I used to help run the website for Rogue Wave Software, who had the domain name "roguewave.com", and also bought the domain name "rwav.com" after the company went public as RWAV.

"rwav.com" had previously been owned by a small ISP, and their most famous hosted site was for "Vicky the Bodybuilder". We knew this because we'd see hits for her page all the time.

I emailed top few sites that were linking to the old Vicky address, letting them know the site had moved, and nobody changed their addresses.

So then I got Vicky's real email, and used the above telnet email spoof to send an email "from" Vicky to each of the linking sites, gushing about how happy I (Vicky) was that they linked to her, and just to let them know I (Vicky) would be really happy if they'd update their links.

It worked.

Reminds me of the time I was working at the Air Force Academy hospital in the basement warehouse in the mid 2000s. There were a few computers, and I wanted to mess with one of my coworkers (a senior airman) who was sitting at the desk in front of me.

There's a Windows command "net send" where you can make a pop up dialogue appear on a user's computer with a custom message. The problem was, I didn't know his exact username, so I did "net send * 'What's up dog??'". The dialogue popped up on his computer, he looked confused, and I was giddy. So I went further and sent a few more, including "You suck at computers" and "Your computer has been infected with a virus, sucka". It wasn't until a few minutes later when some visibly distressed IT personnel rushed into the warehouse and started interrogating people and checking the computers one by one that I realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. Apparently the dialogues were popping up on every single computer in the entire hospital, including the commander's (a full colonel).

I'm sure there would have been more disciplinary action had I not been a high school civilian intern. Everyone started calling me "Neo" from then on, but in a derogatory way.

Ah, “net send”. I remember it fondly. For a brief period almost 20 years ago I worked for a medium sized desktop software company. They had draconian restrictions on what we could do on the work computers. The only approved form of electronic communication was email, nothing instant. Many folks hated email, so the only real way to get an answer from a colleague was to get up and walk over. Being that I hated being interrupted by others walking up, I tried to be responsive to emails, but folks in the org were so used to others not looking, they just always defaulted to walking up. I then realized that while everything was very locked down, for some reason net send wasn’t. First in a small group of folks I told, but soon most of the office knew and was using it, tech folks and otherwise. Then someone had to go and see what else the net command could do. Said malicious person started rebooting other people’s machines. Needless to say, this got IT security involved (IT was in the Corp office, so hadn’t learned about our usage till then somehow). This lead to an investigation and ultimately it came to be known I started the usage. IT tried to blame the malicious loss of work due to the reboots on me, but thankfully my boss argued correctly I had nothing to do with that, they needed to find the real perp. IT’s solution was to put in a very crappy IM system (can’t remember what it was), lock down net command, and not bother finding the malicious person. Their “ultimate spite” though was to block me from using the new IM system (actually it sucked so bad it wasn’t really a loss) as “I was shown to misuse resources”. Needless to say, I didn’t stay much longer and jumped ship for a better job.

I did the same thing in highschool, but on a loop... On a timer... Boy did I get in trouble.

I did exactly the same with the loop and net send when I was 13-14 years old. The school was connected to the city's network somehow so the IT department was not very happy. They figured out it was me but were nice enough to just say "if you ever want to test something like that again, just check with us first" and I got an internship with them the following year. I'm very grateful for their gentle and pedagogical approach.

I liked to use the samba smbclient tool to pipe output of the fortune program to the network...offensive ones only of course...at random times to random netbios stations

Never really got in trouble for it. It was a simpler time. I can only imagine what would happen these days!

I was about 17 years old and IRC was very hot at the time in school. We had a, for the time, very fast 512Kbps internet connection, and I had gotten used to be able to "ping people out from IRC", no idea why I would do that, but hey I was 17. I was experimenting with ever bigger packets, until I hit something very close to 2^16 but not just.

Until the friendly admin just suddenly stood behind me, tapped my shoulder and said: "If you step away from the computer, let me look at what you did here, there will be no repercussions for doing shit you were not supposed to on a school computer".

Turns out I managed to send a "ping of death" and the network gear in our own school had just died. Internet was so unreliable back then that I just assumed things were a bit slow....

I like this approach. Kids are going to test their limits, try things out of a natural curiosity of "what if..." without always understanding the consequences. The whole "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Dealing with it as a teachable moment seems the best way to go for minor infractions lime this.

I did the equivalent on a Vax in 1988.

The sysop came out and had a chat with me, then gave me operator access to a testbed so I could learn, then made me an unofficial (I was quite young) lab assistant.

It was a different world back then.

I use telnet ip.add.re.ss 25 pretty much daily as you descibe (but EHLO these days). Sometimes you come across systems that don't have "swaks" or "exim -bhc" to hand.

A couple of days ago I used it to quickly prove to myself that SPF really is bloody useless against spam. Set "MAIL FROM:" to nothing which implies that the mail server itself is transmitting and is perfectly valid: that is how bounce messages are sent. What will happen is that the receiving SMTP daemon will not have an email address to test for SPF (it will only test envelope from which is what comes after the MAIL FROM: command) With no email address to test it tests the mail server itself and the spammer has set up SPF for their own email server's domain and hence pass the test. They will set the FROM: header to whatever they like in the DATA phase and that is what your MUA (Outlook probably sigh) will display. So the end result is your end user gets an email that appears to come from someone they know and it will pass SPF tests. DKIM and DMARC/ARC will help mitigate (DMARC adds a bit of excitement to mailing lists) as will a proper spam scanner like rspamd or spam assassin or some decent ACLs in Exim int al but SPF on its own is absolutely rubbish.

> a very uncomfortable place

Like the back of a volkswagen?

> In an interview with the student newspaper, the student decried, "I didn't think it would work!"

This reminds me of an interview with RMS[1]

Our way of dealing with kids coming in over Arpanet was to socialize them. We all participated in that. For example, there was a command you could type to tell the system to shut down in five minutes. The kids sometimes did that, and when they did we just cancelled the shutdown. They were amazed. They would read about this command and think, surely it’s not going to work, and would type it—and get an immediate notification: ‘The system is shutting down in five minutes because of . . . ’

We grow up with a lot of rules, and many people learn that the rules have no real force this way. You can literally do anything. The real question can become, would anyone want to be friends with someone who would do anything? We are social animals, so this idea should be important.

Looking around the Internet, it seems like most people never "get it" though...

[1]: https://newleftreview.org/II/113/richard-stallman-talking-to...

> ...carnal knowledge of a very uncomfortable place at a particular time & location.

What? Like the back of a Volkswagen? (Obligatory Mallrats reference)

I remember a story from my tech support days: someone forged an email to [email protected] from [email protected], both of which had auto-responders.