Thread by @textfiles

The person who killed Mark "Sparky" Herring last year with a SWATting was sentenced to 5 years in prison today, the maximum allowed.

I hope he isn't worrying nobody will remember him when he gets out.

krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial…

But that's another circled date in the Jason Doesn't Forget calendar. Instead, let's just talk a bit about Mark Herring, who was a fantastic guy, one of the real good ones, and the creator of the QWK packet, one of the most genius aspects of BBSing to be invented at the time.

FidoNET is another one - allow postings from messages from different boards to swap at night so the reach of people was increased exponentially. But QWK packets were a whole other deal altogether.

Since only one person could use most BBSes at once, time and bandwidth was scarce.

If you're only given 15 to 60 minutes on a BBS to respond to postings, or to read items, you have to be a fast reader, fast typer, maybe both, but probably not. And of course folks are frustrated waiting in line.

Sparky fixed that. He fixed the Hell out of it.

A QWK reader would connect to a BBS, and pull down all the new messages and private messages/email into tiny compressed packets, and you'd be set. You could then browse files or do other things, but you had ALL the new info from the BBS in one swoop.

Here's a fantastic article about the depth of what a difference QWK made: You could give long, thoughtful answers to posts. You could really consider what was being said. And it wasn't costing you a dime to read offline, and you didn't pay to type.

wiki.synchro.net/history:museum…

When I worked on the BBS Documentary, it was vital I interview Mark Herring. I was in Tennessee for a hacker conference so he came to the hotel and sat for an interview. He was naturally fantastic, brilliant as they came. This was 2002.

The full interview footage is here: archive.org/details/200211… - it's 2 hours, only a small amount of which I used. But for me, it was meeting a legend.

In 2020, Mark contacted me out of the blue, interested in bringing the unintended historical value of QWK to the Internet Archive, providing packets and a reader we could host for allowing people to experience them. This is the letter he sent me:

We talked for a while with some details and he went radio silent. It was 2020 and the pandemic meant a lot of people went radio silent. I hadn't realized until the sentencing today that he had been killed. Over a twitter handle.

I've interacted with the sort of nihilistic sociopaths who consider SWATting another tool in the toolbox. I've met them in person, and I have literally ruined all conversation for 20 feet around when I find out. SWATting is attempted murder and law needs to catch up.

In the absence of Sparky Herring, and while I'd idly waiting for his killer to get out, I'd like to invite people to consider helping making his project come to fruition, and help bring access to a reader to the Archive, so some of that history is saved.

Maybe I'll get a chance to meet or talk to his family and talk about who he was or offer to take on his archives, if they haven't (understandably) disposed of them.

Either way, the world's gone a bit darker.

Oh, before I get too many "but Jason" response tweets: Ask around about my legendary reputation for forgiveness. Save your typing.

Update: The family is in contact with me. They held silent for a year to ensure the case was handled properly, can you imagine