Re: What evil things have you done in the past?

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>]

In article <1157399875.494182.284920@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>,
 "Chris Morse" <win32mfc@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> * Crashing BBS's
>
> There were only a couple times where I had the impulse to crash a BBS.
[...]

I operated a GBBS board for several years on behalf of a local Apple 
computer club. I wrote a segment that made the BBS appear to have 
crashed into Applesoft. It gave joke answers to commands in a manner 
similar to Bruce Tognazzini's Super Hi-res Chess program (ca. 1978). It 
amused the folks who frequented the board no end. Those who used the 
clues to figure out the correct exit command could get a copy of the 
source.

This proved surprisingly effective at minimizing malicious calls. I 
think they felt as if they'd "beaten" the system, and so they moved on. 
Some even joined the club. In contrast, local operators with the most 
draconian policies seemed to attract the most vengeful vandals.

>* Breaking into the college computer...
>
>Well, it was more taking advantage of an opportunity than actually
>breaking in.

In a Fortran class, we were given canned JCL headers on punched cards 
that limited the runtime level and CPU allocation to values appropriate 
to our tyro skills. While that was useful for debugging, I needed 
something more for molecular orbital calculations. Fortunately, the 
(enormous) JCL reference manual was chained to a counter in the computer 
center. I don't think tweaking JCL was evil, but I do recall having to 
resist the lure of greed:-)

-- 
John Matthews
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/