I enjoyed the (brief?) times when the client would do string interpolation on the URL and tell you the screen name of the person viewing it.

You had to put a link in your profile that contained "%n", and the client would replace %n with the screen name of the person clicking the link. They never took that away as long as I was using AIM, but there was no way to see anyone simply viewing your profile without clicking a link as far as I can remember.

Ah that's right. I remember when it was still not widely known you could catch some people, but I think people caught on eventually.

Could you have added an <img src="http://tracking.example.com/pixel.gif?name=%n"> to the profile, tracking them via the weblogs, or having a era-appropriate CGI script sitting there that kept track of them?

I'm pretty sure you couldn't embed images in your profile.

I wasn't an AOL user so it took me a few reads. What this must mean is something like:

    [Joe]  what's up <a href="//example.net/?username=
    [Jane] nm, wbu
    [Joe]  ">join my chess game?</a>

Which could show on Jane's screen as

    [Joe] what's up
    [Joe] join my chess game? (<-link)

The message of Jane would have looked like it got swallowed because it was inside the HTML tag, but so long as they don't know what's up and ignore it, the link would go to something like https://example.net/?username=%0A%5BJane%5D%20nm%2C%20wbu%0A...

Less clever than that. jaywalk's comment got it. You could put a link in your away message/status/profile and see which people clicked it and/or were "stalking" you.

This used to work on Facebook... and still does apparently!

At least if you are this person: http://facebook.com/profile.php?=73322363

What mechanism tied an inbound http request to the moo?

I was using a log watcher that could run a command on a regex match, but I remember having an elaborate .htaccess that would shell out all kinds of things... many ways to tie them together, all very hacky.

thank you for this insight.

it might not even be that hacky to be honest. in some ways modern log aggregation isn’t that different, just insulated by more steps and safe guards. less moos though.

I'm trying to imagine what was popular back then. A Perl CGI script?

Perhaps showing my age, but that is still how I would do it. It's dead simple.

Even simpler is tailing the access log into a script that makes sound upon matching the correct path.

Years ago I had /var/www/lights_on.sh that turned lights on in my room. Only hardened against RCE by Wi-Fi password, but was possible. It broke later. The real problem was that browsers sometimes prefetched it.

Similar story: In college much more recently (2019), I had a linux server running at my boyfriend's apartment since he was off campus and we were blocked from doing anything like that on the school's network. Sometimes, I would say hi to him or wish him goodnight by playing a little tune on the PC speaker hooked up to that computer. He'd always text me back with a smiley face or something like that. Feels like that kind of interaction is really rare on the web these days, but we had fun with it for a little while.

Wow cool but that’s bizarro world to me. In my days college was where everything awesome was happening because it had fast and basically unrestricted internet. A lot of the Napster and other P2P stuff that followed was being seeded from someone’s dorm. The best game servers, etc. On IRC in the early 00s, I did a lot of trading of video (live music footage) and one kid in a dorm somewhere could host an enormous amount of content by most home internet standards. Once I got off dialup download speeds, I could easily download more than I could afford to store. The cheapest thing for me to do was buy a massive stack of CDRs and start burning. If I remember correctly, the largest HDD at the time was about 40GB.

Our school's IT department used to go around with wireless scanners to make sure nobody was running networks without the school's permission. I knew people who got busted for stuff like that, but my roommates and I eventually hacked a way around this by naming our network "Dave's iPhone Hotspot" and never had any issues. At that point, the webserver moved from my boyfriend's place back to my own until we moved off campus the following year.

That's exactly why schools started filtering data.

The school I was in had to do a complete wipe of 5 TB of random shares (back then that was a lot of data)

and they expelled a bunch of students for pirating and hosting extreme content

After that the network filtering was standard policy.

In my college days the filtering started because half of the IT students were playing World of Warcraft from the school network. Which obviously triggered a cat and mouse game of introducing new blocking measures and trying to get around it. When we were not trying to get WoW to work we were busy showing off our Compiz rotating desktop cubes. Those where the days.

In those days, the profs were the ones playing the video games.

They were "testing the newly pulled fibre optics" by trying to saturate it with Wow, Diablo, Counterstrike, Doom, Quake, etc.

They would book the computer labs of 60+ computers and tell everyone to boot up a copy of (ahem pirated) Half Life and get everyone one on games and then run a traceroute/ping/packet trace, etc to measure what was happening.

Those were the days...

Games generally use very little bandwidth so that was not a clever test imo... :)

Games tend to need low latency though, so it's not a dumb test.

DR-DOS / Novell DOS actually shipped with a basic multiplayer space sim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWars) in the box, with the official explanation for its existence being "to test network topology and configuration".

Similar memories and tales here :) I had a 100Mbit unfiltered connection in my dorm room in 2001 (!). Pretty wild for the time. I guess it took until about 2018 before I finally surpassed that speed at home. Nuts really.

Lots of pirating but also, thanks to it having a public static IP, a fabulous way for me to learn all about running and configuring my own web server, irc server, mail server, dns server, ftpd etc. etc. It was my gateway into experimenting with linux, discovering luminaries like DJB & RS, learning about RFCs, appreciating the open source/free software movement and probably mainly responsible for why I fell in love with a sysadmin/ops/infra trajectory that still serves me well to this day.

Yeah I started and sold a web hosting company around that time based on the skills I picked up with all those things. I didn’t host it from my dorm but just commodity servers with a shared hosting app installed. If I remember correctly I had about 5000 users and sold because I didn’t want to hire help when it started to encroach a bit too far into my leisure time.

A few of my customers were running legit and decent sized businesses and they had no idea it was being hosted by a college kid who actually wasn’t even monitoring things all that much. When I encountered a problem I couldn’t figure out from searching the internet, I’d usually just write some script and cron job to restart the service periodically. It also served as my everything (nameservers, support, e-mail, etc) so I remember one time there was a fire in my data center and it went down for about 36 hours. I had no way to communicate with my customers and the site was unavailable. Luckily I think only about 10 customers even noticed.

I remember seeing lots of jokes on the Internet about guys going to college "for the bandwidth"

In early 2000s we used to send each other messages using Query Strings or X-Headers....

or MSN Messenger or ICQ

Then again that kind interaction was rare in its hey day.

In 2001 I had an account set up for my girlfriend, now wife, so that she could telnet (openssh wasn't really widespread then!) to my desktop and it would play a sound and blink a light as part of the login procedure.

The light was controlled by an X10 "firecracker" module. Neat stuff, for the time.

Anyway, she would do that to get my attention if I wasn't by the PC and she wanted to chat via ICQ.

I still use one of those firecracker modules to toggle a set of Christmas-type lights from the command line. I've gotten a ton of fun out of that little module in the 20ish years I've owned it.

Did you get it as part of a promotional deal for about $5 in the late 90s?

Yep! Money well spent.

Nice. If I remember correctly it was their "Powerhouse" deal and you just paid for shipping.

I still have the modules around here somewhere!

No native serial ports, though, and the restriction of things needing to be on the same circuit kind of puts a damper on things. In my college dorms everything in my room was on the same circuit.

Yeah-- that was the one. I've found additional modules here and there in thrift stores and garage sales. The stuff was always just flaky enough that I never wanted to trust it with anything serious. Turning on lamps and strings of xmas lights was fine because the occasional "freak out" that the modules inevitably would fall victim to, requiring a power-cycle to overcome, never caused any major inconvenience. Their hard-wired more "serious" brethren, though, scared the heck out of me. I can't imagine they were at all reliable over the long haul.

re: the serial ports - If I remember correctly the signaling to the module was done on handshake pings (because serial data could "pass thru" the module). They'd probably be pretty easy to bit-bang from any 5V logic source.

Have a similar story around the same time, probably ~2002. Cell phones weren't that popular yet either.

As a high school student I helped my school do some sys admin stuff, and one day I was stuck in a server(?) room while the guy who had keys etc. was away in another room and floor. So I ssh-ed into the machine he was likely working on and ejected the CD ROM back and forth until I caught his attention :D

Free cup-holder!

In the early 2000s I had a program on my girlfriend's, now ex-wife's, family computer that would kill the AOL process when sent a specific string over a TCP port so that I could call her when her sister was using the computer. That combined with a DynDNS client let me call anytime.

Her sister caught on but couldn't prove it.

I miss these days of the internet.

Make Arpanet Great Again!

Thanks, I lolled.

I'm seeing this sort of thing a lot lately (perhaps I'm looking for it?). A lot of people expressing, in one form or another, that we, our society, have somehow have gone down the wrong path. Even in this article there is a subtext of change ... for the worse.

If you want to be dismissive, call it nostalgia — or point out that every generation feels this way about the way the world is compared to the way it was when they were younger.

But I think there is something truly broken in the world and I think people feel it too. The phrase that kept popping into my head when I was feeling particularly down about the way of things was, "No one would have chosen this." That is, in reference to the way the Western world is today.

Embrace Gopher, Gemini and IRC/Jabber again.

One night in the 90s I woke up at 1am because the server next to my bed started making a lot of noise! I quickly login and see a process by user "nobody" taking up 100% cpu! I'm being hacked! Quickly pull the network cable out of the wall, wide awake.

Turns out there is a cron job that updates the locate command's index.

Yep!

  updatedb

One day when I had just started using linux, this never happened to me either ;-)

At a web startup I worked at in 2008, we had some automated emails sent to all our users. We didn't have sendmail or postfix or whatever properly configured and so the emails came from [email protected]. Our CEO was pissed because he didn't understand that it wasn't like some intentional joke by our engineering team.

My first real job was to work with another intern to write a “tool to keep track of who’s been trained on what” since they were doing it with a spreadsheet. This was in 2001.

We wrote it on the LAMP stack which gave us the full suite of whatever you could find on a Linux CD at the time.

Fancy graphs? No problem.

Send reminder emails? Sure boss! We dutifully started hacking and testing and hacking to get that function in.

To test, we decided to send emails to jackfrost, santa, and so on from our own sendmail server to the corporate mail server. It worked fine because we weren’t spamming it, we were just sending a few messages every now and then as we debugged.

Turns out there’s really a Jack Frost that worked for us.

He was not pleased.

We were amused.

I think we apologized, and I forget how we figured out he was a real person.

I had the exact same experience :-) it probably wasn't that unique.

I remember mine (a Pentium 2 with a SCSI disk) would go off at 6 AM, just as I was about to fall asleep (aah that student life). One day I had an aha moment, that I could change the cron timer to make it run at 9am.

I, too, got bothered by fan noise at night, and my server was being hacked.

Well. Hacked as in someone banging their password list against an SSH server that only accepts public key logins, at maximum speed with tens of simultaneous connections, pegging the CPU (and I was running junk hardware, I found that 800MHz Intel Coppermine CPU literally from a mixed waste trash bin). Usually the scripts doing this had the decency to keep the attempts to something like 1 per second which would be unnoticeable.

fail2ban could notice that.

I also had a server in my bedroom.

The problem was that I only had mechanical hard drives back then and they would spin up all the time and make noise.

In 2001 I started to systematically search for the causes of the disk noises and document it at https://www.agol.dk/quietlinux/

E.g., I spent a lot of time finding out that CUPS was generating a new certificate every 5 minutes. Nowadays it is a lot easier to investigate things like that. Back then I was patching the kernel.

this reminds me of the Yo! app

OMG, I’d achieved to remove it from my mind. Ooob, the olds times in the apps world

Some relatives of mine have internet-connected RGB lamps that they use in a similar fashion. When one sets the color, the others automatically synchronize. It seems like a pretty neat low-stress way to keep in touch.

What's their encoding scheme?

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/530/

I did something similar when I lost my phone but it was still connected to the network. Ssh into it and `while true; do espeak "I am here"; done`. Related: http://bash.org/?5273

The xkcd reminds me of a friend who was locked out of her car. The battery in her remote key fob had run down so the door would not unlock when she pushed the unlock button on it. She was still trying to figure out online how to get a new battery when I took her key from her and opened the door by inserting it in the lock. She was so embarrassed that she wouldn't talk to me for a few days.

I did that, recently. My fob battery died, I unlocked the car with the key, opened the door and... the car alarm went off. I'm not sure what the designers were thinking.

You turn the alarm off by starting the car, because the ignition has an rfid-like close-range reader which only requires passive circuitry in the key. That's how you differentiate between a break-in and the legitimate owner.

My car has push start (like many new ones) & has no keyhole inside (it has one in door to open the door). Although it has a seat/slot for the whole key to go in, in case of low battery. I assume that will stop the alarm. :-|

My car is also push start and I have to hold the fob in front of the start button for a short while before turning on the car if the fob battery is out.

I’m fairly certain we’ve recently fought to open a rented car because the keyfob died and the way to extract the key from the fob was non-obvious.

Then when we finally got inside, the car didn’t have a keyhole to start it at all. Ended up calling the rental agency that showed us how to invoke the magic sequence by holding the (empty) fob in front of the start button for a few seconds before pressing it. I guess it does passive RFiD or something?

Anyway, that’s the point where I decided modern cars are not my thing.

That's the immobilizer chip. It's a little pill-shaped RFID-like thing that's been inside keys since long before remote locks and push-to-start. Basically any key that has some plastic instead of being entirely metal. The reader is located immediately next to the ignition key hole on the steering column, and that location is sometimes used even in push-to-start cars although apparently in your case it was near the start button instead. Distance is limited to a couple centimeters max. Car won't start unless the immobilizer's reader sees the correct key. When a push-to-start fob's battery is in working order, the distance is moot because it uses full blown RF instead.

Modern is a subjective thing. I have a golf 5 from 2005 (tdi). One day I had to go somewhere and it turns out the car starts and shuts itself down immediately... It turns out the ground connection to the dash was intermittent. The dash for some unknown reason is the place where the immobiliser code/certificate is stored so when you start the car the Ecu has to talk to both the immobiliser coil next to the key and the dash.

I'll leave it to readers imagination how long it took me to troubleshoot the issue.

> Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/530/

Plot twist: It's a Ring doorbell and wi-fi is down.

I did a similar thing with my family: I'd hooked a GNU/Linux box up to the family Hi-Fi system to play our various music libraries, and when I was living overseas I'd "call them" by ssh-ing in and asking mpd to start playing something. They'd come online and call me using Google Talk (the very first one, probably, because it was good, simple, built on open standards, and long dead).

i wonder how often they refreshed it lol

This! This era is nostalgic for me and I am convinced we've only downgraded down from the handiness and thoughtfulness of the tools we used back then.

In 89 we had 9600 baud direct connection from the dorms to the computing center… We’ve come a long way.

Though I did have a Linux ppc box serving website under my desk in the early 2000s.. until they blocked port 80.

Quote similar approach was sharing your Floppy Disk A:/ drive. Any attempt to access it via the network would make this loud noise of empty drive, which meant someone is waiting for you in the chat.

I love this story! A few years ago I had a server in my apartment with a similar 'dingdong.html' that would ring an old elevator bell I had salvaged from the junk. I didn't end up giving people the URL; I just made an ESP8266 button that would send a request.

If it had been a bit more reliable I would have kept using it but I had some issues with either the bell coil or the relay and it kept sticking. All in all the project ended up being more expensive than a wireless doorbell, but I enjoyed the experience (and the smartwatch notification when someone was at the door).