As a young buck who's parents didn't want him tying up the only phone line in the house to get on the internet whenever he wanted, I was limited to an hour of i

As a young buck who's parents didn't want him tying up the only phone line in the house to get on the internet whenever he wanted, I was limited to an hour of internet time a day. I also would pick up free trial discs from local stores, even though I couldn't sign up for a free trial without a credit card or checking account, of which teenage me had neither. One day, however, late at night on a weekend, I tossed in a PeoplePC disc into my machine and ran it through the trial setup to see what I could do. PeoplePC's sign up was completely online, which was pretty new for the day. The trial setup would first dial a toll-free number to get local POP numbers, and then dial the local number to complete the registration. Well, after poking around to see if I could get around the dialup procedure for the temporary Dial Up Networking account (young me at the time wouldn't know that those creds were in the registry for my perusal), I popped open a web browser, and to my surprise, the local pop account had full internet access. Unfortunately, the trial had a timebomb, so after 10 minutes of inactivity in the setup app, it would close the connection, and remove the DUN account. Young me however was a wannabe hacker, and had among other tools, a hex editor at my disposal. Finding the temporary setup directory, I copied the contents into another folder that would persist beyond the setup, and started scanning through various files. Eventually, I found what looked like a username and password cleartext in a binary, and copied them out. Tossed them into a fresh DUN entry, and discovered that the account... just worked. Like that, I had free dial-up networking, effectively whenever and wherever PeoplePC had a POP. I rode that for a good couple years until we eventually got our first DSL modem. Honestly not the hardest or most impressive hack in the world. For all I know, PeoplePC was aware of my usage of it, but because the password was etched into hundreds of thousands of setup discs, it's not like they could rotate the creds. But for a teenage me that just wanted access to the unfettered internet, it was pretty neat.