@tubetime We had a lab of Sun workstations (okay, only five of them, but still) at the university when I was a student and I learned you could cat /dev/audio into a file to record audio, and cat the resulting file back into /dev/audio to play it back.

So of course we'd telnet into other workstations to play sounds on them. It got really stupid until someone snitched and /dev/audio was chmod 0600.

@tubetime I remember when the sysadmins put security into the X sessions by default for new accounts. My friend, who had the older configuration, said “ah, that’s a bunch of nonsense, I don’t need that”

He said that in a lab full of CS students.

So we all remote logged into his computer and popped up Xeyes. And Xclock. And changed his background image. And started half a dozen sessions of Xsnow.

“Okay you guys, very funny”

So we intensified our efforts

@tubetime eventually he was peering through the forest of windows to try to google the magic commands he needed to keep everyone from mucking with his X session

One of the funniest 30 minutes of college

Another friend of mine wrote a script to log into every workstation, change the background to spicy pink, and log out again. He’d run the script and set his own background color to pink, feign ignorance, and then surreptitiously look around to see how many people he got this time

@tubetime when I was in college I would SSH into my roommate's Mac and use the "say" command to announce the wrong time and that programs that weren't running needed attention. I lost my access after that but it was worth it :)

@tubetime Early at Sun we had a script to do this when people were assigning themselves their own IP address and said, "Oh look, .255 is available!" and then proceeded to wack the class C with broadcast crap.

@tubetime Working on CS homework with friends in a Sun lab in 1995, I remember one person finishing early and amusing himself with rsh and play... and then upgrading to a script to copy the .au file over to /tmp because trying to get multiple machines to play a sound at once would end up stuttering due to contention for the fileserver. He had gotten to the point of having random lab machine mooing at each other when we all called it a night.

@tubetime We had something called “rplay” and it enabled a bit more automation - 5pm on Friday we did a broadcast rplay command to play a gong sound on _all_ the workstations to announce Friday drinks!

@tubetime Yup. And when you forgot to check who was actually logged in and did that to your boss instead of the coworker who normally used that machine….

@tubetime

On a network of NeXT machines, recording someone’s own conversation using their own machine and playing it back on their own machine was entertaining. All of a sudden something they’d just said would come out of it.

@tubetime for sun workstations tcpdump equivalent (snoop) had a flag to play a little noise for each matched packet. I had been known to run that on servers people kept in their office.

@tubetime hmm.... I remember that the first release of windows NT had, as a default, snmp enabled amd both read and write set to public. (and some wonder, why Microsoft has a bad name when it comes to security).
Anyway, sending an "administrative down" for the interface was fun - for all but one person.