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Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

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Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#31

Post by QuinnWilton »

chungy wrote: post #29
QuinnWilton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My highschool physically removed the right mouse button from the mice, because we were right clicking to make text files that we'd rename as batch files to get a command prompt open. Some people would just bring their own mouse in to get past the defences.

Doesn't seem extremely effective unless you also remove the F2, F10, Shift, and Alt keys from the keyboard.

Oh and it wasn't. That was the least of the school's problems though.

They also used a surveillance system called LanSchool, which sent out all of its commands entirely unencrypted and unauthenticated, so people would spoof the remote takeover command and steal exams from teachers' accounts. It ended up being a whole thing my senior year.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#32

Post by thaumaturgy »

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby.

Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit.

The other way to get around it -- or around many other misbehaving programs in the cooperative multitasking system -- was to bring up the programmer's interrupt like the author describes, and enter "SM 0 A9F4", followed by "G 0". This would set memory location 0 to the _exitToShell function in the OS ROM and then resume execution from there, which immediately terminated whatever was in the foreground.

The rest of the system would often be a little unstable after that though, so you only had a few moves left before a restart would be needed.

To youths with curious mindsets, an anti-authoritarian streak, and seemingly limitless amounts of free time, little restrictions like these only improved our skills. Systems with challenging but imperfect security are a great way to foster new young talent.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#33

Post by amenghra »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby. Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit. The other way to get a…

AtEase?

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#35

Post by munificent »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby. Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit. The other way to get a…

> To youths with curious mindsets, an anti-authoritarian streak, and seemingly limitless amounts of free time, little restrictions like these only improved our skills. Systems with challenging but imperfect security are a great way to foster new young talent.

I miss the days when the stakes for testing boundaries and experimenting were lower.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#36

Post by munificent »

amenghra wrote: post #33
thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby. Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit. The other way to get a…

AtEase?

Holy shit. Just seeing that written out turned a light on in dark corner of my memory. I had completely forgotten about that until you mentioned it.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#38

Post by 2sk21 »

I have a similar story but I was not quite so clever. Back in 1990 and 1991, I used a cluster of IBM RS6000 workstations in my university to train neural networks. I had previously tried to get backpropagation to work on a Connection Machine but found it too frustrating to work with. The cluster of RS6000s actually ran my code (written in C) very fast and was able top get some good results and graduate with PhD. I built a distributed queuing system to ensure that each work station would pull the next job from a central queue.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#39

Post by guardiangod »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #32

Ah yes, good memories. I'm having a really hard time right now remembering the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder; I think it was "Easy"-something. Google fails me on the name too. Breaking it was a hobby. Some school labs had left access to Hypercard available through that program, so you could just pull up Hypercard and make a new stack that would tell the program to quit. The other way to get a…

>the name of that program that blocked access to the Finder

FoolProof? The bane of my elementary school existence. Just let me play SimCity 2000.

Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class

#40

Post by gambiting »

valyagolev wrote: post #20

Apart from using hacking to overcome imposed limitations such as these, I am amazed by the number of times I had to use my chops to overcome what was simply a bug. Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it. I was very... surprised when I managed to productively use "javascript:(some code)" in the URL bar of the browser of my…

>>Opening the web inspector is such a normal moment of dealing with other people's websites, I have no clue how people manage without it.

As a C++ programmer who has absolutely no idea how to even open the dev console in browser - I just close the website. If I can't scroll it, if it has stupid popups that I can't dismiss, if it lets me get halfway through checkout and then misteriously empties my basket? I'll maybe give it one more try and then just close the website.

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