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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Back in 2000 Coca-Cola had an auction site. I put a HTML comment tag in my username and the words "AUCTION ENDED". The result of which was that whenever I bid on anything it would erase the bid submit button after my name -- therefore no-one else could bid on anything.

https://web.archive.org/web/20010223090106/http://cokeauctio...

This worked for a short time. Then my account disappeared with all my (very hard earned) credits in it. Then I received a letter from the MD of Coke UK telling me I was a very naughty boy.

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Similarly, in 2003, they had some code-under-caps promotion. I wrote a script to submit thousands of random codes to the website, and subsequently someone from Coca-Cola NZ called my home. They calmed down when my dad said I wasn't home, but at school.

Mind you, in 2002 no called, and I got a free shirt and a folding chair.

> I wrote a script to submit thousands of random codes to the website, and subsequently someone from Coca-Cola NZ called my home.

I managed to get a phone call and a personal visit from a script.

Much less interesting than it sounds: I was downloading satellite data from NASA, the increased bandwidth use worried the sysadmin in my research lab, and we each had landline phones on our desks because this was the mid-noughties.

I got my TI-99/4 confiscated by law enforcement when, after watching War Games, I wrote a script to "war dial" connection strings on the local Tymnet POP. Turns out one of the systems I connected to was the backend clearing system for Credit Suisse. They were neither happy nor had a sense of humor. After logs showed I didn't try to steal money or do anything damaging I got my computer back in a couple of weeks.

A couple of takeaways:

a. Credit Suisse did not have a username / password to log in. They were using "security by obscurity" in 1980.

b. The local FBI guys in Dallas didn't know you could purchase a modem for a couple hundred bux and hook it up to a $1000 personal computer. They seemed truly surprised to discover I wasn't part of a well-funded white collar crime syndicate and just a kid in jr. high school whose parents eventually gave in when I begged for a modem for a couple months.

c. You can apparently do damage to your reputation at 300 baud.

> c. You can apparently do damage to your reputation at 300 baud.

lol. that's a great line.

"300 baud criminal" is the name of my next band.

In the 1980's, the New York State Police visited the local police department in the town I lived because of some dialup mischief I caused. The local police chief toldd them he'd handle it.

The lesson I learned was to do a better job of covering my tracks. But I stayed away from that mainframe after that.

The things many of us did to learn about computers back then would get someone prison time today.

In the early 90's I worked for Louisiana State University's AG Center purchasing department and had a mainframe TSO account. I figured out how to use Gopher to various other research universities and download weather satellite photos and other various weather data (sometihng I was interested in at the time). I was then able to subsequently use Zmodem downloads over a 3270 dial up session to do this from home. I thought being able to get this info was pure magic at the time, since it was primarly only available to researchers.

My supervisor got the next month's TSO departmental chargeback bill for my user account from the University's IT group, and it was tens of thousands of dollars of TSO time :). They told me "don't do that anymore"

> Then I received a letter from the MD of Coke UK telling me I was a very naughty boy.

Truly better than any prize. I got a similar letter from my school's headteacher after some extracurricular IT shenanigans. I'm still proud of that one.

Ha! Within weeks of entering primary school at 11 I had persuaded the son of the IT teacher to give me his Dad's admin password for the school network. I caused untold chaos and was banned from touching the computers for the rest of my school history.

Somewhat related, in '99 my school gave everyone shell accounts, so they could check their email through pine. But the shell accounts were pretty functional with access to command line tools, such a perl.

It took me a lot of restraint not to harvest everyone's usernames (which was just the name of the home directory easily grokked) and email everyone at username@highered.edu (since sendmail was also available) something silly during winter break- like the fact that flooding had happened in the dorm rooms, and that everyone would have to move out before Spring semester due to needed maintenance and everyone will receive $500 in compensation because everyone's stuff in their dorm was destroyed.

Surely I would have been expelled, but what a story to tell my next employer.

Anyways, looking for a QA job if anyone's hiring. I would like to break your stuff.

Bidding on a “cokeauction” is a very different thing in 2023.

What is a cokeauction in 2023?

I assume it would be something folks would do on the dark web.

A white house activity

Naughty but very informative to their devsec team . I think that should have been a given you a reward for finding that issue.

Around this era, you could make posts on message boards where your subject was all spaces, and make an unclickable post.

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