6 ms·
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"-som
by thaumaturgy 5y ago
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 5y agoAtEase?
- munificent 5y agoHoly 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.
- function_seven 5y agoSame. It's always a weird jolt when you're reminded of something that you not only forgot, but that you "forgot that you forgot". I remember AtEase, and remember hating it.
- simon1ltd 5y agoIt was AtEase. In the earlier macs, those with a button to trigger a debugger in firmware, you could completely exit AtEase by entering the debugger and typing “G H” I know it worked on System 7, and I think there was a variation that worked in System 8 as well.
- exikyut 5y agoWhat does 'H' do? The other system monitor references in the comments here don't quite do it this concisely.
- twic 5y agoAh, i thought they were talking about MiniFinder: https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/MiniFinder https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/MiniFinder https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c29050e2-809c-c2a3-24e2-809811c3a4ef/80b7fa07-d603-11e7-a73f-fa163e9022f0 https://winworldpc.com/screenshot/c29050e2-809c-c2a3-24e2-80... But that was a bit earlier. From what i remember, MiniFinder was written for MFS, and did not support hierarchical directories. You couldn't use applications unless they were at a filesystem root.
- Tainnor 5y agoI remember AtEase from when I was a kid. Somehow I discovered it on our Macintosh Performa at home and was totally fascinated by it. Kinda like Mouse Practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Practice), which I must have played a gazillion times.
- amenghra 5y agoI used to bypass AtEase using MacBasic or something like that. Write a one liner to launch Finder, done. Compare AtEase to your iOS home screen. We have come full circle?
- munificent 5y ago> 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 5y ago[deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoYes, I have a feeling I would be dismissed now for some of the things I've done in the past.
- Tepix 5y agoI setup a MAC based internet filter at home, secretly hoping my kids will figure out how to bypass it.
- withinboredom 5y agoMost OSs don’t let you change a WiFi’s MAC address these days. Sometimes even the hardware doesn’t support it.
- reasonabl_human 5y agoLove it. Could be fun to toss up a WEP ‘secured’ SSID in an untrusted DMZ VLAN that has doesn’t have filtering. Figuring out how to use the aircrack suite on an ancient thinkpad to bust an SSID was what really got me interested in computers as a kid.
- guardiangod 5y ago>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.
- fotbr 5y agoTrivially defeated with a boot disk and ResEdit. Breaking things with ResEdit was pretty much my jr. high school hobby. It took a bit before I figured out how to restore things when I was done. Head "tech" guy in the building eventually figured out it was me, showed me a few things and ended up just giving me an un-limited login and a few rules. Also taught me how to intelligently use ResEdit instead of the brute-force method(s) I was used to.
- mwcampbell 5y agoYou didn't even need a boot disk and ResEdit. Just hold down the Shift key while the Mac was booting from the hard drive, and system extensions including Foolproof would be disabled.
- TimTheTinker 5y agoMy 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/handler for that keycode in the DOS login program. So I spent several hours trying other key combinations and eventually figured out that Alt+3 sent an ASCII character that had an effect that was equivalent to Ctrl+Break in DOS -- and we were back in business.
- Severian 5y agoWow, so this is very close to what we did in school. Us being the 'hackers'. By chance was this in Ohio?
- TimTheTinker 5y agoNo, 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.
- tbrock 5y agoThe name of the program was "At Ease". It had two big folders with icons that looked very much like a precursor to iOS's springboard we know today. The two folders were labeled "Applications" and "Documents": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Ease You could also trigger the NMI via Apple key + power button and I remember the magic code to set the memory to zero and crash finder being: SM<space>0<space>A964<return>G<space>O<return>
- thaumaturgy 5y agoClose. Usenet for the tiebreaker: > At the ">" ROM debugger prompt, type the following lines, pressing Return after each: > SM 0 A9F4 > G 0 > In the first line, the "SM" stands for "Set Memory", the "0" signifies memory location "0", and the "A9F4" is the trap number for the "ExitToShell" trap. This line puts "A9F4" at memory location "0". In the second line, the "G" stands for "Go" and the "0" stands for memory location "0". This line tells the computer to execute the instructions starting at memory location "0". Since "A9F4" is at memory location "0", the "ExitToShell" trap is executed. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.system/c/lM8yT3I3P08 https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.system/c/lM8yT3I3P0...
- microtherion 5y agoIn 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!
- wiredfool 5y agoThere was one security system that only white/black listed application names. Leading to Control Panël or the entire disk of utilities called Word.