Was there a name/culture around this late-90s style of file sharing?
March 9, 2023 1:48 PM Subscribe
I don't remember specifics, but learned about this through tech-minded friends at university in California, around 1996. This was an era when lots of corps/institutions allowed anonymous FTP access for legitimate purposes, like technical documentation, public downloads, etc. and those with access would create special directories, viewable only to those who knew the process to show them.
You'd log on anonymously, like at ftp.microsoft.com, and then set some environment variables like "setenv TERM vt100". Maybe there were other variables like DISPLAY, but whatever they were would make my terminal display special characters in file/directory names. That meant that an innocuous directory called "docs" might display as "docs^t" or "docs^h", which meant that someone had created the directory with a control character in the name. With my terminal set correctly I could go in that directory and there were caches of pirated files of all sorts, often along with text files of other servers that folks would update. I remember that system being around for a few years, but don't remember what happened to it.
You'd log on anonymously, like at ftp.microsoft.com, and then set some environment variables like "setenv TERM vt100". Maybe there were other variables like DISPLAY, but whatever they were would make my terminal display special characters in file/directory names. That meant that an innocuous directory called "docs" might display as "docs^t" or "docs^h", which meant that someone had created the directory with a control character in the name. With my terminal set correctly I could go in that directory and there were caches of pirated files of all sorts, often along with text files of other servers that folks would update. I remember that system being around for a few years, but don't remember what happened to it.
I remember learning, possibly by word of mouth but more likely on IRC or via alt. newsgroups, of pirate sections of public ftp sites. My memory is telling me that at least one used the directory name of "..." (which would be hidden from directory listings by default), and that I was able to find other software of dubious legality with the proto search engine archie, which searched "anonymous" FTP sites. As far as I recall you would connect to Archie via telnet and enter search terms, getting a list of FTP sites where matching files were found. This would have been sometime in the 1992-1995 time range.
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:18 PM on March 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 2:18 PM on March 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
That's a trip down memory lane! Anonymous FTP, gopher, archie... "Information wants to be free!"
posted by erst at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by erst at 2:21 PM on March 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
The Warez Scene is what you are looking for.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:31 PM on March 9, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:31 PM on March 9, 2023 [8 favorites]
Not Gopher, that's a separate, menu-based document search and retrieval protocol.
posted by hanov3r at 2:35 PM on March 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by hanov3r at 2:35 PM on March 9, 2023 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far. I know about the warez scene and pirating via IRC and newsgroups, but this was only through public ftp, using anon login. What I'm specifically asking about is the process of using control characters in directory names to obfuscate warez content and serving/sharing that content over ftp. There were so many people I knew using that specific method that I figured there would be a sub-scene around it, or a name for it.
posted by homesickness at 2:52 PM on March 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by homesickness at 2:52 PM on March 9, 2023 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I wonder if this is pubbing/tagging:
Pubbing is not so important anymore nowadays. This scan/hack/fill methods are from the old days when many universities and business ftp servers had write access enabled on anonymous ftp-servers. So instead of breaking into a computer, they would just upload their warez and give the IP address to their friends. This was very popular but died out for obvious reasons.
It works like this; there is someone who scans for ftp servers with anonymous logins with write-access. Once found, a pub was tagged (a folder was created with the name "tagged.by.name"). The idea was that if a pub was already "tagged" other pubbers would leave it alone. This apparently worked for a while, with people respecting other people's tags and leaving the pubs alone. But it certainly hasn't worked for a very long time.
A method against retagging is dir locking. This is used in pubbing to stop people which are not allowed to get into the directory of the tagger (and slow the server down). There are a couple of dir locking tricks ... a magical character, the ΓΏ (alt+0255) which is an escape character on UNIX machines. When one gives a directory a name containing that character, the name will be displayed different from what you typed. The creator can get in by typing the original name.
posted by credulous at 3:40 PM on March 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
Pubbing is not so important anymore nowadays. This scan/hack/fill methods are from the old days when many universities and business ftp servers had write access enabled on anonymous ftp-servers. So instead of breaking into a computer, they would just upload their warez and give the IP address to their friends. This was very popular but died out for obvious reasons.
It works like this; there is someone who scans for ftp servers with anonymous logins with write-access. Once found, a pub was tagged (a folder was created with the name "tagged.by.name"). The idea was that if a pub was already "tagged" other pubbers would leave it alone. This apparently worked for a while, with people respecting other people's tags and leaving the pubs alone. But it certainly hasn't worked for a very long time.
A method against retagging is dir locking. This is used in pubbing to stop people which are not allowed to get into the directory of the tagger (and slow the server down). There are a couple of dir locking tricks ... a magical character, the ΓΏ (alt+0255) which is an escape character on UNIX machines. When one gives a directory a name containing that character, the name will be displayed different from what you typed. The creator can get in by typing the original name.
posted by credulous at 3:40 PM on March 9, 2023 [5 favorites]
I don't know what it's called, but could tell you the how and why it was possible down to boring details. It could possibly be done with the TERM environment variable but much more likely the 'stty' command to tweak your terminals I/O entry/display functionality. After that, FTP is pretty basic (the protocol) and combined with FTP Server settings would make this sort of thing trivial. It's about 8 years after my time to know about 'warez' scenes of the mid 90's.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:21 AM on March 10, 2023
posted by zengargoyle at 3:21 AM on March 10, 2023
In the late 80s/early+mid 90s most universities had public anonymous FTP servers (wuarchive for example at Wash U in St. Louis was a big one). Sometimes these servers would not be setup very well and allow anonymous logins to upload for one reason or another. Maybe for collaboration maybe because of incompetence or maybe because the sys admin was amenable to the warez scene.
The warez scene was migrating from modem/BBS to the internet. Finding these misconfigured anonymous FTP servers that allowed uploads let you make things available using other people's servers. If you'd find one, you could use non-printable characters or bugs in the FTP server to create invisible or hard to see or hard to use directories on the server and then upload whatever you want. Then you'd announce it on IRC or post on Usenet and other folks would come and get it.
DISPLAY has nothing to do with it. That's an X Windows concept for running a program on one computer but displaying the program on a different computer.
TERM is how you tell programs how you want the screen to display. The screens were rudimentary and there were some standards for doing fancier things than just showing text. By setting the TERM environment variable, you tell the program what sorts of things your terminal supported; maybe it changes colors or allows cursor movement, etc. But with public ftp sites, you use characters that are invisible under "normal" TERM values but display under other TERM values to create invisible or hard to see directories on the FTP server. Someone just browsing around might not notice the .warez directory because it was hidden by ls but shown by dir. Or the " warez" direcotry rendered without the space in ls and you couldn't cd into it without the space. When you'd set the TERM to vt220 or whatever, the tab would render as ^h. Maybe you'd use an ascii control sequence to set the foreground font color to black so people whose terminals supported ANSI colors would see nothing, but there really was a directory called \u001b[30mw4r3z\u001b[0m you could go into and download the latest Wing Commander or QuattroPro.
Public FTP died out because of a combination of Usenet alt.binaries.* and the http/web taking over. Usenet was like public ftp servers without having to find holes or do tricks. It was like the sys admins were just totally willing to host whatever you bothered to post up no questions asked. A lot of servers might block alt.binaries.something but it was the wildwest and you'd just make a new newsgroup and start posting there.
Personally I don't remember a name for this other than warez. I'd never heard of "pubbing" or "tagging" in this context. But I wasn't really in the scene so much as just growing up at the right time to experience the tail end of BBSes and the explosion of the Internet.
posted by cmm at 9:53 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
The warez scene was migrating from modem/BBS to the internet. Finding these misconfigured anonymous FTP servers that allowed uploads let you make things available using other people's servers. If you'd find one, you could use non-printable characters or bugs in the FTP server to create invisible or hard to see or hard to use directories on the server and then upload whatever you want. Then you'd announce it on IRC or post on Usenet and other folks would come and get it.
DISPLAY has nothing to do with it. That's an X Windows concept for running a program on one computer but displaying the program on a different computer.
TERM is how you tell programs how you want the screen to display. The screens were rudimentary and there were some standards for doing fancier things than just showing text. By setting the TERM environment variable, you tell the program what sorts of things your terminal supported; maybe it changes colors or allows cursor movement, etc. But with public ftp sites, you use characters that are invisible under "normal" TERM values but display under other TERM values to create invisible or hard to see directories on the FTP server. Someone just browsing around might not notice the .warez directory because it was hidden by ls but shown by dir. Or the " warez" direcotry rendered without the space in ls and you couldn't cd into it without the space. When you'd set the TERM to vt220 or whatever, the tab would render as ^h. Maybe you'd use an ascii control sequence to set the foreground font color to black so people whose terminals supported ANSI colors would see nothing, but there really was a directory called \u001b[30mw4r3z\u001b[0m you could go into and download the latest Wing Commander or QuattroPro.
Public FTP died out because of a combination of Usenet alt.binaries.* and the http/web taking over. Usenet was like public ftp servers without having to find holes or do tricks. It was like the sys admins were just totally willing to host whatever you bothered to post up no questions asked. A lot of servers might block alt.binaries.something but it was the wildwest and you'd just make a new newsgroup and start posting there.
Personally I don't remember a name for this other than warez. I'd never heard of "pubbing" or "tagging" in this context. But I wasn't really in the scene so much as just growing up at the right time to experience the tail end of BBSes and the explosion of the Internet.
posted by cmm at 9:53 AM on March 10, 2023 [1 favorite]
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posted by zadcat at 1:49 PM on March 9, 2023 [4 favorites]