News snoop, that would be great. Since you're posting as a guest & I can't private message you, send us an email at editors AT xfamily.org and we'll write you back.

Thanx!

news snoop
Hi! I made my own profile. You can email me at that address. Please send me your address to send the Home Arc. Thanks.

What is the family's "Home Arc"?

They are CDs containing the digitised text of all TFI writings.

The software package (which for some time was released on a yearly basis) is comprised of 3 CDs... one for installation purposes, one for text, and a third for scanned images of illustrated publications. The program also served a number of other purposes including stripping RTF files of originator-identifying properties and assisting with PGP encryption tasks. However, it did not work with any OS newer than Windows 98, and was never updated to do so as by that time most of the underlying code was more than a decade old and would have required almost a ground-up rewrite. The Family later distributed a large number of pubs (though not as many) on a more recent piece of software called InfoStore, which was programmed by a member in Russia.

Both InfoStore and the HomeArc were never released in a non-sanitized form. All pubs in them had undergone the various "purges".

As of this year, the archive of the HomeArc's content is available on the Family's "members only" website at http://www.familymembers.com (which is password protected, and employs significant security measures to protect its contents).

(*cough*) brute force (*/cough*) (*wheeze*) pr0n site style (*/wheeze*)

Sorry guys. I've got a bit of a cold. (tacky emoticon indicatating "Twisted Evil")

Jack is probably already aware of this, but for other interested parties, mere access is not the end of the security measures. I.e. many publications can only be downloaded after they are first encrypted with a known Family home's PGP key, and methods are used in an attempt to be able to determine the source of the leak should the content make it into the public domain.

Jack was not aware of this but has now been made aware. I was real busy spreading doubts when I was a kid so they never let me touch the computers or know what was going on anywhere.

Ah... my bad... actually, I had little access to it myself.

Btw, in the first year (years?) of the Members Only ("MO") site, the login details were Family-wide & changed every month, with each month's login ID and password being distributed in the Grapevines. There was also a bulletin board type thing on the website, which was closely monitored & censored, but even then there were too many people "voicing doubt" and negative viewpoints about TF, so they temporarily shut down the boards and openned it back up after instituting a new login system, where each home was given its own password and would use their home number as the login name, so TF could find out where all these "doubts" were coming from.

This didn't last long however, and they eventually just shut down the boards entirely, with accompanying notices / rebukes from King Penie. The new login mechanism stuck, however, as it offered a way to track activity, leaking of material, etc. If content distributed publicly is found to have come from a particular home ID, they most definitely will have their access to the site shut off, or if the leaders believe it was not the fault of anyone currently in the home & there is little risk of it happening again they may just be required to change their password.

At least that's what I remember.... if anyone has any details to add / correct, I be interested.

Some specifics of what the members only site used to contain include the list of approved movies, an archive of recent Family pubs, mp3s of all manner of Family audio, songbooks of Family music along with guitar chords, pubs that didn't make it to publishing due to the glut of material, classified ads (Family style), public PGP keys for contacting various WS departments, stats of the witnessing shiner homes, and so on.

Courtesy of Grapevine 104 (from Jan. 2001):

HomeARC on Windows 2000! In 4 Easy Steps!

BY DAN, HUNGARY

You will need the following in order to get the HomeARC running on Windows 2000:
1. A copy of the installed HomeARC directory (i.e., C:\homearc).
2. A text editor of some sort, like Notepad.

The Process:
1. Copy the HomeARC directory in its entirety to a directory of your choosing.
2. Go to the drive with your Windows 2000 directory (i.e., C:\WinNT) and go to (Windows 2000 Directory)\system32.
3. Open the file autoexec.nt (located under [Windows 2000 directory\system32]) in your text editor and add the following line to the bottom of the file:
(Path to HomeARC directory)\memctrl.com /i
Please note the above (Path to HomeARC directory) is where you copied the HomeARC directory to (i.e., C:\homearc).
4. Now reboot your computer and run the HomeARC!

NOTE: If you do not have your yourname.INF file saved, you will need to create a new one. In order to do this you will need your original HomeARC CD!

LNF: You can skip this entire process by downloading the installer for W2K – it does it for you! – at http://www.techxcellence.net/downloads … Check it out!

P.S. From WS Computer Team: GBY, Dan, for figuring this out and sharing this wonderful tip with us all! This is just great and will be a big blessing to anyone that is interested in using Windows 2000.

We have still not found any way to get the HomeARC to work in Windows ME (Windows Millennium Edition), and it does not seem that this procedure can be duplicated there. Microsoft removed support for “real-mode device driversâ€

Good news!
You forgot to mention that we don't have to have a Home Arc, InfoStore, or even access to the exclusive D.O. Family Members' site... we can get complete access of most GN's here on this site as well as on the ExFamily.org!!!! Plus, we don't have to tithe 14% of our income to get these precious morsels of tantalizing treats! :wink:

Whoopie, whoopie... holy shit from the WS toilet!!!!

It's amazing that even The Family knows that ME is the worst of all the bad Win OS's.

ME is probably the only real disaster that happened around Y2K.

anything can be cracked though, even PGP coding, i should know because i use PGP. you just need to have the time and stamina to sit there and plug away at until you crack it. you also have to want to do it. thats all hackers do, and eventually someone is going to want to see what is on that site so badly, they are going to hack it, or they will hack it just for the fun of hacking it.

PGP encryption can be cracked (posibilities are highly marginal, however). But you'd need a whole lot more than time and stamina: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Security