Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Nostalgia and hacker history

  • Many reminisce about Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), old BBSes (e.g., Demon Roach Underground), l0pht, shmoo, w00w00, and tools like Back Orifice and L0phtCrack.
  • Several share prank stories involving remote-control trojans and Unix lab shenanigans, noting that such behavior now looks more like bullying or at least ethically questionable.
  • Some are surprised and impressed that cDc is still active after ~40 years.

Site design and aesthetics

  • Strong appreciation for the raw HTML, ASCII-art, green-on-black aesthetic, and total lack of JavaScript, cookies, or frameworks.
  • Others criticize the poor accessibility, especially with large ASCII-art blocks; suggestions include using ARIA attributes and treating ASCII art like images with alt text.
  • Debate over whether frameworks vs plain HTML are inherently better or worse for accessibility; consensus is that either can be good or bad depending on implementation.

Veilid goals and comparisons

  • Veilid is described as an open-source, peer-to-peer, mobile-first application framework, more general-purpose than chat-only tools like Briar or Berty and conceptually closer to Freenet or similar to iroh.
  • Some highlight it as exactly the kind of privacy-oriented framework the ecosystem needs, akin to libsodium for cryptography.

Project status, tooling, and docs

  • Multiple comments note the website appears stale and that VeilidChat is hard to build or not yet user-friendly.
  • There is active development on GitLab (including VeilidChat), but it’s seen as not ready for non-technical users.
  • Key documentation and project lists are reportedly on Discord, which several criticize as ironic and exclusionary; others argue it’s useful for reaching “normal” users.
  • Some feel the project launched with too much fanfare before it was mature.

Culture, community, and sustainability

  • Discussion about old hacker culture being gatekeepy versus newer generations’ more open approach; concern that this contributes to lost “zeitgeist.”
  • Reflections on how open-source projects struggle to compete with commercial efforts due to lack of sustainable funding; calls for paid, non-corporate models.
  • Security-minded questions are raised about defenses against problems like Tor’s high fraction of malicious nodes, but detailed answers are not present.