Link Index - Find and share Good™ sites Google doesn't want you to see

[AmpleApricots]

Z-Library - lots of books and scientific articles.
Steam Underground - lots of games. Trust them to not contain malware? I wouldn't. Take usual measures. Good for that weird early release game you wanna take a look at but can't find a torrent for.

EDIT: Oh, not copyright infringing. Nvm I can't read

 

[Dick Justice]

Site outaged slowed but couldn't stop the update. Subcategorization will probably be added with the next update.

Rejected:
https://www.2600.london/ - Appears to be inactive, will add if someone can vouch they're still doing their thing.
http://cachemonet.com/ - Didn't load in any of my browsers, looks like js garbage. Can add if someone explains what it does and its value.
https://libg●n.is/ - Exists to facilitate criminal copyright infringement. Try again when copyright is abolished and Disney execs are hanging from trees.

Suggestions, will be added if no one dissents:
Sites
http://bash.org/ - The irc quote database, appears to be inactive.
https://restoreprivacy.com/ - Blog collecting security/privacy guides.
Search
https://matrix.itasoftware.com/ - Metasearch of flights for times/locations, graded against price. By google but still worth checking out for travel.
Single Sites
https://defensivecomputingchecklist.com/ - recommended by routersecurity.org, haven't read it yet but it looks thorough and competently done.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan/ - Fascinating read on what's it like to be a filthy gaijin trying to make ends as something other than an English teacher.
https://www.scribd.com/doc/3186890/Prostitution-in-China - Detailed account of the state of prostitution and its cultural underpinnings in Occupied West Taiwan. If anyone knows a non-scribd version of this please share.
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm - The best shoelace knot ever. Two minutes will save you weeks of your life in tying time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

NoScript is a better solution for Mozilla-based browsers.

NoScript is still getting updates unlike uMatrix.

I switched to uMatrix out of curiosity(and someone in another thread said "use uMatrix") and the learning curve is higher than NoScript solely because it allows more fine grained control and for non-sperg users that will probably lead to "argh just allow all" situations, sort of like the current cookie/tracker choices. Lots of choices but it takes up time. NoScript is simpler that way and it's way more intuitive to permanently whitelist scripts in it.
uMatrix is informative in how it shows how much shit goes into letting me click on bicycles to show that I'm not a bot.

 

[Bongocat]

Steam Underground - lots of games. Trust them to not contain malware? I wouldn't. Take usual measures. Good for that weird early release game you wanna take a look at but can't find a torrent for.

I usually steer clear of recommending sites like that for games. Software is a special level of risk, and it's hard to contain the damage it can do unless you really know what you're doing (or are rich and can just afford 2 beefy machines). Torrenting from reputable trackers is much safer since the original files can't be tampered with.

 

[Kosher Dill]

https://www.scribd.com/doc/3186890/Prostitution-in-China - Detailed account of the state of prostitution and its cultural underpinnings in Occupied West Taiwan. If anyone knows a non-scribd version of this please share.

Looks interesting. I found the author uploaded a copy to Wikimedia himself:

File:Prostitution in China.pdf - Wikimedia Commons

commons.wikimedia.org

Might want to grab it because it's been nominated for deletion.

EDIT: wait, WTF is this? Looks like it's just this guy's excuse to go bang illiterate underage prostitutes.

Secretly prying into a small notebook on the bed as she goes to the bathroom reveals that she has made an extensive net of connections, and also that she cannot write characters properly.

lol

I vote against this for inclusion.

 

[Pee Cola]

I only have one suggestion and it's kinda niche, but the PDP-11.RU Mirrors Archive is a mirror covering dozens of retrocomputing websites, FTP servers and so on. There's technical documentation going back to the 1960s, as well as tons of software for 20th century computers and operating systems (as well as the operating systems themselves). Whilst it's really handy for those of us with old DEC minicomputers or AlphaServers lying around the house, it's not an exclusively DEC-related resource.

The only caveat is that some of this stuff may be subject to copyright, but in the same sense that abandonware may be subject to it i.e. technically still under copyright but it's so obsolete that nobody is even sure who owns the rights anymore, let alone who'd enforce it.

Even if it doesn't make the cut for the Link Index (viz. too niche, lack of clarity wrt copyright), my fellow retrocomputing autists may find this useful.

 

[Kosher Dill]

By the way, maybe the index ought to be maintained over on Kiwi Git rather than editing the first post here forever. Maybe it could be kept in some format that's easy to "compile" into static HTML.

I wonder if there's anything worth salvaging from DMOZ:

DMOZ

It's the Web, Organized.

dmoztools.net

The site is so painful to navigate that I have no idea if there's anything worthwhile in there.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

I only have one suggestion and it's kinda niche, but the PDP-11.RU Mirrors Archive is a mirror covering dozens of retrocomputing websites, FTP servers and so on.

This is very important. I'm tempted to wget it all but 14tb, oof.

In a similar vein, the info-mac ftp was the top distribution site for pretty much everything Mac related in the early 90s. Mirrors of it have been up and down in various forms of completeness and in a cursory glance through the apple folder I didn't spot it there. If you ever need to do anything with a mac from before the iMac era (or ever see the need to in the future, there's big bucks to be had refurbishing legacy macs) it's probably a good idea to download this and stuff if on a NAS or on optical media, since it's pretty much the canonical source of drivers for pre2000 macs:

Info-Mac Archive : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Info-Mac Archive was a centralised collection of Macintosh software, with over 100 mirror sites located around the world. It has been made available...

archive.org

 

[Dick Justice]

By the way, maybe the index ought to be maintained over on Kiwi Git rather than editing the first post here forever. Maybe it could be kept in some format that's easy to "compile" into static HTML.

I wonder if there's anything worth salvaging from DMOZ:

DMOZ

It's the Web, Organized.

dmoztools.net

The site is so painful to navigate that I have no idea if there's anything worthwhile in there.

Sounds neat. Can we still include the swastika to scare away reddit?

 

[Stasi]

I have some (mostly game related) suggestions:

Abandonware:
https://www.myabandonware.com/ - Repository of abandoned PC games. A lot of old DOS era stuff but also a good number of more modern games. The list of games on abandonware sites has shrunk significantly in recent years as GOG has gained in popularity and companies realised they can sell 20 year old games to boomers. Still some gems to be found which are stuck in licensing hell or otherwise abandoned (No One Lives Forever, Alice, Heretic II and Chronicles of Riddick for example).
http://www.abandonia.com/ - similar to above and probably a lot of overlap between the two.
http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/ - I swear this used to have direct downloads years ago but now seems to just have links to google searches so less useful than the other two.

Emulation
https://vimm.net/ - ROMs/ISOs up to PS3.
https://cdromance.com/ - ROMs/ISOs. Lots of Japanese only games if you are into the weeb stuff. Has annoying pop-under ads, I usually prefer vimm.

Other
http://the-eye.eu/ - large archive site, a bit like archive.org. I mostly use it for games.
http://www.replacementdocs.com/news.php - archive of old videogame manuals.
https://videogamecritic.com/ - videogame review site which I'm pretty sure has been around since the 90s (and looks it). I think its literally one guy trying to review every game in existence for every console. Pretty simple - 1 screenshot,a short text blurb and a score. Nice to waste some time on or check if that NES rom you downloaded is worth playing.
https://www.ps2-home.com/forum/page/opl-game-compatibility-list-1 - a bit niche but if you have a soft modded PS2 some games don't work properly off the HDD. This site has a list of games and lists which version of OPL works, any tweaks needed to get it going etc.

 

[Never Scored]

I have some (mostly game related) suggestions:

Abandonware:
https://www.myabandonware.com/ - Repository of abandoned PC games. A lot of old DOS era stuff but also a good number of more modern games. The list of games on abandonware sites has shrunk significantly in recent years as GOG has gained in popularity and companies realised they can sell 20 year old games to boomers. Still some gems to be found which are stuck in licensing hell or otherwise abandoned (No One Lives Forever, Alice, Heretic II and Chronicles of Riddick for example).
http://www.abandonia.com/ - similar to above and probably a lot of overlap between the two.
http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/ - I swear this used to have direct downloads years ago but now seems to just have links to google searches so less useful than the other two.

Emulation
https://vimm.net/ - ROMs/ISOs up to PS3.
https://cdromance.com/ - ROMs/ISOs. Lots of Japanese only games if you are into the weeb stuff. Has annoying pop-under ads, I usually prefer vimm.

Other
http://the-eye.eu/ - large archive site, a bit like archive.org. I mostly use it for games.
http://www.replacementdocs.com/news.php - archive of old videogame manuals.
https://videogamecritic.com/ - videogame review site which I'm pretty sure has been around since the 90s (and looks it). I think its literally one guy trying to review every game in existence for every console. Pretty simple - 1 screenshot,a short text blurb and a score. Nice to waste some time on or check if that NES rom you downloaded is worth playing.
https://www.ps2-home.com/forum/page/opl-game-compatibility-list-1 - a bit niche but if you have a soft modded PS2 some games don't work properly off the HDD. This site has a list of games and lists which version of OPL works, any tweaks needed to get it going etc.

I know one of the rules is no copyright infringement because the sites die, but Vimm has been around for over 20 years and I can't see it dying anytime soon, whatever they're doing to escape Nintendo's fury.

 

[Bagronkleton]

A few media creation & design oriented links

https://photomosh.com

A poor man's photoshop/after effects combo if you're into datamoshing and glitch aesthetics but don't have the scratch or hardware to do either.

Sumopaint - Online Image Editor

The best photo editing and drawing tool online.

www.sumopaint.com

Free photoshop-like online painter.

https://magenta.tensorflow.org/lofi-player

Interesting simple lo-fi music generator that you influence through different sliders. Can be nice background noise, if nothing else.

 

[Dick Justice]

http://8bitworkshop.com - online/offline ide/debugger for various obsolete computers, selfhostable

Should probably be posted to the software thread as well.

https://www.astrolog.org/labyrnth/daedalus.htm - the single most autistic maze program to ever exist, author is an ulillillia type and the entire page is terrifyingly detailed

Rejected. I don't see any nuggets that can be extracted without running the client software itself, which plants it firmly in the purview of software thread.

>Browser addons (These should all be available for both Firefox and Chrome)
WebRTC Control - prevents WebRTC from leaking your true ip address. https://mybrowseraddon.com/webrtc-control.html
Decentraleyes - Uses local versions of scripts to prevent them from spying on you https://decentraleyes.org/
uBlock Origin - Ad blocker. really good. light on cpu usage. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
uMatrix - blocks requests from websites. Can break sites. Probably for advance users only (i don't even use it)
I don't care about cookies - Blocks popups from sites telling you they use cookies. https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
Archiveror - One click web page archiving solution https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror
Smart HTTPS / HTTPS Everywhere - forces https on every website. HTTPS will encrypt the traffic to and from websites. Your ISP can still see what sites you're going to. That's where a vpn comes in handy. https://mybrowseraddon.com/smart-https.html / https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
ClearURLs - removes tracking elements from urls. https://gitlab.com/KevinRoebert/ClearUrls

>Privacy

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/

>Other
Youtube-dl - swiss army knife of downloading videos online. Not just for youtube. Tons and tons of sites. There's a gui for it that makes using the program easier. Enemy of RIAA. https://yt-dl.org/
lgogdownloader - command line downloader for gog. https://github.com/Sude-/lgogdownloader

Rejected. All except dig deeper because they're software and belong in the software thread. Dig deeper's author's autistic obsession with catalogue every single bad thing about its entries is useful, but a lot of the arguments feel specious. If someone else can vouch for it I'll add it anyway.

Steam Underground - lots of games. Trust them to not contain malware? I wouldn't. Take usual measures. Good for that weird early release game you wanna take a look at but can't find a torrent for.

Rejected. Copyright infringement.
Z-Library looks cool. Can anyone comment on whether it has substantial non-infringing uses?

 

[tehpope]

Z-Library looks cool. Can anyone comment on whether it has substantial non-infringing uses?

Z-Library is pretty much libgen. So no, its not legal.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Dig deeper's author's autistic obsession with catalogue every single bad thing about its entries is useful, but a lot of the arguments feel specious. If someone else can vouch for it I'll add it anyway.

From what I've read, the guy's generally right on the facts, but it's up to you to decide how much you agree with his "sky is falling" interpretation of them.

 

[Pee Cola]

Z-Library looks cool. Can anyone comment on whether it has substantial non-infringing uses?

Not really. Even though it contains many out-of-print books as scanned PDFs, out-of-print ≠ copyright free. It's still a great website, though.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

This is a useful site for finding random businesses. Idk if it’s applicable to anyone else but I find if handy. I’ve used it before to find tiny LLCs that I couldn’t find elsewhere. It’s also easier then going through each states database individually:

https://opencorporates.com/

 

[Dick Justice]

FFS post your links in https and help us encrypt the web
First attempt at subcategorization completed, but I was iffy on some of the categorizations. Does the demoscene forum belong under "net culture"? "software and services"? "art"? What about GNU? Should they be listed multiple times for completeness or only once for elegance. If anyone wants to take a stab at problems like this I'd live to see your conclusions.
The more I look at what's missing from the index the more I see holes that could be filled with specific videos, video creators, and video channels, which unfortunately implicitly means yt. Where do my fellow kiwis stand on the inclusion of yt links in the index?
The line between "Sites" & "Search" is starting to blur. Any input is appreciated.

Rejected:
http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/ - Any site that hosts jewgle searches in place of content deserves to burn in a thousand hells of kernel panics and nginx errors.
https://cdromance.com/ - I want to add this, but the site appears to track exclusively in game ROMs. I'm not familiar with retro vidya, but am inclined to believe that a substantial proportion of the games on the site are either abandonware or freeware/FLOSS/public domain and therefore legitimate. Can an expert comment?
https://www.ps2-home.com/forum/app.php/ - I think under the copyright offices exceptions and fair use that this would have substantial legitimate uses under US law (where the farms are based), but I can't confirm. Can anyone else?
https://photomosh.com/ - "This browser or device does not support WebGL. Please try with latest Chrome. :^) PhotoMosh-Pro now available! :^))))))))))))"

https://magenta.tensorflow.org/lofi-player

- buggy and unreliable. I might add it if I can spool up a working local instance but the absence of useful documentation is discouraging.


New suggestion, will be added if no one contests
https://accursedfarms.com/games/ - Patron saint of vidya Ross Scott made a huge index of games recommended for this reason or that, most of which are quite obscure or esoteric, and his reasons for recommending each of them are highly original. Good place to start if you're looking for something to play.

I know one of the rules is no copyright infringement because the sites die, but Vimm has been around for over 20 years and I can't see it dying anytime soon, whatever they're doing to escape Nintendo's fury.

The reason I want sites with substantial non-infringing uses is not the risk to warez sites, but the risk to the farms.

 

[William Tell Underpass]

Anyone know anything about https://unblockit.ltd/ ?
If its legit it seems like a pretty cool proxy service and a nice little list of sites, but these things always seem too good to be true.

 

[Xarpho]

http://www.homeoftheunderdogs.net/ - Any site that hosts jewgle searches in place of content deserves to burn in a thousand hells of kernel panics and nginx errors.

The original HOTU died in 2009, probably where the confusion comes in. The closest to a successor you'll find to HOTU is Macintosh Garden, below.


Computing/Tech:
Macintosh Garden: Large archive of Mac software (including commercial software). Don't use for copyright violation.

Other Interesting Stuff:
StarbucksEverywhere: Database of an insane person who has visited nearly every Starbucks worldwide. Contains photos and dates.

Those are the only ones that I can think of right now.

Also

https://accursedfarms.com/games/ - Patron saint of vidya Ross Scott made a huge index of games recommended for this reason or that, most of which are quite obscure or esoteric, and his reasons for recommending each of them are highly original. Good place to start if you're looking for something to play.

Went there and for a number of titles appearing in the front page is just a screenshot and a link to the Steam page (for example). Am I missing something here?

Edit: the Starbucks site seems to be down at the moment
Edit 2: it's back up