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Can someone with knowledge of all of these early programs explained how they worked? I remember getting booted from rooms (and offline) all of the time during t
by matt_wulfeck 9y ago
Can someone with knowledge of all of these early programs explained how they worked? I remember getting booted from rooms (and offline) all of the time during this period. It seemed like the Wild West, where all of these outlaws were above the law. It was glorious even though I was constantly in fear of being “punted”.
Now as a technical adult I’m very curious how they could do it. Did they send a certain “magic” byte sequence to my username? Did they overload it somehow? I can still vividly recall an IM with a stream of sinister ASCII and suddenly poof! Offline!
- grifter 9y agoSome IM punters exploited issues with the primitive HTML renderering capabilities in AOL, when receiving certain HTML AOL would either take too many cycles render it, detracting from its network code cycles causing a disconnect from he server (booted), or in some cases crash. Some IMing also exploited bandwidth disparity, whereby they would send more than you could consume forcing a disconnect.
- el_duderino 9y agoThe 1IM punt HTML tag that overloaded AOL’s own buffer <font size="199999999999…"> and fill the 9's to the end of the IM window. I believe there was even a more effective one that was something like <font size="¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿...">.
- gech 9y agoThat was it? So simple