[HN Gopher] Saying "sup" with `net send` ___________________________________________________________________ Saying "sup" with `net send` Author : markchristian Score : 305 points Date : 2022-12-28 04:47 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (drew.shoes) (TXT) w3m dump (drew.shoes) | bcjordan wrote: | Same experience as OP and others here in discovering this setting | (also in middle school). While sitting next to a friend I | jokingly typed out "net send * [our third friend's name]" | intending it as a "haha wouldn't that be wild. OK let's delete | this now" quip, but my friend reached over and hit ENTER, we ran | away from the computer like it was radioactive, and later | discovered it was sent school district wide. We had used a non- | user specific account but cracked under the pressure of being | grilled as the obvious suspects for any computer shenanigans at | our school and being good friends with friend #3. | | The third friend's father was LIVID that our friend's name was | besmirched by being placed in the contents of the pop-up, later | threatened me over the phone, and put pressure on the school to | throw the book at us (fulfilling his promise to "TAKE THIS TO THE | MAT!"). My friend and I were suspended for a day and banned from | visiting the high school computer club for some weeks. | | From the district IT perspective the middle school's punishment | somewhat backfired because news of our suspension resulted in | many more students across the district learning about the | command, greatly increasing the # of incidents and becoming a | district-wide. They weren't able to figure out how to turn it off | for a year+ after. As a temporary measure they made the printer | in the high school library print out the originating computer of | every net send message, which often backed up printer and caused | the HS librarians (my mom happened to be the head one lol) to | have to remove these useless sheets from the printer all day. | | 0/10 would not recommend glob experimentation | 0_throwaway_000 wrote: | LUL Brilliant! | BoppreH wrote: | Once upon a time we were pranking each other in the university | lab. We thought ourselves pretty clever by convincing a friend to | run a Fork Bomb. | | "What is it supposed to do? Nothing's happening." | | "Really? Did you run it in a shell?" | | "Yeah, in my SSH session in the main server." | | _Oh._ | | The server was down for a couple of days while the admin figured | out what happened, fixed it, and limited the number of open | processes per user. | donatj wrote: | I too discovered the wild card net send in high school. I was at | an assigned computer in class though and ended up with a stern | talk from IT in which they claimed I caused all sorts of network | issues. I thought it was hooey at the time but I was pretty | sheepish about the whole thing. | | I didn't get in trouble and returned to class. | | Later that year I installed VNC server on my friends workstation | in the same class and used it to mess with him during class. We | had a pretty good laugh. Another friend saw this happen, took the | idea with some of his friends and a few days later installed VNC | server on a bunch of computers throughout the building. My | understanding is they generally caused a bunch of chaos, it was | figured out who had done it, and the group were arrested(!). They | ended up with community service if I recall. | | I very thankfully was not pulled into this at all and found out | about the whole thing later. | andrensairr wrote: | What 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. | iforgotpassword wrote: | Oh the NT4.0 days. When we found out about the "*" feature, we | spammed each other and everyone like crazy. A few days later the | admin got very mad, as he found the domain controller showing | hundreds of stupid messages that he had to dismiss one by one. It | took him a few more days to figure out how to disable the | messenger service. In the meantime someone found out that the | sender and receiver displayed in the messagebox were actually | included in the payload of the "protocol" and not verified by the | receiver. So someone cobbled together a little tool that was even | more fun. | tialaramex wrote: | Severals groups of boys at my grammar school+ built what were | called "User groups" which were "online" services accessible only | on the school's computers with (at least theoretically) exclusive | membership. There'd be maybe some simple games for your users, | perhaps some sort of "bulletin board" and most often a "chat" | service. Except, on the PCs we were increasingly using, these | chat services all worked by using file I/O to a shared file, | which is obviously very hard on the poor file server in ~1991 | which is when this would have been happening. So the "chat | services" were banned by staff. But I figured out how to write | NetBIOS/NetBEUI software so I could implement chat without | touching files, and this was allowed, increasing popularity of my | User group, which I believe was named "Erewhon 2280". | | + for Americans, the UK used to have selective education, some | parts of the country still do, under this system children who | test well at age 11 or 12 are sent to different state funded | schools from their peers, mostly single sex such as a Grammar | School, so that's a school of mostly high achieving all boys, | this is probably a bad idea on net but it's popular for various | reasons. | queuebert wrote: | The hidden copy of UT resonated deeply with me. We spent many | hours playing Doom and Quake in the high school computer lab when | the teacher was out of the room. Every time we were discovered we | had to hide it somewhere else. | pedro2 wrote: | Best way to hide files on Windows: \$Recycle.Bin :) | acjohnson55 wrote: | We had a computer lab that overlooked our library, which also had | computers. It was fun to pick a specific computer and `net send` | messages to that person that made it clear they were being | watched. I sure hope we didn't cross any lines messing with | people, but I really can't remember. | cramjabsyn wrote: | Had the same experience at my school, but IT was much slower. net | send * worked for weeks if not months | amccloud wrote: | I don't quite recall how I did it but I have a similar story of | ejecting disc trays across my HS and school district. something | with novell iirc | throwaway742 wrote: | The command that got me in trouble was shutdown /i | whalesalad wrote: | My entire school district was in the same domain/workgroup and so | I remember sending a net send to literally every computer on the | network, 4 high schools (mine had a population of 4K students), 3 | middle schools and a dozen elementary schools. The IT department | came running into the computer lab to figure out who had done it. | I simply closed the window, switched back to MS Word and played | dumb. Good times. | | A few months later I got expelled for some Novell netware breakin | shenanigans but that whole experience was well worth it. I had | been booting into slax and stealing SAM files from shared/library | computers and then cracking them at home with lophtcrack to | figure out passwords. The top level system admin had a 5 letter | dictionary word, "north" as his password. I had keys to the | kingdom. I'd shut systems down all the time for fun but never | broke a thing. They tried to throw the book at me but fortunately | it all fizzled out in the end. | metadat wrote: | Do you mean suspended? Expulsion is a permaban and means you | have to find a new school to attend. | | In any case, your tenacious dedication to the cause was | admirable. | bayesianbot wrote: | All 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. | efitz wrote: | I 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. | | We started getting lots of complaints about abuse in the mid 90s | as the web was taking off, and changed our best practice | recommendations to disable that service; it was not mission | critical. | | Most of the low level NetBIOS services were designed naively | before people thought much about security; we eventually disabled | or removed most of them. | urbandw311er wrote: | > most of them | | ...surely begs an interesting question! | drivers99 wrote: | I was worried for them, glad it worked out. I wouldn't be so sure | about this statement: "now that I'm a grownup I know that [...] | we wouldn't have gotten in very much trouble anyway." | | Unfortunately this was the type of thing that would get students | banned from the computers, or only allowed to actually use the | computers on Friday to do their computer science work (like my | friend Dave). | | Speaking of NET SEND specifically, I went to a vendor for | training once (circa 2000) and they mentioned someone who had | recently come for training and was sent home because they had | used NET SEND * there. I wonder what their employer thought of | that. | | Either me or a friend has at some point (in the 80s or 90s as | minor students) been: kicked out of computer lab, had notes | posted in the library that we are not to "hone our programming | skills", kicked out of the Supercomputer Challenge[1], been told | (second-hand) we're "a security risk" by the government, been put | specifically under remote monitoring by the teacher, lectured, | sent to the principle, had the police sent to their house, been | told we "probably have an FBI record" and "are putting their | parents' jobs at risk" over similar levels of playing around with | computers that they let us use, not even trying to do anything | particularly "hacker (cracker)"-like. | | [1] https://supercomputingchallenge.org/22-23/index.php (Not this | specific year obviously. More like 30 years ago.) | gorkish wrote: | just wanted to say I enjoyed the alert() at the end | | It was an absolute free for all when windows machines started to | be plugged into campus networks. | | The prankster's evolution generally went from net send to NetBus | and then to Back Orifice in those days as the tools rapidly made | such tomfoolery a point-and-click affair. Interestingly many of | the features in these early Windows prankster/hacking tools | heavily shaped modern day remote administration / MDM software. I | actually remember BO being used as a proper remote management | tool in some situations. | AdamJacobMuller wrote: | Sub7! | vyrotek wrote: | 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. | jastanton wrote: | I 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. :( | nicbou wrote: | 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. | e808 wrote: | I recall in the late 80s on vt100's accessing BITNET allowed you | to 'net send'-like to other BITNET nodes around the country. I | used to randomly try to contact other users at other random | educational institutions after using the 'finger' equivalent to | remote BITNET sites. I can only imagine how my messaging probably | messed up their terminal session screens and just end-user | confusion ensuing. | | Another 'write' unix shenanigans was the ability to send control | sequences, so one could send a 'terminal reset' sequence to any | user online a terminal room using a dumb terminal (wyse, vt100 | etc) and it would quickly reset the terminal and log them off. | One could even send a long sequence of control strings to force a | crude ascii animation, then reset terminal if you wish. (not me | of course) | pedro2 wrote: | Ah the memories of innocence in computing :) | moron4hire wrote: | IIRC, you could do this by IP, also. I remember my best friend in | college and I mapping out the addresses of all the computers in | our main lab and using it to send messages between each other. | Kept the map in a notebook so we always knew where to send to | regardless of where we sat down. We also used it to troll the | student in front of us who was looking at porn and playing games | in the middle of class. It didn't get shut off until after we | came back between semesters, so I don't think we ever explicitly | got caught, other than network techs seeing someone was doing | something. | donalhunt wrote: | At university, we had a whole IM network built around "write" on | a multiuser *nix server (over the past 20+ years, the university | netsoc has run services on freebsd, solaris and various flavours | of Linux). We also had terminal based maps which would allow you | to find friends based on the IP they logged in from. | | See https://c-hey.redbrick.dcu.ie/ for the wrapper around write. | These days students seem to prefer discord. :/ | rmccue wrote: | Exactly 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.) | adamrezich wrote: | I also discovered net send in high school and abused it similarly | for a brief time, but never knew it had wildcard support! wow | chagaif wrote: | Totally worth reading until the very very end, loved the js alert | :) | Hikikomori wrote: | Had 3.5 weeks of excel classes in school, completed everything in | 2 days and spent the rest of the time playing quake or annoying | the ones not finished with net send in loops. Now that I think | about I'm not sure this classroom of computers were on their own | broadcast network or not, but they were running an older version | of windows that didn't block net send by default while others had | a newer version. | schmichael wrote: | I remember doing this! I remember graduating to the more | nefarious "Microsoft's IPX implementation responds to broadcast | pings". It might have been this CVE: | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/securityb... | | Luckily I went to a school that believed in redirecting the | (endless) time and (boundless) energy of obnoxious nerds like me, | and I spent far more time helping out than breaking things. Or at | least I hope... the long tail on the IPX ping was pretty painful | to stop. | grahar64 wrote: | Same series of events happened at my school. | | 1. Discover net send | | 2. Discover net send * | | 3. Get in trouble for using net send * | | The next step was discovering telnet and the schools smtp server. | nsenifty wrote: | Same here. However we discovered that the windows service | "messenger" had to be re-enabled on the target machine to make | this work again. So we'd sneak into a gullible person's | computer, log in (each one of us was an admin, yay!), run "net | start messenger" and were back in action! | nirav72 wrote: | Spoofing email addresses and sending prank emails via open SMTP | gateways was fun. Pretty much all smtp gateways were open back | in those days. | csmattryder wrote: | When your school's IT department realise you're doing this, and | remove "Command Prompt" from the machine's whitelist, you | definitely shouldn't create a file called "COMMAND.COM" and | double-click it to get into the prompt again... | superhawk610 wrote: | My high school also had a hidden copy of Unreal Tournament | squirreled away on a network share somewhere, half of CS class | always finished up with 20 minutes to spare to get in a few | rounds. Good times. | xaduha wrote: | Yep, happened to me. Literally just sent 'Test'. Got yelled at by | two people, but that's about it. | lormayna wrote: | I had a friend that was very religious, he also had a blog about | religion. Me and a friend of mine sent him a series of | profanities via email through an open SMTP relay, that seemed | like it was coming from one of the parish leader's account. I am | very embarrassed now for doing that, but it was really funny in | the moment. | greggarious wrote: | >When I was in junior high, my friends and I discovered that a | Command Prompt command called net send was enabled on our school | network | | I knew some folks who did that as well. Unfortunately I was not | in the set of folks who could get away with such nonsense. You | were incredibly privileged, and need to be mindful of that for | the rest of your life. | hex4def6 wrote: | This brings back memories. | | My favorite discovery was that the "scheduled tasks" folder was | shared on every computer in our school. This meant you could do | the net send * bomb from a friend / enemies computer, and get | them in trouble. | | The other fun one was Borland C++ 6 had a limit on how wide the | code window could be -- you could only horizontally scroll so | far. However, you could hold down tab for a few seconds, then | write something like cout<<"logout next time"; in their code. | Unless you knew the trick, you'd never find the code afterwards | -- you couldn't scroll to the right far enough due to the | limitation of the viewing window. | mickeyp wrote: | Heh. If you used the underlying windows api calls, you could | spoof the sender. Something I discovered when I did just that, in | the Windows 2000 days. | | Combine it with a for loop and you could generously message | everyone on the LAN with little effort. | | There's a reason why everyone around me turned off the net | service after a while... | Zach_the_Lizard wrote: | I did something like this, also on Windows 2000, when I was in | high school. It definitely surprised some teachers.... | | I also discovered that our student IDs and PINs were based on | our birthdays, though I was not creative enough to come up with | an amusing use of student logins. | c7b wrote: | Lots of memories, very similar experiences. Fun detail: net send | * only broadcasts to machines in the same working group, and | since we had classes where each student had their own machine and | each class its own group, we could actually use it to broadcast | messages to our class, and no one else. We also gave self-chosen | names to our machines and used net send as a reasonably practical | live chat system during classes. | | I also told a friend in another school about the command, and | their attempt also ended up sending a message to every machine in | a district with over a dozen schools. We knew it would go to the | whole school based on the group settings, we were still surprised | that it went to other schools as well (still haven't really | figured out how that worked). Luckily for them, nothing got | disabled, and they kept using net send as a bilateral chat system | happily ever after :) | woodruffw wrote: | Very funny! I guess is this more of a universal (tech) experience | than I had realized: my friends and I spent a lot of time in high | school griefing each other with `net send` (and the other `net`) | commands. | | My memory is fuzzy at this point, but I vaguely recall being able | to change others' desktop backgrounds with a remote client. That | produced a lot of entertainment value. | cramjabsyn wrote: | A classic at my high school was taking a screen shot of the | desktop with icons, setting it as the desktop background, then | hiding all the desktop icons. | | Bonus points if you could get the teachers machine | augusto-moura wrote: | I rotated the screenshot to be upside down, set it as a | background and then rotated the whole screen on Display | settings. So that the background would be on the correct | orientation but the mouse cursor and everything would be | reversed. | | Good times :D | tinco wrote: | Yeah, we played around with net send as well, I'm pretty sure | you could also shut down other computers with either a net | command, or with the shutdown command itself. | | We found a way to circumvent the way they prevented third party | apps from running and spent hours just playing AoE2 in the | "study" hall. | gavanwilhite wrote: | Read to the end! | dylan604 wrote: | my page didn't load the images (or whatever) in any kind of | timely manner, so i bailed on it before they loaded. was there | more than just the one pop-up? | zamfi wrote: | Pretty sure there aren't images, and you received, but were | unimpressed, by the outcome. | dylan604 wrote: | ultimately, this is what I thought might have happened. | Reading it on a desktop had enough space that the down | arrows were probably meant to indicate scroll on mobile, | but showed all at once on the desktop experience. However, | with all of the blocking that I have sometimes causes | render/layout issues when people embed things, so I | naturally just assumed something wasn't loading vs lame | layout tricks | PM_me_your_math wrote: | I think we've all done this to various effect. I made every | computer (hundreds, maybe over 1000 on the domain) on campus go | BEEP simultaneously. I almost didn't press enter, but I'm glad I | did. When I heard the ubiquitous beep, the yelps from startled | students in the rooms next door, and the sound of chairs as | people jumped, I about lost it. I had tears coming out of my | eyes. They never did figure out who did it. | dylan604 wrote: | we 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! | donatj wrote: | I worked in an office in the early 2000s that was PC's but we | had a single shared Mac workstation we'd use for tasks like | testing things in Safari. I sat right next to this workstation | and every time someone would sit there I would ssh in and use | `say` to make it say strange things like "help, I'm stuck in | the computer". It was one of those green G3 towers and it would | come kind of creepily out of it's internal speaker. | | No one knew who was doing it until one day my friend was using | it and I made too much of an inside joke that gave it away. | krazydad wrote: | 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" | dylan604 wrote: | Were you home schooled? ;-) | | Saying that in a school lab wouldn't make much sense | cuttysnark wrote: | say -v cellos "droid" | | Pretty sure this is how they generated the sound that was | used for those commercials once upon a time. | msarnoff wrote: | Us too. And if the sound was off, we could just turn up the | volume with `osascript` commands! | dylan604 wrote: | Luckily, the internal speaker on the Macs were decent enough | so you could do this even if there were no speakers | connected. | | By designating the voice, you could even have multiple | "people" talking to the user. It got annoying quite quickly | to be on the receiving end | jamal-kumar wrote: | We used to do this in high school all the time. | | The other thing we did was access network shares which you could | see, but if you tried clicking them in explorer they'd say | "access denied". The administrator apparently didn't lock things | down very hard so a two-line .bat file: @echo off | net use Z: \\administrators | | Would get us access to all sorts of crazy stuff. | budafish wrote: | also @net use Z: \\administrators | | Would achieve the same effect :) | grubbs wrote: | We used to run executable versions of Quake and Tribes off the | Administrative share. No need to install. Just run .exe and it | threw you into the LAN game. | jamal-kumar wrote: | Our computers weren't that high spec but we did the same with | scorched earth. | | There was also evidence someone else found this before us | because they had filled this one directory with viruses that | had extremely obvious .jpg.exe extensions and basically | various thirst trap stuff for creepy teachers filling the | rest of the filename to click on it. I think I remember | access to all of this was lost when this one kid was dumb | enough to actually click something in there and he got blamed | for it and expelled, which was pretty funny. | dangero wrote: | 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. | pea wrote: | Oh man I remember doing the exact same thing in high school, | didn't think the wildcard would actually work. Overheard | concerned teachers talking about it and never fessed up until | now! | ilyt wrote: | Ah, yes, back where network security was an oxymoron | ocdtrekkie wrote: | Congrats on topping HN with your blog's first post, lol. | | This is something I actually _worry_ about future generations | missing. My core love of computers came from being able to tamper | with them. Being able to poke around in the operating system, | figure out how to do neat things, etc. | | Today, students are given either an iPad or a Chromebook, and | generally locked into using some horrific privacy nightmare like | Gmail, and have very little ability to actually experiment with | computers. | | I suppose this means we have better security, but people like me | born more recently may not end up in the field because of it. | nirav72 wrote: | Oh this brings back memories. I remember before NAT routers | became a common thing for home broadband connections and when | most households only had one PC - my local DSL provider was | assigning IP addresses from one block of IPs in an area. So | browsing through other people's shared directories on windows NT | or 98 machines was trivial. So many people had open shares. | Including sending out NET SEND messages. | dgfitz wrote: | I wrote a net send script in high school that sent a pop up to | every computer in the building... 500 times. Someone snitched on | me. I regret nothing. | alxjsn wrote: | This 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 directory set a cookie to a 6 digit identifier in | the cookie. We could access any student's grades and details by | just setting it to another ID, or looking at their lunch card. | | 4. During finals we wouldn't be allowed to see our grades until | after all the finals were submitted into our grading portal. | Somebody picked up on the fact that if you stop the page load | before it finished that the grades would show up. Using JS to | block our grades after they loaded didn't stop even the least | technical people. | | 5. Some of our labs had monitoring software to make sure we were | working. We could just kill that process and they would lose | access. | | 6. Invert MacOS screen colors using Control + Option + Command + | 8. Teachers didn't know how to recover from this and would resort | to restoring the entire Mac. | | 7. CTRL + ALT + Down to flip the Windows screens. Again caused | issues for a lot of people who didn't know this shortcut. | | What a bunch of troublemakers we were... | metadat wrote: | Heh, you've reminded me. | | I used to go to Fry's Electronics computer department and | screenshot the desktop with clickable stuff, then proceed to | set that as the background and close all the windows and remove | or relocate all desktop items. To an end user, it then seemed | like the computer was frozen or otherwise fubar'd. Rinsed and | repeated that for a whole row of machines a few times. It was | entertaining to then watch people approach and try to interact | with them. | | I know this is weak kung-fu compared to many stories in this | thread is but it was a good time! (at the time..) | dilap wrote: | I still occasionally accidentally do this to myself when I | come back to my phone looking at a screenshot in full- | screen... It's almost a sensation of vertigo when you realize | what's going on and your brain readjusts. | somat wrote: | 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. | 13of40 wrote: | 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. | ceautery wrote: | That's pretty funny. I worked at a unix shop and occasionally got | a kick out of things like the following, if I ever saw one of my | buddies logged in at the same time as me: | | echo 'Terminal overheating, please blow on screen' > /dev/tty0 | jimt1234 wrote: | I 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. Getting fired was the best thing | that ever happened to him. He was a weekend "action photographer" | [surf/skate/snowboard/...] who decided to go full-time after | losing his job. He rode the early-2000s "extreme sports" wave and | ended up being quite successful, and more importantly, much | happier.) | msla wrote: | https://everything2.com/title/Jordan+K.+Hubbard | | > Long before FreeBSD, Jordan K. Hubbard earned a spot in | Internet history in 1987 when he accidentally attempted to | broadcast an rwall message to every machine on the Internet. He | stopped it once he realized what was happening, but not before | he & the other UC Berkeley network administrators were flooded | with complaints. | smoldesu wrote: | Got in trouble for something similar in middle school, | actually. I would bike over to the high school for my | robotics club, and some of the older members had written a | privilege escalation script for the Windows machines. So, I | brought it on a flash drive to my technology class the next | day and ran 'shutdown -i' with admin privs. Being young and | stupid, I broadcast a reboot message to all ~700 machines | connected on the network, and got a fairly thorough talking- | to... | ilyt wrote: | I played with network sniffer on home network (that sent | funny packets to switch to make it MITM traffic thru my | machine). Except it didn't work/I fucked something up and | all traffic went thru my machine. | | They couldn't prove it's me so teacher just blanked banned | anyone in the library (our class with few of my friends | were on the 4 machines in the library) from using machines | there for few months. | | Then when we got new shiny machines for computer lab I was | bored when the teacher was explaining something so I | started guessing admin password. It was zaqwsx | azinman2 wrote: | When I was studying abroad, I noticed that the Ethernet | at my Uni dorm seemed to have a lot of cross traffic. So | I ran a simple password sniffer, not knowing it also | effectively turned my computer into a giant switch. Soon | after I came home to my flat mates saying "the IT | department came and kicked you off the internet." I | thought it was a joke, until I saw I wasn't on. I called | and pled dumb, saying I had installed an "internet | accelerator" and they believed me and restored access. | | FWIW I wasn't actually going to do anything with the | passwords (of which I accumulated many!). It was mostly | just a fun nerd flex with no bad intentions. | HeckFeck wrote: | [dead] | bluesign wrote: | Similar story; bet with a friend to hack and change his | password at university. Accidentally changing all user | passwords to some profanity including his name, luckily didn't | get caught. | kelseyfrog wrote: | This brings back memories of sneaking a C compiler onto a | classroom computer in high school and writing a program which | issued ten thousand net-sends to a bully's computer. IIRC, the | next send window popped over every other window and it | effectively denial of service attacked his UI. The options where | to click thousands of times or restart the computer. Well, it was | pretty easy to rerun the program once his was restarted and let's | just say he didn't take it well. It was a blessing that net send | doesn't show sender information. | spogbiper wrote: | 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 | mrlonglong wrote: | I like this very much, it's suitably evil. | mrlonglong wrote: | I had fun with fork bombs on the VAX/VMS machine at uni. Till the | day it ran too quickly for me to stop it. Walk of shame to the | CSO to own up and for them to terminate the run-away processes on | the Sysop console. | nickt wrote: | Reminds me of the day, obviously some years earlier, that a few | of us aged about 10 years discovered *NOTIFY and even better, | *REMOTE on the Econet connected Beebs we had at school. | | Oh, here's the manual (PDF), which we never read: | http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/Manual... | xingped wrote: | Haha, I got a great laugh at the end-of-article scroll. Well | played! | dhammack wrote: | Had a similar experience in middle school. We started initially | doing net-send to specific users and having played around a | little bit with batch files/command prompt before I tried net | send *. | | Well the entire county was on the same network. All computers in | the school district received my message. Fortunately the message | was just "hi", and I think it was only sent once. | | Like the OP, in retrospect I saw that the message shows the | sending computer+user. Since we had student-specific logins it | didn't take long before I was tracked down and reprimanded. I | think they even told my parents about it and were threatening | suspension etc. But at a certain point it became kind of obvious | that the network/configuration was more at fault than a curious | kid. So I got off with a stern warning and narrowly avoided a | life of crime. | mastax wrote: | I have very similar memories from my time in the computer labs at | school. We also discovered `net send` and got it disabled a few | weeks later. | | The computers were really locked down to the point that they were | annoying to use. Right click was disabled (at least in windows | explorer?), among other things. One of my acquaintances wrote a | program in visual basic called "Firstname Lastname's Computer | Fixer" that was somehow able to disable many of the restrictions | on the computer. I remember it was a pretty large window with | lots of buttons though I can't remember what they were all | supposed to do. After passing it around for a few months it was | deleted from all our home folders and I found out that he was | suspended for a week and banned from using computers. The | computers got even more locked down. Oh well. | atkailash wrote: | [dead] | CamelCaseName wrote: | Oh goodness, what an awesome end. I love this article so much. | PrivateButts wrote: | When our school started to provide network shares to students, | they were pretty lax on security. I figured out that everyone's | share was publicly read/writable, and the network path was pretty | easy to guess. Whenever someone would annoy me I would replace a | project file they were working on with some matter of nuisance | program, like a zip bomb or a script that just kept opening word | until the system ran out of ram. I'm surprised I never got | caught, because I was too much of an idiot to properly cover my | tracks. | vsviridov wrote: | 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... | phamilton wrote: | I put `net send * Seniors2005` 200 times in a OPEN_ME.bat file | and put it in our shared folder on the school network (it was | buried deep in the Art department directories and was full of | emulators and music and stuff. | | My friend saw it and said "What's this?" I told him not to open | it and of course he did so immediately. | | This was a K-12 school, so every single lab, every single | teachers computer all the way down to kindergarten got it. | | When IT came to my friends machine, I fessed up and got in | trouble. Banned from school computers for the rest of the year, | all my teachers got a notice about it and I had more than one | awkward conversation about what I did. | naikrovek wrote: | I changed the environment variable PROMPT in DOS to "Enter | Password:" once, confusing my teacher endlessly. | try_the_bass wrote: | I remember doing this during one of my first years of college. I | would usually finish the lab assignments early, so I would poke | around the computers and see what I could get into. I eventually | discovered `net send` on the cli, and read through the help to | discover that you could broadcast with a wildcard. | | So, I promptly ran `net send * All your base are belong to us`. | | The immediate result was giggles from all around the computer | lab. As soon as I realized I had sent it to every computer in the | lab, I realized I had no idea what _other_ computers I had sent | it to. I decided my best course of action was to log out of the | machine and switch to another one. | | About 5 minutes later, a couple people came into the lab, going | straight to the machine I had sent the message from. They looked | around, asked the room if anyone knew who was using the machine, | got a bunch of noncommittal shrugs, shrugged themselves, and | left. | | A couple weeks later, the Messenger service was disabled across | the campus. I found out from someone that the message had popped | up on every machine on campus, interrupting presentations and | leading to some slight confusion on the part of teachers all | over. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-12-29 23:00 UTC)