Very interesting article!

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    This takes me back to a simpler time.

    A time of playing Total Anihilation and hanging on MSN messenger.

    Does anyone remember musicmatch jukebox with the jumping sheep visualisation?

  • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This is pretty cool, although it makes me feel old.

    I can’t imagine anyone younger than 30 would even get what this article is about.

    • wootz@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Actually, I’d love to hear from anybody younger than 30. Does this article make sense to you at all?

      • itsralC@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        I am not at all representative of my age group (I am on lemmy ffs), but yes, I do know what winamp is/was.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        Yeah? Dude got some corrupt skins for the Winamp program back in the day that didn’t work and poked into the files to see what was in there.

        Makes me wanna check out WACUP, but last time I tried a skin with it that I at least remember working back in the day, it didn’t work.

        Idk maybe it’s because I’m not American so we didn’t have the latest tech at all times, but I’m in my mid-20s and my first OS was Windows 2000 (no I don’t mean ME). I remember my dad teaching me how to rip CDs with Alcohol 120% when I was 5 or so lol.

      • CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        I’m under 30, I have no idea what winamp is but I figured it’s some music software from the skins’ pics. I imagine it was popular for it to have a museum thing about user created skins

        (I haven’t googled anything yet)

      • lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 month ago

        27, I dimly remember what Winamp was (never used it though) and extrapolated what Skins would be. I assume they’re essentially an archive of image files used to give a music player a custom look? Except they’re not technically restricted to image files and can apparently contain other files too, which I assume will make them invalid as skins, i.e. corrupted.

        How far off am I?

        Mind, I’m far from representative for my age group, given my IT expertise.

      • rbits@lemm.ee
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        1 month ago

        I’m 21, but people talk about winamp online all the time so I’m pretty familiar

    • Mojave@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Bro people know what hieroglyphs and wax Edison cylinders are. People know things, winamp is not some obscure hidden knowledge

      • Alphane Moon@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Wasn’t implying it was hidden knowledge.

        I was thinking about the zeitgeist of different generations in context of computing.

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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    1 month ago

    What a great read. Thanks for sharing.

    I wonder if a “KOOL” tube is a tube for smoking a cigarette out of (I remember that being a brand).

  • just another dev@lemmy.my-box.dev
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    1 month ago

    Such a lovely post, a nice distraction from all the doom scrolling articles! I wish we had more of this.

    I should write a happy news moderator bot for my instance.

  • Menschlicher_Fehler@feddit.org
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    1 month ago

    Oh wow, I never heard of the skin archive. This is fantastic.

    I still use Winamp 2.95, with a Pure Pwnage skin I downloaded back in the mid 2000s. Added it to the archive.

  • Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Oh for fucks sake, now the article itself has a misplaced mobile Wikipedia link and there’s nowhere I can quickly see to put my copy paste about it.

    copy paste for context:

    Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.

      • Plopp@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        General infosec tip: keep your browser add-ons to the absolute minimum you can live with. Add-ons are attack vectors. The more you have - the more at risk you are. And only install the ones you have a reason to trust.

        • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 month ago

          Nah, browsers are sandboxed to absolute shit it is such a pain in the ass to make an extension just to do a phishing attack or to buy the ownership of one to introduce malicious code.

          At most an extension with really broad permissions like read/write contents of any page (a fact that is made obvious upon installation) can replace a link to take you to a phishing page to harvest creds, but thanks to SSL and HTTPS it won’t even work without fifty some odd warnings

          • Plopp@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            You live by that and I’ll live by the advice I’ve seen from infosec professionals that recommend as few add-ons as possible due to security concerns. But yes, browsers are getting more secure over time and that’s good.

            • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              I’m an cybersec MSc and an infosec professional.

              You obviously shouldn’t install closed source or otherwise shady extensions from dodgy authors you don’t know, but on the whole there is very little they can do that you should worry about.

              Most “advice” comes from people who want to sell you something and the infosec industry is mostly a scam to drain B2B procurement budgets plus a few gay furry researchers at defcon who are incomprehensible savants and actual malware authors who do something, unless they just write crappy .NET junk.

              Take for example an average “”“zero-day”“” in 2024: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/threat-actors-exploited-windows-0-day-for-more-than-a-year-before-microsoft-fixed-it/

              This isn’t even a vulnerability. It’s just phishing that requires a user to have file extensions turned off, then download a dodgy as hell .PDF file that isn’t one due to hidden extension, which then uses a milquetoast .hta trojan downloader that only works if one has IE enabled on Windows AND opens the .pdf in MS Edge to pull in reverse shell code via probably psexec of some sort.

              There are so many steps one wonders why not just send a iamnotavirus.exe uac prompt and all to download, compile and run ransomware from vxunderground source code then and there.

              Worrying about stuff like this in browser is akin to using a VPN on public WiFi to avoid MITM attacks, there’s nothing wrong with it but there’s basically nothing to actually worry about there.

              • Plopp@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                You obviously shouldn’t install closed source or otherwise shady extensions from dodgy authors you don’t know, but on the whole there is very little they can do that you should worry about.

                Sorry if I’m nitpicky or confused here. You just said it’s obvious that you shouldn’t install closed sourced or otherwise shady extensions. Do you think a normie knows and cares if an extension is open source? And how do they know if an extension is “shady”? And what about legit extensions that get bought by shady people and turned into shady ones long after they’ve been installed and the user base trusts it?

          • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 month ago

            I mean, couldn’t an addon just read the password you put into a login field, or send in a request, and send it off to their servers?

            • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              If an add-on is modifying contents of pages it shouldn’t or of the clipboard when it shouldn’t, you would have to give it explicit permission at install time, i.e. “This extension can: Read and Modify Data on all sites you visit: Read and Modify contents of the clipboard.”

              Obviously a simple URL redirector for wikipedia requesting access to this data is absurd and would be an immediate red flag. The reason this very thing doesn’t happen more often, is because frankly you’d have to be so computer illiterate to get to that stage that it is much easier to just phish you with basic Facebook profile info for much greater gains.

              This is also the reason most “hacks” nowadays are either supply-side or phishing, shit is just too secure, no fun. We should bring back ActiveX.

              • Plopp@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                Obviously a simple URL redirector for wikipedia requesting access to this data is absurd and would be an immediate red flag.

                To you, yes it should be. But it does require knowledge about how websites and browsers work that most people don’t have. I’d be very surprised if 50% of people have any idea what those permissions actually do and what would be reasonable for different extensions to have.

                • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                  1 month ago

                  But installing few extensions doesn’t protect against it if the few extensions you install have scope and permissions to do bad things. It’s all worded in plain English, at some point you gotta just not use computers anymore if you can’t read.

                  Even if it’s good advice for nan checking emails on IE6 on windows vista, it really shouldn’t be necessary for a Lemmy user.

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      People not having the Wikipedia app baffles me. Sharing from there gives you reasonable links.

      • Mr. Satan@monyet.cc
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        1 month ago

        Why use an app when there’s a web site? In case of Wikipedia I fail to see any functional benefit for an app.

        • bitfucker@programming.dev
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          1 month ago

          The app has offline capabilities and to save articles on a named list. I use it as a reference when forgetting something or to save the list type article as a starting point when researching a software to use. Or just generally a reading material when on the go (yes, I find reading wikipedia articles entertaining)

        • Victor@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Better reading experience overall. Compartmentalizing all my Wikipedia reading so as not to mix it with my other many open tabs. (Wikipedia app has tabs, too.) Sections are not collapsed by default. Easier to search on the page by default than in the browser.

          I can probably go on it I made a more in-depth comparison after using the web version for a bit…

            • bitfucker@programming.dev
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              1 month ago

              My man, I think I have over a hundred tabs and saved wikipedia articles alone that I always refer to when needed. The app works great for me

              • Plopp@lemmy.world
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                1 month ago

                I would assume, and hope, it works really well for such usage. I only tend to end up on Wikipedia a couple of times a week, and 95% of that is on my desktop to have a quick look at something I won’t be getting back to ever again.

            • Victor@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              Time? Pff, no clue. But I look things up all the time and don’t have time to finish articles the first time round, ever (two kids under six).

              So it’s great to have and get back to articles.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    1 month ago

    Eventually I figured out that the password needed to be lower case. Inside were a bunch of .avs files

    https://fileinfo.com/extension/avs

    … is a configuration file used by Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), an audio visualizer for the Nullsoft Winamp media player.

  • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    This is a truly fantastic story. It reminds me of why the Internet is cool, if you dig deep enough, there’s always treasure to be found.