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Comment by technothrasher | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why, but this reminded me of going to school in the early 90's, we'd go through the university's voicemail system inputting random phone numbers and trying the default password, '0000', which meant the voicemail on that number had never been set up. When we found one, we'd record a song as the greeting. We then posted notes by the various public phones on campus for our 'dial a song' directory so anybody could enjoy a song, like a big public jukebox.

The entire thing worked well for a semester, until some killjoy updated the phone system default to disable voicemail for unused numbers and blew away all our songs.

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Oh my God, I remember doing this to my friends. The default voicemail password always worked so I reset their voice messages to strange sounds or me doing voices.

It’s amazing how insecure everything was. I remember as a kid walking around with a cordless phone realizing you can pick up other peoples’ conversations.

There was something so charming about technology back in the day. I don't think it's purely nostalgia. I think part of it was that our lives didn’t revolve around it so poking around never really hurt.

I feel the same way thinking about computer security back in the early 00's. Nothing was ever really locked down, sometimes you could get administrator access by pressing "Cancel" on the login dialog three times, network drives were just open to everyone and you could install new software by just bringing it to school on a floppy and installing it on the lab computer. I think that environment was what really fostered my love of tinkering with systems the same way phone phreakers did a few decades earlier.

Now everything is locked up like a vault and it's all group policy this and mobile device management that. Nothing can be unlocked and nobody has permissions because if it isn't your device ends up encrypted with a ransom note telling you to send cryptocurrency to a state sponsored hacking group in Russia.

I do feel like younger people are really missing out on the "hackability" that everything had before we collectively realized how computer security worked.

I had fun spoofing friends' email addresses (only for harmless jokes). Amazing to think now that there was a period when anyone could convincingly and effortlessly send an email as anyone else, and it wasn't widely abused.

Is regedit still a thing in Windows?

We had good fun with it in school computer labs back in our day.

Yes, but the Group Policy editor has superceded it in many ways.

In the late 90s at my first job I would invite all my housemates to my office after hours for LAN parties using my co-workers computers. There were no logins and it didn’t even bother my co-workers unless a newly installed game took up too much drive space.

I feel we viewed computers more like expensive toys that should be shared rather than than the highly personal items they are today.

I think at that point we were still thinking of computers as expensive tools to be shared; it hadn't been that long since a computer took up a whole room and would be shared by all users in several businesses. We also weren't as concerned about security because most of the really important business stuff was locked away on the mainframe.

> It’s amazing how insecure everything was.

Something I really miss from that era that I'm confident we'll never get back (for good reasons) is the open and transparent nature of everything. Everything felt hackable and based on trust. Where as today we can't trust anyone.

It's tempting to say peoeple were nice and didn't abuse the system, but I think more likely some people just didn't know the amount of money they could make from the abuse.

Nah, it was actually a nightmare. The small number of people who understood this and exploited it lived like Gods. It gave malevolent people far too much power.

And while a smaller percentage than today were in it for the money, a lot still were. Plus the ones not in it for the money were sometimes worse, since they were motivated solely by ego, power, and sociopathy.

> The default voicemail password always worked

That kept newspaper editors in scoops for years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

I really hate this. Who were the songs hurting? Nobody, someone just decided to make the world a little bit worse because it wasn't "proper".

Hurting anyone, no, but the whole jukebox probably cost the provider at least a penny all told, and that's a good enough reason for someone to close the oversight.

EDIT: thinking about it again, there is such a thing as surplus capacity. Like how before we all transitioned to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud services you would just have an idling CPU you could point at SETI and folding@home.

The jukebox probably didn't strain the host enough that they had to expend any actual expense, so I changed my mind, somebody might have thought they were shutting down some freeloaders but they weren't costing any money really.

OTOH there are cases where viral phone forwarding blew past the system's capacity and did cause downtime, see "You and the little mermaid can both go fuck yourselves, I can't find The Books, they must be in La Jolla" [0] (Act One)

[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/203/transcript

[0.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROLM

I think idle CPUs still exist, people are just afraid to share them now. For example, for lowest latency you want your application servers close to your end users. Your end users probably all go to bed at about the same time and wake up at the same time. So your server is just sitting there taking up space, maybe saving a little power, overnight. But, nobody is will to take the risk to let someone else use their computer for a batch job of some sort, so the best you get is slightly less heat output and slightly less power consumption instead. For those that don't really care, the cloud providers have shared core instances, so some batch job is probably using your cycles late at night.

I think the thing that killed SETI@home was crypto mining. Why help others when you can collect stuff for yourself? Plus, everyone woke up to the electricity arbitrage going on; when every employee started using their work computer to mine crypto, and the electricity bills got high, someone started looking for answers. The edict came down from on high: don't steal our electricity for yourself or for human good. Rest in peace, SETI@home and folding@home. (I was always personally a fan of Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when those things were cool. I guess I didn't know much about protein folding or searching for extraterrestrial life, but I did understand factoring numbers.)

I agree that crypto killed donating cpu cycles, it was only surplus insomuchas it couldn't be converted to coins

To be fair, while our jukebox couldn't really cause an issue, that wasn't where we stopped. We also figured out a test code that opened a long distance line on any phone. Since we had to pay for long distance calls back then, that was likely much more damaging to the school when we spread that around.

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