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Comment by icameron | Hacker News Reader

As a teenager in the 90s I was a bit of a pyromaniac. The early internet allowed us to purchase long fuses, nitromethane from eBay, and “homemade C4” from Amazon. An FBI field agent had a knock and talk to the address we had ordered the fuses to. They don’t mess around! Not sure how they found out either.

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That unique 90s time period where any kid could print out bomb making recipes on the school printer from alt.anarchy or whatever, but columbine hadn't occurred yet so we didn't really get in trouble when a teacher found out.

In the early 1990s a friend of mine ran a dial-up BBS. It was completely unmoderated (aside from spam), and ended up become a rather active board for (mostly black hat) hackers to post and trade information. My friend wasn't involved in any hacking directly - he simply ran the BBS which also hosted a bunch of doors (games) like TW2002 that were also quite popular. One day, a mutual friend of ours (who was an aspiring black hat hacker) got picked up by the FBI for a variety of phone phreaking offenses. During questioning, they asked him a bunch of questions about the BBS. As soon as he got out on bail, he relayed this information to my friend who ran the BBS. Needless to say, the BBS was shut down and all of the disks/hard drives trashed within an hour.

Thankfully there were never any legal implications for my friend with the BBS, but you can be damn sure there were quite a few sleepless nights subsequently as he waited for a knock on the door!

Or the '80s, when you could just order the Anarchist Cookbook from a willing bookstore (some would refuse).

At the time I recall that there were definitely kids into this stuff. Not literal anarchy or violence, they just liked making bombs and setting them off out in the woods somewhere. Homemade fireworks really. They got into the chemistry of it, just nerdy stuff. No harm intended.

I was also around then, and even then it had a reputation of being trash, not really anarchist, and probably dangerously poorly put together.

I've heard the two gateways into becoming interested in chemistry are getting high and blowing shit up.

A friend and I want to make a small amount of nitroglycerin in chemistry class in HS. The teacher was all for it, but it got bumped all the way to the superintendent who shot it down.

Boo.

Anything fun in life is illegal, immoral, fattening, or dangerous.

In high school chemistry, I once superheated magnesium in a covered crucible and then blew on. That was fun.

All chemists are pyros, by definition and by requirement.

To be honest, the Anarchist Cookbook had some really dodgy recipes. It was arguably a collection of future Darwin Awards.

The tennisball bomb definitely didn't work as advertised.

Just saying * looks around innocently *

so you also made a tennis ball rocket?

The bookstore clerk told us that, and suggested that we purchase an army improvised munitions field manual. Lol

In the 90's, Tower Records sold The Anarchist Cookbook no questions asked. Its recipes didn't appear very well researched and some seemed outright lethal or impossible.

On the bulletin boards there used to be all these horrible phone phreaking plans that were clearly not functional, like the blotto box that would electrocute someone across the phone lines.

We also had all those weekly world news tabloids.. i think some of it just made for weird entertainment.

In the 90's almost all of us played with fireworks and m80's in the fields. We used to rig up long fuses with our estes rocket kits for remote detonation. Everyone turned out fine.

The pre No Child Left Behind / Zero Tolerance era of school, was a great time. I feel bad for kids today.

>Everyone turned out fine.

The mother of all survivorship biases. We have ample statistics demonstrating that no, plenty of people died.

Christ, can't believe I even have to point this out.

I think most of us, at least most males, can recall things we did as teens that could have killed us if things went wrong. Some people are also more reckless than others, and will find ways to get their thrills no matter what rules you try to lay down. Some people get unlucky, which is sad but always has been and always will be that way.

In the mid 80s my best friend brought in a select fire (aka full auto capable) mauser c96 with the case that doubles as a stock. His grandpa acquired in wwii, the teacher just asked if it was loaded.

I have a very old, very fuzzy memory of someone telling a story about sending a completely meaningless, “encrypted” (garbage) snail mail letter to somewhere in the Soviet Union.

Despite taking great precautions to obscure their identity, they still received a visit from government law enforcement.

These kinds of posts are always fascinating to me, as someone who had to move heaven and earth to get a graphics tablet and a PC that could run XP and Blender c. 2006. It's not like we were in particularly dire straits financially, and were on the more rational side of "overly sheltered" (having known people who couldn't attend school clubs or who had a parent hovering over their shoulder every time they got online), but the freedom and access some of y'all had is just... hard for me to fathom. Like, whose credit card were you using??

For some of the stuff in the early days we could mail cashiers checks with the order number, bypassing need for credit card. Sure it took longer, but you could still buy a lot of stuff that way.

Before eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, buying something then mailing the person a check was fairly common.

You could buy western union money orders for 45 cents at the minimart, and mail it to the seller with the item number. Sometimes even send cash.

> Not sure how they found out either.

I surely hope they can find out, and the harder it is to know how they found out, the better it is since fewer people will be able to evade it.

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