If Gmail proved anything, it was that people would, for the most part, accept any terms of service. Or at least not care enough to read the fine-print closely.

I remember, at that time, I was more worried about how admins in my local ISP spend their time than some far away company.

I still remember being a young kid (11-12) and running a program to scan my local ISP in my small town (back then small ISPs could easily get government grants and become a monopoly) for insecure SMB servers or something. I suddenly got a flood of results like

  • /private/passwords.txt

  • /administrator/USD###-users.txt

All kinds of tasty things. Very excite. Then the results started pouring in by the thousands…

  • YOU-ARE-VIOLATING-CFAA

  • FBI-DOORBELL

  • FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.EXE

  • PWN3D-LMAONOOB

Things like that. I immediately shut my computer down and that was probably the first time my dad saw me not eat for a day. Didn’t ask why I wasn’t sleeping much the week after that 😄

Also I Googled for the filenames and found nothing. So if you’re the 50-70 year old who wrote that script and happen to see this, I’d love to get a message with the ISP name. They are in a number of small-medium size towns around my hometown now.

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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