Totse
From Freepedia
Totse (TOT' see, (commonly mispronounced as TOTE' see), from the acronym for "Temple of the Screaming Electron"), is a popular (more than 2 million hits daily [1]) San Francisco Bay Area website and former BBS started by Jeff Hunter (a founding member of NIRVANAnet) in 1989 as a dial-up BBS originally named "& the Temple of the Screaming Electron". The original &Totse specialized in small text files (Hunter had an old 8088 PC XT clone with limited hard drive space; small text files were the only data he could store in reasonable quantity).
Totse became available on the World Wide Web in 1997, and the dial-up BBS system was discontinued in spring 1998. Totse is now home to a message forum powered by InfoPop UBB, yet it is still referred to as the site BBS despite the fact it is no longer available as a dial-up BBS. It is reputed by some to host the world's largest collection of text files [1].
The website is occasionally featured on mainstream news networks or publications, ordinarily for members committing crimes or for particularly controversial text files. A great deal of Totse is dedicated to theoretical methods of growing/creating illicit chemical substances, as well as methods for building explosives, bio-weaponry, and instructions on committing both computer and physical crimes but also contains many areas for the discussion of literature, politics and religion.
Recent upgrade
As of September 15, 2005, Jeff Hunter has upgraded the software that Totse runs on. According to a post made by Jeff Hunter there is, "a new OS (SuSE Linux Pro 9.3), new 2.6 Linux kernel, a new FILESYSTEM (reiserfs -- much better support for the thousands of flat files that UBB uses), a newer version of Apache 2.0, newer version of perl (5.8.6), mod_perl 2.0, new Postfix mail server (still working on that), and all sorts of stuff." [2] The UBB software dated from 2000 has not been updated.
This upgrade was made necessary by the website crashing due to the outdated version of Linux the server was previously running.
Forums
During a recent overhaul, several forums were merged and there are now 32 individual forums on the Totse.com community bulletin board. Many moderators lost their privileges when their forums were removed. There are 5 Administrators and 44 Moderators at Totse. According to the site, there are 32584 registered users (as of 12.00 25th October 2005 GMT+1). Registration for the BBS was temporarily closed for several weeks, however (as of August 15th, 2005) registration has since been reopened.
Notes
- 1⇧ According to the books Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge and The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling
