Just curious, could you just put the address for Finder into that hook instead of the auxiliary program? Or even better, just put the main MPQS program?
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
#42For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
When I was in uni a few years ago it wasn't exactly unusual for students to use the PC pool for things like this, but you didn't need to circumvent any security to do it (which presumably would have drawn some ire - some poking at security was ok, but always a bit uneasy). Nobody cared unless you really got in the way of people wanting to work on the machines.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#43> On these computers, I could factor a general number with around 70 decimal digits in a reasonable amount of time (like overnight). What’s the comparable figure you could get on typical hardware in today’s university computing clusters or computer labs?
I generated two random 35 digit primes, multiplied them, and then tossed the product into the first hit for "factor integer online": https://www.alpertron.com.ar/ECM.HTM
1731 322587 637083 705865 442033 654804 904216 446486 784497 444181 466938 498269 (70 digits) = 25317 847509 490819 861309 522806 413689 (35 digits) × 68383 482718 586893 688113 139227 257221 (35 digits) Time elapsed: 0d 0h 0m 23.8s
This is in JavaScript on a single core on my laptop.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#44Please, for the love of all that is holy, don't put long-form content on Twitter. That's not what Twitter is for. Reading long-form content on Twitter is like trying to read a novel written on post-it notes. Please, just don't.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#45In 19 and 82 or 3, I worked at Lockheed Shipyard in Seattle, in a sort of tech writing capacity on a Navy ship building project, based on my recent experience in the Navy. The business closed with completion of the ships.
We had to fill out lots of forms that documented what we called "analysis," and we'd often have to change them based on some factor changing. One change could cascade through the whole form.
Paper forms. Green see-through plastic letter guides. Whiteout. Lots of whiteout.
We had access to a department mini computer, don't remember what it was. The language might have been Basic-like, but I didn't know enough to recognize it as such.
I figured out how to write and run programs, someone showed me how to print, and I wrote a program that would accept values for all a form's fundamental values, and cascade those through calculations for the dependent values, and print out the filled in form. You could save it, update a new value, re-cascade, and print it out again. No more whiteout.
Part of the calculation involved sorting. I didn't know anything about sorting, so I implemented what I later learned was bubble sort. Because that's obviously how you'd do that.
The system administer noticed more load when people ran my program. He found me, and told me not to do that again.
I learned that there was a thing called a system administrator. He might have given me a better canned sort, don't remember.
I eventually thought it would be a good idea to quit and go to school, so I did.
(I took a number theory class, but had to drop it. I don't have the math nature.)
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#46Ah 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…
My school's computer lab ran Windows 3.1 for Workgroups on top of DOS. The network login prompt was in DOS. There were some hackers in upper grades who had installed games like DOOM, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, etc. in a folder named Alt+255 on many of these computers, which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to Windows Explorer.
The lab manager found out about our Ctrl+Break hack and put in an event listener/handler for that keycode in the DOS login program. So I spent several hours trying other key combinations and eventually figured out that Alt+3 sent an ASCII character that had an effect that was equivalent to Ctrl+Break in DOS -- and we were back in business.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#47For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
I graduated last year, and I worked for my colleges IT department. We used to have to come knocking at the door if a student even had their own printers set up. It definitely would not go well. That being said, I did know people who clogged the cs department's machines with batch jobs to train really expensive ML models that did God knows what. Its not the same as bypassing a security system, but it is an instance of…
Funny, because I remember bypassing my university's print quotas in grad school a few years ago simply by printing directly to the IP of the printer. I didn't set out to do this. It was just an unintentional side effect, and one I never abused, but I did happen to notice that whenever I printed, my quota allotment never went down.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#48I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
Ah, the era of primitive DIY security. Those were the days. It's kinda of sad that today's kids have to deal with industry-grade encryption and professional best practices, instead of going toe-to-toe with an underpaid self-taught middle-aged "computer guy" like my generation did...
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#49I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so primitive :-)
Ah, the era of primitive DIY security. Those were the days. It's kinda of sad that today's kids have to deal with industry-grade encryption and professional best practices, instead of going toe-to-toe with an underpaid self-taught middle-aged "computer guy" like my generation did...
> industry-grade encryption and professional best practices
You overestimate "professional best practices" in many places...
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#50Apart 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…
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