Cult of the Dead Cow – Veilid (2023)

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

A legendary hacker collective, Cult of the Dead Cow, has launched Veilid, an open-source, peer-to-peer application framework aimed at enabling privacy-preserving, mobile-first apps such as secure chat. Commenters reminisce about the group’s 80s–90s hacking culture and tools like Back Orifice, while contrasting that era’s DIY, ASCII-heavy aesthetics with today’s web norms and accessibility expectations. Others examine Veilid’s technical promise and active development, but note slow visible progress, sparse public documentation, and reliance on Discord for updates as barriers to broader adoption.

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.