KnoopPunt: Low Cost Technology
Those who inspired us
- Chaos Computer Club Still exists. Techo-anarchists: active since 1985 (I think). Very socially driven. Those guys shaped our views on technology. Description: "Galaktische Gemeinschaft von Lebewesen, unabhängig von Alter, Geschlecht und Abstammung sowie gesellschaftlicher Stellung." Time to update your German a bit.
- Antenna: Oldest Telecommunication Site for Non Profits in The Netherlands. Sysop Michael Polman wrote a book about the origin of the early internet in Europe, Van Bolwerken tot Netwerken
- GreenNet in Engeland
- Association for Progressive Communication (A.P.C.)
- Activist Press Service, Amsterdam [Archive Ravage]
- Hacktic, now Xs4all
Learning Internet without Internet
The big problem was that we had to reinvent the net every day. Fortunately, we had a lot of internatioanal contacts (Antenna, Hactic and APS in the Netherlands, Greennet in England) that we learned a lot from, but it was solving a different problem every day and their advice was invariably RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual). We did. Not only we did assemble our computers ourselves, but we also had to install system software ourselves because back then Bill Gates wasn't remotely interested in the Internet, which wasn't going to work anyway according to this great prophet.
For our modems, we had to write the drivers ourselves. I still remember the famous rfossil driver waarvan je hier een stuk de fossil driver source written in C.
We worked on different platforms: FreeBSD, Linux, PC and Mac, we were supporters of OpenSource Movement
We assembled our computers ourselves so we could insert high quality parts, like SCSSI hard drives in cheap boxes. We didn't need the last high speed processors that could manage high definition screens. We used black and white screens or no screen at all for our servers. We plugged in a screen when needed or managed our servers over the Net with SSH. We had to.
Our X-router stood in our small office in Brussels, but we worked most of the time in Ghent. And we used unix, not Linux but FreeBSD, a less known unix branche, but super stable that even hackers had less knowledge of. I think we were the only system that never has been hacked... though when we hosted the website of 'Herri Batasuna' a bunch of Spanish nationalists had organised a mail attack against our mailserver. They only succeeded to paralyse the backup mailserver of our provider, not our's.
There were other attacks. The pioneers at the time was a quite diverse bunch of event organisers, civil engineers and other loose ends. Some cowboys tried to hack their competitors. But they never succeeded to hack KnoopPunt. It happened that a system administrator changed the main passwords of the servers and took over the whole network or claimed a ransom. Some hosted soft-porno sites. They smelled big money. Porno is still responsible for a lot of traffic on the Internet.
The business models of the internet, originated in the academic world and the hackers environment were non-existent. Our ethical code was too high to solve this problem. The internet pioneers came under attack at the moment the major industry and the US-government started to intermeddle in 1994. In a period where monitarianism governs, speculation takes over, causing a bubble. The dot-com bubble started to undermine our activities that ended in 2000. The dot-com bubble bursted at the end. Its burst lasted from March 11, 2000, to October 9, 2002. It was a serious one.
More about the NGO's we worked for