Saying “sup” with `net send`

When I was in college I realized that they hadn't disabled net send with wildcards on the CS computer network. We all had individual logins.

One day I walk into my lab class and see that a poor soul forgot to logout of his session. I'm sitting with my lab group and explain this "net send *" macro that would send a message to every single account on the system.

Another person in my group says "I'll do it." He types it in and presses enter.

We log out of the account, then log into one of our accounts, see the message, laugh and move on.

The next week, I get to my lab and this kid walks in and says to my lab group member sitting in front of the computer "Can I speak to you outside?"

He goes outside and we think nothing of it, but then I hear my lab partner outside the door say in a raised tone "Look, I have no idea what you're talking about! Goodbye!" and he comes storming back in.

This lab partner was absent the week before and didn't know what had transpired. We ask, "What did that guy want?" He says, "Some BS about how he thinks I sent a message through his account to everyone on the network because he forgot to logout last week and now he's in trouble with the CS department because they think he did it."

Our jaws dropped and I think if he had spoken to anyone else in the group we probably would have laughed and he would have known it was us right away. I still wonder how much trouble he got in on our behalf for embarrassing the CS IT department. Didn't seem like that big a deal to me.

I did this prank, only it was more elaborate. We were in the lab, playing around with Windows NT (so all machines were set up with the same Administrator password), and one thing you could do, is to get a remote telnet, and `net send` to yourself, but on the remote machine, so the origin would basically be that person's machine, which makes it impossible to detect the actual sender.

Once the person was sufficiently annoyed, he disabled the Messenger service, but again, because all Administrator passwords were same, it was possible to just connect to the Services snap-in in Microsoft Management Console, and re-enable it, send the message, and immediately disable it, so once that person went to check - the service would be off...

In retrospect it was somewhat cruel, but oh well...

It's fun to see how we had such similar experiences growing up. We pretty much did the same thing in high school with Net Send. Except we sent "All your base are belong to us" and then left the library computer lab in a real hurry once we saw the message go everywhere. Pretty sure it reached other schools too.

Yep, happened to me. Literally just sent 'Test'. Got yelled at by two people, but that's about it.

many years ago I had a fortran class where our lab was a bunch of x-terminals connected to some old SunOS Sparc thing. all of the user sessions used ttys that for some reason were world writeable. anyone who has had the misfortune of writing fortran code will remember that its very column dependent. each line of code has to have certain elements lined up in the proper columns.

so, of course I wrote a little script that wrote a single space character to a random tty every so often. the character wouldn't be in the users source code but since it was shown on their terminal they would generally hit backspace to "fix" it which made the text on screen line up but misaligned the columns in their actual source file.

very few people got their assignments to compile