Welcome to the Alleycat BBS

Here you will find links to my programming projects and other stuff that I find interesting.
(This website is 100% hand-coded HTML.)

Latest News (September 29, 2022) -- Install Alleycat Player

Alleycat Player was last updated on August 7, 2022 - get version 5c
Kraker Local Proxy Server was last updated on November 9, 2022 - get version 4e
8kun Bread Launcher was last updated on August 23, 2022 - get version 2e

Send your questions and feedback to my email: 8chananon@mail.com

My Software Projects at 8kun (anonymous forum)
I guess I'll be dropping little gifts here from time to time. Here's a cute little app for watching TV. It's a subset of what will be available in Alleycat Player. There are 48 channels to play with. They are all in the United States in case that matters. There are three categories: Alternative, Mainstream and Specialty. Many of the channels use my remote proxy server to steal the video link from the originating site. Click the link below.

Free TV Channels
Update - July 21, 2024 - I forgot to date my previous update which was submitted a week ago. This note is just to let "whom it may concern" that I haven't suddenly gone away again. I also notice that the daily counter at the bottom of this page shows 44 hits on this day. Huh, where is that coming from? I normally just get 1 or 2 hits a day though I have no idea from where or why.

I'm sure you've been following the constant news about the staged assassination attempt. Yeah, I think it was staged but we'll never really know the truth, just as we still don't know the truth about JFK or 9/11. The real truth would likely shock us all so we'll never be told.

The broken link to my repository on Internet Archive has been fixed. See the note that I left near the bottom of this page. Internet Archive sucks. I originally starting uploading to IA because I needed the ability to run HTML pages for my Youtube Player project which was later renamed to Alleycat Player. Then IA blocked active HTML so the site lost most of its usefulness. Right now, I'm feeling like I just want to delete everything.

I'll be doing a writeup on something that I've noticed about porn sites. This isn't about porn. It's just that I've noticed that porn sites have not gone woke. You would expect them to be pushing gay pride and drag queens but you won't ever see any of that. No pride flags and no drag queens even though you might think that drag queens would be a perfect fit for porn. Why is it that the whole fucking western world is into faggot worship but porn sites are being all conservative? Isn't that the one place where you would expect wokeness to be dialed up to eleven???
Stay tuned! The best is yet to come!

In the next few weeks, this place will come back to life after being put on hold more than a year ago. Why have I been away? The answer is complicated but I won't bore you with a long story. Suffice to say that my software projects failed to attract sufficient interest, to the point that I was working in the dark with no feedback whatsoever nor even any idea if anybody has been using my software beyond an initial trial. I decided to just stop releasing code and to just take my time to make everything better. This has been difficult because, as I said, there has been no feedback so I've been left to guess on my own what features people may want or what features weren't working as intended.

Alleycat Player is not dead. I've been keeping it up to date insofar as it serves my needs. I still use it to play all of my videos. I never play videos on YouTube or Bitchute or Rumble or any other site. I don't like the site designs and I despise the ads (I'll never understand why a simple banner in the sidebar is not good enough). I watch my movies and TV shows by stealing the video links from the pirate sites. My needs are being met. It's too bad that nobody else has been benefiting. Really, all anybody had to do was drop me a message asking for an update and I would have obliged. I'm sad that nobody bothered.

The Kraker Local Proxy Server is the reason why Alleycat Player has been able to do what no other browser app has ever done. However, it seems that a lot of people have regarded the proxy server with suspicion, like it was going to mess around with their OS or do nasty things in secret. I guess I can't blame them. We do need to be careful about what we install on our machines. In any case, my aim has been to beef up the proxy server to make it an indispensible tool and not just a sidekick to my video player.

Those who have survived through the many DNS outages on 8kun will remember the advice about updating the "hosts" file. Who supplied the IP address for that? I did. How did I know? The Kraker proxy helped with that. I'm just trying to say that the tool was always intended as a bit more than a crutch for Alleycat Player. The problem has been the lack of any apps to demonstrate the features. As long as I'm tooting my own horn, some anons might (fondly) remember the 8kun Authentigator and the spy-versus-spy scenarios (it was fun and no hard feelings, Jim).

My biggest problem right now is finishing the documentation. After over a year of work, there is a LOT to document. Documentation is important but it's more important that it be written clearly and concisely so that people don't need to be software engineers to grasp the concepts. That's hard but I can say that the hardest parts have been completed. It should go a lot more smoothly from here on. I just need to kick myself to get it done. That's why I'm committing myself with this post. Please yell at me if I take too long.
To whet your appetite - here's the link to my YouTube Player demo.

A couple of things: all videos are 360p and some videos won't play. The reasons are simple. First of all, YouTube has dropped support for the 720p audio+video format, leaving 360p as the only option. 480p and higher formats are DASH only, meaning that the audio and video tracks are separate rather than combined in a single file. This makes the video unplayable in the web browser without additional software support.

Some videos have a setting which prevents the video from streaming to a different IP address than the one used to load the metadata. Put simply, www.youtube.com is where the metadata comes from (blocked by CORS) while the video itself streams from a subdomain of googlevideo.com (not blocked by CORS). The demo player uses a remote proxy (a barebones version of Kraker) to access YouTube but the proxy does not support video streaming due to bandwidth limits on the free Vercel account. Therefore, YouTube sees an IP address belonging to an Amazon cloud server but Google sees your real IP address so it blocks playback with a 403 error. This is a common issue with using a remote proxy server.
The Internet is getting tougher and more user-unfriendly😾

As we've seen with YouTube's crackdown on ad blockers (the reason for the existence of my YouTube demo player), website operators are getting more desperate for revenue and they are also looking for ways to lock you in. The unfortunate thing is that the "security features" written into our web browsers are being used against us. Maybe that was always the intent though I'm sure that the developers who work hard to maintain the code bases we all depend on are innocent of this. Historically, developers have always been liberty-minded and they would be offended by the idea that they are the unwitting pawns of "The Man" whom they have always fought against. Yeah, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt but, at the same time, I'm sure that many of them behave exactly like tyrants when the shoe is on their foot. For example, the push for every site to be HTTPS has these same "liberty-minded" developers acting like gate-keepers who look down on anyone who prefers to just use HTTP. What kind of neanderthal uses HTTP? Are you not concerned for the safety of your users? Ah, the old "safety" excuse. It's for the kids, right? The truth is that HTTPS is unnecessary for most websites and it is another tool in the toolbox of those who would limit free speech.

The primitive state of copyright laws in an age of unlimited access to information is another sore point. The gate-keepers would love for you to pay for every word you read but it is difficult to contain information which wants to be free. Nevertheless, they keep trying and they will do anything to make you dependent on them. Paywalls are just one small part of that. Now, I don't begrudge people for wanting to get paid for their work. I respect paywalls and I would never consider hacking into a server to steal someone's property. However, I do begrudge attempts to leverage my own machinery against me.

I use a web browser to gain access to information and I despise those who would use its built-in software features as a bludgeon to keep me away from information that wants to be free. Put up a paywall if you like. However, if your business model requires you to shove ads in my face or to steal processing cycles from my CPU, then you are an enemy. It is difficult for most people to comprehend the many ways that web browsers actually work against them because somebody running a website wants to make sure that they stay inside the curated garden and not wander afield. A very simple example is copying an image or some text which can be blocked by the browser in response to a server setting or some CSS or whatever. I'm sure you've seen this sort of trick from time to time. Using the developer toolbox can sometimes work but there are nastier tricks that can prevent even that.

My position is this: if I can see it or hear it in my web browser then I should be able to copy it or download it. I allow some slack for the likes of Netflix because they're not pretending to offer "free access" to anything. They demand my money up front and I respect that. YouTube does not get the same respect. If it plays in my browser without money changing hands then I'm the one in control, not YouTube. They can scream about "copyright theft" all they like. If they don't want me to share then they shouldn't be allowed to share either. Keep your crap in a vault somewhere but don't expect me to be nice when you offer "free access" and then bitch about me taking that literally.

Some readers might note a smidgeon of hypocrisy when I say that I respect paywalls but, at the same time, I help myself to movies and TV shows from websites which are clearly guilty of copyright theft since the material is not normally available without paying. I won't argue the point. I'm a hypocrite but I like free stuff. The irony is that some of these pirate websites are even more stingy with their "free access" than YouTube. It's a battle and a half sometimes to liberate material which was stolen in the first place. There's plenty of room for hypocrites on the copyright bandwagon.

My mission is simple. It is to liberate that which is supposedly "free" but is being kept not free by virtue of the features that are present in the web browser. If I want to watch a video on my own equipment under my own terms and conditions then I ought to be able to do that. If it means "breaking" the web browser to liberate the material then I will create the tools to do that. I'm not in any position to modify and compile the browser code. That would be too large of a task. I have to somehow work both outside of and within the browser. This is the point of building a proxy server which I can run on my own system and which will conform to my own needs. The proxy server acts as an intermediary between the website which wants to block my access and the browser which needs to be told to shut up and let me go about my business.

Then all I have to do is write some HTML and some Javascript to tell the browser to go get what I want from where I want without any bullshit. That's it in a nutshell. I invite you to follow me on my journey. Liberate your browser from the tyranny of the Internet.
Kraker Local Proxy Server basic features:😺
  • configurable DNS manager with support for DNS-over-HTTPS
  • ability to route specific domains over a Socks5 or HTTP proxy
  • use Tor, I2P and normal Internet with the same web browser
  • ability to pin the SSL certificate for sensitive domains
  • observe and modify HTTP requests and responses
You might get the idea that the purpose of the proxy server is to support your web browser. That's true. It is also for developers. The last feature listed above supports the analysis and reverse engineering of complex websites in order to scrape data from them. I use a special tool that I call Kraker Mockery which works with the proxy server and the web browser to help me figure out how to scrape a site to get video links. Alleycat Player can then use the proxy server to bypass browser restrictions to find and play the videos.

Some additional features:
  • access to the local file system
  • websocket for global messaging
  • cryptographic support for RSA and AES
  • ability to mimic websites to fool the browser
That last item can be especially useful to bypass security measures meant to block bots (like the Cloudflare bot fight mode). You can steal cookies. You can hijack code from a website and run it in your own app. The sky is the limit.

If you have used man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxies like Fiddler, Charles or HTTP Toolkit then I have to tell you that Kraker is not the same. Kraker is meant to be always online and it only intercepts HTTP requests on demand. It is not a tool that you only run as needed. You need it all of the time.

Kraker has a very small memory footprint. It is 15 to 25 megabytes, depending on usage patterns. It runs under Node.js and, as far as I can tell, it is bulletproof (crossing fingers, kek).
A brief history of the Alleycat BBS🐈

The name comes from an old project I started in 1981 called "Alleycat BBS". This is of nostalgic value to me.

The Alleycat BBS (Bulletin Board System) has disappeared into the fog of history. Nothing can be found about it in any archive. It was small with just 200 to 300 users. The computer which hosted it was also small. It was an Ohio Scientific Superboard with 8K of memory (later upgraded), a one-Mhz 6502 CPU and a 300-baud modem with a home-made phone pickup device. The code was written with a home-brew OS and a very basic machine code assembler. The service ran for three years and enjoyed a solid reputation. The name "Alleycat" was fondly regarded and, no doubt, persists in the minds of its former users. It seems only fitting to bring the name back to life.

The term "Bulletin Board System" has fallen out of favour over the years. While the boards of today are certainly more sophisticated than the boards from the 1980's, there is little difference in terms of the intended function. Posting messages and replying to messages is a tradition that goes back to the stone age of computers.
Links to my other Internet sites:

My board on 8kun (also called "Alleycat BBS"). My repositories: Internet Archive - GitHub

Due to some sort of mishap at Internet Archive, my username has changed from 8chanAnon to 8chanAnon2. My account was deleted and I had to recreate it. I asked whether my original username could be restored and I got a terse negative response. Awesome customer service. Not a finger lifted to resolve their own screw-up. Also, some time ago, my Europa item got hit with a login requirement when the view count reached 5000. Not a good look.



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