... and a new file with the same name (and path) and different content can be created that exists at the same time.

This can be confusing.

"I'v updated that file on the server and it has not taken effect. I'v ssh'ed in and I can see the new version. What is going on? If I reboot that box the phone will start ringing..."

So, in the year 2001, NZ telecom provided most of the telephone lines and a much smaller company called Clear sold phone service in some areas. When a customer of one phone company called a line provided by the other they had to pay two NZ cents to the company terminating the call. This meant that NZ telecom customers calling ISP numbers on Clear lines for hours resulted in a trickle of money that was enough for a 'free' service.

This ISP service closed in the year 2002 when they stopped being paid to receive calls.

It looks like OP acquired the domain name when it expired in the year 2015 and, eleven years later, has gotten around to putting up a reproduction website.

I wonder how much email you get that is intended for people who had an ISP email address quarter of a century ago?

Google, gmail, youtube, reddit, yahoo, archive.org etc don't work because they are blocked in China.

It appears that this orange hnn website does not work in China either.

Some websites are 403 forbidden as they seem to be blocking the exit ip addresses.

If you play with this, it may help the enter URLs including the https:// as it does not seem to always properly handle a website upgrading http to https. It may not update the address bar if you get redirected.

It is on youtube.

I see a couple of dozen hours of TV a year because the nearest pub has often has a TV turned on with subtitles, sound off, I would like to watch less.

It had a poor reputation. My vague recollection is that I experienced an irritating number of driver-related BSODs. To me, it now feels like a standard Microsoft experience of them pushing out a new OS then fixing it with service packs over a few years.

To answer OPs hypothetical thought-experiment:

In my view, running Windows Vista today would firstly have the problem that Microsoft has added lots of extra stuff (OS APIs, runtime libraries etc) and you would find that quite a lot of software won't work without stuff in newer versions of Windows.

I feel that if someone added enough extra stuff to Vista to run current software to Vista that it could run most current software then it would not really be Vista anymore.

Most of the Window XP source code has leaked. As far as I know, no pirates are patching, recompiling and releasing versions of it.

Patching Windows security holes is a lot of work. I think Vista was vulnerable when some NSA tools leaked in the year 2017 and it was possible to remotely seize control of Windows machines if port 445 was reachable and things like the wannacry worm caused global chaos.

I'm fairly sure that when Vista reached EOL it still had a lot of LPE vulnerabilities.

See the recent research paper about recreating quantum factoring records using a dog, an abacus, and a vintage computer

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36937413

I'v asked a couple of network engineers that used to work at cloudflare, they said that they have a compliance department that deals with lots of specific requests related to supoenas and law enforment but have not seen bulk feeds of plaintext traffic to other entities.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42915664

Do you mean "I want to block incoming spam email to my email addresses" or "I operate an email mailing list and I want to block bots from joining the list" ?

It really helped to write up why they don't matter now, such as "I was a child when that happened, I'm now an adult who knows how to handle that."

My brain thinks that a physical piece of paper is much more authoritative than a thought in my head and makes less effort to remember things that are documented so having twenty page booklet that I can get out if I need it seemed to help.

First friday of the month is London 2600, which is a bunch of geeks drinking and talking in the Angel pub.

I think thursday is electronic projects evening at South London Makerspace close to Herne Hill station.

There is an OWASP thing for website security and pubstandards which is webdevs and geeks drinking in a pub.

Specifically 27MHz CB radio.

People miles away can hear your conversations with your friends.

Sometimes in the daytime the radio signals bounce off the ionosphere, the noise level goes way up and local chatting range is reduced because stations from 600 miles to thousands of miles away are coming in.

In the days when it was popular trolling assholes would jam and disrupt. people up on a hill with an illegal high power amplifier talked over people.

In the 1970s and 1980s high power AM transmissions sometimes blasted out of the neighbors cheaply-made hifi or scrambled their TV picture.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

The eleven meter wavelength means you need a reasonably large antenna for good performance.

These days it is local CB is almost dead in most places and the noise level is often high in towns due to every house having a dozen switch mode power supplies and other electronics, which really reduces the range.

Decades ago, when it was popular, it was chaotic. Some CB radios did not receive well if someone nearby was talking within a few channels of you. Meet ups at pubs sometimes turned into fist fights.

These days, in most of Europe and the UK you may sometimes hear the last few old men and crazy nitwits that still use CB radio but they are often far away and a legal 4watt radio does not get out far enough for anyone to hear you.