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.