Acorn on El Reg

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/25/who_me/

Ha! Used to toggle the cassette relay on/off remotely to freak newcomers… Deleted that utility when someone tried it one the filestore – which crashed.

I’ve forgotten which school came up with the wheeze of connecting the Break key to the cassette motor relay, so you could disable it in software. My Beeb still has that modification.
It was known as the <name of school> modification. No, it’s gone.

I do not know of any other school that did this, but my classroom of Beebs all had that mod. The underside of each motherboard was rather spaghetti-like with the other mods to ram and rom switching. ;-)

Maybe I was lucky, but over 10 years and thousands of pupils I never had any problem with network abuse, including with Arcs.

Confession: I hacked and took over a Level3 FileServer and removed everyone’s PRIV status (except my own, of course). It turns out you could peek usernames & passwords in the fileserver – it hadn’t been PROTed.

;-)

There must have been vulnerabilities, but my network was tied down as far as I knew how. With DNFS and NFS 3.60 many of the earlier hacks were much more difficult. I also involved anyone who showed promise in the running of the network – poachers to gamekeepers. ;-)

Looking over my old ROM/EPROM stash I was reminded that I replaced NFS with ENFS, which originated in Oundle School, and was even more secure. That was maybe where the idea of the cassette relay came from as well.

OUNDLE! You star.

Confession: I hacked a Beeb to make passwords visible as users typed them; hunt-and-peck typists didn’t notice and my code reinstalled itself on a reset, so had to be power-cycled to remove it. My computer studies teacher was not best pleased!

Confession: getting my A3000 to log the Econet data stream to memory in real time…

…was why I taught myself ARM code way back when. The ARM2 could easily keep up with the network of Beebs, Compacts, and Masters; and with 2MiB onboard, plenty of buffer space. ;-)

Somebody (Philip Blundell?) did a better network monitor that showed what was happening on screen on real-time (and nicer than the weird codes used by NETMON). Mine didn’t display anything on the screen, the whole point was not to. ;-)

Made it dead easy to get everybody’s passwords. Because Econet was just that secure.

When the CS teacher found out, he wanted the source code, and importantly, wasn’t even slightly bothered. But, then, his favourite tool was the nutcracker called Harry The Hammer. Feel free to bring your own innuendo, it was a boy’s school after all.

When the later IT teacher found out, be told me it wasn’t possible and to stop making up dumb stories.

And there lies an important difference between somebody who understands computers, and somebody who teaches “information technology” to teenagers and only knows how to use the school’s computers because somebody else showed him how.

Anyway, sniffing stuff off the school network. What introduced me to LDMVSFD R13!,{R0-R12,PC}^ because stuff like that is what made the ARM awesome. Especially after the rigamarole of saving/restoring state on the 6502 and stuffing everything onto the stack via the accumulator…

You are all very, very naughty!

But I do like you!

Confession: it’s dead easy to give yourself privs on a non-harddisc FileStore.

Going from memory so this may be wrong…

• Take out all the discs, open the flap, switch it on.
• Log in as SYST (because nobody ever used the FSUSER setting), there is no password. You’re in maintenance mode.
• Insert a blank disc into the left drive, format it (*FSFormat 4 DiscName). By default there will be a SYST account with no password created on that disc.
• Close the flap and return to user mode (*FSMode U).
• Log in as SYST. Then *ADDUSER to add a new user, and then *PRIV {username} S to make it a supervisor.
• Now log out, insert any other floppy and then log in as the user you just created. Logging in as a supervisor grants you that level of access to the server, not to each floppy. So you can add extra users, tweak privs, and so on.

The truly cunning out there might notice if the official SYST has a utility to list user accounts. And they might notice that it is written in BASIC with a ton of OSWORD calls (so go swipe a copy of the Econet Manager’s Guide). And they might notice that it is actually quite easy to insert a few lines of code to blatantly lie, like simply not list any supervisor account that starts and ends with a Z (because Zardoz had recently been on television and the entire dormitory nearly wet themselves laughing).
They might.
Mightn’t they?

Ah, the eighties. Fun!
(and good music too)

I find this obsession with passwords unfamiliar.

None of my pupils was allowed a password. This completely avoided the problem of “I’ve forgotten my password” disrupting the start of lessons. I suppose it also reduced the challenge of cracking the passwords on the server. And there were no offensive/amusing passwords either. ;-)

Of course, there had to be a certain expectation of acceptable behaviour for this to work, but it did for years.

None of my pupils was allowed a password.

It’s not pupil’s passwords we were looking out for… :-)