Now I am waiting for time when they move us-east-1 physical security to run in us-east-1... Thus locking themselves out when needing some physical intervention on servers to get backup.
This is in SEA. They probably operate from ap-southeast-1 or 2. But yeah, if the internet goes down, the provider service goes down or AWS goes down they are cooked.
At the moment there's a [dead] subling comment by the project author explaining what it's about. Because the comment is dead I can't reply to it asking further questions unfortunately.
The project was apparently designed and created on a phone.
I vouched for it and encouraged others to do the same. It doesn't appear to have been flagged and a provides a detailed rationale for the project, even though I share the doubts about the overall utility.
The article provides a good foundation for opposing arguments.
Excerpting:
> The researchers wanted to find a way to do the seemingly impossible — to give the military the benefits of a global, high-speed communications network without exposing them to the vulnerabilities of the metadata that the network relied on to operate.
> ...
> There are other implications, as well. For a CIA agent to use Tor without suspicion in non-U.S. nations, for example, there would need to be plenty of citizens in these nations using Tor for everyday internet browsing. Similarly, if the only users in a particular country are whistleblowers, civil rights activists and protesters, the government may well simply arrest anyone connecting to your anonymity network. As a result, an onion routing system had to be open to as wide a range of users and maintainers as possible, so that the mere fact that someone was using the system wouldn’t reveal anything about their identity or their affiliations.
> ...
> Anonymity loves company — so Tor needed to be sold to the general public. That necessity led to an unlikely alliance between cypherpunks and the U.S. Navy.
> The NRL researchers behind Onion routing knew it wouldn’t work unless everyday people used it, so they reached out to the cypherpunks and invited them into conversations about design and strategy to reach the masses.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
Man! TextAssist was the very first thought I had when I opened the article. I occasionally search the web for it, and indeed, it seems in the process of becoming forgotten. Made me wonder if I was the only one spending many hours with it. Thanks for your comment!
FWIW, X11 also includes a bunch of quaint background patterns as well, in /usr/include/X11/bitmaps.
You can try each of them by just doing `xsetroot -bitmap <filename>`. I have mine set to wide_weave, which is incidentally identical to Pattern 15 in https://paulsmith.github.io/classic-mac-patterns/
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