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Comment by jjbinx007 | Hacker News Reader

I have happy memories of going to play on the PCs in the local computer shop that were all running Windows 95. There really was quite a buzz around them. I remember loading up 2 low resolution pixelated .avi files and playing them at the same time.

Soon afterwards I was running Windows 95 at home and a friend of mine who was in the hacker scene joined an IRC channel and one of his acquaintances demonstrated a new method of crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP. I was connected to the internet directly using a modem (no home router with NAT to protect me) and the resulting BSOD was warmly received by all.

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Similar. I was really excited about Win95. My first computer that was my own came with Win 3.11, and a ‘free’ upgrade to Win95 after release. Win95 really was a radical change. I spent hours exploring Win95 and message boards (on MSN at the time).

> crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP

WinNuke. Any packet on TCP port 139 with URG (Out-of-band data) flag set crashed NetBIOS/SMB service.

Was that a Cult of the Dead Cow release, by any chance?

wow that's a name I've not heard of in a while. Didn't they release Back Orifice and other butt name related, ahem, "remote management" tools?

They just recently released http://veilid.com too

Semi-related, but I remember in the 98 days using "net send" to send a popup message to any computer on the local network. And my introduction to the windows API was a remote control application in VB. A great time where OS features outpaced OS security :)

I wouldn't be a programmer today if it wasn't for the relative openness and accessibility of Windows 98. It let me into the system files without flinching, and I learnt so much just from changing things just to see what happened.

Modern security is necessary for everything being always connected, but it does bolt the doors on curiosity.

Linux and BSDs still offer a lot. Everything is still just files. Hardware isn’t directly accessible anymore, but a lot can still be learned without writing to mapped hardware addresses.

If my memory doesn't deceive me, i remember the "net send"-command to anyone in the era of Windows 2000. I think Win 98 couldn't do that yet.

Ah yes you're right! According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_(command) it was also in NT, but 2K must be where I'm remembering it from. It was only 20 years ago, not sure why it would be foggy ;)

>Soon afterwards I was running Windows 95 at home and a friend of mine who was in the hacker scene joined an IRC channel and one of his acquaintances demonstrated a new method of crashing Win 95 remotely by sending an Out-Of-Bounds packet to my IP.

Ping of death <https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/blogs/history-of-windo...>

Amusingly, the ping of death was somewhat a result of all the other UNIX ping tools that silently truncated the ICMP packet to the “standard” size, even when told to use a larger size. It was Windows ping that actually honored the packet size option, which allowed the larger ping packets to be sent. Im pretty sure that many UNIX systems were also affected by it, as they had never been exposed to larger ping packet either. I don’t know if there are good sources explaining this, but I remember it when it happened.

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