HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: nikos@bnr.ca (Nikos Mouat)
Subject: Re: Dangerous Wallpaper
Reply-To: nimouat@napier.uwaterloo.ca (Nikos Mouat)
Organization: Bell-Northern Research Ltd.
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 12:28:43 GMT

[DG] dmgirard@nyx.cs.du.edu (David Girardot) writes: 
DG> Well this won't work either.  So I am not ashamed aboutnot posting a hack.
     Au contraire mon fraire!

DG>  I will post a question, however.  Anyone out there able to help me in
DG> setting up a VMS temp dir?
DG> 
DG> --David
DG>  
     Sorry for asking such a silly question, but do you mean MVS, CMS or are
there more acronyms that I have yet to learn, and be tortured by the horrendous
operating systems that they represent?


  Nik.

ObProject: Considering writing kernal routines for connecting PCs in paired 
networks connected through LPTx ports (similar to lap-link) to enable software
messaging without buying fancy hardware (only a single cable). Then lending
the software to shareware game authors to enable two players to play a single
game interactively, on different computers... (Each node has a copy of the game,
and messages such as 'player A moved 3 degrees left and blew up enemy X, show
the explosion on player B's screen' would be sent across the link)
--
     Please post Responses, Comments, and Flames because I'm on a gated network
without Internet access, and the only connection I have to the real world
is through USENET... (no mail, no ftp, no telnet).. My school account (@napier) 
is still active, but I'm not a good enough hacker to try and get out of this
network and over to that account.
--
Opinions are mine, not my employers.
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: jfritz@ptolemy3.rdrc.rpi.edu (Joe Fritz)
Subject: Self-extracting UNIX floppy
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 03:32:39 GMT

I just finished a really neat hack to simplify the installation on
software on an end user's system.  The user must simply insert the
disk into the drive and type "sh /dev/df0", and the diskette spins for
a while, then ejects, and the user is left with an unpacked
dirtribution tree in his or her current directory.

This hack was accomplished with dd and tar.  The files were tar'd and
the tar file was compressed.  The compressed file needed to be
packaged in another tar file, then it was dd'd onto the floppy.  The
'boot' shell script was dd'd onto the first block.



-- 
May God keep and bless you always   | jochen (joe) fritz
And may all your dreams come true   | jfritz@rdrc.rpi.edu   <><
May you always do for others        -----------------------------
And let others do for you.  -- "forever young"  --Dylan
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: scm3775@tamsun.tamu.edu (Sean Malloy)
Subject: Re: Dangerous Wallpaper
Keywords: Microsoft, SQLWindows
Organization: Texas A&M University, College Station
Distribution: na
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 16:10:42 GMT

Well, this isn't quite related to the discussion that had been
going on in this thread, but the title did remind me of something
that happened this summer.

We had written a MS Windows application that did some network
management for an improvised RS-485 network that our product
used, did database queries, and generally grew to be large enough
that it took > 5 minutes to come up.  Our hardware people had
already flown from Palo Alto CA to St. Petersberg FL and were
in the process of installing our system in the client's
warehouse.  The software people, myself included, were spending
long hours putting the application through it's paces and making
cosmetic changes when we discovered an annoying problem.

The program wouldn't run on about half the machines in our office.
On bootup, we'd get the famous MS Windows UAE.  After trying
just about everything we could think of, and getting nowhere
we decided to minimize the use of system resources on the machines
that gave the UAE.  Why?  Well, we were out of ideas, and
some of the non-working machines actually showed more free resources
than machines on which it worked fine.

Well, imagine our surprise when the culprit was the choice of
wallpaper for windows.  Not the presence of wallpaper, but the
choice.  If you had paper.bmp, then the application would
happily run along.  Choose chess.bmp and UAE.  No one understood
it at the time, but it was repeatable.  In development, the
head programmer used paper.bmp and I ran without any wallpaper
at all so I could minimize the system resources that I used.
Made life much easier when running this huge application, the
development environment, Message Spy, Heapwalker and an
editor with only 4M of memory and a slow-as-hell disk.


Obhack: Getting the above project, developed in Gupta's SQLWindows
to display Metafiles and memory-context bitmaps after the Gupta
Tech Support people told me it couldn't be done.  After it was fait
accompli, they wanted source code!  And we were paying $1500/quarter
for the priviledge of tech support.  I think they finally got it, 
but they got an earfull from our administrative person in the
process.

-Sean

-- 
 
  Sean C. Malloy  -  Texas A&M University  -  scm@tamu.edu
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: pete@achilles.arl (Peter Flugstad,,,)
Subject: Re: BYTE magazine reading alt.hackers
Reply-To: pete@achilles.arl
Organization: Washington University, School of Engineering, St. Louis MO
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 17:02:37 GMT

In article 3232@bnr.ca, nimouat@napier.uwaterloo.ca (Nikos Mouat, aka Spiff) writes:
>     A few month ago we had a discussion on this group about writing trojan 
>horse login programs to collect peoples UserIDs and Passwords (and someone was
>so bold as to actually mask the process and really log them in!!), any way
>in this article, it said (paraphrased roughly): 
>
>          Beware, sometimes hackers will write login style programs to collect
>     passwords and userIDs etc. etc.
>
>What surprised me was that this was in the first issue after we had the discussion. I guess big 
>brother is watching after all.

I don`t think this had much to do with BYTE editors reading alt.hackers, although I think 
they probably keep up on the major news on the Internet.  This is a common method 
for grabbing passwords, and has been published in several books, notably  
"The Cuckoo's Egg" and "Cyberpunk".    I think the first time  it's been used was on
the VAX by the Hanover Hackers Gang, at least that's the impression I got from "Cyberpunk".


>Nikos.

ObHack:  This post, my first to alt.hackers.

---
Pete Flugstad				| Internet: pete@arl.wustl.edu
Applied Research Laboratory		| Tel: (314) 935-6110
Department of Computer Science		| "To err is Human, to really 
Washington University in St. Louis	|  foul up requires a computer"
From: amol@ms.UKy.EDU (Amol Deshpande)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: (none)
Date: 11 Oct 92 15:14:24 GMT

Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: amol@ms.uky.edu (Amol Deshpande)
Subject: Mapping mouse buttons in X
Keywords: 2 button mouse
Summary: how do you map three mouse buttons to a 2button mouse ?
Distribution: alt.hackers
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 15:14:22 GMT
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences

Hi,

after trying every related usenet group I could think of, I finally figured
this would group would be able to help me. My problem is that I want to use a mouse which has only 2 buttons. I'd like to know if there is a way to map some combination of keys (say shift-button2) to button 3 on this mouse. 

Thanks,

-Amol

Ps: sorry I don't have the ObHack. This is not my first posting, and I'm not enuff of a hacker to come up with one every time I post



-- 
     ---------------------------------------------------------------------
    | "By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity - another man's,|
    | I mean. "		-- Mark Twain				          |
     --------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Organization: large
Date: 7 Oct 1992 10:15:38 EDT
Expires: 1 Apr 93 12:34
Subject: Dumb password encryption
From: hobbit@babyoil.ftp.com (*Hobbit*)

I recently ran across a commercial product that stores the characters of its
"master God password" at a fixed offset in a file, with each character simply
subtracted from 255.  I thought this was pretty stupid.

Imagine my disgust when I found the "magic seekrit factory backdoor password"
[which makes you equally god-like] buried inside an executable, in PLAINTEXT.

_H*
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)
Subject: Re: (none)
Organization: Reed College, Portland, OR
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 19:29:46 GMT
Reply-To: nelson@reed.edu (Nelson Minar)

>after trying every related usenet group I could think of, I finally
>figured this would group would be able to help me.

well, if you really want alt.hackers style help..

>My problem is that I want to use a mouse which has only 2 buttons.
>I'd like to know if there is a way to map some combination of keys
>(say shift-button2) to button 3 on this mouse.

sure, it's easy.

Hack1 - If your mouse input down on the motherboard has room for 3
buttons, then there's a trivial solution. Take a wire, and hook it to
the shift key on your keyboard. Put it with a logical or of button 2
on the mouse. Wire this into the button 3 mouse input. Now, if you are
both pressing the shift key *and* pressing button 2, then you'll trip
that 3rd button.

Hack2 - if you don't have room for a 3rd button in the interface, but
you have it in the software, then there's another easy solution. Remap
the bit of the ROM that is the lowlevel keyboard/mouse interpreter into
some RAM. Rewrite the interface (thereby improving its speed three
times), and add in the "shift+button2 = button3" modification. While
you're there go ahead and map in all those other hacks you wanted -
"shift+arrow keys = mouse motion", and a full chorded keyboard just
out of those two mouse buttons.

ObHack (this is quite minor, but since I hardly know lisp I was happy)

I want to byte-compile all the "tek-*.el" files in
/local/lib/epoch/epoch-lisp. So I go into that directory, and from my
bash do:

for f in tek-*.el; do
  echo \"$f\"
done

then back into my lisp-interaction buffer in epoch:
(mapcar
  (lambda (l) (byte-compile-file l))       ;lambda is a macro
  '( <paste in quoted files here> ))

no big deal, but I manged to use two completely different command
systems, *and* X11 to accomplish what should have been a simple task.
                __
nelson@reed.edu \/                         I can live forever in formaldehyde
From: hards4@evans.ee.adfa.oz.au (Brad Hards)
Subject: Re: Yes, it's one of those tests again
Organization: University College UNSW ADFA Australia
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 22:33:49 GMT

In article <1992Oct7.133620.23731@ousrvr.oulu.fi> pvk@phoenix (GinTonix) writes:
[some crap about a self modifying .plan so he can tell when his mates
logged out last]

You could just install the new GNU finger, or do something like
---
#! /bin/sh
echo -n 'Searching for:'; last $1 | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f1
echo -n 'last logged out at' ; last $1 | head -1 | cut -c55-60 
---
It could use a lot of work to add an variable and save the two last's, and
also to handle if the guy is still logged in. But you get the idea....

ObHack: AUFS, and many workarounds to make it do anything useful :(
 
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: cddukes@c00033-118dan.eos.ncsu.edu (PakRat's Anonymous)
Subject: Re: Dangerous Wallpaper
Organization: North Carolina State University, Project Eos
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 23:14:13 GMT

In article <bill.719181133@chaos.cs.umn.edu> bill@chaos.cs.umn.edu (Hari Seldon...psychohistorian) writes:
>In <1992Oct15.122843.24008@bnr.ca> nikos@bnr.ca (Nikos Mouat) writes:
>
>>[DG] dmgirard@nyx.cs.du.edu (David Girardot) writes: 
>>DG>  I will post a question, however.  Anyone out there able to help me in
>>DG> setting up a VMS temp dir?
>>DG> 
>>     Sorry for asking such a silly question, but do you mean MVS, CMS or are
>>there more acronyms that I have yet to learn, and be tortured by the horrendous
>>operating systems that they represent?
>
>ok well then heres another: DEC as in whats the os for a computer made
>by DEC.
VMS is the Virtual Memory System, or something equally silly...  It is a wonder
ful dec product for VAXen and PC-AT's (Local food store chain runs Micro-VMS
on a PC-AT driving 1 console,  3 dumb terminals, and 8 cash registers for
inventory, UPC database, ordering, corporate orders, time cards...)


DEC's run VMS, Ultrix, OSF/1, Various unix hacks, MSDOS (See rainbow, and their
new line of intel based machines), OS/2, linux...


ObHack: Setting up private file servers, and other servers on public
workstations... through the user of the network install program.

ObProject:  Taking one of those vaxes that are the size of two full size
refrigerators minus the DASD... along with a tape unit and a drive unit
(Minus the drives) and finding drives and getting it working in my garage.

Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: bill@chaos.cs.umn.edu (Hari Seldon...psychohistorian)
Subject: Re: Dangerous Wallpaper
Organization: University of Minnesota
Distribution: na
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 20:32:13 GMT

In <1992Oct15.122843.24008@bnr.ca> nikos@bnr.ca (Nikos Mouat) writes:

>[DG] dmgirard@nyx.cs.du.edu (David Girardot) writes: 
>DG>  I will post a question, however.  Anyone out there able to help me in
>DG> setting up a VMS temp dir?
>DG> 
>     Sorry for asking such a silly question, but do you mean MVS, CMS or are
>there more acronyms that I have yet to learn, and be tortured by the horrendous
>operating systems that they represent?

ok well then heres another: DEC as in whats the os for a computer made
by DEC.

carhack: when the speedo in my duster started acting up. (and gyrating
like crazy) i pulled the speedo out and noticed the speedo bearings
were worn (causing the needle to wobble) so i put the end of the 
speedo (where the cable goes in) in a vise and carefully smashed it.
it was just enough to hold the bearings in place. now the speedo reads
fine. 

bill pociengel
--
llbi locgeenpi " i'm a little confused right now"
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: thompsn@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Adam Thompson)
Subject: Rutgers ?
Followup-To: junk
Summary: What the ...?
Keywords: Rutgers sysadmins workaround hack censorship
Reply-To: Adam_Thompson@umanitoba.ca
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1992 03:04:21 GMT

Pursuant to recent posting...

What, exactly, have Rutgers sysadmins done regarding alt.hackers?

-Adam Thompson
 thompsn@ccu.umanitoba.ca

ObHack: ...nothing recently... 
        ...comes from _working_ for CompServ, I guess...
-- 
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Adam Thompson        University of Manitoba        Computer Services |
| thompsn@ccu.umanitoba.ca                                  OLC Team   |
|     UNIX Programmer they call me... so how come I never program?     |
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: pinky@tamu.edu
Subject: kbd hacking
Organization: Texas A&M University
X-Newsreader: Eliza v.New.and.improved
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 02:51:05 GMT

ObHack: While calling some BBS's in my area, I noticed that one or two
people could type with in their posts with extremely weird characters
(ie. an E would be replaced w/ an epsilon, a d with a delta, an i with
an upside down bang).  Wishing to be able to do this, I wrote a small
TSR which acted to replace any keystroke w/ its properly demented
equivalent whenever the scroll lock key was on.  Soon I was entering
in alien lines whenever I wished!  I later learned that a later version
of the comm program I use (Telemate v.3.01) allows kbd remapping within
it, therefore avoiding such elaborate ways of duplicating the feat.

Incidentally, this program can be quite fun to run on other people.
One friend I have began typing away, only to see those strange keys
coming back at him, and just about fell out of his chair (Hi Tom!).
You can also try 'keyb fr' at any DOS machine on April Fool's, and
when your victim complains, casually look over the kbd, blowing away
imaginary dust (and secretly hitting Ctrl-Alt-F1or2--I forget) and
shrug as you say "I can't see anything wrong..."

Thanks to the DOS Power Tools book for the last idea. :)

Till next time,

<>  Sam Inala  <>

Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: fdd@epg.harris.com (F. David Duncan)
Subject: Just another hack
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 12:14:09 GMT
Reply-To: fdd@epg.harris.com (F. David Duncan)
Organization: Engineering Productivity Group, Harris Corp., Melbourne, FL

So the AC fan just quit working.
No smoke, no nothing.
Last time, the drain was plugged up and the motor would turn very slowly.
Had to clean the motor brushes and unclog drain, but no major problem.
But this time - nothing.

I didn't want to work on it.
But she said please.

Check electrical first - 
  Unplugged fan.
  Have power on connector.
  Have resistance (which varies correctly with speed switch) on ground.
  OK.

Plugged back in and tried starting fan manually, but no good.
Still had meter hooked up while tring this.
  Noticed voltage side drops to zero.
  Turn off switch, voltage comes up,
  Turn on switch, voltage goes to zero.

Used meter probe wires to add power to connector and fan started.

Find the loose wire or connection in all that mess?
Of course not!

Hacked in a new power run and she was happy.
From: pcl@oxford.ac.uk (Paul Leyland)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: "Unforking" an SLC.
Date: 13 Oct 92 10:03:51 GMT
Organization: Oxford University Computing Service, 13 Banbury Rd, Oxford, OX2
	6NN
In-reply-to: dmb@srl02.cacs.usl.edu's message of 13 Oct 92 03:56:34 GMT

In article <DMB.92Oct12215634@srl02.cacs.usl.edu> dmb@srl02.cacs.usl.edu (David M. Brumley) writes:

   will quickly reach the per user process limit, after which all
   attempts to execute commands from csh, except built-ins, will fail
   with a "Vfork error."  Apparently, using the csh "kill" built-in to
   kill the forking processes does not work.

...

   $ rsh <host> exec /bin/kill -9 -<PGID>

   After running the kill a few times, all of the original rabbit
   processes die off and are replaced by dog processes.  Finally, we send
   a quit signal <CTRL/\> to the original dog rsh, all of the dogs die,
   and everything is back to normal.

Why not "kill -STOP", to prevent them reproducing, and then kill -KILL
afterwards?

Obhack:  Using exactly this technique to kill off some luser's self-calling
csh script.  (Only a tiny hack, I admit)

--
Paul Leyland <pcl@oxford.ac.uk>          | Hanging on in quiet desperation is
Oxford University Computing Service      |     the English way.
13 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6NN, UK     | The time is come, the song is over.
Tel: +44-865-273200  Fax: +44-865-273275 | Thought I'd something more to say.
From: pc123@cl.cam.ac.uk (Pete Chown)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Dangerous Wallpaper
Keywords: Microsoft, SQLWindows
Date: 16 Oct 92 22:01:29 GMT
Reply-To: pc123@phx.cam.ac.uk (Pete Chown)
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK

All this reminds me of the time when we had an Excel application that
needed to run on two machines.  Trouble was, it didn't... both were
running MS-LOSS 5, Windows 3.1, Excel whatever version it is.  But the
program would only run on one of them.

Eventually it was about 24 hours before the deadline, and we were
hunting through the file trees and things trying to figure out where
the machines could differ.  Eventually we spotted it - the list
separator character had been changed on one of them, and Excel macro
code actually changes syntax (the list separator character separates
arguments to procedures.  I wonder what would happen if you set it to
'2') as a result of changing the Windows configuration!  What sort of
a language is this, we asked ourselves (crap seems to be the answer).

ObHack: When doing the same application, we needed to find out whether
a large area of the Excel worksheet had any numbers in it.  It was too
slow to search it all, Excel's macro interpreter has to be seen to be
believed.  But Excel has the facility to transform an array by a
formula, all in one step.  This is far quicker, because it doesn't
involve the macro interpreter, so I wrote a formula that mapped
numbers to 1 and everything else to 0.  Then I evaluated the sum of
all the values in the array, and if the result is > 0 the array
contains at least one number.

Who said you couldn't have a hack in a spreadsheet?
--
---------------------------------------------+ "A tight hat can be stretched.
Pete Chown, pc123@phx.cam.ac.uk (Internet)   |  First damp the head with steam
            pc123@uk.ac.cam.phx (Janet :-)  -+  from a boiling kettle."
From: pvk@phoenix (GinTonix)
Subject: Yes, it's one of those tests again
Organization: University of Oulu, Finland
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.1 PL6]
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 13:36:20 GMT

Lemmesee... if this one works it's too easy.

The obHack:

Well, not really a hack but a nice thing to do for a friend. We have a
numerous amount of terminals in the campus, in different classrooms of
course. When you want to meet your pal who hangs around these
computing-things, you know, you go to the nearest terminal and
<finger> him. If he is logged on, then no problem, just see where he
is and go there or <talk> or <whatever> him. If he isn't, the <finger>
you just punched (really, punched, with this f*cking tandberg) in just
says last logIN time. Who cares? The guy has probably sat staring the
screen for hours and hours. You want to know when he LOGGED OUT, of
course, so you could do some thinking and guess where you should try
next: the bar, a cafe, a classroom, home... whatever. So we made it
easier: when you <logout> the .plan file will be time-stamped. On
screen it seems ridiculous and obvious but it might solve some
problems when trying to catch someone. BTW: when you <login> the .plan
file will polymorph, of course. A bit of individuality: a different
plan every day. Enjoy.


--

---
Pertsa K

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pertti Kotipalo                         : INTERNET : pvk@phoenix.oulu.fi
Dept. of Information Processing Science : INTERNET : TKOP-PVK@finou.oulu.fi
University of Oulu, Finland             : BITNET   : TKOP-PVK@FINOU
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disclaimer : If there are any opinions above, they *must* be mine...
Motto      : There should be sunshine after rain... (Dire Straits, Why Worry)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
From: pete@arl.wustl.edu (Peter Flugstad,,,)
Subject: Re: BYTE magazine reading alt.hackers
Reply-To: pete@arl.wustl.edu
Organization: Washington University, School of Engineering, St. Louis MO
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 17:25:41 GMT

In article 3232@bnr.ca, nimouat@napier.uwaterloo.ca (Nikos Mouat, aka Spiff) writes:
>     I don't know if any of you guys noticed in last months BYTE magazine,
>(Is UNIX dead), but hidden in the back of the magazine was an article on 
>system security.
>     A few month ago we had a discussion on this group about writing trojan 
>horse login programs to collect peoples UserIDs and Passwords (and 
>someone was so bold as to actually mask the process and really log them in!!), 
>any way in this article, it said (paraphrased roughly): 
>
>          Beware, sometimes hackers will write login style programs to collect
>     passwords and userIDs etc. etc.
>
>What surprised me was that this was in the first issue after we had the 
>discussion. I guess big brother is watching after all.
>Nikos.

I don`t think this has much to do with BYTE editors reading alt.hackers.  I 
think it has more to do with that method being mentioned in a couple of 
very famous books, including "The Cuckoo's Egg" and "Cyberpunk".  I do
think however that the editors of BYTE, or at least a couple of their writers
keep up on major Internet news.  I seem to recall other issues mentioning 
things about the Internet, but I don't remember anything specific.

ObHack: this post, my first... 

---
Pete Flugstad			| Internet: pete@arl.wustl.edu
Applied Research Laboratory		| Tel: (314) 935-6110
Department of Computer Science	| "To err is Human, to really 
Washington University in St. Louis	|  foul up requires a computer"