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Comment by bsimpson | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid, banks and similar institutions would have computer terminals in the lobby, loaded up with the company website in a special browser that would only let you view that site. This was also the age of Best Viewed In badges.

Whenever my parents would take me with them to run errands, I would find one of these computers and click around until I got a Best Viewed In badge. (It was often on the Help page.) That would bypass the restrictions of the single-site browser and take you to e.g. netscape.com, where you could find a link to a search engine and browse wherever you wanted.

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Reminds me of when the PCs on display at Sears, CompUSA, etc. would have their demo software running which didn't let you do the one thing you should do when buying a PC.. actually use it. So I used to CTRL+ALT+DEL and kill the demo software with the task manager. For the more stubborn demo software that would instantly relaunch, I'd then open msconfig, uncheck the demo software from running on startup, and reboot.

I remember the amazement and joy of other people nearby watching, who would then ask me to do it on their PC so they too could click around and play Minesweeper or Pinball :-)

Sounds so amateur now, but it's hard to remember that CTRL+ALT+DEL in the mid-90's was -- dare I say it? -- sort of a power tool that only more experienced users knew about.

I would actually say that Ctrl+Alt+Del was better known in mid-90s simply because so many people were still on DOS, and that was the proper and documented way to reboot it. Which was not uncommon to do especially since if a DOS app locked up, your entire OS was unusable.

I should probably clarify that I meant "known" by average consumers you'd see in a retail shopping mall, most of which at that point in their life have never owned or possibly even used a PC.

This reminds me of trying to get around the web filter on the computers in high school. Going to MS Word, selecting open from URL, then entering a search engine or whatever site you wanted, would open the browser and circumvent the web filters.

This is a thing on the PS5. You cant just browse the web like the PS4. But you can open links in messages. So put https://google.com in a message and open it

Why bother, you can use a pihole/etc and redirect the users guide to wherever you want, like a webkit exploit and hen enabler. (Which is what they've been doing since the ps3)

This is used for homebrew. There is (of course) a WebKit exploit on some firmwares and there is a way to get arbitrary page load by going into the help section then bouncing around in several Google help pages until you get to a search box, search for the exploit page and click it.

wow, mind blown at this ps5 "detail" yuk

My school (where I work) seems to be blocking certain SSL certificates or blocking at the DNS level but changing the DNS server to 1.1.1.1 is futile. Using Mullvad’s free DoH or DoT is futile as well. The website is unable to load

The VPN is one of the few reasons why I pay $5 for proton unlimited and I could make do without it.

My only alternative is to set up my own wireguard exit node at home with a raspberry

Your school is likely using a NGFW like a Palo Alto. These provide very granular application based filtering of traffic.

Back in my day, I'd go to the library and telnet into various edu hosts. Those servers often showed a motd piped into more before dropping you into whatever software (eg lynx). However, they didn't use "restricted mode", which meant I could open a shell by typing "!sh". Good times.

This is similar to how I used the internet in the early 90s as well, but instead of the library I was lucky enough to have an older cousin who got me the University’s dialup number to some VAX system gateway that was supposed to do something or other but probably not let me telnet anywhere without signing in.

I had to hunt for servers that had gopher/lynx on them which didn’t have any login. I vaguely remember having to do something similar to this post to navigate somewhere that would allow me to bring up search or enter a URL.

This was all done on a C64 and a 1200 baud modem, along with this incredible software I was able to find on local BBSes called NovaTerm - an 80 column terminal on a Commodore 64 was black magic at the time. That disk was my prized possession and I almost wore it out.

I remember in university, our computers in the rec center had restrictions like this. Our email could be opened via web, I would email myself a link to search engine, open email, right click and open in the same frame. At that point you could go anywhere you could find a search result for. Good times.

> I would find one of these computers and click around until I got a Best Viewed In badge. (It was often on the Help page.) That would bypass the restrictions of the single-site browser and take you to e.g. netscape.com, where you could find a link to a search engine and browse wherever you wanted.

I’m not familiar with a “Best Viewed In” badge and I am intrigued as to how this bypass worked (based on my own 2000s high school experiences of working around restrictions). Would appreciate if any passersby could elaborate.

It linked to the browser’s website. The only actual restriction on these computers was usually that you couldn’t access the address bar to type in arbitrary URLs.

I don't remember the specific restrictions, but I remember that you could only click links that were on the allowed site.

So if you tried to go to example.com, you would be redirected to bank.com. But if a link on bank.com got you to example.com, you could visit it that way.

Obviously address bars are one of the restricted things. I feel like there might have been others, but I don't recall the specifics.

These sites just didn’t link to any other site that had anything cool. And you couldn’t type in your own link obviously.

Except when they slapped on that badge, it linked to netscape.com which had a search engine.

If I remember correctly, these were href images used to recommend a specific browser for the best experience.

Indeed. They were small images (https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/iv8hgg/the_netsc...) at the bottom of webpages linking you to netscape.com/microsoft.com so you could download the browser “recommended” (or targeted) by the page creator. These icons were usually a standard size (88x31 px?).

Wikipedia explains the context in whoch these were born a bit more: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars

I remember when the Windows NT login screen had this feature. Also found through help.

As a current student we're still doing this stuff to bypass the network filter

What's the chance the computer was also on the bank's internal LAN?

Shhh hehe. This still works somewheres

Any computer back in the day. 10 print "hello world" 20 goto 10

Owned ;)

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