It’s especially rough when you remember seeing it on the internet before and even had it yourself at one point. There are/were a bunch of music artists I discovered at both the old eMusic and the music section of old download.com, but those collections weren’t archived anywhere in any meaningful way when the sites changed. It took me years to finally locate what I was after. It’s just so draining to know that something used to easily and freely available and to not be able to find it no matter how hard to dig.

So do I call her Mother or Goddess.

The game was rigged from the start.

Maybe I’m missing context, but the article doesn’t mention what this admission looked like. Was it just a use saying “yeah I downloaded the new ghostbusters movie, it sucked glad I didn’t pay for it”, or was it someone admitting to camming/distributing/facilitating piracy at a base level? Surely they are not going after someone for just casually mentioning they pirated a movie?

I ran a cgiproxy instance with proper ssl certs that totally bypassed and trivialized the school’s internet filter. It was password protected with unique passwords per user and I had it set up in such a way I could tell when a password “got out” and I’d cancel it. It got added to the blocklist a couple times, but I was ready because I’d already registered like 20 dynamic dns services to point to the server. It would take them months to add it to the manual blocklist but just a minute to change a link on my forum so people used the next address in line. It was an open secret that I was running it, but I was pretty smart in how I ran it and who I provided access to. I also ran a forum that was popular with the student body and the passwords to the proxy were given out there, but only to people I trusted and could reasonably deduce who they were. Even then they didn’t know it was me running the whole thing.

I mean most people probably did, but again I did it in such a way there was never any real paper trail. I never made any money or wanted any clout for it. I just thought it was fun that I got pissed off at the internet filter blocking newgrounds one day and thought “absolutely not”, and basically trivialized the filter schoolwide.