Oh what a cute little animation... OH MY GOD. (Not acceptable, even in the '80s)
- Reference: 1594624509
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/07/13/who_me/
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Today's tale comes from "Trent" (which is most certainly not his name) and takes us back in time to his university days.
Entering higher education in the period between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Trent was a product of the home computer fad of the era, "having been brought up on the Peeks And Pokes of the C64 and built-like-a-brick-s**thouse Research Machines 480Z in school."
We're pretty sure Trent is referring to the Research Machines LINK 480Z, a 8-bit micro that could be networked to a Research Machines 380Z, which would perform file server duties. The Z80-based machines were sold mainly into education and dropped into BASIC, or a variant of CP/M, when powered up. Research Machines followed up the 480Z with the Intel 80186-based Nimbus PC-186 before going full-PC compatible until [2]RM gave up on the hardware game in 2014 .
For Trent, however, fresh from the 480Z experience, university life brought with it the impossibly glamorous world of the IBM PS/2s lurking in the computer lab. "With Harvard Graphics and a new-fangled CD-ROM drive!"
"A mate who worked for the local county council back home," he told us, "had given me a floppy with a file named 'Head 42' and told me to have a look when there weren't many people around."
Trent realised he'd misunderstood the filename when he popped the disk into a drive of a PC in an empty lab. He was presented with some terribly pixelated smut, an animation of three people doing something vaguely recognisable as NSFW.
"Looking back," he said, "I guess it was fairly high-tech computer pr0n for the era."
The nameless educational establishment had recently rolled out an update to the PCs, which saw them autorun a simple menu to allow students to select applications (word processing and so on) with the press of a key rather than having to remember a sequence of commands.
"However," said Trent, "it was simple to break out and get back into DOS."
Later, over the ludicrously cheap student beer of the time, Trent and a chum pondered if it was possible to fiddle with this simple boot menu and make anything run on startup.
"Back in the empty lab that evening (might have been straight from the students union bar after an extended lunch...) we found that not only would it boot any old file, but it would also work over the basic network."
Curious to see if they could, the duo pointed all the PCs in the lab ("might have been 40 to 50 machines") at Trent's blocky X-rated flick. To their delight, it seemed to work.
"It seemed like a good idea at the time," he told us with what sounds a like a tiny bit of remorse.
They were back in the bar for last orders.
It is unknown how many innocents found themselves trying to work out what the pixel animation was showing, but by the time Trent rocked up at the computer lab the next day he found it closed "for maintenance" (as it remained for a few days).
A rumour circulated among the students, frustrated that they could not complete assignments, that smut had been found.
The duo swore never to confess their sin, until today, and "amazingly were never found out."
"I still have the original 3.5-inch floppy somewhere."
Trent is now in his 50s and "quite ashamed of what we did."
Indeed he should be. Youth and beer do not excuse the pushing of pixelly pr0n onto the unsuspecting.
Ever done something in your youth that leaves you still gnawing a knuckle or two decades on? Would you forgive Trent or condemn him for his unacceptable behaviour? Pop your judgement in the comments and email your own confession to [3]Who, Me? ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/who-me
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/03/rm_fiscal_13/
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Regrets cut both ways
The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.
- Helen Rowland
-or-
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
- Sidney J. Harris
-or-
'The funny thing about regret is....It's better to regret something you have done, as to regret something you haven't done...'(You must be 18 to view the end of this sig.)~ Mgmt.
-Gibby Haynes
Re: Regrets cut both ways
> 'The funny thing about regret is....It's better to regret something you have done, as to regret something you haven't done...
There speaks a man who has never stopped a chainsaw with his hands. Presumably.
Re: Regrets cut both ways
My favourite safety warning was in the handbook for a Husquvarna chainsaw: "Accidents with chainsaws are rarely trivial".
Re: Regrets cut both ways
An up vote for that final reference. Always amuses me that I was 22 going on 23 when I first heard that album.
BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)
The IT dept of a place I once worked seeded a file on the network with a filename intended to make it look like an illicit game. (I think it was the work of a particularly noxious admin guy we had the misfortune to employ for a while)
The snag was that the file size wasn't huge enough for it to be a Windows executable and not even large enough to be a DOS game.
So I investigated.
It turned out to be a (very) crude honeypot: you ran the executable and it created a log file that contained the time, date and login of the person who'd run it, all trivially encrypted.
Once we'd broken the encryption (simple letter swap) we started seeding numerous log files with suitably rude encrypted messages.
Happy days
Re: BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)
"BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)"
upvote for the term alone!!!
the reg need a midweek BUFH column now.
Re: BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)
When I ran a BBS many moons ago it allowed folk to drop into the o/s which looked and felt like CP/M but was in fact the multi-user Turbodos. There were no built in commands, everything being executables. I made all the dangerous CP/M commands like format, fdisk, del etc as just hidden bat files that logged their use and user for public display and disabled their accounts.
it just showed how many bastards existed.
Re: BUFH (Bastard User From Hell)
If you have an Internet-facing machine with an SSH server on port 22, try creating a user called "pi" with the password "raspberry" and a default shell of /bin/cat .....
Head
I have heard that the song "Walking on the wide side" from Lou Reed escaped BBC censorship because they did not know what "giving head" meant (it being US slang and not UK slang).
Re: Head
I wonder what excuse they used for playing the Divinyls 'I Touch Myself' song.
Not my doing, but...
Many, many years ago I worked during my uni holidays for a company. They were looking to get some new computers in, and a sales woman from some distributor came in to demo a rather nice (in the day) Amiga with a full windowing GUI (very new at the time - well before the first versions of Windows were out).
At the end of the demo she said she would leave the machine with us for a few days to evaluate and, as she left, she popped a floppy on the desk with a "have a look at that after I've gone - I think you'll like it".
We were expecting some marketing junk, but it was lots and lots of high-res p0rn images linked into a slide show.
Distracted us so much we never did get round to evaluating the system...
Re: Not my doing, but...
ahhh, but did she get the sale?
All of these tales and comments...
... indicate how unsuitable MS/PC DOS was as a network operating system, something that persisted into the Windows era until the advent of NT.
But it trained several generations of system admins. and developers to be extremely lax with how they treated the security of the systems they worked on.
Even now, it seems that many organizations do not even take the basic steps to enforce decent limited user access on their Windows shares. I was looking at one of the shares I have to use the other day where I work (at ostensibly an IT company) and saw that by default all shares were open for write access for everybody, even those that were specific for users and teams. No wonder ransomware can de so devastating in these environments!
Windows can do it properly. Why don't people use these protections?
Re: All of these tales and comments...
Share permissions often seem to be left at full permissions for everyone but NTFS folder permissions are usually set correctly (not always though). That does mean the files are properly protected but anyone could remove the share (or change it's permissions) and thereby block access.
Re: All of these tales and comments...
The unix world doesn't escape either.
Do a google search for "chmod 777" and you'll cry at the results that come up....
Re: All of these tales and comments...
I found a kernel module that had been 777'd on a system once - and yes, it was being loaded.
It was supposed to have been a vendor managed system too...
Fail
The whole point of the hacking ethos is to prove you can do it. If you go for a week of meditation in the woods to find your inner self or spiritual roots that's absolutely fine, but tell somebody so that you don't have rescue teams and helicopters looking for you. Inconsiderate hacking is arrogant oafishness. Even when your super-hacking-powers have been used to save the day, management's skin and a drowning kitten, modesty is more becoming. Also more awesome for the mere mortal spectators.
Re: Fail
Inconsiderate hacking is arrogant oafishness.
So I guess as a student you never, ever tried to do something to a computer or network, just to see if you could?
Re: Fail
.. Or at least do the honourable thing (involving white van, quicklime, shovels if need be!)
Don't leave a bloody mess for the cleaning lady!
Re: Fail
"Don't leave a bloody mess for the cleaner!"
FTFY
Re: Fail
Weren't you ever 18?
And I speak as someone who would have been cleaning up student labs in the 1990s - no we never had a lab full of porn. Perhaps because most of the students around the labs in my neck of the woods were history/sociology students; the look of bemused horror as they came out of their first computational statistics workshop were hilarious.
Ever done something in your youth that leaves you still gnawing a knuckle or two decades on?
Yup...
In college, noticed that the lab computers had no security on them for remote login and devices. We (a group of us) wrote a small program to play audio files of farm animals to //dev/audio, cows, sheep that sort of thing. We waited until there was a lab and then set in in motion. Admin knew it was us as we had login's to the terminals. We did similar to the green screens with the Glade mushroom advert song.
I got called in once for editing all the MS-DOS error messages with childish swear words after using a hex editor to edit the strings in command.com. That one offended some elderly evening class students.
My friend managed to make a perfect green screen login page. He was remarking on how accurate to the real thing it was. The SysAdmin needed to quickly check something though and chose his terminal to login. His password didn't work - but he was suspicious so went off to the main cell. He came back in the room and told my friend he was banned from the college Internet for a few weeks for that stunt.
ashamed ?
"Indeed he should be (ashamed). Youth and beer do not excuse the pushing of pixelly pr0n onto the unsuspecting."
Actually, since it was in university, largely, everyone was 18+ years old, so while I'm not advocating pushing pron to anyone unsuspecting, it's not that bad. They've been exposed and doing the thing already :)
Researching
Back in the Noughties I had a genuine scientific research reason to do an online search for ‘Muscle Anatomy’. I clicked on one link and my screen filled with rapidly reproducing browser windows (remember them?) all showing pr0n. In an office shared with 3 female colleagues (all out in the lab fortunately). I hurriedly hit the kill switch and shut the computer down. Then opened it back up cautiously.
I never did find the info I was searching for. I had it from an ancient copy of Grey’s Anatomy (the book not the TV series) but wanted up to date figures.
Adult floppies...
Smut was more like magic-eye pictures in those days - you had to stare for a few minutes trying to work out what it was.....