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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

#91

Post by a3n »

yumraj wrote: post #90
a3n wrote: post #45

In 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 f…

And now you’re a semi truck driver.. how did that happen from soft developer to semi truck driver?

Anger and poor impulse control led me to rage quit a job. And I wasn't the best developer. I don't think any job was ever sorry to see me go.

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

#92

Post by ergot_vacation »

cc_cccc wrote: post #88

The twitter thread and this comment section is a good reminder I don't belong on HN. I feel like the most complex coding I have done is write a CRUD web app haha.

As long as you can be thoughtful and curious about tech-related stuff and communicate that thoughtfulness well in text, you belong on HN. There's certainly a tilt toward career SV types for obvious reasons, but this place has everything from genuine, jaw-dropping geniuses to people who are just hobbyists, and a lot in-between.

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

#93

Post by elengyel »

Someone wrote: post #59
elengyel wrote: post #19

I'd like to clarify that my code was running only on machines that were otherwise idle. Not many people were in the lab late in the evenings. MPQS processing nodes could be added and removed dynamically, so if somebody needed a computer that was part of my cluster, they could just quit my program and everything would go back to normal. Also, once the number theory professor learned of what I had implemented, he worke…

> I could enter that program in the system monitor, but I needed a way to run it. The simple way: in that mini debugger, the ‘G’ command (for ‘Go’) takes an optional address and jumps to it. “G 40F6D8”, for example, continued execution at address 40F6D8.

I don't remember the exact details, but I did try the G command, and it didn't work out. The problem was something like the program had nowhere to return to, so just ending with RTS would crash, and ending with a call to ExitToShell() would just restart At Ease and put you right back in the secure environment. I had to trick the computer into executing the program as a subroutine from inside another running program, which is accomplished by using the drag hook.

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

#94

Post by microtherion »

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…

In the late 1980, we did some Mac consulting for a largish ad agency, and one lower tier executive wanted to demonstrate the importance of his work by having us install some password protection on his Mac.

Suspecting that this would not end well, I installed a very light weight solution; he promptly forgot his password within a week, called me in again, and I bypassed the password prompt with the above NMI+ExitToShell() method. He was suitably impressed and asked me to write down the magic incantation on a post-it note that he attached somewhere to his desk...

What can I say? They always promptly paid their bills!

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #35
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.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by disillusioned »

I have memories of the kiddie version of this, which was using "locked" down computers at stores or libraries and abusing the hell out of the context menu from, say, an arbitrary print window that shouldn't appear, which would normally be enough to get you a separate Explorer (or File Explorer) window, from which you could do whatever. Or enough to launch a command prompt as well, depending on the system.

Nothing quite so fancy, but in the same spirit.

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

#97

Post by TchoBeer »

wheybags wrote: post #89

I did a nasty hack a little like this when I was in college. College wired internet had all sorts of filters on it, I can't remember the details exactly. The important thing was it didn't allow the upd ports for counter strike from the wired connection we had in a society room. The computer science department had their own web proxy, which was only accessible from inside their network. Cs students could SSH into spec…

Was running counterstrike through two computers really faster than just using the wireless connection or did that one have weird filters too?

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

#99

Post by TimTheTinker »

Severian wrote: post #63
TimTheTinker wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/h…

Wow, so this is very close to what we did in school. Us being the 'hackers'. By chance was this in Ohio?

No, it was on the west coast... but I bet a lot of places were running similar setups. Network admins at the time (at least the good ones) were likely receiving the same periodicals and reading the same books.

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

#100

Post by salty_biscuits »

Brings back memories of my friend borrowing the lab computers over the weekend to do some long running Monte Carlo simulation runs (so trivially parallel). Except he had a bug that implicitly gave all the runs the same RNG seed. Took a bit of head scratching to work out what the hell had happened.
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