I used chatGPT to create a newsletter, I made close to $2,000 total profit.
Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
191–200 of 414 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#192I was 16 or 17 and had a guest account on the local universities Ultrix server. I discovered that all of /dev/tty* was world-readable UNTIL someone had successfully signed in.
So a “cat /dev/tty* > passwords.txt” and waiting an hour collected the credentials of everyone logging in to the server.
At some point, I had logged into the account of one of the sysadmins who msgd me and let me know he’d changed his password and this would be my last time on his account. (If he only knew.). He offered me my own account if I told him who I was, and he might have meant it, but I didn’t bite. About a month later, a patch fixed the issue and that was that.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#193I must have been about 12 years old. I wanted to rent a movie on DirectTV. To rent a movie, a phone line had to be connected to the receiver box. The box would dial out to DirectTV and send over the information that "jrib purchased movie X". I learned that I could connect two phones directly with a 9V battery and the right resistor in the middle. So I connected a phone line on one end to the DirectTV receiver and on…
Awesome
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#194I dialed into a BBS that had pirated content. After creating an account you needed to wait for 3 users to vote up your access level. I created 3 more users and voted myself up.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#195As a young buck who's parents didn't want him tying up the only phone line in the house to get on the internet whenever he wanted, I was limited to an hour of internet time a day. I also would pick up free trial discs from local stores, even though I couldn't sign up for a free trial without a credit card or checking account, of which teenage me had neither. One day, however, late at night on a weekend, I tossed in a PeoplePC disc into my machine and ran it through the trial setup to see what I could do.
PeoplePC's sign up was completely online, which was pretty new for the day. The trial setup would first dial a toll-free number to get local POP numbers, and then dial the local number to complete the registration. Well, after poking around to see if I could get around the dialup procedure for the temporary Dial Up Networking account (young me at the time wouldn't know that those creds were in the registry for my perusal), I popped open a web browser, and to my surprise, the local pop account had full internet access. Unfortunately, the trial had a timebomb, so after 10 minutes of inactivity in the setup app, it would close the connection, and remove the DUN account.
Young me however was a wannabe hacker, and had among other tools, a hex editor at my disposal. Finding the temporary setup directory, I copied the contents into another folder that would persist beyond the setup, and started scanning through various files. Eventually, I found what looked like a username and password cleartext in a binary, and copied them out. Tossed them into a fresh DUN entry, and discovered that the account... just worked. Like that, I had free dial-up networking, effectively whenever and wherever PeoplePC had a POP. I rode that for a good couple years until we eventually got our first DSL modem.
Honestly not the hardest or most impressive hack in the world. For all I know, PeoplePC was aware of my usage of it, but because the password was etched into hundreds of thousands of setup discs, it's not like they could rotate the creds. But for a teenage me that just wanted access to the unfettered internet, it was pretty neat.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#196My proudest hack would have to be when I figured out how to bypass the administrator password on my parent's computer. I had been trying to access certain programs and files that were restricted, and after some research and trial and error, I was able to successfully hack into the administrator account without them knowing. It was a satisfying feeling to finally have access to everything on the computer. It was the Windows XP era.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#197Being in Scotland and poor to the point of trying to eat on a few pounds ($5) a week. I discovered (by watching another customer) that a certain kind of very expensive Scottish smoked salmon was 4 pence more expensive than the price listed on the shelf. The supermarket (Tesco) also has a large sign stating that if the price was wrong on any item, they would both give you the item for free and the money it costs. I pr…
My uncle was in a similar situation: bought a granola bar, price was wrong, free granola bar. He went back a few days later and the price was still wrong. He’s a lawyer, and he sued the store and won (false advertising or something) to get them to fix the price. Pretty awkward because it’s the closest store to his family’s house. His son said it best one day, “dad, are you bored at work?”
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did you get it out of RAM so cleanly?
It wasn't clean, I had to manually parse it out of /proc and triple check the math before committing it with fdisk.
I had something like this happen once -- a company I was at had these old RAID arrays that we kept limping along while we waited for budget to buy ones from a company that hadn't ceased to exist, and at some point a disk failed in some way that caused the RAID system to lose its internal partition table information (to my recollection... it's been awhile).
I could still access the block devices, but couldn't instantiate the logical volumes, and dumping dd chunks showed that there was data there... so I wrote some code to scan the disk for ext2 magic numbers, and once I found them did some math on paper to find the partition boundaries and very... carefully... recreate them. I have a photo of the piece of paper here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jedwards/4494268626/
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#199This one is so silly but also, was one of the first hacks I ever executed.
I was a kid, trying to play the game "Thief" on a newer computer. The game would never boot, always crashing when it tried to load video. I found all the video files, and deleted them, and the game worked. I felt like a god.
Re: Ask HN: What's your proudest hack?
#200Around the time that tap-to-pay apps were in their infancy, vendors were offering extremely generous bonuses... a combination of a couple of these ended with essentially free snacks for the entire time this promo existed (~6 month period). This was back when the tap-to-pay app was called ISIS, for context. I combined a couple offers: Amex's Serve (prepay debit card thing) offered a $1 off any transaction over $1 (a f…
People have gotten millions of airline rewards miles through credit card churning. They don't even try to conceal what they're doing. For a while, people were purchasing thousands of dollars in coinage from the government, using their credit cards. Another method which still works is purchasing gift cards and using them to purchase money orders which can be deposited into a bank account.
These credit card offers are designed to exploit people who have difficulty living within their means. It's interesting how creative people are in exploiting the loopholes left behind.