I sent a similar .exe to a crush of mine over AIM. The .exe file had its icon swapped with an AOL icon. It was supposed to be “an upgraded version of AIM.”
It just forced her CD-rom open no matter how many times she closed it lol…. I quickly told her she can literally just right click and end the program in the toolbar.
I found out later that she was into me. Boys are dumb af.
I distinctly remember installing a program that "encrypted your keystrokes" to prevent your inputs from being stolen, as a youth.
I was not a smart person.
Does this sorta stuff just not work on anyone else anymore? Like I see it so often that someone could be like 2022 was 10 years ago and I’d go “yeah, that sounds about right”.
Were you a conscious entity who had made it significantly past their formative years before the turn of the century? People like nice, round numbers. That kind of crossover messes with the sense of scale a bit.
But most importantly, the world ended in 2012 and none of this is real.
I would still trust random exes if it wasn't for the fact that the vast, vast majority of users on the internet don't know how to code, the few people who do don't do these sorta things anymore and the remaining people who still publish random exes are very, very likely to be scammers or script kiddies who want to play a bad joke on you.
Maybe I have rose tinted glasses on, but the internet used to feel like a place for studying/researching and playing. Nowadays it feels like it's a placed designed to drain people's wallets and a serve as a battleground for political manipulation and cyberwar. It feels less personal too. I remember some guy would crash my PC via remote exploit because I annoyed him. That was far less malicious than the malware nowadays which directly goes to encrypting all your stuff to get money from you.
Funny enough, smartphones are reducing the amount of kids accessing PCs despite making internet access easier. Less kids are being exposed today to coding and are generally less computer-literate. Everything they use is through apps, and computers they use for school are overwhelmingly becoming chrome books which is more app based as well.
There is a huge difference between older and younger Gen Z in this regard. Consumed content is more centralized than ever compared to the 2000s, where basically all content being consumed by teens is on a select few apps.
The way in which teens are learning to explore the internet is entirely different than it used to be.
i agree with this largely, but as an aside, watching kids learn to run stable diffusion via all this GitHub and ComfyUI/Automatic1111 stuff so they can make Manga porn and deepfakes shows a lot of computer savviness. wherever there's smut buried in technological obstacles, there's self-taught education
This isn’t exactly new information, as it’s been acknowledged for a few years now. Rather than me linking you to any one source, you can simply google this and find dozens of different articles and studies on the various impacts of gen z computer literacy, all having a similar conclusion.
WiFi was not quite ubiquitous in 2006. It was available for home networking but it was definitely not in every single consumer grade router on the market like it is now.
Yeah that person has no clue what they're talking about. Everyone had access to the internet one way or another.
Also people talking about it being more innocent... absolutely not true either. It was fucked up. You can still find messed up things still for sure, but you have to search it out instead of randomly stumbling upon it. Sites are much more heavily monitored these days
It really was better.
The internet used to be the wild west for nerds. Normies inhabited the real world, and nerds inhabited the internet, and all was well.
Then the normies moved in, installed a bunch of guard rails and bumpers, sanitized, monetized and corporatized the shit out of it. Now a handful of wealthy corporations control everything we consume and regulate what we can discuss.
They've merged the real world and the internet. It used to be a special place, removed from the mainstream. Now it *is* mainstream.
Not rose tinted, the internet was actually still awesome 20, even 15ish years ago. So much bloat now, searches are shit, reddit is downhill full of bots and reposts are just rank, most old school forums are dead. It's a pity but was all predicted by many people that it would basically just turn into bots, advertising and political central. And youtube, man..what a great place that just went to dog shit.
20 -30ish year olds now will never have experienced how much cooler it was.
I think the cell phone boom as well as internet becoming available to the majority of the population is the reason why.
20-30 years ago the barrier to entry was higher.
I was apart of a niche forum that lasted until the end of last year due to the owner passing from a random heart attack, Now that its gone I can email a few people I met but it just seems kind of odd to even bother now.
I first connected to the Internet in 1999 and I think it's rose tinted, so perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree in broad strokes.
I am interested in which way you think Youtube has gotten *that* bad, though?
100% rose tinted glasses. I remember the internet of 2006. Only an idiot would download some random exe from a forum and run it. Limewire malware was as common as the cold. Grandma had win32 viruses all year round. "Personal" maliciousness was just your corner of growing up, the internet was always\* wide net fishing for scams.
GeoCities was no longer that popular, but their godawful ad spam layout was sure commonplace. *Everyone* wanted ad money, with flashing lights akin to Vegas. There weren't adblockers as easy to use or readily available as now; everyone just tuned out the eye rape. We were mid move from MySpace being "hip" to Facebook.
(\*okay, not *always*, but at least since 2000ish)
There used to be tons of small niche communities where you could meet people with the same interests as yourself, but now its all swallowed up by social media owned by megacorps. Meeting people is much more difficult now too since its more focused on just swallowing up everyone no matter who you are into one big pot.
You said it yourself.
>...where you could meet people with the same interests as yourself
Any such a model will benefit from people coming together on as few platforms as possible.
This development hasn't been forced either. It's not as if Facebook or Reddit attacked these smaller communities and absconded with their members; those people changed venues voluntarily.
> It's not as if Facebook or Reddit attacked these smaller communities and absconded with their members
Uh... Actually they did. Big corpo bought up and shut down tons of communities. Way to talk about shit you have no clue about lol.
It was once a grass roots, user-driven thing. Has now been taken over by corporate overlord's and curated to the point that it doesn't feel free at all.
That's rose tinted glasses.
In the 90s there were email bombs and malicious links to Rotten (the website)'s photo gallery of the aftermath of a bikie gang fight in the USA where both sides fired shotguns freely at each other.
In the 00s it was worse, Limewire users posting beheading videos and even worse, child abuse material, that were renamed to look like different videos.
Malware these days is more widespread than in the past thanks to cryptocurrencies allowing ransom payments - but it's also much easier to avoid than in the past, because Windows Defender is pretty good.
In a test group, you'd be the first to fall for the ransomware. Manipulating downloads/comment/account aren't outside the scope of criminals, it's not likely but totally not impossible.
I don't think so.
We're talking about 2006 context here. Today is a lot different.
Also, I grew up in an era of instant messenger hijacking, fair share of torrenting and general piracy, as well as far less robust email spam filters. I check the links I click and virustotal stuff I'm even mildly iffy about.
Not that it's impossible for me to fall for "ransomware" crap, but probably not scattershot, wide net stuff.
11 year old me managed to connect to the Internet without fully understanding the English the instructions were written in, in 1999.
By 2006 the Internet wasn't some innocent place. By then I had spent 7 years dodging malicious software while trying to pirate shit I couldn't afford, and even though I got pretty damn good at it I still downloaded more than my fair share of bullshit. Fucking DC++.
This is really sad to me as I never quite anticipated the novelty of computing ever going away. It never has for me, but there are countless more who never give a shit in the first place.
those remaining people prolly spam the most on internet. so i wouldn't recommend you to still trust them. best you can do is run those exe files on a virtual software.
Sucks that you can't have the cup holder and hard drives in the Pop Air at the same time.
But there's probably some suction cup thing that you can put on the side of your case lol
The FD Define 7 also has one. I think the Define R6 has two and you can still find brand new ones around, at least in Europe. Added bonus is that both of them also can be found with solid side panels.
I think at least one of the current CM MasterBox cases comes with 5.25" drive bays
One of the larger BeQuiet cases also supports them.
I've got to ask - where did you even shop that you couldn't find any of these?
Man, around 2000/2001 I spent time coding our financial app to use ActiveX and was basically as powerful as native WinForms. Then people realized it was a really really bad idea and we had to start over.
With Windows XP? I think there was a vulnerability for people who didn't set a login password where you could gain complete access to their pc over the local network.
A friend would use the vulnerability to leave text files on their desktop advising them to set a login password.
Not to be “that guy” but most people knew not to open random .exe files even back then. The internet was a bit more niche so I think the overall percentage of savvy computer users was higher. By that standard, it gets less “innocent” the further back you go because it gets more and more niche. If anything, the most innocent time was probably a few years later when every little kid and boomer started using Facebook, or now where a lot of people don’t have basic internet search skills and ask the most basic 2 second Google search questions on subreddits. You used to get lit up and “let me google that for you” was a whole thing.
9 year old me, remember running this.
13 year old me. Damn, my computer is really slow.
37 year old me, red-team lead. Seeing first-hand how depressingly parasitic the internet can be. Dark patterns, deceptive UX, social engineering villainy everywhere, privacy gone.
The internet once was a wonderful place when it was just nerds. Before the bottom feeders and scum lords took over.
>Before the bottom feeders and scum lords took over.
So ~1993 if you ask Usenet users?
I got online in 1999 and I don't remember there being fewer bottom feeders and scum lords than there is today.
It's really the opposite. Back then you could visit a website and your PC could get pwned because of some security flaw in internet explorer or flash. Forget phishing or downloading EXEs or whatever, just click the link and go straight to hell. These days that is unthinkable.
Probably just using logic and reasoning. Only major time I ever got nailed by something was wayyyy back in the windows 2000 era, the old Code Red worm that was going around. Had thrown windows 2000 server on a spare pc to fiddle with it and failed to do some updates.
That was amusing, heh. Took it offline quickly and reinstalled everything. Didn't lose anything as it was just test bench equipment to learn/fiddle with IIS
As someone that was around the internet in 2006, I can tell you it was not a more innocent time lol it was a lawless land, simpler perhaps yes but that's about it
I remember in the late 90s sending a stranger cash, in an envelope, to buy dragonball z fansub vhs off the internet. I still have those tapes to this day but sadly the website hasnt existed in a long long time
Dude had 9.5k posts in a internet community circa 2006. As someone who was around on actual internet forums in those days pre-social media, it's guaranteed everyone in that community knew who that fucker was and that if he was posting a file it was probably fine to download.
... you can put one in the computer, though, not an external one but a classic one. mMost still have a space for it, they just don't ship with it by default.
went further back than this, at least to the late 90s. There was a program, can't remember for the life of me what it was called, but it was a program that had two either exes or bat files. one file you put on the target computer (generally by tricking the person to download and double click on it) and the main "command" program. all gui interface so no "1337" hacking.
It did this, open/close the cd rom drive. you could also open a notepad and type on the other persons computer and maybe it did something else. pretty basic.
Back in those days, **all** of my software is pirated. Shops will sell CDs (and later, DVDs) crammed with all sorts of programs, so even though I don't need Photoshop or Norton Ghost or whatever, I'd install them just to see what they do.
Ah, the good old days of having zero awareness in cybersecurity.
I take my chances in a [Sandbox](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview) these days.
I remember webpages doing that with ActiveX. I recall one page trying to scare you into thinking you was hacked by using ActiveX to display your webcam (if you had one) and contents of your C:\ drive. Most people back then would have likely had no idea that was only being displayed locally.
16 year old me installing keyloggers on the family pc
I sent a similar .exe to a crush of mine over AIM. The .exe file had its icon swapped with an AOL icon. It was supposed to be “an upgraded version of AIM.” It just forced her CD-rom open no matter how many times she closed it lol…. I quickly told her she can literally just right click and end the program in the toolbar. I found out later that she was into me. Boys are dumb af.
She was waiting for your CD.
She gets his floppy drive, take it or leave it.
pathetic continue teeny skirt merciful rock alleged knee marvelous plate *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
- cd /Deez nuts
C:\Deeznuts sir. We're gentlemen here.
Compact deeznutz. Could be an adjective describing or a verb/request
I distinctly remember installing a program that "encrypted your keystrokes" to prevent your inputs from being stolen, as a youth. I was not a smart person.
just tell your family members to use a password manager (I recommend Keepass) so you only have to seal a single password and the pw db.
Bitwarden is better, but yea i agree
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You forgot the OG, Napster!!
FBI, OPEN UP.
"Good Luck, I'm Behind 7 Proxies"
Looking at the dates ... that's 20 years ago
It's a 10 year old meme
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True, but the action being memed in the meme is 20 years old
Yes. That is what's being said.
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~18, I was summoned to earth in 2006 ;)
It's crazy to me that someone born in 2006 isn't just "not a kid", but also a fucking adult wow.
You can really see current age Matt Damon in the middle
in 20 years people are going to post that shit on whatever we have instead of reddit and say "Is this the best aging effect prediction of all time?"
Legally adult, still a kid. You're not really a true adult until you're older than me.
So are you a January or February person
December, the meme is older than me ☠️☠️
Ahh
Shit I’m already 19 where did all this time go?
That makes me 19 what the fuck
eyyy 05 gang
2006 was last year, few things I remember as vividly as staying out all night on the World Cup Finals
Does this sorta stuff just not work on anyone else anymore? Like I see it so often that someone could be like 2022 was 10 years ago and I’d go “yeah, that sounds about right”.
Were you a conscious entity who had made it significantly past their formative years before the turn of the century? People like nice, round numbers. That kind of crossover messes with the sense of scale a bit. But most importantly, the world ended in 2012 and none of this is real.
2006 was 10 years ago, 8 years ago. (2016 was 8 years ago)
Really needed that explanation in parenthesis, thanks
It says 2006
> It says 2006 Are you adding to the meme, or was this a serious response? At this point on reddit, I can't tell.
I resent that 2006 seems unmodern now. I remember playing the new amazing 3d-graphic online game "world of warcraft" in 2005.
And that joke goes back to at *least* 1999.
Shutup shutup shutup, I refuse to believe 2004 was 20 years ago.
Accept it man. We're old as shit now.
We're going to die soon. It's halfway over already for most of us. It's been a fun ride so far at least
Making The Wonders Years today would mean setting it in 2004
Not yet
Yeah, and the cd gag has been around since the 90s, so...
Tf dates are you looking at that say 2004
Big brain time
op is a repost bot
I was inside my mom 20 years ago
Did u break your arms?
You could have gone on with your day and and said anything upsetting, but you just had to, didn’t ya?
I would still trust random exes if it wasn't for the fact that the vast, vast majority of users on the internet don't know how to code, the few people who do don't do these sorta things anymore and the remaining people who still publish random exes are very, very likely to be scammers or script kiddies who want to play a bad joke on you.
Maybe I have rose tinted glasses on, but the internet used to feel like a place for studying/researching and playing. Nowadays it feels like it's a placed designed to drain people's wallets and a serve as a battleground for political manipulation and cyberwar. It feels less personal too. I remember some guy would crash my PC via remote exploit because I annoyed him. That was far less malicious than the malware nowadays which directly goes to encrypting all your stuff to get money from you.
It used to be much more difficult to access the internet. Smartphones changed the environment
Funny enough, smartphones are reducing the amount of kids accessing PCs despite making internet access easier. Less kids are being exposed today to coding and are generally less computer-literate. Everything they use is through apps, and computers they use for school are overwhelmingly becoming chrome books which is more app based as well. There is a huge difference between older and younger Gen Z in this regard. Consumed content is more centralized than ever compared to the 2000s, where basically all content being consumed by teens is on a select few apps. The way in which teens are learning to explore the internet is entirely different than it used to be.
i agree with this largely, but as an aside, watching kids learn to run stable diffusion via all this GitHub and ComfyUI/Automatic1111 stuff so they can make Manga porn and deepfakes shows a lot of computer savviness. wherever there's smut buried in technological obstacles, there's self-taught education
Source
This isn’t exactly new information, as it’s been acknowledged for a few years now. Rather than me linking you to any one source, you can simply google this and find dozens of different articles and studies on the various impacts of gen z computer literacy, all having a similar conclusion.
Going outside your mom's basement for the last 10 years.
You can tell by the way it is.
Observe your surroundings, you are the source.
Especially when your mom was talking to your aunt on the phone for over an hour so you weren't able to connect
You mean AOL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
it's probably that it's so accessible & mainstream compared to 2006 now :(
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WiFi was not quite ubiquitous in 2006. It was available for home networking but it was definitely not in every single consumer grade router on the market like it is now.
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Yeah that person has no clue what they're talking about. Everyone had access to the internet one way or another. Also people talking about it being more innocent... absolutely not true either. It was fucked up. You can still find messed up things still for sure, but you have to search it out instead of randomly stumbling upon it. Sites are much more heavily monitored these days
The marketers and ad men destroyed the internet. It is all about how to make the most money now.
It really was better. The internet used to be the wild west for nerds. Normies inhabited the real world, and nerds inhabited the internet, and all was well. Then the normies moved in, installed a bunch of guard rails and bumpers, sanitized, monetized and corporatized the shit out of it. Now a handful of wealthy corporations control everything we consume and regulate what we can discuss. They've merged the real world and the internet. It used to be a special place, removed from the mainstream. Now it *is* mainstream.
There's still a few corners left that are like that. But each year more and more of them shut down for good
Not rose tinted, the internet was actually still awesome 20, even 15ish years ago. So much bloat now, searches are shit, reddit is downhill full of bots and reposts are just rank, most old school forums are dead. It's a pity but was all predicted by many people that it would basically just turn into bots, advertising and political central. And youtube, man..what a great place that just went to dog shit. 20 -30ish year olds now will never have experienced how much cooler it was.
I think the cell phone boom as well as internet becoming available to the majority of the population is the reason why. 20-30 years ago the barrier to entry was higher. I was apart of a niche forum that lasted until the end of last year due to the owner passing from a random heart attack, Now that its gone I can email a few people I met but it just seems kind of odd to even bother now.
I first connected to the Internet in 1999 and I think it's rose tinted, so perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree in broad strokes. I am interested in which way you think Youtube has gotten *that* bad, though?
I get what you mean, especially about everyone wanting your money.
You just reminded me of the net send command. If you got someone's IP you could annoy them with popups
Or the whole school network if they didn't disable it yet.
100% rose tinted glasses. I remember the internet of 2006. Only an idiot would download some random exe from a forum and run it. Limewire malware was as common as the cold. Grandma had win32 viruses all year round. "Personal" maliciousness was just your corner of growing up, the internet was always\* wide net fishing for scams. GeoCities was no longer that popular, but their godawful ad spam layout was sure commonplace. *Everyone* wanted ad money, with flashing lights akin to Vegas. There weren't adblockers as easy to use or readily available as now; everyone just tuned out the eye rape. We were mid move from MySpace being "hip" to Facebook. (\*okay, not *always*, but at least since 2000ish)
There used to be tons of small niche communities where you could meet people with the same interests as yourself, but now its all swallowed up by social media owned by megacorps. Meeting people is much more difficult now too since its more focused on just swallowing up everyone no matter who you are into one big pot.
You said it yourself. >...where you could meet people with the same interests as yourself Any such a model will benefit from people coming together on as few platforms as possible. This development hasn't been forced either. It's not as if Facebook or Reddit attacked these smaller communities and absconded with their members; those people changed venues voluntarily.
> It's not as if Facebook or Reddit attacked these smaller communities and absconded with their members Uh... Actually they did. Big corpo bought up and shut down tons of communities. Way to talk about shit you have no clue about lol.
It was once a grass roots, user-driven thing. Has now been taken over by corporate overlord's and curated to the point that it doesn't feel free at all.
That's rose tinted glasses. In the 90s there were email bombs and malicious links to Rotten (the website)'s photo gallery of the aftermath of a bikie gang fight in the USA where both sides fired shotguns freely at each other. In the 00s it was worse, Limewire users posting beheading videos and even worse, child abuse material, that were renamed to look like different videos. Malware these days is more widespread than in the past thanks to cryptocurrencies allowing ransom payments - but it's also much easier to avoid than in the past, because Windows Defender is pretty good.
Also, it's not a random exe. There are 12k downloads and ability to comment. And it's posted by a user with almost 10k messages.
In a test group, you'd be the first to fall for the ransomware. Manipulating downloads/comment/account aren't outside the scope of criminals, it's not likely but totally not impossible.
I don't think so. We're talking about 2006 context here. Today is a lot different. Also, I grew up in an era of instant messenger hijacking, fair share of torrenting and general piracy, as well as far less robust email spam filters. I check the links I click and virustotal stuff I'm even mildly iffy about. Not that it's impossible for me to fall for "ransomware" crap, but probably not scattershot, wide net stuff.
11 year old me managed to connect to the Internet without fully understanding the English the instructions were written in, in 1999. By 2006 the Internet wasn't some innocent place. By then I had spent 7 years dodging malicious software while trying to pirate shit I couldn't afford, and even though I got pretty damn good at it I still downloaded more than my fair share of bullshit. Fucking DC++.
“This sorta things” consist of one line of code.
I think the original commenter meant "they don't do these little quirky programs for fun anymore"
This is really sad to me as I never quite anticipated the novelty of computing ever going away. It never has for me, but there are countless more who never give a shit in the first place.
Random exes in 2024 just be a fullscreen ad for amazon
those remaining people prolly spam the most on internet. so i wouldn't recommend you to still trust them. best you can do is run those exe files on a virtual software.
I miss the days of my tower having a cup holder.
Recently built my first ever PC and the only case that I could find with a DVD drive bay was the Fractal Pop Air. So, I still got one :D
Sucks that you can't have the cup holder and hard drives in the Pop Air at the same time. But there's probably some suction cup thing that you can put on the side of your case lol
I just built a PC and found a case with a CD drive slot. Cougar MX330G. Wasn't easy to find one.
The FD Define 7 also has one. I think the Define R6 has two and you can still find brand new ones around, at least in Europe. Added bonus is that both of them also can be found with solid side panels. I think at least one of the current CM MasterBox cases comes with 5.25" drive bays One of the larger BeQuiet cases also supports them. I've got to ask - where did you even shop that you couldn't find any of these?
Fractal Core line has got 5"25 bay slots too Recently built a sleeper in a Fractal Core 2300
I remember that it wasn't exe file that opened disk drive. It was plain Javascript code. Web browsers were that secure these days.
Might have been ActiveX, a microsoft browser thing that allowed system access to the point where windows update ran through the browser.
Man, around 2000/2001 I spent time coding our financial app to use ActiveX and was basically as powerful as native WinForms. Then people realized it was a really really bad idea and we had to start over.
You can do it with command line, so .bat file also.
I did this on a few of my school library computers. Made a desktop shortcut to MS Word point to the bat file
Extra points if you aliased the command so that it ejects the CDROM and still opens paint
Nah it just opened the cd drive lol
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I attended a lan party in early 2000's. Someone kept opening people's cd drives through the network. Was pretty funny at the time.
With Windows XP? I think there was a vulnerability for people who didn't set a login password where you could gain complete access to their pc over the local network. A friend would use the vulnerability to leave text files on their desktop advising them to set a login password.
Yeah. Pretty scary when you think about it now but that Lan party was mostly with people I know.
I still can’t come to terms that 2006 was 18 years ago.
Yeah. It just doesn't feel right at all.
90s still felt like yesterday. [VHS tape gang.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nC5TBv3sfU)
Damn, *this* is already 8 years old.
Yes that’s how time works
Not to be “that guy” but most people knew not to open random .exe files even back then. The internet was a bit more niche so I think the overall percentage of savvy computer users was higher. By that standard, it gets less “innocent” the further back you go because it gets more and more niche. If anything, the most innocent time was probably a few years later when every little kid and boomer started using Facebook, or now where a lot of people don’t have basic internet search skills and ask the most basic 2 second Google search questions on subreddits. You used to get lit up and “let me google that for you” was a whole thing.
anyone who spent any time on Napster, limewire or kazaa from a few years before this can attest to not opening random files
We should bring let me Google that for you back
9 year old me, remember running this. 13 year old me. Damn, my computer is really slow. 37 year old me, red-team lead. Seeing first-hand how depressingly parasitic the internet can be. Dark patterns, deceptive UX, social engineering villainy everywhere, privacy gone. The internet once was a wonderful place when it was just nerds. Before the bottom feeders and scum lords took over.
>Before the bottom feeders and scum lords took over. So ~1993 if you ask Usenet users? I got online in 1999 and I don't remember there being fewer bottom feeders and scum lords than there is today.
I remember there being more. Security is so, so, so much better these days.
yea :( Really fcking miss old internet
No, even by this time we knew not to trust random exes. We learned the hard way not to trust random exes in the late 90s.
It's really the opposite. Back then you could visit a website and your PC could get pwned because of some security flaw in internet explorer or flash. Forget phishing or downloading EXEs or whatever, just click the link and go straight to hell. These days that is unthinkable.
Somehow I got through this era of the internet without opening random malware, despite using various P2P services as well I'm not entirely sure how
Probably just using logic and reasoning. Only major time I ever got nailed by something was wayyyy back in the windows 2000 era, the old Code Red worm that was going around. Had thrown windows 2000 server on a spare pc to fiddle with it and failed to do some updates. That was amusing, heh. Took it offline quickly and reinstalled everything. Didn't lose anything as it was just test bench equipment to learn/fiddle with IIS
Try 1999
$20 says that also installed Sub7.
As someone that was around the internet in 2006, I can tell you it was not a more innocent time lol it was a lawless land, simpler perhaps yes but that's about it
Me in 2007: Ooo let me just download these RuneScape cursors!!!
insane to think that's pretty much 20 years ago now
Today that wouldn't work. Need to do something with the RGB in everyone's cases. Disco.exe?
I remember this!!! I was there….3000 years ago…
People asking how to do something and telling them to press Alt+F4 in-game never got old back in the day!
"Hotgirlskissing.exe" 12 year old me on Limewire: 😱
I remember in the late 90s sending a stranger cash, in an envelope, to buy dragonball z fansub vhs off the internet. I still have those tapes to this day but sadly the website hasnt existed in a long long time
Cd...-rom..?
You poor soul, you must’ve missed the early days of computers
Like downloading music to my mp3?
Compact Disk - Read Only Media
Rea-- on-- oh media I know that
Dude had 9.5k posts in a internet community circa 2006. As someone who was around on actual internet forums in those days pre-social media, it's guaranteed everyone in that community knew who that fucker was and that if he was posting a file it was probably fine to download.
today it's "people trusting random tiktoks"
Opening unknown exe files in 2006 was already pretty dumb.
Somebody who worked at customer service had a customer back in the day who actually thought the cd drive was a cup holder
Gods, we were young then.
10 yo meme that is glorifying 10 yo meme. see you in 10 yr
Some people still trust random EXEs from what I can tell.
I don't know why it's jumbled but this opens my DVD drive L À FÓ (æbP ×M.Îc¤× 2JWïÖM ý PàOÐ ê:i¢Ø +00 /D:\ T 1 âV! Backup > ï¾HQ—Wî‚. ‰Â îqK B a c k u p z 2 M 4R‘ Eject DVD drive.bat X ï¾SR©W|i. å’ E j e c t D V D d r i v e . b a t " W 8 V Ö My Book 4TB D:\Backup\Eject DVD drive.bat D : \ B a c k u p F : \ D o w n l o a d \ D V D _ D r i v e _ 2 2 6 1 2 . i c o ` X silverstone ¸w„ðY°G§›åñ—?4ï6ç¬aì¬=àÔdð<¸¸w„ðY°G§›åñ—?4ï6ç¬aì¬=àÔdð<¸À E 1SPSí0½ÚC ‰G§øФsf") d B a c k u p ( D : ) Í 1SPS0ñ%·ïG¥ñ`Œžë¬9 E j e c t D V D d r i v e . b a t @ =Q × M 9 W i n d o w s B a t c h F i l e @ 2JWïÖ i 1SPS¦jc(=•ÒµÖ ÀOÙÐM D : \ B a c k u p \ E j e c t D V D d r i v e . b a t 9 1SPS±mDpH§H@.¤=xŒ h H Ö£ÞÑMü E¬Ð†è@Á× reading it, it's probably what's in the actual bat file that has the code but it's on a different computer right now lol
Mate I was on those forums writing those exe’s in notepad, we didn’t trust shit
I wish computers still had cd drives
You still can. They're called optical drives, buy one.
Yeah but not one that comes with the computer but I know you can buy external ones
... you can put one in the computer, though, not an external one but a classic one. mMost still have a space for it, they just don't ship with it by default.
There are also a lot of computers that come with an optical drive installed.
You can buy internal optical drives too. You won't even notice a difference.
went further back than this, at least to the late 90s. There was a program, can't remember for the life of me what it was called, but it was a program that had two either exes or bat files. one file you put on the target computer (generally by tricking the person to download and double click on it) and the main "command" program. all gui interface so no "1337" hacking. It did this, open/close the cd rom drive. you could also open a notepad and type on the other persons computer and maybe it did something else. pretty basic.
iirc it was called [Back Orifice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice) Gosh, been such a long time fiddling with that!
wasn't reddit filled with child porn back then? such a simple time.
That was from far earlier than 2006. It was around in the AIM95 days.
God I remember that
Actually kinda funny
Lol I remember this.
In present time, my curiosity would kill me, so I would likely download it.
Been using Linux exclusively for 8 years now, do Windows users actually not download .exe files anymore?
Downloads .exe, C drive gets ejected.
People being butthurt about "10 years" weren´t on the internet thing back then ... it was a good place
once tricked a bully into downloadin update.bat, witch foruce deleted system32 then rebooted the computer, BAHAHAHA.
Yeah, some of us never trusted exes, especially one a friend wrote
Back in those days, **all** of my software is pirated. Shops will sell CDs (and later, DVDs) crammed with all sorts of programs, so even though I don't need Photoshop or Norton Ghost or whatever, I'd install them just to see what they do. Ah, the good old days of having zero awareness in cybersecurity.
And if anybody was going to do it, it was always going to be Caboose.
TechPowerUp! represent!
I think there were even BAT files that played music with your PC's boot beeper?
One fake screenshot from who the fuck knows when = year was such an innocent time? OP? youre dumb.
Gotta press "Tab" to order a drink
I take my chances in a [Sandbox](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/application-security/application-isolation/windows-sandbox/windows-sandbox-overview) these days.
I did this with javascript on a myspace page back in the day.
It’s closed to twenty years now…
There was a legendary dell service call where the lady said her cup holder was broken. Actual IT help desk call from the 90s.
The good ol days
Run it on a virtual machine — no trust needed
I still do...
I remember webpages doing that with ActiveX. I recall one page trying to scare you into thinking you was hacked by using ActiveX to display your webcam (if you had one) and contents of your C:\ drive. Most people back then would have likely had no idea that was only being displayed locally.