[ale] OT: Pranks are out

[Jeff Hubbs]

When I worked for the Air Force, I came to be in the frequent company of 
two VAX admins, John and jack, who had a bit of the BOFH about them.  Me 
and one other guy, whose name I've forgotten, were very interested in 
the VAXen and what could be done with them.

Being multiuser systems, but way before IM, it was natural for users to 
want to know who all was on the machine and you did this with the SHOW 
USERS command, which would list all of the logged-on usernames, the 
process name for each one, and a process ID number.  The process names 
were user-definable, and so the process name became kind of a 
15-character "vanity plate" for many of us.  Jack and John challenged 
this other guy - motivated by a steak dinner, I recall - to write a 
utility that would change *other people's* process name on the fly.  
This guy was pretty geeky, more so than even me, so he flew into it with 
a passion, spending hours with binders from the "orange wall" that VAX 
people knew only too well. 

He wrote up something in assembler that accessed process data within VMS 
and Jack and John actually let this guy come in on a weekend so he could 
try out his code with the necessary CHMKNL (Change Mode to Kernel) 
privilege.  Doing this on a weekend was important because one wrong move 
and you could crash a VAX (and I heard that he did) playing around like 
this.  However, he got it to work, and from that point on Jack and John 
could vandalize people's process names at will, even to the point of 
making the entire list of process names read out little poems and so 
forth. 

One guy had a process name set to "B4I4QRU/18QT" and our BOFHs asked me 
to figure out if there were a way to add a pi symbol to the end.  I 
determined that indeed the terminals could display it, but you'd have to 
insert the necessary control codes into process space much as that other 
guy did...and rewrite the operating system to use 16-character process 
names. 

They did have something that would force input on another TTY port, 
which was put to no small amount of mischief especially with the IM-like 
PHONE utility.

Stone bastards that they were capable of being, I actually learned a lot 
from those guys; because they didn't like to actually do work or be 
bothered by people about work, they put an awful lot of effort into 
automating everything to a very high degree, so as to leave themselves 
more time for interprocess vandalism, dialup bulletin boards, making fun 
of other employees, etc. 

The worst that *I* ever did, if you can call this a prank, was to use a 
school computer (Data General Nova) to find a girl's unlisted phone 
number by process of elimination (thankfully, it was a phone exchange 
that was barely over a page in the phone book); once all the numbers 
were entered in an array, it was easy to identify whole swaths of 
invalid numbers and after that, I was left with a manageable amount of 
numbers to cold-call.  Yes, I got her number; no, it didn't get me anywhere.


Scott Castaline wrote:

>Brian MacLeod wrote:
>
>  
>
>>At one of the colleges where I was a student, we had an lab of RS6000 
>>thin clients connected to an application server.  In this case xhost 
>>was irrelevant -- anyone could effectively do anything on the displays 
>>on any of the stations if they knew the correct incantations.
>>
>>I never did this to anyone doing legitimate work (which since this was 
>>a public lab, it was always busy), but many people who were playing 
>>games on the stations or viewing questionable materials began to 
>>wonder why their windows were closing, or in some cases when they 
>>clicked on the root window, why they were being logged out.
>>
>>My groups of friends had a hell of a time getting into each other's 
>>accounts.  One of us was quite proficient in Unix environments at the 
>>time (the rest of us were not), but we managed to get him to leave his 
>>computer for just moments without him locking it first.  We were able 
>>to have a little fun, but he quickly resolved any issues.  We also did 
>>this to another guy who wasn't even in computers, and we seriously 
>>messed up his web page so that he actually stopped fighting it, and 
>>let it go to see what kind of horrible spectacle it could become. It 
>>wouldn't meet any standards of PC nowadays, and would have been 
>>immediately removed if such standards existed then.
>>
>>My aunt and I programmed one of her kids' computers to say "You're 
>>really making progress now" everytime the backspace key was pressed.
>>
>>Ah, I miss having that kind of fun...
>>
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>This reminds me of when I was working for Quotron Systems, based in LA, 
>CA. Back around 1984 QSI and AT&T had formed a joint venture to develop 
>a system for the Wall Street community, based on UNIX. All field 
>employees were brought into LA HQ for training on UNIX and the new 
>system. While in class, I started poking around the different buffer 
>tables and crossed my input buffer (kybd) with the instructor's output 
>buffer (video). This caused what the instructor was typing on his 
>keyboard to show up on my CRT and what I typed was on his CRT, which was 
>behind him facing the class. Therefore, he did not see that when he was 
>typing "By viewing my output buffer table, you can see exactly what I'm 
>typing!", did not show up on his 23" CRT, but instead what everyone saw 
>was "He really doesn't know what he is talking about!". It took a while 
>for him to realize why everyone was laughing, a while longer to realize 
>where it was comming from, and a shorter time in assinging a password to 
>root...............
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