pirate bay, w3m, and the interface is just an interface (BEST post ever)

[Emanuel Berg]

Hello Saturday night party people. Now I'm so tired
from not sleeping but I'm still convinced this will be
my best Usenet post ever. Here, I know what you are
thinking: "How can he be so sure?" Let me tell you: I
have already visualized success! Now I'm not talking
visualization like in a hot shower with the lights
off. No, I'm talking visualization like a true
Taekwondo champion from the United States of America.
(Taekwondo is originally Korean but I don't know if
they do the visualization stuff as well. Most
definitely some of them do.) And now you are thinking:
"OK, let's hear it then, what did you visualize?"
Well, problem is, it is always difficult to put in
words any decent visualization - but here goes:

As you might know, the Swedish police a couple of days
ago raided the high-profile torrent site "The Pirate
Bay", and put it down. For good? That remains to be
seen.

The Swedish police don't care about some
military-cinematic complex on the other side of the
world. Their only desire to do it would be to impress
their colleagues in the US Air Force fighting
"cyber-crime" - (I mean, how cool is that? Wait... it
*is* pretty cool!) - but it isn't cool enough for them
to actually do it. So it is a big-business, government
thing behind it, no doubt. Anyway it is done.

This isn't the first time that happened. It happened
once before. Then, there was a big ruckus and people
were banging on the big drums with both arms, and even
some sticks as well. Some people literally took to the
streets. It wasn't in numbers that would impress the
Autonomous Left in Hamburg, but it happened.

But other things happened as well. Many people from
all over the world took part in revenge DoS attacks
that temporarily put down some government websites.
Sure, those people hatched some eggs. But did they
make an omelette as well?

Well, perhaps not exactly them, but other people did,
for sure. Because the site was soon up again - which
is logical: otherwise the police wouldn't raid it
again, brainiacs!

This time, the reaction hasn't been the same, and the
event has passed unnoticed to a large extent. Some of
the people that way-back put up the site have
expressed that "the site sucks, the code and
technology is dated, the site had distasteful adds all
over, let it rest in peace, move on" - that kind of
talk.

But of course the most critical people of anything are
the people who did it. The most critical guy at the
theater is the guy who wrote the play - he can barely
watch it out of fear and embarrassment the first
couple of runs.

Because the service provided by the pirates wasn't bad
at all. And as for the ads, which seem to be
especially painful for the creators, this is an
example of how the focus should always be on what is
provided - and what can be provided in any way anyone
would like, given just a small effort!

The future of computing is interface-agnostic. I'm
writing this mail in the Emacs Gnus message-mode. Are
you reading it just fine in Thunderbird or in a
web-GUI? I'd be damned!

Here is a couple of w3m defuns that demonstrate an
interface which is 100% lacking of any distasteful
interactive and/or sexual ads on the old pirate
stronghold:

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/emacs-init/w3m/dl.el
    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/emacs-init/w3m/search.el

Then just use it with a couple of zsh functions to
beam the data to rtorrent -

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/conf/.zsh/download

- and you are done: you have the file in no-time and
didn't even have to play a JavaScript sorry excuse for
a game to get it.

Look, I'm not advocating piracy - or saying you
shouldn't do it, for that matter - I'm saying, don't
get stuck on the surface. If you don't like it, make
your own, the fun and easy way for all us dummies.

(Here, when I'm done with the visualization thing I
think I'll just not send the post. Or should I? Fine,
I'll do it.)

-- 
underground experts united