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1993 Fools: Internet Talk Television is coming to a workstation near you!
From samba!concert!gatech!udel!wupost!gumby!yale!cs.utexas.edu!tibet.uucp!null!ftp.foo.net!nobody Thu Apr 1 22:57:41 EST 1993 Article: 12 of alt.internet.talk.radio Xref: samba alt.radio.internet:2 alt.internet.talk.radio:12 news.admin:16866 alt.best.of.internet:1085 rec.video:32138 rec.video:32139 rec.humor:67808 alt.internet.services:4494 comp.misc:10726 Newsgroups: alt.radio.internet,alt.internet.talk.radio,news.admin,alt.best.of.internet,rec.video,rec.video,rec.humor,alt.internet.services,comp.misc Path: samba!concert!gatech!udel!wupost!gumby!yale!cs.utexas.edu!tibet.uucp!null!ftp.foo.net!nobody From: Deng_Xiaopingpingping.BEIJING@Tibet.UUCP (temp using Dollie LLama acct) Subject: Internet Talk Television is coming to a workstation near you! Message-ID: <GetALife.CaliforniaDrivers@ftp.foo.net> Sender: news@ftp.foo.net (NeTnEwS) Nntp-Posting-Host: ftp.foo.net Reply-To: /dev/null Organization: The 501st Channel, All Flames - All The Time - Television Followup-To: my kremvax posting of 4/1/1986 Date: Wed, 31 Mar 1993 23:59:59 GMT Distribution: world Approved: no Lines: 165 The following article is reprinted without permission from ConCoctions. ConCoctions is published by the Poretni Company. More information cannot be obtained from the electronic mail address elo@porenti.com. Internet Talk Television Karl MyNameIsMud (karl@television.com) Internet Talk Television attempts to fuse these two trends of gossipy newmagazine format shows with a desire to squander network bandwidth with abandon just because it is there to form a new type of publication: a news and information service about the Internet, distributed on the Internet. Internet Talk Televsion is modeled on the Oprah and Geraldo talk shows and has a goal of providing in-depth technical information to the Internet community. The service is made initially possible with the support of people unlike you. Our goal is to provide a self-referential parody for the the Internet community (please note the Date: header on this posting :-). Head: Bane of the Internet The product of Internet Talk Television is either a Quicktime(tm) movie file or 54,000 GIF files per show that require a 50 MIPs or greater workstation capable of displaying 30 GIF files per second, poorly produced and unfortunately widely available on computer networks (and public ftp archives where we have found directories that are writable by the anonymous ftp account and have a free Gig or so of disk space, we hide the GIF files in '...' directories. To produce these files, we start with the raw data of any journalistic endeavor: we make things up. This raw information is then illustrated graphically using professional-quality equipment : primarily Mario Paint running on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System as used by a 5 year old. The information is then brought back to our studio, and edited and mixed on a secondhand $179 Emerson 2 head VHS VCR in Super Long Play mode (SLP). The "look and feel" we strive for is akin to "Inside Edition", "Hard Copy", "Now It Can Be Told" or other lowest common denominator programs that appeal to the general interest in sensationalistic sleaze, scandal and gossip. Our goal is cover the stories that don't make it into the grocery tabloids for reasons of legal liability for libel, truthfulness and just plain good taste. Instead of discussions of protocols, we want to present actual packet traces of protocols on actual networks along with captured passwords, SMTP dialogue showing interesting private email messages and in-depth interviews with convicted crackers on how to break DES, Kerberos, NFS, passwords, how to make a Cisco router go into conniption fit mode, how to create cyclic spanning tree graphs that loop via routing protocols, etc. Instead of COMDEX, we want to cover the underground Legion of Doom beer busts, the Phone Phreaks annual telethon, etc. Head: Town Adult Video Tape Rental Outlet to the Global Village The result of Internet Talk Television's journalistic activities is a series of video image files. The native format we start with is the popular GIF format, then we envision releases in JPEG, MPEG, PostScript, Quicktime(tm) and X Window Dump File format. At 30 frames per second times 60 seconds time 30 minutes a half-hour program would thus consist of 54,000 GIF files. If each GIF file is around 50k the entire program should use up only about 2,575 megabytes. [I would start buying a bunch of 2 Gigabyte and greater SCSI drives right now] (By the way our advertisements will be primarily companies selling disk drives and other magnetic storage media devices - "You can archive Internet Talk Television onto our 3rd party Exabyte EXB-8500cs; holds 25GB compressed!" ). GIF files are initially spooled on FTP.FOO.NET, the central machines of the Alternative network. Files are then moved over to various regional networks for further distribution. For example, FOOnet, a commercial network provider for the Marianas Islands with service in 2 countries, will act as the central spooling area for the Pacific Islands region. The Guido Bros. trucking company will provide the same service for Brooklyn. The goal of uncoordinated distribution is to increase the load on key links of the network. Transferring several megabyte files over 56kb and 64 kbps links will help quickly provide VP Al Gore the political support he needs to make NREN a reality :-) Files thus move from the FTP.FOO.NET central spool area, to regional spools, to national and local networks. We anticipate most of this transfer to be done using the X 11 protocol, but some networks are discussing the use of Display PostScript(tm) (PostScript level 2), Apple Quicktime(tm) and MicroSoft Windows(tm). It is important to note that Internet Talk Television is the original copyright violator (point of illegal origination in legalese) and does not control the distribution. Please make copies on videotape and send them to your friends. Send a copy to Deng Xiaoping (Free Tibet!). Shock your friends by transmitted frames via ObscurePhone(tm) (oops, I mean PicturePhone(tm)). Make your own compressed HDTV 8mm tape - and in 5 years you will be able to view it on something. Bring a VHS tape of the program with you to watch the next time you go to a sports bar with large screen projection tv (if you want to have several beer bottles cracked over your head. "Hey! Put the game back on!"). Head: Serial Crimes, Parallels to Television Once files have made their way to an individual's desktop (hopefully each individual will perform their own ftp to the one central overloaded FTP site and will waste network bandwidth as well as disk space by storing their own redundant versions of the files) it is up to the the individual user to decide how to present data. We hope to see an infinite variety of different ways of having our files played and only list a few of the more banal methods. The simplest method to view a .gif file on a Sparcstation is to type "xv filename." (alternately "xloadimage filename" may work on some systems). If the file is placed on a Network File System (NFS) file system some remote site's server somewhere, the user is simply going to have to break into that remote machine or hack SUNRPC packets to spoof the remote machines NFS daemon to read the remote file system via NFS. Once the user has obtained the file the user copies the file into some other poor suckers account (on the local machine ) who left the permissions on their home directory wide open so that the rather large file doesn't show up as part of the sneaky users disk usage when the system administrator does a 'du' to try to find out where all of the disk space is rapidly disappearing to. More adventurous playing of files involves video scan convertors, and unlicensed low power VHF TV tranmission (do-it-yourself so- called pirate television stations). This involves connecting the output of a SparcStation to a scan convertor (or convert the RGB signal from a Mac or convert the VGA from a PC) to produce a NTSC composite signal that can be fed into a VCR using the RCA connector video input. Then have the VCR output the AUX signal in out via the RF adapter (commonly set to VHF channel 2, 3 or 4) and connect the RF output coax to a large and high VHF antenna mounted on a mast high above your house. Several of your neighbors should be able to pick up your signal. You might even want to try feeding the signal INTO your local cable system. The addition of a RF signal amplifier (which you can make using parts from Radical Shlock for just a few $$$) can increase your signal strength (and range) considerably. Caveat: Kids, don't try this at home, the FCC hasn't a large sense of humor. Head: How to obtain Internet Talk Television The GIF files will be available on FTP.FOO.NET ( Internet numeric address 127.0.0.1 ) beginning April 1, 1993 in the anonymous ftp subdirectory pub/television/. Filenames begin with the frame number, followed by the date, followed by the extension .gif. Please be sure to turn on 'binary' transfer mode inside FTP. The GIF files holding the individual frames go from 00000 to 54000: ftp> dir 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 521825218252182 -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 00000.040193.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 00001.040193.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:43 00002.040193.gif ... -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 53998.040193.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:41 53999.040193.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 foo bar 50000 Apr 1 03:43 54000.040193.gif 226 Transfer complete. 521825218252182 bytes received in 0.5 seconds (1.9 Kbytes/s) ftp>
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