response 116 of 334:

Nov 20 19:07 UTC 2010

1. any chance of getting CGI - SuExec+Apache installed?? It's easy on 
Linux.. simple apt-get. I need it for scripting.
2. tsty: could you activate/validate the volunteers account?
3. What SDF is doing is:
ARPA members have immediate access to:
 600mb total / 20000 files 
 access to multiple subdomains                              (mkhomepg
 -a)

Could we do the same?? "total" 600MB NOT 600MB/user.. instead of stating
 that we give xMB/user fixed, could we give both values..

response 118 of 334:

Nov 22 14:22 UTC 2010

http://m-net.arbornet.org/~veek/index.cgi

hey, hey check this out :) it's not working perfectly and needs more 
features (also i need to re-edit content) BUT

1. look at that file-dir thing on the right! also, you can click on 
those links and view the contents of the file!

What i'm thinking is EVENTUALLY (that's my home-dir for now) ordinary 
voluntary mice can edit "content" in a browser and submit it. Now! If 
you ran that on the main cyberspace website ANYBODY can edit code and 
fix things :)

And it's rock solid secure (once i do some thingies to it)! What I'm 
saying is lynne can put in her password over https (different from the 
system password - we could prolly make it the same thing too) and act 
as web-mistress!

2. Right now it doesn't do much, 'cept view files.. - it was for the 
volunteers page - for them to view crud.

3. You will also be able to view content umm.. like right now those 
tags aren't being interpreted but in the future volunteers can right 
tiny text files like poetry and have it appear.

(it's basiclly like a crummy MIS.. :p)

anyway.. it was easy to do.. i just bummed some programs :) but i'm 
formally registering this project and the grex-flyers project!! no one 
else should work on this urmm.. (that's a request naturally..)

(it's still in a very elementary stage..) You can do stuff like:
http://m-net.arbornet.org/~veek/index.cgi?
entry=/../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/motd

but it's read only and only has perms what i have

response 120 of 334:

Nov 22 16:37 UTC 2010

Boo!  :)

response 122 of 334:

Nov 23 13:56 UTC 2010

[rit]      psulliva nope.. i'm just learning stuff and it look like an 
interesting project
[psulliva] ah 
[psulliva] when did you get your account? 
[rit]      dunno a while back
[rit]                                 
<no message sent>
[psulliva] i tried to create one a while back and i could never 
           get verified 
[rit]      heh, yeah they suck at verification
[rit]      arbornet's not too bad at that.. cyberspace is the pits
[psulliva] yeah, thats a great way to get lots of users :/ 
[psulliva] i wanted the free php and sql 

response 124 of 334:

Nov 23 14:03 UTC 2010

[psulliva] yeah, arbornet's 'newuser' login doesnt work for creating 
           an account 
[psulliva] frustrating trying to get into these services and 
           theres no way in, but theyre both pushing advert like mad 
[psulliva] anycase, gotta run, be back in a bit 
<psulliva@iceland goes AFK>

response 126 of 334:

Nov 23 19:00 UTC 2010

Yes, that's something I've really got to get cracking on.  :-/  I'll 
see if I can look at it tonight.

response 128 of 334:

Nov 23 19:28 UTC 2010

Thanks, Dan. I hope you'll have a chance to look into this soon.

response 130 of 334:

Nov 23 22:40 UTC 2010

resp:129 That was a different time and we've seen that it doesn't work
anything.

response 132 of 334:

Nov 24 20:36 UTC 2010

yeah, but there were a lot more staff to reset the b0x. in the end it
all  b0ils down to the person willing to go to provide and do the button
 pressing :)

response 134 of 334:

Nov 24 20:42 UTC 2010

but veek don't you see that usage has gone down since the validation 
patch was put in.  If the validation patch discourages new users, which 
it does, it defeats its own purpose.

response 136 of 334:

Nov 24 21:18 UTC 2010

i checked and there were 754 odd resh accounts..

response 138 of 334:

Nov 24 22:45 UTC 2010

resp:134 Actually, Richard, do you have any data to back that up?
Because I've been watching the user population, and it's remained
more or less the same size from before the "user validation patch"
was installed.

That said, it declined significantly in the years leading up to
putting the validation policy in place.  I attribute this to three
things:

1. Grex was frequently down for long periods, for two reasons:

   a. The efforts of anti-social types like cdalten and mickeyd to
      find and exploit security problems in OpenBSD (which we chose
      to run for its much vaunted, but ultimately way overblown
      security reputation) and in Grex's configuration, leading
      Grex to either crash or be effectively unusable.

   b. Despite much protestation about things like the necessity of
      ECC RAM during the SPARC vs. x86 debate, when the current
      Grex hardware was purchased, the buyers nickle and dimed on
      important components (like ECC RAM, hardware RAID, and some
      sort of remote console capability).  I think this was a sad
      side-effect of Grex being run by an organization that for
      nearly its entire life operated on a shoestring budget.

2. The environment on the system was so hostile, in party, BBS and
   even just for interactive users working at the command line,
   that many older users left while many newer users didn't see the
   point.

3. Grex, as a service and as a community, is generally less appealing
   than it once was.  If you want to argue endlessly about conservative
   vs liberal, republican vs democrat, atheism vs religion, pro-choice
   vs pro-life, gun control, oil, wars, and all the usual stuff,
   and you want to argue it endlessly with the same five people
   who's positions are known and extraodrinarily unlikely to change,
   then Grex is a great place to do it.  But so are thousands of
   other places.  If you want to do that using either a web interface
   dating from the late 1990s or a command line interface from the
   early 1980s, then Grex is just awesome.  But most people don't
   want to do that.  Also, the scale of problems associated with
   keeping Grex running increased in the mid-2000s to such an extent
   that it became very challenging indeed to keep Grex running.

Note that the validation patch was designed, and largely succeeded,
in addressing points 1(a) and 2.  It really has nothing to do with
1(b) or 3.

Now, Richard, what you will notice, and I will agree with you about,
is that there has been a general decline in participation in the
Grex community, as defined by the BBS and party.  But that's only
one of several communities that exist on Grex; it would be a mistake
to conflate the two or to assume that decline in one implies decline
in the other.

Richard, you've made clear that you don't like the validation policy.
Fine.  But you've also made no proposal for dealing with the problem
of electronic vandalism that, history has shown, will occur if we
get rid of it.  If you have a viable alternative, I'd be very happy
to hear about it.

response 140 of 334:

Nov 24 23:06 UTC 2010

Somebody, it might have been Dan, suggested validating via a micro-payment 
like through PayPal. Couple that with a manual validation method for 
people who are unable to use PayPal (ie. other country, or under 18), and 
I think that would fit our needs.