Subj : Beautiful hacks
To   : All
From : Bob Worm
Date : Sat Oct 21 2023 14:20:14

While I was out walking the dog during the week I suddenly had a flashback to a trick we occasionally played back in the dial up / IRC years.

Some bright spark noticed that if you sent a CTCP ping to a user through IRC containing "+++ ATH", their client would echo that back and, more often than not, it would hang up their modem.

In theory, after the "+++" puts the modem into command mode, any further data arriving within 1s is meant to bump it back out of command mode again - presumably to stop exactly this type of jape. It turns out a *lot* of modems didn't implement that, especially the cheap internal soft modems we all had in our Windows 98 machines :)

I love the 10/10 elegance of this one, plus the warm nostalgia hit thinking about the "click". That and the fact that the self-styled Internet guru we mostly used it against never figured it out.

Anyone else got any beautiful hacks / bodges that fill them with delight?

BobW
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