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Comment by lacunary | Hacker News Reader

can't ride a netsplit to takeover and +m a huge channel IRL

This made me feel so nostalgic. I haven’t heard the term "netsplit" in probably 25 years. It’s amazing how things that once seemed so important get relegated not just to history, but sometimes to total oblivion.

Well, almost. Apparently, it has its own wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit

I still see the occasional netsplit.

But with modern nickname and channel services (Nickserv and Chanserv, mostly), and the very small IRC userbase, they certainly aren't as impactful as they once were.

Or CTCP PING users with cheap modems with +++ATH0

You could also send a specific string to a channel, which caused mIRC to log it to a file. Then a hyper-sensitive anti-virus would see it and quarantine mirc.exe :D

Probably EICAR. AV engines are only supposed to fire on EICAR when the file contains only magic string, but many are/were trigger happy and will alert if it appears anywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

Also seemed to work over ICMP ping, with "+++ATH0M0DT112", they did not return to the channel.

I think it was some buggy Rockwell modem chips that did not require the delay between +++ and switching to command mode, but it has been some decades.

It did indeed, though people used to hide their IP addresses through various means, and so CTCP was usually a sure fire winner.

Most cheap modems seemed to ignore the required 1 second (IIRC) delay. Well-heeled users who could afford U.S. Robotics et al were safe, winmodem users were not.

damn right

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