Hotline Hacked Vol. 7
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Thank you for calling hotline hacked. Share your strange tale of technology, true hack, or computer confession after .

the b hey, guys, love the podcast my named. I do know in brisbane, australia, they need to make my voice anonymous. Anything like that? Of course you welcomes make a sound bedroom less nicely past.

Hey, nail powering. I'm there with you, brother.

Remember the community.

It's a small community.

It's a small community, but it's proud my nose .

has been broken thirteen times. I don't know what your excuses, but you are part of my community .

thirteen times. We're going to dress that later.

Otherwise, I don't think too many people will come after me after this confession. First, I love the podcast. Love everything that you guys do.

Been a regular listening after for a number of gears, definitely in my top two of sib's security podcast. So yeah, it's great. I love IT.

So this stories is a hot line hat. Just some quick background. I worked at a fairly medium to lodge business nationwide in australia. They had officers scattered all capital cities. So we're talking twenty five years ago, early two thousands, I was just a spring chicken at the time.

Um I just organically found myself being good at I T and just standing up on the national I T hot death, helping out the the I T guys in in sydney from time to time. As part of that they gave me element access to the email service so I could help you know reset passwords and trouble sheeting and things like that. Um so yeah, I was just a really basic pop three on that kind of deal.

Um so anyway, eventually I left the organization and um my girlfriend at the time, uh he also books there but left around the same time and um well, working there we I guess you know we are mercurial as to what was going on after we left because this was a few years before facebook and we didn't really have any contact anymore with anyone that was still working there over the time. We made a few friendships, I guess. So you know, I guess we could have picked up the phone and call them to see our things we're going, but we chose the the lazy way in would still log into my admin account to check people's emails just to see what was going on.

As I said, I was pop three. So usually of an evening I could still sit emails that was sitting in in boxes willing to their load cells. You know, I have pretty much check, says anyone in the organizations emails to see what was happening. So that was fun for a little while and I kept us entries for, I guess, a few months until my account was eventually disabled. So that was that we moved on.

But then um sometime later, my girlfriend calls them, I guess I am back into the emails and like what what's gone on and SHE SHE said I just put in have me as the using name in password one, two, three, four so that i'll chest, not god back in that was quite funny because my girlfriend was completely your computer illiterate. SHE has very little interesting anything you LED IT to cyber. So I guess you could say that some these guys were compromised by really a very um uh intro level hacker.

Maybe, I don't know. That's a little story. The old, i've mean one, two, three, four. Anyway, I can't remember what happened. I think we just got bored of IT.

And who knows how long that passed with combination in hand sight, we probably should have let them know. But, you know, we were Young and stupid. Thanks guys. See letter.

the old password, one, two, three, four trick, the old admin as user .

name a welcomed the hotline hacks. That's a Colin show where you can share your strange tell technology, true hack or confute computer confession. Um IT can be recent. IT can be from twenty five years ago when you were just a spring chicken.

IT can be from like forty years ago. Yes.

because the person .

I think IT was two episodes ago, maybe up a hat, Colin hat four yeah. The person who did the inductive coupler in switzerland and like hacking, like the old, like dalan servers and stuff, actually did reach out and told this his history. And he did end up with a long and successful and continuous career in tech.

truly. And I think we've speculate during that call like, wow, what a career this person probably went on to have based on how kind of clever they were during the anette. And indeed they did like on german television, I think um for doing hacker stuff, like had A A very interesting career that there not quite wrapped up yet. But I think of bitcoin reaches six digital is what they said that they'll .

be they'll call IT in IT took took a hard transition from like fin tech and financial management. The banking is industry to the obvious out cryo. And yeah, he's hoping on a six figure bitcoin, brice, and ensure there's a lot of the other people that are too.

But so for him, I hope he gets there. I'll put put aside my cynical m and say for you, you earned IT. I hope you get IT. So what i'm curious about is.

in the intervening years since this story, if the colors girlfriend, who was then just an entry level hacker, has since gone on to have a bitcoin fuelled professional hacker career as well, maybe that admin plus paster one, two, three, four really Sparked something. I really think the thing that I really liked about this was the we were curious about the company. Yes, we could have picked up the phone, but we went with their easier option like that. You just decided like we're just gona hack back into all the emails verses like calling up Steve in accounting and seeing how it's been going.

I'm going to make a movie your reference here, which is not something I have to do. But like, have you ever seen the movie .

lair cake .

like a Daniel crag? Yeah, I remember .

that that moves why he got James born James.

But this is a scene and that where is kind of doing his character introduction and he's like, you know i'm a drug dealer by like I poses like a real estate broker and it's like, know everybody wants to know what's on the other side of a dorm k private and it's just like a thing about mankind of like, you know how we can help ourselves but like if i'm not allowed to be in there, I want to be in there and exactly this. I have the access. It's not really adding any value in my life, but for some reason i'm using that access to learn little bits of information that I shouldn't have had well because is .

also compelling to it's like an old workplace. You're not there anymore. It's been years. But there's probably people that you're curious about and like dramas that you .

want to know how they watch meeting totally .

like you just want to kind of know. So maybe maybe you try .

here and catch up on what's going on in their life. Yeah, you have another part, their emails server and read the emails. Same same. Yeah, exactly.

I also liked the twenty five years ago this color was able to kind of like obviously like they have some technical knowledge, but they were able to kind of just like, I was just really good at computer stuff so anyway, i'm sitting on the national IT help desk and it's like, wow, that work differently back then. Uh, they said he was a po p 3 i map kind of deal。 Uh, for anyone that doesn't know what what's that?

yes. So when I was listening to this, that the first thing that really shot out to me was that, like I hadn't heard, the acronis pop or pop three for male is so long because it's essentially a dead protocol. Like, I don't know you, you might not be old enough, but pop three used to be like my email client would go to the server and get the emails and then then they were no longer on the server.

And if I deleted them locally off my email client, they were gone forever. I map was the first protocol that I was like, we keep an archiver. Like your mailbox stays on the server, and then you keep a sink of IT locally. I completely forgot about the nightmare that was pop email. And the second he said at a like trigger me and I always said I was having these like flashbacks of being like accidently deleting something or like losing a laptop or a harsh life corrupting and just losing all your emails I was like, all god, remember those days .

it's the computer equivalent of, like, L, S, D. Stays in your body for a decade, and I can show back up at any time. You can have a sort of like flashback acid trip acceptance for pop three. And remembering that there is a type of email delivery that's not stored back redundantly on the server, I also feel like d is ptsd that feels like that feels conspicious sly, like you could sell that as a service today like the there's like a type of email or it's like vanish mode, like vanish mode, like vange. You could just revert fifteen years to a much older standard you're like for ninety.

eighty months. Hey, like let's just follow. Let's just pull that way. Like what did microsoft pay for slack? Because slack is just irc chats, put a new a fancy look and call the court communications to all. It's still like I guarantee that if you took the source code for slack IT still has the prot like I bet lot of the base code is still the open source rc code because you use hashtag gs for channels, they use like ads for people like everything still the same. And i'm looking at my slacks window right now being like I pay so much money in for corporate lack when it's really just a private irc server.

I like this idea. The thing I ve been really enjoying about hotline hat is that a lot of the calls naturally are gonna bias to being older, that they happen to the past because those are the types calls that people are willing to share publicly this APP in fifteen years ago. Who cares if I share IT is sort of like them the crux of IT. Um but i'm also getting a glimpse into all of this cool old tech that I was wasn't really either around for or wasn't IT really paying attention to at the time. And I really like this idea that you could just like resurrect and old standard and being like dear sharks, this is this is my new business.

It's like vanish mode yeah but for email.

exactly it's pretty good.

Would be like.

okay OK OK it's called pop three no.

you to give you a new name I see became slack. You can have slike you have to give IT some fancy marketing names so that when my gives you a billion dollars for IT that you like.

yeah I think vanish, vanish is pretty good. Will workshop at later. It'll be fine. Well, higher and extremely excited sive branding agency or something to help us name IT.

And I just kind of a memory sales force spot lack, not microsoft. So I can note all of that microsoft .

conversation IT was sales force on the island.

See you see on the with all the rest of the crypto .

billionaire actually see on the crypto islet.

But yeah, welcome to online hack journey and chartist but will be in back and it's all because of our wonderful sponsor delete me. Now delete me offers a kind of a privacy service to help cleans your personal information out of certain data brokers. But we can talk a bit, bit more about that later. But just big thank you to them for making the show. The hot land tax year is possible .

and 呀 你 need to 吃。

And the truth, I kick to the next one.

I think you kick on down to the next one.

Hey, guys, love the show. The story of Michael robby reminded me of a time I broke the internet for a relatively well known midsize marketing company. I wasn't even working for set marketing company.

I was working for a tiny start up, renting office space and importantly, ban with from the marketing company. People who work in tech may not realize how heavily startups will lean on google sheet for their entire text tag. IT slow as hell, full of security vulnerabilities and most relevant to our purposes, extremely easy to break.

But IT is free and very accessible databases. Administration capabilities might be in short supply, but you can move data between large google spread sheet with a five minute youtube videos worth of google up script, which is basically just java script. Such was the case with this tiny startup, our entire text stack was a Frankensteinian laboring of google sheet, collecting, analyzing, transforming and storing data with google outscore .

pt big ups for Franklin tinian lab on yeah I voice conversion really answer for me.

It's really nice when someone with a way with words plugs them into an ai. It's a Frankensteinian laboring like u. One of the tables .

who stored information about press releases we were generating for our clients, one of the properties we wanted to report on was whether or not google had index the live URL of a publish press release that's easy enough to figure out, but not programmatically at scale. Being the lucky go getter that I was, I attempt to to solve this problem.

I learned that if you create a function in google, ABS ript IT is available to use in a cell formula inside google sheet. I wrote a function which I thought could scrape google S E R P to test for whether or not the press release URL had been picked up. I then loaded the formula in the google sheet, similar to how would work in excel and copy IT down all twenty thousand rows.

Feeling very proud of myself, what I didn't know is that, first of all, google is pretty protective of programmatic scraping of the serbs. So I wasn't even getting the information. I thought I was. More importantly, I didn't realize that google sheet refresh es every five minutes or so, which means our Frank in database was paying google servers twenty thousand or so times every five minutes.

Not only did that clock the network with traffic, effectively dosing the entire building from the inside, but we found out that google and our IP address shutting down our access to all google services in a digital marketing company. They called in someone much smarter than me, and they managed to fix IT by the following day. I now know proper S, Q, L.

Dosing a dose us we dose them. I like that and we're calling a dauzier and start calling a dosing.

Yeah I kind of els right. You them a little bit like IT feels like it's a it's like not a thing you want to have happened to you. Yeah okay.

The a dose of the Frankensteinian lab and .

the new aborn because you paint the google server twenty thousand times every five minutes and google went not on our fucking and watch and just shut everything down.

okay.

So working for amid size marketing company was not he's working in the office of insight marketing company first started tup um but for some .

reason doing marketing related communications press releases like he was in the is a text basic of marketing for sure.

okay.

And of those like we own an agency and we have a tch idea now we have a start up inside of our office, yes, had access to their .

like their databases. M was clearly been tasked with moving things around inside of those database and in this case, trying to figure out whether google had index alive. You are that we were sent out in a press release um was what this collar was trying to do, right? Okay.

sir, like searching results. So just trying to see if I was in the if a robot had index .

IT got IT be .

a bunch of other ways to get IT.

But okay. And so they create this, created a google function, created a function inside of sheet that they put into a cell in which had twenty thousand rows in IT. And I understanding that correctly.

if you and I have the same understanding, so for not understand.

they were both off the page, they loaded IT in and then apparent so help me understand, as they run this and IT runs this little scraping checking twenty thousand times, like what happened then that's work.

Yeah yeah sure. So IT sounds like they defined the function in the like sheet itself. So it's like a global function will call IT for people that program.

And once they have bedded IT in a cell, essentially any time you load the sheet up, open IT up, make changes like do anything massive, anything that causes the cells to recomputation would immediately mean that every cell that has a call to that function would get called again. So and because the functions not like, is there three special places afterwards? If not, then ceiling, the third one and rounded or something like that.

Like it's not some basic function that's like easy and quick to computer, but it's like create a socket to the internet, go out and get this piece of data past the return, do all this stuff. It's like it's it's A A tangible task for each one of those function calls. So every time the page gets refreshed or change, the compute boom IT trigger twenty thousand of these massive functions. And importantly.

whatever that function was, IT pains google servers. So this is happening locally on their system. No one gives a crap, but it's calling to google server.

So they go, who the heck is calling us twenty thousand times every five minutes? Shut IT down. yeah. The funny thing is.

I can't believe like that actually seems like such a low amount of traffic that I am surprised that google would actually have caught that. Like we think about google traffic, two thousand active connections is like not .

something every second we're talking. There's an order or magnus de more yeah yeah. But maybe once you doing IT, they're like it's probable .

it's probably related to they probably have like an antiscorbutic system in place and IT was like they IT trigger some form of detection that automatically hot flag them when I was stopped IT. So yeah yeah um google sheet powerful but also chaotic. Actually the whole google platform love IT to death use at all the time, but IT can constantly have problems in IT.

We have someone to talk about on the next chat chat. There's been so much stuff with google lately, but we will say this for the next one. Oh.

so get this touch into that. Just a hair .

just for fun.

When Jordan, I were in vagus for death, kn was when the ftc, and I call that stuff started with google like and we were actually just hanging out chatting with somebody in line at one of the talks who was a google employee, right? There's remember and he was like, yeah, we all got an email this morning being like, don't talk about this, don't say anything to anybody .

we're sending their own our big prosperous being like k just like pointing at them being like, you know that we're like yeah look like yeah we're not hiding anything. There's no room of people I want to deceive above being a member of the press less than any any room of death con.

Yeah exactly. So anyway, that's that's the teaser for that discussion is that we we were we were in at defcon and that of all like god announced. The funny thing for me is and this is disappear, decide. But if you're all listening to the show you used to, this is google stock didn't take a beating from that for like a week after like IT was public knowledge that the ftc was going after them for like monopolists get a prize stuff. And literally one of the first things I did was checked the share Price on monday, and I was like going up and then in the financial news, IT broken, like the thursday that this was happening, and then always said in the stock up pumped. And I was like, how did the financial news be like five or six days behind, like the real news saying we are decide, but that, no, what happened?

I'm so intrigued. histories. We did that whole big episode.

Chrome and its connection to advertising, and whether or not this cross pollination, because they not. And now the D. R, J is telling google to sell chrome. Next chat .

check yeah next chat check like we got .

I got takes.

I get hot takes. I think rome is a sacrificial lam.

I think it's an negotia think so too. That's matic.

I think they're just like, you know what, we're got to give you some things. So we're going to give you chrome and and it's just like we're not going to break up the display ads and then not working the search and the whole pool. That is our perspective monopoly but will give me crime like art, not for profit, essentially free use product that that like sell is that they already White lab allowed .

to most other browse sers on the internet like I think um there's a world I know that there's a push also for the search platform to be functionally White lavelle like a of course it's this like fly.

We will argument that we've now reached a point where IT is impossible for another party to enter the ecosystem regardless of funds because the traffic is simply all in google and any competing product will just be worse because of that lack of product. So to me saying like we need you to sell off your browser is like what do they want that more or less than having the White label their own search technology like IT. It's not about what's it's IT is definitely like monopolistic consumer protection argument but is also an negotiation. And I don't know i'm trying to be what who wants what um yeah yeah .

completely agree think that we should stop this.

Back to the hot .

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This is one that I actually like because because IT runs consistently, it's not like to do one sweep of the internet. You give them in the nineteen dollars or whatever, and it's done. They're constantly monitoring the data sources, looking for your information and requesting as removal in real time. So for me, that's a huge value. So you sign up.

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Now back to the show, back to IT. The one of the thing that I think we should hit on is what we're in direction. Land here.

Let's not stop. Is you send me the email that came into the hole line hacked account about the dynamic ad insertion. Do you remember saying this to me? You put a screen shot in with the audio files.

So apparently we were in the last high line hat. We were having a conversation about like cars moving to a subscription model for functionality and stuff. And apparently somebody out there in the world got served an add for a lexus car with a subscription service for some of its functionality, like at the end of the episode. So so they emailed in and were like all my god the chefs kiss was that I got served add by lexis a forest subscription based car immediately after listening to your discussion about IT. So so that's for reaching out.

That's brand energy every time that is like we don't for anyone that's curious because this is probably one of the few shows where people would be compelled by this host. Red ads, we do see what they are. Dynamic inserted ads, we typically don't.

There is a set of criteria that you get the flag and then the act just kind of happen because of different advertisers will pay to advertise different people in different geographic regions or who've expressed different interests, which is a really round about wave, saying we don't really know what goes into those dynamic non host read ads. And the majority, the time when we get a funny email about IT, it's not worth talking about. But when you when you should talk, he did seat subscriptions in an episode and then an address for a new car .

that has he didn't subscriptions you yeah yes, from U K.

Thanks for in this show I really get me through my a my long commute to face once a week um conversions trying to submit a story into hot hat enjoy the 说 um my story stays back to things the late nineties um maybe early two thousands I forget uh and I was reminded of recently because of all of the year the noise around um a asist tickets to the curve recently always is being such a big band tickly in U K。 A meter late nine cities and um being A A teenager that time um really got into wanting to to play IT all but those are being teenager that time I remember no a little money and I wanted a particular type of um accused is out to play about um and just really struggled to save up the ah the funds for and um again like a lot teenager that time I played a lot of games as well. Um let someone can so who is much more to pcs and understanding how they built and how they worked um and so on my first quest trying to find a uh I get all supply so that I emulate is about this uh I came across a website after looking for ways and weeks uh you have found website that was uh I had a competition running and um a part of the exact specifics round IT now looks of how IT work but IT was something long lizer of IT was a multiple questions that you had to answer um instead of the shortest time possible so they they also had you right um and they had to uh and you had to want within in the shortest time possible and I was still dial up inside at the time so everything was a bit painstaking this slow but I remember um the prize of a guitar. You got a certain selection of guitar from the the Price would be announced every week so there's a winner every week and much I tried to win this cats these questions I can never do IT in the time frame um and I would have a little board at the end of the week you'd see .

in the top five people in the shortest time and who is .

the winner and I could never win IT he could never win IT legally in a few weeks when passing was never gonna en but I say I used to play other games at the time and um remember playing uh maya ying three day in particular I I wants to finished IT um I then started to think, well how could I how could I uh beat the game uh in a different way um and find some cheat for and uh remember I got hold of A A memory traina maybe cause something different but the premises was IT you could play the game and if you had say a hundred amo.

You would run this program and you tell you that you had one hundred and one hundred bullets or hundred munitions remain and then you would you know, right off a few rounds in the game and pats you go to ninety and then you go back to this program. So right now I got ninety right? And then you do IT again.

And seventy go back and seven and after a eventually will come back to you and say, I where this value is being held in the program, memory and IT would let you adjust IT so you could then go into the program. So right now i've got thousand dollars and I would adjust the in the in the in the running program. So I was I playing this game, so I thought I wonder if this would also apply to my brothers. Um so I went back to this uh competition page and I tried answering the questions and I think that like the the top school, the the lowest number, the lowest time someone had to something like uh eleven seconds and I was getting something like eighty ninety and so I went through the the the round of questions of about five questions and I can like twenty two seconds and I put in the memory train and focused IT on international floor the time because he was and said, right you know twenty .

two could be an netscape now they throw back .

now my cat and .

my back to IT again because like point one, point two seconds we back in but only one point to IT did that a few times and IT came back and said, I found the memory value so hh, well, was to go right and so I put in, I think IT was like ten point two seconds didn't want to over regit didn't want to make IT seem unusual isc put in ten point two doc end rounds of questions and sure enough up on the screen, pop, well done. Ten point two seconds and so my names went to the top of the letter board and there are set so the rest of the week until the friday or saturday when he was announced. And then I look back on the site n and one my choice her have gets on um so I went ahead and chose the it's hard that I really wants IT i'm sitting here .

pensively waiting there's another two minutes left in this and it's like, did he get IT .

and and then the FBI showed .

up is their check and baLance instead .

if you don't do a guitar solo, were arresting you.

your ten point two seconds to do an amazing guitar.

Well, to shed harder than you've ever read, like the devil chAllenging youtube, a fdl contest.

shoney read electrochromic guitar. And IT completely got delivered to me. And I was I was reminded about IT specifically recently because that that that guitar itself, I still have to this day.

it's a trophy.

Yeah you never get rid that because you .

can get rid that. Good time.

No say I do still look at the occasion and I I do feel like guilt um of how I got IT uh but at the same time I hope you know that they bow out a um but at the time remember um the the my my girlfriend at the time um let's say that one of the things SHE liked about me because I could play IT all will be a really bad you right never got to already um but that girl from became my wife and we now have two kids and yeah I thought about day because they have guitar lessons and one of them now takes my guitar has been all restricted takes at the school for guitar this and so I hope in some way is what the quite this all this way I attained IT um I hope you know whoever was in charge that back doesn't mind too much considering IT I think I went to a good call and did didn't good in the wealth so as my story um i'll probably have that guitar for a few decades yet and uh if so often just look at this thing yeah there's a little good that can come for about thanks guys really appreciate the show and 类似的。

Got down. That's awesome, man.

I GTA say every time we do one of these episodes IT makes me like like the the people who listen to apart always seems like there's a lot of like moral consideration and moral growth that has happened in the people. Like a lot of people are telling us these stories being like, you know what? And I still look back on IT with remorse about the problem and evil that I did.

Like there's been it's, I don't know. It's nice. I like to hear that. You know, like we're all kids at one point we are and then to learn a moral immorally develop from that so important and .

yeah I really like that. Um I was I was ready at the moment when he flagged at such a tiny detail and no one go back to the start of the story.

But we like at the site where they were doing this quiz years later, I got bought out i'm sure the person who knew on the got a bunch money it's like, oh, you followed, you followed IT there is a sense of moral capability for this link cool, acoustic, electric guitar, ironically, which i'm kind of shopping for one. I feel so seen in this call. There's like five parts of IT. I am like, I think we should be friends totally.

You want to go about beer.

it's totally. But that he had been like, every time you looked at this guitar, I thought about the site and he followed that the site had gotten saw. This is very funny to me. Um I want to build up to, I want to get to the ending where the girlfriend likes that he played guitar.

He learned to play guitar on the hat guitar um but to go back to the beginning um a wasim tickets being the thing in the right guys that made him remember this story because he loved to asses when he is Young and so much to go to that tour really with a bunch of people that are nostril of asis from about the same time time period. And i'm like i'm a medium I was a medium fan in high school, I would say. But I the thing I won't do is miss a bunch of people going to see oasis in mexico. There's no way IT won't be really, really like I want to watch a asis, I want to watch you to watch a wash is going to be really good.

The detail left out that you just dropped in there is that you're going with british people and that makes more sense because like I feel like asis was like a seven out of ten here yeah were like eleven at a ten there.

Big deal. A very like great people and i'm very excited to go to see IT with them. Um so I am right there with yeah so color.

There is a website that had a competition running for a free guitar trivia IT was time to trivia. There was a winner every week and he had to you really, really fast. People are finishing this thing in tense seconds called us Young. They're not clock in less than twenty, so they crack OpenAI, I was googling for this during the call, and I found a post about, like does our generic training hack game value tools as a few of them, game wizard, freeport o memory scanner, infinity machine, game buster, four point o um i'm curious how this worked with a web browser that was the like technical side of this. I didn't totally rock because that sounds like .

these read RAM. Let's talk. Well, as I worked, yeah, sure. Let's talk both things. Let's talk about like these tools, infinity, these sharks and whatever all of these RAM scanner that are looking for persistent values in the in the memory. That's kind of not too to similar to something like what a game shark was doing for you on like a whatever can board yeah like so much like I used to be able to to pop open binaries and hacks and like look for values in them, like things that were hard coded in and modify them. Like there wasn't a lot of as long as you didn't cause overflows and stuff, there wasn't a lot of control for that stuff.

And yeah, I honestly like when I when he first arted talking about using a memory scanner, I immediately became a bit critical being like I wonder how that's gonna work just given the fact that it's kind of any like an a synchronous web conversation. It's not something that's inactive memory. But I guess the browsers probably submitting the response back to the server. But to further the year question is i'm rambling, is your web rus is using a boatload ARM like weren't probably chrome right now? I bet if you opened up activity monitor on your mac, crime is the single largest user of memory at this moment.

So those values could be stored in leaders IT would therefore ally make sense of those values were actually stored the ran, which made impossible by that tool.

Yeah the thing the thing like for me, like maybe I was different back then, but i'm just thinking about how many processes are in modern brother. Like i've got chrome open and i've probably have to say it's a slow day for me. I've probably have eighteen tabs .

open this a chill eighteen .

is eighteen sub processes running each with their own memory black buffers. I assume back then, if I remember, like the pre tab web, like you had a window open for an explore nets cape and that was your web browser. Maybe like I think originally, you couldn't even have multiple windows open if i'm like, we're going and so far back in my history here that on my memory is fAiling me, but i'm pretty sure like the original net capes and in an explore you one window, which means that there would be like one memory buffer or like memory stack that you could go through. So I could see, I could see that obviously worked.

So it's like kind of a creative way to do IT IT wouldn't have been my first thought about IT way to do IT is given that its web and IT is a synchro for me, I probably would have tried to intercept the submission results and and supply a false result there, rather than modify a result value in a variable in and then have to send that. So anyway, just interesting, fascinating solution to IT. And yeah.

their words and words. He was inspired by duke new 3d， one of the first games I ever had on PC. We got a wasis. We've got duc 3d and then the other one was， I didn't do any hacky stuff, but I was just reflecting on the fact that in my mind, the first purchase I would really like sweated over and put the money in like I was I was a guitar and I I know a lot of people who like thirteen or fourteen a parent had the like wisdom to say, like, note, you want this bad enough.

We're not gonna pay for if you wanted, you got to figure that out on your own and you're just going to sort of like teach yourself how savings works and how you know put screen away a little money every week can build up to something bigger ah and it's making me wonder what's the wild dest thing a teenage boy did to save up money for the target because I bet it's a lot narrower than either of our stories. There is is a big motivation. Yeah.

I didn't I I trying to think what my first big purchase like that was IT probably would have been something sporting related skateboard. He was definitely a skateboard, yes. And I bought, I bought one. I think I saved up and I bought IT in when I was like, seven yeah.

that was about the damage. Is the guitar moo .

eight? Yeah, and you know, you know how I raised that money, raised that money, Scott, not stealing them on the internet. I raised IT by collecting discarded cans and trading them in at five cents of pop. I raised hundreds of dollars to buy the first cape board.

I works. That's pretty good. That's a pretty good one. Top can I worked in the the parking lot of the local carnival in the city where we're from.

Go there you go ah it's really fucking to you that you like have a kid that is learning to play guitar on this guitar that you hacked when you were a kid that impressed your girlfriend, that you could play guitar that then became your wife like I know it's a little silly hacky story that kind of weird way becomes a little bit of a life story. And I didn't think we were gone to get any of those on this call. Um they really appreciate this one. I really enjoyed this.

Yeah, me too. Me too.

My name is Jordan. I used to be into the B, B, S, S. Scene in the early nineties.

Bulletin board services kind of like a proprietary old school forum. Think about .

like that um mainly calling local numbers so uh cities and answer around me and connecting to uh various bb s is sometimes chatting with this set up uh other times playing the games that we call doors on the like the tax based uh games on the B B S um and then H I was there mostly though for uh the wares. So if I could find any B B S S that we're offering, uh parody download. I really love that. So like uh games like doing things like that. I had first acquired uh through uh B B S.

how long I took to downtown. The low over dialogue .

I cannot imagine, I think about pivoting and M P three and being like, well, plug in the generator. It's going to be up all night.

Enter the mid ninety, nineteen, ninety five, I was six years old. Uh, I was using windows. And things that kind of taking a big shift from BBS is really pretty much disappear. And everything was now kind of online. And that parenting scene IT moved on line.

So one of the big change changes there, just to give a little history on this because I also had friends that were where's junkets when I came off a bulletin board services IT kind of moved into partially in the news groups, which was like a other old school um protocol that we don't anymore, that maybe we rebranded and launched himself for billions of.

But IT also became one of the times we're like public facing hacking became big because a lot of people would hack FTP servers and servers that had FTP and web servers and then store the wares and hidden folders and in hidden on this series. So a lot of there was a lot of private services. But given the legality, the content, a lot of people that were big and distribution IT actually spent a lot of time hacking to find private repositories. But this stuff so just some history.

No, it's good.

Uh, where I kind of used that a lot was on A F, C and uh acquiring files V F T P. So what would happen is that was uh a number of channels on the R, C, including uh one cup where is six, six, six and a number of other ones uh both uh publicly accessible and private channels um and we would use F T P clients to access the um the the libraries of files um if you could recall. And this isn't the case anymore.

I think there used to be a lot you can go to a lot of domains and just type in F T P at the domain and 点 com rather than W W W。 And sometimes you could just you could log in with no user name and no pass. You could simply press enter on both.

This is true. One of the default settings for a lot of, like, especially unique service. Step back in the days that they come with.

A handful services be enabled being pop three, mail, I, T, P, FTP, telnet before S S H and a lot of even now today, if you go to a lot of domain hosts like people that deal with DNS hosting, the default package of sub domains is like W W W F T P mail. Like a lot of those services tie to the original um subdomain structures. So like almost every major company that had like microsoft 点 com， also had an FTP of microsoft 点 com that you .

would immediately .

fall into a directory where you could sometimes upload a file if you're in that T P line um and read the files from within there。 So what would happen as people would often use those as dumping grounds for paroe files, games can neo cracks and when I um and eventually those would be discovered by the yet beans that run those uh web servers uh and and the access would be locked up um but what was really coveted was the uh private server so those would be and IT mean his they set up um A F T P server with uh for pacy in which case there were very well like particularly ly organized often directories by theme name or by year uh directory within those ones for all of the applications and then within them the cracks that go along with them eeta。 Uh so this was prior to any anything like a torrent or something like that.

Um everything was on F T P. Where those got traded was on the R C, the internet. Really I used mark to access that, which is a windows client.

Um so uh back in ninety five I was sixteen years old very much into this very much loving and you know was a hobby of mine. Uh but uh, acquiring those private services was very highly. Cabinet ones was tRicky.

Uh, you had to trade and trade up or you had to know the right people and beyond the right teams and things like that. I wasn't into any of that had so much as, uh, I was running a little bit of A A scam of sorts where um I would log into all of the channels at once that I knew. So where is six? six? Six of others, probably ten wear s channels. And I would I would dispatch a message. I would change my name importantly to a girl's name um IT was almost always Jessica um IT just seemed like a sweet inside girl that Young men like myself might like to help out.

Jordan becomes Jessica.

Yeah, yeah. That's funny. I don't have the a wash style parallels here, but it's extremely funny.

I do. I do love the fact that he mentioned something that I completely forgot existed that like teams, like I remember, there were like organizations of, like self organizing groups of people that used to steal off here, and they had, like, you'd see there, little like act and stuff at the beginning of the file name. This is all coming back to me.

This is so long, some of that stuff is still in piracy like you still see like names and kind of brands behind IT.

Like hey, let mass larson's and make sure that we put our handle on IT. So like it's easy to track how much stuff we've stolen.

Let's do some crimes. Well, let's make sure that we have a brand we're building.

We do IT leave a business guard.

but we IT ally.

And I would post a message to all the check out once, and the message would be composed, would be a something like, um, I use cute F T P. For work and need to access IT today. But every time I started, IT keeps crashing in IT says, Q F, T P died. I N I is missing or corrupt. So all I would need to say, and I would add, that a friend or colleague told me to ask you guys here, because they you I know that software immediately I would get like ten or more transfers like d ccs is what they call them.

This is brilliant to say IT.

Now yeah, I I think i'm following what's going on and it's extremely funny this there is a honeywell. It's a honeypot.

Direct transfers to my account of someone else is cup that I N I ile.

You know what A I and I file is? No, I don't, kay. It's like initialization. It's like a settings file. Essentially, it's plain text, but it's where a piece of software will save a bunch of user settings. And I think notably in this case, it's where people will save favorite servers in their log in entities for IT.

Um and then what's contain within that and I found the plain text list of the F T P domain, the logging n name and the uh password for all of these private accounts, including also their anonymous es um so I would suddenly have tens of fresh new para uh F T P sites.

I would then get a second flood of messages from all the same people um kind of uh which just prepared with so many of sciences like they would realize only after sending me the I N I found what was contained with in IT because they just gave me the keys to everything um at which point I would just kind of disappear and go over a couple weeks just enjoying my cash of whatever I got you using those sites um and then I could go back in a couple weeks later uh and then dude again uh so that's uh my little story about uh software piracy seen in the midnight ty gas um and IT was quite a fine time. I'd love to hear um about other people uh from that time or in particular like about baby access and stuff. I think there's a lot of interesting things.

There are love you show. Thank you. But guys by Jessica .

biel sica hope you have a good one.

We too, would like to hear more of those stories. If you have a call, if you have a story, if you have something you want to share. A hotline hacked 点 com got an email。 We got a phone number.

Uh, this rules. Okay, so, so my sense of this is in the ninety nine, the piracy ecosystem had had to do with people sharing different servers on irri channels. Some of them were a private servers, which were the real world rolls rice of these things. And then other ones were, I guess, people just uploading and downadup stuff to like company's servers, hoping that they could get the files up and back down before and had min noticed IT. Am I understanding that right?

yes. So wares was shared in lots of places, B, B, S, S, news groups in private transfers between people. But FTP servers like the nineties were like the FTP era, because I was like, everybody had an FTP server, a windows server installation, like, almost headed on by default.

I think so. So many websites and web servers and corporate servers that were web facing typically had an FTP server, and some of them might have not disabled guest credentials I might have enabled because I made IT easier for them to use IT for whatever thing. And they weren't thinking about cb security because he was one thousand nine hundred ninety three.

yeah. Security and convenience. We always talk about this. It's like, yeah, the lack of security is extremely convenient and convenient stuff is extremely insecure.

But you also do remember that like band with in that era, like A T one line was like, I want to say t one was like one point five negatives, but I would have been like a massive commercial line to get for little business. So it's like a lot of those servers probably SAT on private band with the private pipe. So like of course, they're gonna notice when they are daily band with on their server goes from like eight mags to like sixty terror gig bites. And it's like so of course they get caught like the second share.

Exploiting at the other thing is like the private service for the people who either worked at companies and set them up underneath the discretion of like hidden away from the Operations, or even people that had large home pipes, like I actually know a person that had a private FTP and IT was member only and you had to get access. You had grads and all the rest of IT and and they set IT up at great expense to themselves because they added by hard driver rays and set Operator rays in the server. All the rest of that they set IT up just so these because people would then give them the weirs.

Instead of them having to go look for IT, their server is filled up with what they wanted. They would take whatever they needed, delete stuff, and then people would fill IT up with more stuff. And IT was like, IT was an interesting, interesting generation to be in big business in the software industry, because I was super easy to steal off.

interesting. So these people would set up these private servers for some cocktail of altruism, for the community and just self interest. People are just going to upload all this free stuff that I want to have for my self, and they'll upload to my service that I control links to and credentials to get access to. These servers were precious in this community because you knew that they all the cool shit on them, and you wanted to get access this color.

I love the turn in the story where it's like, so anyway, now that i've set all this up, I was running a game of sorts and in this case, this was that they would log in all these channels, said their user name as a girl's name, which was always Jessica, and then tell the little story of, like, hi there, i'm not from this world. Someone told me that this is where I should come with a question, and I need help getting access to this thing. Can anybody help me?

yes. yeah. Play off the levels of others. Like if you grew up in that generation too, right? You need to remember that you've grown up with fairy tales and put prince charming and stuff like that. So it's like everybody dies. You know massy and perspective of themselves is that you're going to save the dams and distress.

So you put on the mass array of the danes and distress like if there's anything I know about Jordan, was that after death, con, Jordan was very intrigued by the social like community and stuff like that. And this is a social engineering hack like stealing self, whatever everybody was doing IT. This person figured out a way to get a bunch of people who valued a ton of private information and like, earned these credentials and access to these servers, to just put them into a direct file transfer to them by just pretending to be the dams and distress.

Yeah, I use the term honey pot during one of the great like I use the term honey pot, I think because it's apt. But I also just like the idea that that term typically associated with like spycraft and people kind of like like a honeypot typically is not just the name Jessica, that's a very low bar for onion p sure.

The tonality he is, i'm sure. Added to IT.

IT was a character, very, is very short. So they play this character, they tell this story. A friend of a colleague, you asked me to ask you, everyone starts sending over these I N I files to contain the domain to the private server, the log in and then the password, and they go, here you go, my lady.

Here's what? Here's the help that you need. Oh no, I just gave you the log in credentials and i'm reflecting now on the fact that you are almost certainly not Jessica rats. Yes, yes. okay.

Pretty, pretty good. I is. I assume the way the scan worked is I put this sad story into the general charter, into one of the charts five heroes show up to save me. And then the next response to my message is somebody being like you're an asshole like put on a steel credentials and then the five heroes read that message and go o shit, I just got scammed and then I send IT a exploit field message being like you prick .

oh that's a good read in .

the public chat.

Ah ah ah so the window of time yeah yeah.

yeah the people who were immediately like, oh, Jessica needs help. I have like A Q F T P that I I feel have mine yeah I would like to be the .

first one to help Jessica go .

Jessica and then a minute later.

someone's like, that's not Jessica.

exactly.

That's Jordan.

That's Jordan who is stealing your information.

That's pretty good. This is a good one, man. And the one thousand nine hundred and ninety sounded, I guess I can't really say that. It's I was about to say like I out sounded like a really different ecosystem. And then in the last call, we were talking about pump fund and mem coin streamers trying to but like it's like it's always been a weird, crazy mess. It's just the shape of the mess changes in such fascinating ways.

Well, I saw, I don't know this is real, but apparently some kid was like, live on twitter. Something created a fake alona coin, like sona based meme coin, and then rugged IT. So he pulled like, like, drove up the value and then sold all of his coins, and like a left at thirty grand.

And then the way the community has gotten back at him was by pumping IT even more. And now the coin's value is like ten million dollars something. So the kids like, oh my god, I only took thirty grand when I could have had ten million and i'm just like this whole community makes .

no sense to me yeah I was literally what I was talking about. I think it's the two banks kid is is my understanding of and then everyone to show up the Price of its like eighty five million dollars or something. I like you're .

a fool ah you and it's like this .

child made twenty thousand dollars. There's nothing dollars. There's nothing you can do. Like it's like, yes, opportunity cost if you just held on a little longer, it's like the child made twenty thousand dollars and that's before we even get into what does that mean that there is an online service where children can do financial fraud? What's that mean?

What are we going to do about that? Teacher, i've been .

working on A I Jordan has been working on a on a meme coin project that i'm .

very excited to share.

I didn't say, wo wow.

wo no one .

said anything about evil. There's new ones is all i'm trying to say, but we will talk about that on a later episode. This has been great.

All wait for the hot line hat call from AI Jordan where he cops to all of his bad and talks about the immoral development that he's had sense yeah.

So anyway, I was running sort of a scm that turn our way through the call that's going to come real early in this call. Let me tell you. H that's great bubble.

Talk about that in a different episode for now. I think that's another hot line hacked in the bucket. Genuinely, if you got a story that you want to share, strange, tell attack.

True, hack. Computer confession. IT can be from the nineties, the two thousands of twenty tens. You can have done IT. Yesterday we want to hear about IT go to hot line hack dot com email phone number. We just wanted hear .

from you if you want to be a part of A I Jordan, a shot evil empire that just takes internet services from the eighties and nineties, rebandaged them and resells them to corporate clients. Give us a shout to how we had to calm.

or if you're adventure capitalist, feel in Lucy gucci today and just feels like investing in audio pop three. But it's an APP now with the eyes, with the eye, get at us. We want to hear from you and you'll hear all about exit amp simulator, the hit new meme coin on the next episode of a hot line hack.

Thanks for hanging out.

Thanks for hanging out. Will catch in the next one.

Marketing is hard, but i'll tell a little secret IT doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great.

You love the host. You seek IT out and download IT. You listen to IT while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom.

Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great lisser like yourself with podcast advertising from lives in ads.

Choose from hundreds of top podcasts, offering host endorsements or rn na reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with libin ads, go to libin ads dot com. That's L I B S Y N as that come today. Marketing is hard, but i'll tell you a little secret IT doesn't have to be.

Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host.

You seek IT out and download IT. You list into a while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast aad.

Did I get your attention? You can reach great lessons like yourself with podcast advertising from lives in ads, choose from hundreds of top podcasts, offering host endorsements, or run na reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with lib sin ads, go to libin ads dot com. That's L I B S Y N as that come today.

Marketing is hard, but i'll tell a little secret IT doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great.

You love the host. You seek IT out and download IT. You list into a while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom.

Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast add. Did I get your attention? You can reach great lessons like yourself with podcast advertising from lives in ads.

Choose from hundreds of top podcasts, offering host endorsements or rn na reproduced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with lib sin ads, go to libin ads dot com. That's L I B S Y N. And that come today.