing windows on a RAM (that later cannot be booted from because... it gets wiped after a shutdown)), Flytech Videos (I suggest the Microsoft edge protocol series, as well as the fork bomb + regedit vid where they delete each major directory at the time and see the results) and all time favorite, and the channel that jump started my interest when I was in elementary school, danooct1 :)

thanks for asking and I hope this was cohesive!!