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They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]! I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work f

They have missed out Perl CGI scripts from “Matts Script Archive”[0]! I remember much difficulty as a 13YO trying to get his “guest book” Perl script to work for the first time (with all its famous security holes). Oh, and “CGI Proxy”! Hosting that somewhere on a personal site so that we could get passed the filter on the schools internet. Anyone who knew how to host that had great power in the IT rooms! Edit: wow cgi proxy has been updated as recently at 2019! [1] 0: https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarchive.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/19980709151514/http://scriptarch... 1: https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/ https://jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

comprev 5y ago
CGI Proxy takes me back for exactly the reason you describe - bypassing filters on the school network :-)
tomnipotent 5y ago
> Matts Script Archive Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.
leviathant 5y ago
Around the time the word 'blog' was being coined, I did terrible things to the guestbook CGI script from Matt's Script Archive in order to make it easy for a small staff of writers to update a news site I had started about Nine Inch Nails. I later migrated to a Perl Script called 'News Publisher' by someone named Grant Williams - it's basically a static site generator that runs on Perl and flatfiles. Around 2008, I ported the whole thing to C# & SQL Server, but in the process, refactored and cleaned up the Perl code, and figured - why bother with the big underlying shift? So it's still what powers that NIN website two decades later.
stordoff 5y ago
CGIProxy was the start of a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between the IT staff and a group of students at my school. It started with finding public hosts ("inurl:nph-proxy.cgi"), and quickly evolved to self-hosting CGIProxy on custom domains/ports. Portable Firefox could be used to sidestep some of the filtering software, until they started auto-closing any window with "Firefox" in the title and .exes called firefox.exe (both of which could also be worked around). It culminated in them creating their own domain admin account so they could disable most of the blocking/monitoring software (the main domain admin's account password being "school" made this _much_ easier than it should have been). They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.
krapp 5y ago
Matt's Script Archive is still live. God alone knows why, but it is. You can still download wwwboard (even though FF warns about an insecure connection), it was last updated in 2002. ... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.

comprev 5y ago

CGI Proxy takes me back for exactly the reason you describe - bypassing filters on the school network :-)

tomnipotent 5y ago

> Matts Script Archive Such great memories! I was also fond of wwwboard and used it to create my first community in 1997 for the original Diablo game, right before I discovered pirating software and downloaded UltimateBB.

leviathant 5y ago

Around the time the word 'blog' was being coined, I did terrible things to the guestbook CGI script from Matt's Script Archive in order to make it easy for a small staff of writers to update a news site I had started about Nine Inch Nails. I later migrated to a Perl Script called 'News Publisher' by someone named Grant Williams - it's basically a static site generator that runs on Perl and flatfiles. Around 2008, I ported the whole thing to C# & SQL Server, but in the process, refactored and cleaned up the Perl code, and figured - why bother with the big underlying shift? So it's still what powers that NIN website two decades later.

stordoff 5y ago

CGIProxy was the start of a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between the IT staff and a group of students at my school. It started with finding public hosts ("inurl:nph-proxy.cgi"), and quickly evolved to self-hosting CGIProxy on custom domains/ports. Portable Firefox could be used to sidestep some of the filtering software, until they started auto-closing any window with "Firefox" in the title and .exes called firefox.exe (both of which could also be worked around). It culminated in them creating their own domain admin account so they could disable most of the blocking/monitoring software (the main domain admin's account password being "school" made this _much_ easier than it should have been). They only got caught because one of them was logged as using a USB drive called "<surname>'s USB" while logged in the domain admin account, which served as an interesting lesson in OPSEC.

krapp 5y ago

Matt's Script Archive is still live. God alone knows why, but it is. You can still download wwwboard (even though FF warns about an insecure connection), it was last updated in 2002. ... and if you search "wwwboard" apparently you can still find some in the wild.