I can't get enough of these stories from the early days of computing. Perhaps I was just young, but those years felt magical to me.
Saying “sup” with `net send`
91–100 of 144 posts
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#92This brings back good memories from High School. Here's a bunch of things we used to do: 1. Set fun messages on all the HP Printers: https://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/jetdirecthack 2. Bypass firewall restrictions by setting http:// to https:// (later had to resort to SSH tunneling using Putty). Got me banned from our library for a month when I was on Facebook and a teacher passed by. 3. Our student directo…
One of the labs in my highschool was for typing training, and it had something like 50 barebones PCs in it. Every day you'd sit down at a random machine, which booted from a 5.25" floppy. The autoexec.bat on the floppy let you log into the network where it ran another batch file from your user directory there.
As an experiment I wrote a piece of batch script that would append itself to both the network and local batch files if it wasn't already there (i.e if it was on the disk it would copy itself into your network account and visa versa), put it on one random computer, then forgot about it for a few days.
By the time I got around to checking again it had propagated itself to every computer in the lab and presumably every network account that had logged in during that time.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#93we used to do similar with the Mac's ability to speak using the command 'say'. we'd ssh into a computer we knew someone to be sitting and have it 'say' something while using their name. at least, until one day, the 'say' app was not longer available!
And if you used the -v option to set the voice to “whisper”, it was super creepy. say -v whisper “Get out of the house”
say -v cellos "droid"
Pretty sure this is how they generated the sound that was used for those commercials once upon a time.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#94I was working a tech conference, probably around 2001, with about a hundred PCs networked together. A colleague of mine intended to send a simple "net send" message to only my workstation, just as a joke. He messed up the syntax and the popup appeared on every PC in the conference, including the giant screen in the main conference hall. The message: "Fuck you" . He was fired the next day. (Don't feel bad for the guy.…
I mean, if I did the same and lost my job, I'd still say "worth it". I'd still be holding back the sniggers despite the vociferous verbiage flying my way.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#95What fun that was. My friends and I did something much more innocuous in high school and earned outselves a stern talking-to: we changed the IE/Netscape home page on half- a dozen lab computers to a Geocities/Angelfire site we'd made and on which we had been experimenting with JS. Nothing sinister or malicious, but enough to cause a bit of confusion for a few students. The school's admins ran a pretty tight ship policy-wise, but it was a veritable playground for "network-curious" sorts like myself.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#96This brings back good memories from High School. Here's a bunch of things we used to do: 1. Set fun messages on all the HP Printers: https://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/jetdirecthack 2. Bypass firewall restrictions by setting http:// to https:// (later had to resort to SSH tunneling using Putty). Got me banned from our library for a month when I was on Facebook and a teacher passed by. 3. Our student directo…
With regards to point 6. invert macos screen colors. What is the use case for this? and more importantly why bind it to a key combo?
For example a left-right flipped screen could be needed in a rear projection setup, but I am at a loss for what you would use inverted colors for.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#97All these people getting trouble for net sending are not going far enough.
When I was in school the admin left his account logged in and left the room. I was there to make few admin accounts to myself, and later programmed malware that worked as a keylogger and gave me some remote control of all the machines (I put it inside a .BAT script that was ran after login, distributing it to every computer in the school).
I used my powers by downloading stuff and burning it to CDs as I didn't have a good connection. I also gave some access to my friends, and the computer lab turned into a war zone. We were opening stuff on other people's screens, but not good stuff. Things like Goatse and people doing stuff with farm animals they shouldn't be doing..
After some time it had gone way too mad and computer lab got shut down. But the crazy thing is, after a while the school just let it go and didn't even notify our parents. Apparently, nobody wants to tell the parents that a room in school has been OnlyFans Farm Edition for a while.. I had some stern talks with the principal and IT teacher as the only suspect, but that was it.
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#98I did: "net send * The server room is on fire, please turn off your computer!"
Not only that, but my computer name was assigned to my username so it said my full name next to it.....
I was called up to the office within 2 seconds and immediately suspended. I also got braces that dad. Rough day. :(
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#99I worked for Microsoft during those times doing security for Windows. In the early 90s employees still occasionally used the Messenger service (the service behind “net send”) for messaging. It was originally intended for alerts like print job completion or server powering down, but it became widely abused. It could actually be used over the internet if the target machine was addressable, eg had a non-rfc1518 address.…
> most of them
…surely begs an interesting question!
Re: Saying “sup” with `net send`
#100Exactly the same experience for me, and similar with the game too.
We figured out that while the C: drive wasn’t accessible in Explorer directly, you could create a desktop shortcut directly to subfolders. Installed a copy of Worms World Party on all of our machines using that; somehow, although the machines were imaged weekly, it ended up on the image and got copied across to every school computer which was convenient.
I also went a step further with the joke messages, creating a program which showed a bunch of dialogs with choices in a loop. It couldn’t be closed and some choices did things like open/close the CD tray (as a “diagnostic”). People started just dragging it to the corner of the screen out of sight.
We also had a self sign-up system for sports, where you could pick a main interschool sport, or a “development” sport that was more about learning interesting stuff. The system was pretty insecure, using your date of birth as a “password”, but it also turned out that it had an SQL injection, so I used that to set everyone’s sport to Equestrian. Getting to hear an announcement at the school assembly about how the computer system had a problem was pretty great. I even emailed them about the injection issue but they never fixed it. (A risky move, really.)