Hacker News Reader

Comment by reid | Hacker News Reader

My high school in 2003 used IBM PCs with Windows NT. I discovered the Messenger service, enabled by default, remained enabled and was not turned off by group policy.

Start > Run, type "cmd", then:

    net send B131 "Hi there"

This would pop up "Hi there" on the B131 computer. The hostname of each computer (B131, for example) was taped to the top of each monitor, so I had a great time annoying my classmates in computer lab. One day students around me noticed me doing this and I naively showed them how to do it. I helpfully suggested to never type * as the hostname or the message would send to all computers.

After a school wide DDoS from several students around me sending messages over and over like:

    net send * "this school is the worst"

...and a lot more unmentionable messages, I was soon escorted out for a three day suspension for "hacking the school network." Good times. :)

View on HN

heh I remember doing a little bat file that was something like

  @echo off
  net use e: \\Network\Share

to get to the network shares which I could see in windows 2000's network display but would just tell you 'access denied' if you tried to simply click on them. Just giving them a drive mount like that worked fucking swimmingly. It gave us access to pretty much everything, including this program called 'photodex' where the username and password was the first initial of our principal's first name and his last name and the password was 'teacher'. Some other kid figured this out at some point before us, and we found a folder containing bunch of shit with super obvious file names like TEENPORN.JPG.EXE and the kid we didn't really like in our IT class who turned out to be a registered sex offender as an adult (he told me this at a wedding after complaining that they took his guns away, and all i could do was remember this incident and laugh) actually went and clicked one of these because he was a bit thick in general, and ended up getting in shit for this. I don't remember if they managed to lock things down properly after that but I think I remember recalling that this ruined the fun.

Same era, same net send! But at the International School of Geneva. Good to know that word got around. I also knew how to change the process name, so that librarians listing everyone's frontmost process with MasterEye wouldn't realise that students were playing games. Or type =rand(200,99) into a Word document (some idiot classmate then decided to press print). I was still just a nerd though.

When I had a 1st gen iPod, I was teased for it. But then the iPod became popular, and I knew how to swap hard drives and screens around to do repair. That's when "I suddenly went from unpopular nerd, to guy you want to know."

I went off to study Electronic Systems Engineering, exchange programme to California, Working Holiday around the world, 4 years in Taiwan, and am now working as an embedded software developer in New Zealand. But for me, it all goes back to iPodLinux as a teenager. I'm grateful for early-2000s Apple, yet also disappointed at how difficult phones are to repair these days, and how that will prevent the next generation from tinkering the way I did.

Exactly the same here! What a memory. In my case, my fellow students started sending broadcast messages which included a lot more profanity. They reached the computer of the school principal, which immediately came to our lab asking for explanations. Lucky for me, the teacher was a great guy who just knew I was the one that started all that mess, but he didn't say a word.

I also remember writing .bat fork bombs during the pauses. My classmate would pick a victim and while they were away I would completely freeze their PC. Yes, silly. And don't get me started on the remote shutdown messages, again enabled by default.

Fun times :)

That DoS is how I got our whole class downgraded from Windows to DOS as a punishment: all our school educational software was written for DOS anyway. I DDoS-ed one of the classmates, and he couldn't understand who was the culprit; in the end, he physically attacked another one of our classmates, thinking it was him.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com