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This brings back memories of installing DOOM into the printer spool folder because it was the one place on the hard drive that anybody could write to. Also stol

by nly 12y ago

This brings back memories of installing DOOM into the printer spool folder because it was the one place on the hard drive that anybody could write to. Also stole an admin password or two back in high school because keyloggers, which weren't even installed with local admin privileges, were perfectly capable of logging keystrokes heading for the login prompt. At least we've moved beyond this level of naivety these days.

Lewton 12y ago
Keyloggers? hah. We just looked over the shoulder of the admin when he typed it in: qawsedrf I don't think i'll ever forget that password (If you don't understand why, try looking at a qwerty keyboard)
Keyframe 12y ago
Old days war story. In the early 90s we had a computer center (we still do) here where we could all use computers if we were with an academic or school institution. This was a few years before web, around 1992. I think. This primarily consisted of a single SPARCstation with SunOS 4.x. and a bunch of VT320 terminals (and a few IBM ones). I was in grade school, there were high schoolers here and there and mostly people in college using systems for primarily IRC and gopher. I was learning C at the time and heavily into graphics programming so I wanted to use as much system resources as possible - which of there weren't many. So I had this cunning plan where I wrote a simple (I was grade school) C program that basically malloced as much memory in a loop as it could get and kept it. I figured that there was no quota for memory as there were for hard disk space. I ran the program I wrote into background (&) to get the process id and waited. Program ate all the available memory and, presumably, started trashing the swap until all of the running processes were extremely slow and/or unresponsive. I watched as people around the room started to close their programs (IRC, gopher mostly) and gave up on using the system. As soon as most of them were gone, I killed the program with pid I had before. It was so effective even things like ls wouldn't work, only kill. I know it was a dick move, but I was a kid and even kind of proud of what I did back then.

by nly 12y ago

Lewton 12y ago

Keyloggers? hah. We just looked over the shoulder of the admin when he typed it in: qawsedrf I don't think i'll ever forget that password (If you don't understand why, try looking at a qwerty keyboard)

Keyframe 12y ago

Old days war story. In the early 90s we had a computer center (we still do) here where we could all use computers if we were with an academic or school institution. This was a few years before web, around 1992. I think. This primarily consisted of a single SPARCstation with SunOS 4.x. and a bunch of VT320 terminals (and a few IBM ones). I was in grade school, there were high schoolers here and there and mostly people in college using systems for primarily IRC and gopher. I was learning C at the time and heavily into graphics programming so I wanted to use as much system resources as possible - which of there weren't many. So I had this cunning plan where I wrote a simple (I was grade school) C program that basically malloced as much memory in a loop as it could get and kept it. I figured that there was no quota for memory as there were for hard disk space. I ran the program I wrote into background (&) to get the process id and waited. Program ate all the available memory and, presumably, started trashing the swap until all of the running processes were extremely slow and/or unresponsive. I watched as people around the room started to close their programs (IRC, gopher mostly) and gave up on using the system. As soon as most of them were gone, I killed the program with pid I had before. It was so effective even things like ls wouldn't work, only kill. I know it was a dick move, but I was a kid and even kind of proud of what I did back then.