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In 2003 I had my web server in my college apartment bedroom. This is back when AOL Instant Messenger was popular. I had a URL on my website called moo.html th
by digitalsushi 4y ago
In 2003 I had my web server in my college apartment bedroom. This is back when AOL Instant Messenger was popular.
I had a URL on my website called moo.html that wasn't indexed. My friends had it bookmarked, and when they visited it they got a picture of a cow, but it played a cow mooing in my bedroom. It was a nudge to come online and be social.
The End.
- jrootabega 4y agoI enjoyed the (brief?) times when the client would do string interpolation on the URL and tell you the screen name of the person viewing it.
- jaywalk 4y agoYou had to put a link in your profile that contained "%n", and the client would replace %n with the screen name of the person clicking the link. They never took that away as long as I was using AIM, but there was no way to see anyone simply viewing your profile without clicking a link as far as I can remember.
- jrootabega 4y agoAh that's right. I remember when it was still not widely known you could catch some people, but I think people caught on eventually.
- knome 4y agoCould you have added an <img src="http://tracking.example.com/pixel.gif?name=%n http://tracking.example.com/pixel.gif?name=%n"> to the profile, tracking them via the weblogs, or having a era-appropriate CGI script sitting there that kept track of them?
- jaywalk 4y agoI'm pretty sure you couldn't embed images in your profile.
- lucb1e 4y agoI wasn't an AOL user so it took me a few reads to get the concept. What this must mean is something like: [Joe] what's up <a href="//example.net/?username= [Jane] nm, wbu [Joe] ">join my chess game?</a> Which could show on Jane's screen, if there is no HTML escaping at all, as: [Joe] what's up [Joe] join my chess game? (<-link) The message of Jane's would have looked like it got swallowed because it was inside the HTML tag, but so long as Jane doesn't know what's up and ignores it, clicking the link instead, the owner of example.net would see a pageload of https://example.net/?username=%0A%5BJane%5D%20nm%2C%20wbu%0A%5BJoe%5D%20%20 https://example.net/?username=%0A%5BJane%5D%20nm%2C%20wbu%0A... and thus learn that the other person is called Jane. Then again, for this to work it would already have to be on the screen of the person clicking the link, but not of the person who sent the link or there would be no point. So I feel like I'm still missing something.
- jrootabega 4y agoLess clever than that. jaywalk's comment got it. You could put a link in your away message/status/profile and see which people clicked it and/or were "stalking" you.
- oliwary 4y agoSomething similar used to work on Facebook... and still does apparently! At least if you are this person: http://facebook.com/profile.php?=73322363 http://facebook.com/profile.php?=73322363 (This link redirects to the profile of whoever clicks it)
- thakoppno 4y agoWhat mechanism tied an inbound http request to the moo?
- digitalsushi 4y agoI was using a log watcher that could run a command on a regex match, but I remember having an elaborate .htaccess that would shell out all kinds of things... many ways to tie them together, all very hacky.
- RockRobotRock 4y agoI'm trying to imagine what was popular back then. A Perl CGI script?
- nluken 4y agoSimilar story: In college much more recently (2019), I had a linux server running at my boyfriend's apartment since he was off campus and we were blocked from doing anything like that on the school's network. Sometimes, I would say hi to him or wish him goodnight by playing a little tune on the PC speaker hooked up to that computer. He'd always text me back with a smiley face or something like that. Feels like that kind of interaction is really rare on the web these days, but we had fun with it for a little while.
- conductr 4y agoWow cool but that’s bizarro world to me. In my days college was where everything awesome was happening because it had fast and basically unrestricted internet. A lot of the Napster and other P2P stuff that followed was being seeded from someone’s dorm. The best game servers, etc. On IRC in the early 00s, I did a lot of trading of video (live music footage) and one kid in a dorm somewhere could host an enormous amount of content by most home internet standards. Once I got off dialup download speeds, I could easily download more than I could afford to store. The cheapest thing for me to do was buy a massive stack of CDRs and start burning. If I remember correctly, the largest HDD at the time was about 40GB.
- nluken 4y agoOur school's IT department used to go around with wireless scanners to make sure nobody was running networks without the school's permission. I knew people who got busted for stuff like that, but my roommates and I eventually hacked a way around this by naming our network "Dave's iPhone Hotspot" and never had any issues. At that point, the webserver moved from my boyfriend's place back to my own until we moved off campus the following year.
- barkingcat 4y agoThat's exactly why schools started filtering data. The school I was in had to do a complete wipe of 5 TB of random shares (back then that was a lot of data) and they expelled a bunch of students for pirating and hosting extreme content After that the network filtering was standard policy.
- fullstop 4y agoIn 2001 I had an account set up for my girlfriend, now wife, so that she could telnet (openssh wasn't really widespread then!) to my desktop and it would play a sound and blink a light as part of the login procedure. The light was controlled by an X10 "firecracker" module. Neat stuff, for the time. Anyway, she would do that to get my attention if I wasn't by the PC and she wanted to chat via ICQ.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoI still use one of those firecracker modules to toggle a set of Christmas-type lights from the command line. I've gotten a ton of fun out of that little module in the 20ish years I've owned it.
- fullstop 4y agoDid you get it as part of a promotional deal for about $5 in the late 90s?
- EvanAnderson 4y agoYep! Money well spent.
- fullstop 4y agoNice. If I remember correctly it was their "Powerhouse" deal and you just paid for shipping. I still have the modules around here somewhere! No native serial ports, though, and the restriction of things needing to be on the same circuit kind of puts a damper on things. In my college dorms everything in my room was on the same circuit.
- EvanAnderson 4y agoYeah-- that was the one. I've found additional modules here and there in thrift stores and garage sales. The stuff was always just flaky enough that I never wanted to trust it with anything serious. Turning on lamps and strings of xmas lights was fine because the occasional "freak out" that the modules inevitably would fall victim to, requiring a power-cycle to overcome, never caused any major inconvenience. Their hard-wired more "serious" brethren, though, scared the heck out of me. I can't imagine they were at all reliable over the long haul. re: the serial ports - If I remember correctly the signaling to the module was done on handshake pings (because serial data could "pass thru" the module). They'd probably be pretty easy to bit-bang from any 5V logic source.
- blhack 4y agoI miss these days of the internet.
- llaolleh 4y agoMake Arpanet Great Again!
- JKCalhoun 4y agoThanks, I lolled.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI'm seeing this sort of thing a lot lately (perhaps I'm looking for it?). A lot of people expressing, in one form or another, that we, our society, have somehow have gone down the wrong path. Even in this article there is a subtext of change ... for the worse. If you want to be dismissive, call it nostalgia — or point out that every generation feels this way about the way the world is compared to the way it was when they were younger. But I think there is something truly broken in the world and I think people feel it too. The phrase that kept popping into my head when I was feeling particularly down about the way of things was, "No one would have chosen this." That is, in reference to the way the Western world is today.
- anthk 4y agoEmbrace Gopher, Gemini and IRC/Jabber again.
- Scarblac 4y agoOne night in the 90s I woke up at 1am because the server next to my bed started making a lot of noise! I quickly login and see a process by user "nobody" taking up 100% cpu! I'm being hacked! Quickly pull the network cable out of the wall, wide awake. Turns out there is a cron job that updates the locate command's index.
- ISL 4y agoYep! updatedb
- Kim_Bruning 4y agoOne day when I had just started using linux, this never happened to me either ;-)
- DavidSJ 4y agoAt a web startup I worked at in 2008, we had some automated emails sent to all our users. We didn't have sendmail or postfix or whatever properly configured and so the emails came from nobody@ourdomain.com. Our CEO was pissed because he didn't understand that it wasn't like some intentional joke by our engineering team.
- mikehollinger 4y agoMy first real job was to work with another intern to write a “tool to keep track of who’s been trained on what” since they were doing it with a spreadsheet. This was in 2001. We wrote it on the LAMP stack which gave us the full suite of whatever you could find on a Linux CD at the time. Fancy graphs? No problem. Send reminder emails? Sure boss! We dutifully started hacking and testing and hacking to get that function in. To test, we decided to send emails to jackfrost, santa, and so on from our own sendmail server to the corporate mail server. It worked fine because we weren’t spamming it, we were just sending a few messages every now and then as we debugged. Turns out there’s really a Jack Frost that worked for us. He was not pleased. We were amused. I think we apologized, and I forget how we figured out he was a real person.
- Roark66 4y ago
- napolux 4y agothis reminds me of the Yo! app
- patoroco 4y agoOMG, I’d achieved to remove it from my mind. Ooob, the olds times in the apps world
- thomastjeffery 4y agoSome relatives of mine have internet-connected RGB lamps that they use in a similar fashion. When one sets the color, the others automatically synchronize. It seems like a pretty neat low-stress way to keep in touch.
- couchand 4y agoWhat's their encoding scheme?
- lucb1e 4y agoObligatory: https://xkcd.com/530/ https://xkcd.com/530/ I did something similar when I lost my phone but it was still connected to the network. Ssh into it and `while true; do espeak "I am here"; done`. Related: http://bash.org/?5273 http://bash.org/?5273
- didgetmaster 4y agoThe xkcd reminds me of a friend who was locked out of her car. The battery in her remote key fob had run down so the door would not unlock when she pushed the unlock button on it. She was still trying to figure out online how to get a new battery when I took her key from her and opened the door by inserting it in the lock. She was so embarrassed that she wouldn't talk to me for a few days.
- ghusbands 4y agoI did that, recently. My fob battery died, I unlocked the car with the key, opened the door and... the car alarm went off. I'm not sure what the designers were thinking.
- stonogo 4y agoYou turn the alarm off by starting the car, because the ignition has an rfid-like close-range reader which only requires passive circuitry in the key. That's how you differentiate between a break-in and the legitimate owner.
- davchana 4y agoMy car has push start (like many new ones) & has no keyhole inside (it has one in door to open the door). Although it has a seat/slot for the whole key to go in, in case of low battery. I assume that will stop the alarm. :-|
- Haegin 4y agoMy car is also push start and I have to hold the fob in front of the start button for a short while before turning on the car if the fob battery is out.
- endgame 4y agoI did a similar thing with my family: I'd hooked a GNU/Linux box up to the family Hi-Fi system to play our various music libraries, and when I was living overseas I'd "call them" by ssh-ing in and asking mpd to start playing something. They'd come online and call me using Google Talk (the very first one, probably, because it was good, simple, built on open standards, and long dead).
- joshxyz 4y agoi wonder how often they refreshed it lol
- arvindamirtaa 4y agoThis! This era is nostalgic for me and I am convinced we've only downgraded down from the handiness and thoughtfulness of the tools we used back then.
- acomjean 4y agoIn 89 we had 9600 baud direct connection from the dorms to the computing center… We’ve come a long way. Though I did have a Linux ppc box serving website under my desk in the early 2000s.. until they blocked port 80. https://web.archive.org/web/20020124163137/http://www.linuxppc.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20020124163137/http://www.linuxp...
- katrotz 4y agoQuote similar approach was sharing your Floppy Disk A:/ drive. Any attempt to access it via the network would make this loud noise of empty drive, which meant someone is waiting for you in the chat.
- drewzero1 4y agoI love this story! A few years ago I had a server in my apartment with a similar 'dingdong.html' that would ring an old elevator bell I had salvaged from the junk. I didn't end up giving people the URL; I just made an ESP8266 button that would send a request. If it had been a bit more reliable I would have kept using it but I had some issues with either the bell coil or the relay and it kept sticking. All in all the project ended up being more expensive than a wireless doorbell, but I enjoyed the experience (and the smartwatch notification when someone was at the door).