[HN Gopher] Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
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Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
Author : renameme
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-05-03 21:53 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| jmercouris wrote:
| I remember in high school renaming programs to "calc.exe" so we
| could run them. Back when these kinds of protections were so
| primitive :-)
| drummojg wrote:
| When I was in college, we would set the process name of the MUD
| client to whatever WordPerfect used on the VAX so we wouldn't
| get busted for playing games during non-gaming hours. Of course
| the sysadmins saw right through the charade, but it was fun to
| feel like you were getting away with something for half a
| minute.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| We had this StudeNT Vista thing and yeah it was so much fun
| finding exploits.
| QuinnWilton wrote:
| 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.
| chungy wrote:
| Doesn't seem extremely effective unless you also remove the
| F2, F10, Shift, and Alt keys from the keyboard.
| QuinnWilton wrote:
| 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.
| thaumaturgy wrote:
| 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.
| amenghra wrote:
| AtEase?
| munificent wrote:
| 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.
| munificent wrote:
| _> 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.
| guardiangod wrote:
| >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.
| SilasX wrote:
| > 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?
| taldo wrote:
| Or on a single modern smartphone?
| andai wrote:
| On that note, I'd like to share a clip about how fast modern
| machines are relative to early 90s supercomputers (the
| relevant part is in the first 5 minutes):
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=oJ4GcZs7y6g
| elengyel wrote:
| I'd very much like to revive my old code (which I still have)
| at some point and see how well it runs on modern computers. My
| guess is that a typical 64-bit ~3 GHz quad-core machine could
| accomplish the same task in a few minutes today.
| throw5away wrote:
| 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) x 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.
| acchow wrote:
| A quick lookup for CPU speeds of yesteryear shows the Motorola
| 68040 in those macs did about 35 MFLOPS [1].
|
| If you could parallelize this program to use all 2.6 TFLOPS in
| a Macbook Air M1's 8-core GPU, you're seeing about 75,000x
| speed improvement. So a 12 hour "overnight" job may take just
| over half a second.
|
| [1] https://tech-insider.org/mac/research/1991/1021-e.html
| elengyel wrote:
| 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 worked out an agreement with the lab manager to
| give me legitimate access to the machines. :)
| lebuffon wrote:
| "And if you tell the kids that today they won't believe it!"
| Four Yorkshiremen sketch
| Monty Python
| Jtsummers wrote:
| For 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 computer
| in the cluster, and then using nohup or screen (this was pre-
| tmux) you could have your program run as long as the system was
| up. I had to ssh in a couple times because I'd forgotten to
| logout and didn't want to get "baggy pantsed".
| widforss wrote:
| At my uni, it's pretty much solved by having the student's
| computer society own the most capable machines on campus
| (sponsored by Facebook if I've understood things correctly). If
| any one want something done, they just ask the root of the
| society, and move on with their newfound computer resources.
| This access can range from a tiny VPS (automatic access for all
| students) to shell access to the (small but capable) HPC
| cluster.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| I think that it totally depends on the definition of 'behavior
| like this today'.
|
| If 'behavior like this' is creatively toying with lab equipment
| that you have been given physical access to, bending the rules
| a little bit in the process, to participate in an academic
| challenge? If it would be up to me then a slap on the wrist
| would suffice, now just as well as presumably in 1993.
|
| But if 'behavior like this' means breaking into computers,
| which nowadays are essential parts of a university's
| infrastructure, in straight violation of rules and conventions
| on hacking that have been in place since before you were born
| (say 2000), just to get some computer time to, say, mine
| whatevercoins? Then a little more than a slap of the wrist
| would be completely fine by me.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > For anyone still at or associated with a university, how
| would they react to behavior like this today?
|
| They would wonder why the student went through all that trouble
| instead of getting time on our HPC cluster.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Not even that. You can reach those kinds of levels with a GPU
| these days (and GPU programming is sufficiently obscure that
| most people won't even attempt to go that route).
|
| Though... with the whole GPU shortage going on right now,
| maybe it'd be easier to steal computer time from someone
| else's lab right now!!
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Hah, fair enough, HPC clusters are certainly more common than
| when I went to school. In that case, take the "like" to be a
| generalization (how I meant it): A student (or students)
| pushing the limits of the existing rules and infrastructure
| to accomplish something productive or interesting. Yes, it
| breaks some rules, but what's a typical reaction anymore? Do
| they get hired by the university or pushed to work with
| particular researchers like when I was starting school or do
| they get pushed out or punished like when I was wrapping up
| college?
| tantalor wrote:
| Some universities provide distributed computing resources.
|
| Example: https://www.psc.edu/resources/allocations/
|
| _A primary mission of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is
| to train students, including undergraduates, in high
| performance computing. To this end, PSC offers Coursework
| allocations which are grants of free supercomputing time to
| supplement other teaching tools._
|
| _Typically, Coursework allocations have been used in heavily
| quantitative subjects, such as numerical methods, computational
| fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry. But we encourage
| all fields, including the social sciences and humanities, to
| take advantage of Coursework allocations._
| hervature wrote:
| In a public lab that is used frequently, I believe this would
| be viewed quite negatively. Not from a "you hacked our systems"
| perspective but a "it could have been damaging to other
| students' education if things had gone wrong". To make the
| differentiation somewhat more clear, filling up a bucket of
| water from the bathroom sink to clean something vs. removing
| all the shower heads and making a super funnel of hoses to
| spray wash your car outside. The former activity is clearly
| much less likely to cause issues with other students. If the
| computer lab was in some basement used by 3 students throughout
| the year, I don't think anybody would care.
|
| Building on that, many universities have computational
| resources for any level of needs as long as they are justified.
| Free network storage to last a lifetime and access to computer
| clusters that comes with your university email. Upgraded
| computer clusters for class projects, personal research (like
| this), or really any legitimate need (as long as you don't say
| something like "I want to mine bitcoin") is an email away from
| the university IT. The next level would be the university's
| super computer that generally needs a short proposal to justify
| the academic purpose. When these systems are in place now, it
| is kind of hard to justify these type of things.
|
| Edit: The author of the post put a comment basically confirming
| that things haven't really changed. He was being respectful
| (low usage lab, allowed people to stop his programs if they
| needed a computer, low impact to others, etc.). He was given
| access to more legitimate resources afterwards at the request
| of the professor. Not as easy as it is now, but that's Moore's
| law.
| detaro wrote:
| 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. Nobody cared
| unless you really got in the way of people wanting to work on
| the machines.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Well, with protected memory you're not going to be getting full
| access to the lab machines anymore ;)
| znpy wrote:
| Is gp mentions SSH, that means software is not running in
| real mode.
|
| And if you can get SSH, chances are sooner or later you can
| exploit some misconfiguration or something else to escalate
| to root.
|
| Years ago having send mail installed basically meant having a
| security hole... And sendmail was very common.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| True, you're not going to get this extreme level of access to
| the machine. But even doing things like ssh'ing in to many
| machines to use it as a personal distributed cluster, even if
| you did everything to make your program run at the lowest
| reasonable priority, got some people in trouble at one
| university I was at.
| vuciv1 wrote:
| 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 people
| having the ability to run whatever code they'd like in certain
| circles.
| ohazi wrote:
| > if a student even had their own printers set up.
|
| Students aren't allowed to have a printer? O_o
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > We used to have to come knocking at the door if a student
| even had their own printers set up.
|
| What's wrong with having a printer?
| valyagolev wrote:
| 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
| phone once when I was stuck in the airport probably like 10 years
| ago and needed to do something that just wasn't working normally.
| Now that we're used to smart phones it probably sounds quite
| basic but it was absolutely weird back then.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>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.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| The web is broken. Someone's website wouldn't scroll (I don't
| remember the details, and I don't think I wanted to find out
| --- maybe it was overflow: hidden, but it could've been
| something else), and the only way I could figure out to deal
| with it was to open up the devtools responsive design mode and
| pretend the screen was bigger than it was so that the full page
| could show, and then use the browser's scrollbar from within
| that view.
| Gelob wrote:
| This stuff gets you suspended now
| [deleted]
| 2sk21 wrote:
| 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.
| fireattack wrote:
| 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?
| lisper wrote:
| Please, for the love of all that is holy, don't put long-form
| content on Twitter. That's not what it's for. Reading long-form
| content on Twitter is like reading a novel written on post-it
| notes. Please, just don't.
| a3n wrote:
| 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 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.)
| linux2647 wrote:
| Thread on a single page:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389106103179378689.html
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