Re: "The Net"

[Ray Arachelian <sunder@escape.com>]

On Thu, 3 Aug 1995, Dr. Dimitri Vulis wrote:

> I once was a consultant at a small financial services firm, and a (young,
> disturbed) user was going around playing stupid pranks on unattended PCs. I
> mandated the use of screenblankers that kicked in after 3 minutes of inactivity
> and required a password to get back. The user would then reboot the PCs; some
> password was needed to get onto the LAN, but he'd mess with the local
> config.sys's. He eventually got fired and I do something else.

Unfortunatly, the lusers here are brain-dead and don't care about 
anything.  They don't even know the first things about DOS.  We do have a 
couple of geniuses who think they know Windoze (or want to learn it) who 
occasionally play with the icons and groups: one such genious once closed 
a group window, then claimed someone "erased it."  What a dork!  The 
worse is that I have to clean up after them no matter how stupid they are.


> I guess byte values>255 are the IP equivalent of 555. Better than 127.0.0.1 -
> someone might telnet to 127.0.0.1, then ask mgm/ua whose address this is. :)

Well, the loopback is only a single IP address.  If they used that, every 
net.entity would have the same IP.  Not too good. :-)

> My 6yr-old's IBM Aptiva comes with a sound board and the software that reads
> English text and pronounces it in much more lifelike manner than the gizmo in
> the movie. That gizmo sounded annoyingly computer-like, but had intonations
> obviously coming from a human actor.

Nope, sounded right the like the Apple MacinTalk II Pro voices.  They've 
got some really cool voices, some even human sounding.  Check it out if 
you get a chance.  Real intonations: you can hear the voice flex, etc.  
There are some voices that follow songs or other tones.  (i.e. Big Ben, 
Bells, etc.)  They sound like they're singing.

> The notion is very realistic (but the flashy displays in the movie were not).
> At the recent PC Expo at the Javitz Center in NYC, there were tens of PCs
> running various Web browsers to try out. No one was watching over most of them.
> I entered the URL telnet://uunet.uu.net:119, and sure enough, got connected.
> It accepted 'IHAVE', but I was too lazy to type in an entire Usenet article.
> I (and the heroine) could have telnetted to someone's port 25 just as easily.

Yep.  Those be the same machines where I dropped my Cypherpunx PC EXPO 
V2.0 disks.  Just left a few dozen infront of each machine as I used 
them.  Sort of the sleight of hand that theives use to lift stuff; only I 
didn't take, I put. >;-)


> Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

Say, what's on this BBS anyway... (send me email, enough noise on this list.)

=================================================================93=======
 + ^ + |  Ray Arachelian | Amerika: The land of the Freeh. | \-_    _-/  |
  \|/  |sunder@escape.com| Where day by day, yet another   |  \  --  /   |
<--+-->|                 | Constitutional right vanishes.  |6 _\-  -/_  6|
  /|\  |    Just Say     |                                 |----\  /---- | 
 + v + | "No" to the NSA!| Jail the censor, not the author!|     \/      |
=======/---------------------------------------------------------VI------/
      /  I watched and weeped as the Exon bill passed, knowing that yet /
     / another freedom vanished before my eyes.  How soon before we see/
    /a full scale dictatorship in the name of decency? While the rest /
   /of_the_world_fights_FOR_freedom,_our_gov'ment_fights_our_freedom_/