Nostalgia time. > Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right? Devices, yes. Internet connection: not at first. With the AOL app (not a separ

Nostalgia time. > Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right? Devices, yes. Internet connection: not at first. With the AOL app (not a separate appliance or OS feature) responsible for establishing the dialup connection, it only bridged internet access to the OS when the current AOL user had no parental controls. As a 10-14 year old whose AOL account was set to "young teen" (DNS allow list) and then "mature teen" (DNS deny list), I was free to use non-AOL apps but they had no internet access. Solution: download a keylogger* and subsequently use a parent's AOL account for the next few years until they removed controls from mine, giving full Internet access to the whole computer, without being found out. *The free version had a "pay for this" nag popup every few minutes. I opened the exe in a hex editor, typed over that nag string, and managed to corrupt it just enough that it would crash (with a totally generic fatal error) instead of nag. Launched it right before finding mom or dad to help me do some safe but blocked activity, which they were always happy to do, with increased supervision.