The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-software-saving-the-internet-from-ai-bot-scrapers/

The Open-Source Software Saving the Internet From AI Bot Scrapers
https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-software-saving-the-internet-from-ai-bot-scrapers/
As promised: PartUtil a limited partition editor that makes dual booting DOS and Win 9x without a boot manager easier.
Hide, unhide and make partitions active. Save and restore MBRs to files. And a few extra tricks that help with initial setup. Runs on any PC compatible and any version of DOS. Source code included.
(I've been using an earlier version of this for years on a PCjr. This is a complete rewrite that is finally worth sharing.)
@cyningstan ... But one thing I am not sure about, CGA allows each pixel to appear in 1 out of 4 colors, Hercules is only black or white (green, amber, ..), but on Hercules each CGA pixel is mapped to 3 Hercules pixels by average. Does one do some dithering to represent the 4 colors?
It's a tiny one! I'm going to embed this inside a CRT to make an all-in-one. Must be one of those CRTs with speakers attached or built in. #freedos #dos #msdos #retrogaming #retrocomputing
Great laptop:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/going-deep-with-the-book-8088-the-brand-new-laptop-that-runs-like-its-1981/
An IBM-compatible Turbo XT! My first PC, of 1989 was such a thing, but a huge box with a tiny 12-inch green CRT monitor. 640kB RAM, 10MHz in turbo mode, and a Hercules-compatible graphics card, 640x350 pixels, for games one used a software CGA emulator, mapped the 320x200x4 colors of CGA onto the 640x300x3 gray levels of Hercules ...
And with locally installed DoS ...
Programmed #Pascal on it.
A few weeks ago I wondered what it takes to turn a small LISP-1 into a LISP-2. Turns out it takes just a few hours to get most things right, then some days to iron out a few subtleties, and then a couple of weeks to polish it into a piece of art.
MICRO COMMON LISP is a tiny, purely symbolic, microscopic subset of #CommonLISP. It runs in less than 64K bytes of memory, even on #DOS (tiny model) or CP/M. Here it is:
http://t3x.org/mcl/
#CPM #LISP
MCP Python SDK (<1.9.4) has a HIGH severity vuln (CVE-2025-53366): malformed requests can crash services via uncaught exceptions (DoS). Patch by upgrading to 1.9.4+ and boost input validation! https://radar.offseq.com/threat/cve-2025-53366-cwe-248-uncaught-exception-in-model-bed56cf4 #OffSeq #Python #Vuln #DoS
Based on in-game hints, I suspect I'm near the end of Alien Logic.. but I could be wrong! Let's see how we go after a quick Lode Runner warmup. Streaming now! https://twitch.tv/sonneveld #DOSGaming #Twitch #Streaming #Retrogaming #retro #Retrocomputing #DOS #MSDOS
Coming soon ... a utility to make swapping active partitions easier.
On my PCjr I like to switch between DOS 3.3 and DOS 5, while keeping the drive letters in the extended partition the same. To do that you have to mark the new partition active, but also hide the old partition. FDISK doesn't allow that.
Other tools exist but they are often not small machine friendly. I wrote a similar utility years ago but I lost the source code, so here it is recreated and enhanced.
I just have released the schematics and PCB of my transputer board, along an article describing the process. Enjoy it! #retro #transputer #ibmpc #dos https://nanochess.org/transputer_board.html
Oh, Alien Intruder in BrewOtaku issue 6
https://www.brewotaku.com/2025/05/brewotaku-006-dec24-jan25/
Also, the game is here! https://www.usebox.net/jjm/alien-intruder/
Yay! Or maybe AIEEE! Seems like I'm giving a talk at #EuroBSDCon again this year!
Anyone who has been following me here for a while will know I'm a hopeless #retrocomputing nerd, and I will make no attempt at hiding it during my talk:
Dirty Tricks: Using nginx and Lua to thwart bots and skript kiddies
I'll (try to) show how you can protect your #BBS from drive-by portscans and your production systems from #DDoS attacks using all the wrong tools.
Dietary warning: may contain traces of floppies.
https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/talk/review/RHDFBQWZEVC833T3WDLDEXYFQVRWJKMN #FreeBSD #BSD #Unix #DOS #RunBSD
There are loads of videos about MS-DOS, DOS games and DOS PCs on PeerTube, here's a playlist:
https://fedi.video/w/p/uEorJj9vYsrdmihjc2otzu
- Watching on a phone: Swipe up first two videos at bottom to browse rest of playlist
- Watching on a computer: Choose video by scrolling through playlist on right of screen
- Watching embedded: Click or
to see next or previous videos in playlist
cc @msdos
As you can see this mobile provider is now running at the good 4G+ speed. It was quite low in the evening before, probably due to the fact that they have too many clients that are allowed to log in per Cell Tower
Working on some bug fixes and polish for an upcoming release of #OpenCrystalCaves, such as having the green "bigfoot” monster chase the player on hit, or tweaking the hurt boxes so that trick jumps work - they have to be just right!
#Microsoft revives the #MSDOS EDIT.COM editor as an #OpenSource, cross-platform #CLI editor #WrittenInRust
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/edit-is-now-open-source/
/cc @dosnostalgic
Sometimes, I just enjoy browsing through those old ascii art catalogues from old 90s shareware disks. These ads are simply too precious!
The KCS Power PC Board equips an A500 or A2000 with a miniature DOS PC - the computer can then be operated alternatively in Amiga or PC mode. Sander von der Burg has succeeded in developing a simple device driver for AmigaOS that mounts any DOS partitions created by the PC on AmigaOS.
GNOME 2.x has something that the other Gnome's have never had. Full configurability almost like KDE has
That was the period where I would gladly use both Gnome and KDE on my desktops.
When the Gnome programmers started to think for me, is when I Departed.
I am however glad that the Gnome project exists and thrives, because there are hundreds of thousands of people who like the way that the Gnome programmers work. Without Gnome we would have lost those people to Macintosh
Get back to subject please take your time to go to Amber monitors, to the time when you had to run Sidekick, the time when you had to run DOS 3.3
I'm almost certain, no I am certain that you can't argue, that what sidekick did there for a crude and rudimentary user interface was advanced.
I love the way SideKick used the interrupt timer, interrupt the whole system inserted stuff do whatever it wants to do, then tell DOS how to save the files, and then when you got out of SideKick, it was almost magical, that you could use a single tasking operating system and pause it do one of the tasks and then resume it without the operating system ever getting screwed up