[HN Gopher] WinPopup (2001)
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WinPopup (2001)
Author : susam
Score : 29 points
Date : 2022-11-03 08:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (susam.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (susam.net)
| vyrotek wrote:
| When I was in high school, we abused "net send" and managed to
| blast a "all your base are belong to us" message to every PC on
| campus.
|
| We suspected it even reached other schools in the district.
|
| Good times.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Everything is so stingy and uptight now. Stories like this make
| me feel like I missed the golden era.
|
| Yeah, there were genuinely malicious actors. But there was also
| just plain old fun.
|
| So many Windows 2000 machines in my school and I didn't know
| what power was at my hands...
| googlryas wrote:
| Similar story...I was in 10th grade, and we had a teacher who,
| in study hall, would make us all watch a projector of her
| monitor just reading awful powerpoint slides about whatever
| topic she was interested in. I wanted to do my homework in that
| period since I never did homework at home, but she wouldn't
| allow it. Other people wanted to quietly socialize but
| couldn't. Everyone hated it.
|
| So on one of the computers in the back of the room, I used
| windows task scheduler to do something akin to "net send
| room-6a-teacher COMPUTER MUST BE REBOOTED IMMEDIATELY" every 5
| minutes for the duration of the class. The teacher was not very
| tech savvy, she once claimed to have "deleted regedit, because
| it looked like a rubiks cube and I don't want games on my
| computer". She never ended up figuring out why her computer
| messed up during our class, but it let us have our study hall
| back as our own.
|
| In 12th grade I told my computer networking teacher that story,
| and he said basically he knew exactly what was happening, but
| not who did or why they did, so he didn't want to stick his
| nose in to a study hall, but "I should have figured it was
| you". I took it as a compliment of the highest order.
| throwanem wrote:
| In my younger or customer-service days, I once had an awkward
| conversation with my manager after a message I'd intended for
| one person ended up going to everyone in a very prominent
| credit card issuer with about ten thousand on staff at the
| time.
|
| The only reason I can imagine for why I wasn't fired was
| because they didn't really want anyone else getting ideas about
| what to do with the effectively unsecured Windows 2000 machines
| on their desks, and giving me a reason to keep shtum about it
| was considered preferable to not giving me one.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| We did this in college within our computer labs. Then someone
| broadcast it to the entire campus. IT blocked it within a few
| days, but it was fun in the months before that happened.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Oh god, this reminds me of a horrific meeting.
|
| As IT were the only ones using WinNT we'd set the UPS up to
| broadcast net send messages to all NT clients if it detected
| power loss. Unfortunately someone had upgraded the main meeting
| room's projector PC to NT without us making that connection. So
| 5 minutes into the "Of course the company's fine, ignore the
| rumours of our impending bankruptcy" meeting with all our major
| clients, the presentation was interrupted with a big message
| saying that all the servers were going down in five minutes.
| Not a good day.
| ale42 wrote:
| The funnier part was that it was pretty easy (by compiling some
| simple code) to abuse the protocol sending out net send packets
| with spoofed senders ;-)
| Minor49er wrote:
| I did this too, only my computer lab had the network names
| labeled on each monitor. So instead of blasting everyone, my
| friends and I would target other kids, then watch the
| confusion, which sometimes degraded into chaos
| muterad_murilax wrote:
| net send * "message" in a batch script loop was fun.
| emsixteen wrote:
| I did this, to three campuses without realising - My intention
| was just to send to my classroom.
|
| Oops.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| In 9th grade I discovered WinPopup by cleverly getting through
| the "Student Vista" lockdown crap and wandering all the
| applications in System32.
|
| I immediately used it to semi-accidentally send messages to every
| computer in the school board with my full name attached.
|
| That was my first suspension.
| xnx wrote:
| The next social network?
| Ambolia wrote:
| Would be nice to see how it looks like when the message is
| received. And when multiple messages from different computers are
| received. Anybody has an screenshot?
| curiousfab wrote:
| No screenshot, but when there were several messages you could
| go through them with the arrow buttons that are grayed out in
| the screenshot.
|
| Not very advanced but 'good enough'.
| azalemeth wrote:
| That looks like a far better predecessor of the much missed XP
| tool, netsend. There was something off charming about Windows 98.
| It was awful, but charmingly so. The icon of the Jack-in-the-box
| highlights that well.
| curiousfab wrote:
| Oh yeah - when we finally had laid RG-58 coax from downstairs up
| to the attic around 2000, my mom used Winpopup to tell us kids to
| stop playing Duke Nukem and come down for dinner.
|
| Good times!
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And the Windows XP issue where if you installed a fresh copy,
| unpatched copy connected to the net. You'd receive spam popup
| messages.
|
| Which is ironic as you needed to connect to the internet to get
| the patch.
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(page generated 2022-11-04 23:01 UTC)