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Comment by wepple | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but these same links have always been a great way to break out of poorly designed kiosk systems.

I recall noodling with a huge interactive display on the side of a bus stop that had an embedded map, and surely enough the TOS link launched a browser, and from there you could use the Save As dialog to get to anything to execute

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As a kid I loved doing this in every museum/library/other place that always had 'locked down' interactive Windows systems back in my youth.

One of my favorite ones was in a museum where I was with a friend, and there was a PC. We were bored and wanted to play some flash game, but we only had access to a mouse, and clicking links inside the locked fullscreen browser. With enough clicks we got to google and managed to copy/paste letter by letter the name of a game site in the search field and play some games.

And I'm just excited to be able to 'visit' a museum from the internet :-)

Although using the on-screen keyboard in accessibility settings would have been easier (if that existed back then), I like your creative young mind.

We couldn't access anything but the browser window in fullscreen, only using the mouse. No start menu, tray icons, keyboard shortcuts, etc.

I'm sure there's like 100 different ways to break these bad Windows kiosks so that you'd eventually end up being able to access the accessibility settings, but it wasn't directly accessible to us.

Also on Android-based kiosks, you can get into the OS through the on-screen keyboard if they're using it. Try long tapping the buttons around the spacebar, one of them would usually get you into system settings. From there you can as much as completely take over the device if you wish.

Novell Netware had a similar bug circa 1998 whereby pressing `F1` at the login screen of the terminal opened the help dialog, which opened links in IE ... from there the main Windows shell could be ran and bingo ... you're in.

I never saw IE or Windows running on Novell Netware. It was a server operating system. What you’re saying is akin to saying you can create a windows shell from inside linux.

The Netware backend server was it's own OS, IIRC. However on the client side, you had MS-DOS and Windows Netware clients to login to the Novell server and access the associated shared resources.

Right, but those clients weren’t “Novell netware”.

The windows client login and resource control was branded as such tho

I think what they mean is the Netware login dialogue, on Windows. My classmate hacked our high school's network, getting him thrown out of class. I'm pretty sure he used a different method, though. He got a job working for the school. This was in the mid 90s.

Colonial? (This definitely happened at my school, wondering how common this was.)

This was in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm not sure how it was done, but I imagine it involved the SAM file and Jack the Ripper or something along those lines.

This brought back many fond memories of using this hack to play Soldier of Fortune 2 on the school network.

This is how I get to web videos on my Peloton. Viewing the mandatory software licenses leads to web links and then you can visit anything in that Chrome browser window.

Risky share -- the statute of limitations is not up on that one!

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