the joys of net sendSeeing the net send being left on has reminded me about an incident in my first year at Aberystwyth uni, and it's inspired me to stop lurking and register.
As bored first year computer science students we used to use net send quite often to send insulting messages to people. It was never sent to lecturers or sstuff like that since the message body always contained 'Message from (whoever was logged on) at (the time they sent it)'. However, some bright spark must have looked up some documentation on it and realised that instead of typing 'net send (login) (message)' you could type 'net send * (message)' and the message would come up on everyone's computers in the room. There were only a few people in the computer rooms at the time, and they had a great laugh swearing at each other for a few minutes.
Problem was, net send * actually sent the message to everybody who was logged in, all across the campus. Computer rooms, library, halls of residence, lecture theatres where the lecturers were using powerpoint (ie most of them)... the subsequent traffic was enourmous and caused a good few problems for a couple of minutes, as well as some very confused lecturers.
The 3 involved got their accounts suspended for a while and a severe bollocking by all sorts of people, and I think I remember somebody telling me they were fined too, but that sounds a bit suspicious... Anyhow, net send was swiftly axed.
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Sat 25 Oct 2003, 14:55,
archived)
As bored first year computer science students we used to use net send quite often to send insulting messages to people. It was never sent to lecturers or sstuff like that since the message body always contained 'Message from (whoever was logged on) at (the time they sent it)'. However, some bright spark must have looked up some documentation on it and realised that instead of typing 'net send (login) (message)' you could type 'net send * (message)' and the message would come up on everyone's computers in the room. There were only a few people in the computer rooms at the time, and they had a great laugh swearing at each other for a few minutes.
Problem was, net send * actually sent the message to everybody who was logged in, all across the campus. Computer rooms, library, halls of residence, lecture theatres where the lecturers were using powerpoint (ie most of them)... the subsequent traffic was enourmous and caused a good few problems for a couple of minutes, as well as some very confused lecturers.
The 3 involved got their accounts suspended for a while and a severe bollocking by all sorts of people, and I think I remember somebody telling me they were fined too, but that sounds a bit suspicious... Anyhow, net send was swiftly axed.