Comment by lb1lf
4 years ago
-Back in the day when file sharing was new, I won two rounds of beer from my friends in university - the first after I tried what I dubbed hardcore backups (Tarred, gzipped and pgp'd an archive, slapped an avi header on it, renamed it britney_uncensored_sex_tape[XXX].avi or something similar, then shared it on WinMX assuming that as hard drive space was free and teenage boys were teenage boys, at least some of those who downloaded it would leave it to share even if the file claimed to be corrupt.
It worked a charm.
Second round? A year later, when the archive was still available from umpteen hosts.
For all I know, it still languishes on who knows how many old hard drives...
Poor guys, still looking for the right codec to play the britney tape they downloaded 28 years ago.
Disturbing, she'd have been 12 at that time.
Hm, I thought she was popular in the mid '90s, but maybe it was more like the '00s?
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Which brittany are they referring to?
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Your story reminds me of a Linus quote.
"Real men don’t use backups, they post their stuff on a public ftp server and let the rest of the world make copies." -Linus Torvalds
You devil! I'm pretty sure I remember running into a file that looked like that and a quick poke around showed it wasn't anything valid.
Funny how these things work since I'm pretty sure I remember running into it around 2008 (i'm a few years younger).
I think i just deleted it though since I was suspicious of most strange files back then; I was the nerd who didn't have friends so i used to troll forums for anything i could get my hands on.
"running into it"... Yeah. Right. ;)
Not sure how WinMX works, but back in the old DC++ days, you not only searched for things but could navigate directory structures directly from users connected to the same hub. It was uncommon for me to browse through some of the biggest/interesting users and see what they were sharing.
By doing that, I'm sure I stumbled upon my fair share of sketchy stuff unintentionally, so it's not hard to imagine the same for others :)
Oops my finger slipped on the download button and I accidentally waited 2 days to let it finish. Clumsy me
That's a perfect college CS story. Beer and bastardized files - what a combo!
ah hell, you're the one who made my computer crash trying to open that and make me panic? damn you man