[laborcontract]

Oh my God, I remember doing this to my friends. The default voicemail password always worked so I reset their voice messages to strange sounds or me doing voices.

It’s amazing how insecure everything was. I remember as a kid walking around with a cordless phone realizing you can pick up other peoples’ conversations.

There was something so charming about technology back in the day. I don't think it's purely nostalgia. I think part of it was that our lives didn’t revolve around it so poking around never really hurt.

[quasse]

I feel the same way thinking about computer security back in the early 00's. Nothing was ever really locked down, sometimes you could get administrator access by pressing "Cancel" on the login dialog three times, network drives were just open to everyone and you could install new software by just bringing it to school on a floppy and installing it on the lab computer. I think that environment was what really fostered my love of tinkering with systems the same way phone phreakers did a few decades earlier.

Now everything is locked up like a vault and it's all group policy this and mobile device management that. Nothing can be unlocked and nobody has permissions because if it isn't your device ends up encrypted with a ransom note telling you to send cryptocurrency to a state sponsored hacking group in Russia.

I do feel like younger people are really missing out on the "hackability" that everything had before we collectively realized how computer security worked.

[wanderingstan]

In the late 90s at my first job I would invite all my housemates to my office after hours for LAN parties using my co-workers computers. There were no logins and it didn’t even bother my co-workers unless a newly installed game took up too much drive space.

I feel we viewed computers more like expensive toys that should be shared rather than than the highly personal items they are today.

[drewzero1]

I think at that point we were still thinking of computers as expensive tools to be shared; it hadn't been that long since a computer took up a whole room and would be shared by all users in several businesses. We also weren't as concerned about security because most of the really important business stuff was locked away on the mainframe.

[tempestn]

I had fun spoofing friends' email addresses (only for harmless jokes). Amazing to think now that there was a period when anyone could convincingly and effortlessly send an email as anyone else, and it wasn't widely abused.

[markdown]

Is regedit still a thing in Windows?

We had good fun with it in school computer labs back in our day.

[greenavocado]

Yes, but the Group Policy editor has superceded it in many ways.

[CapsAdmin]

> It’s amazing how insecure everything was.

Something I really miss from that era that I'm confident we'll never get back (for good reasons) is the open and transparent nature of everything. Everything felt hackable and based on trust. Where as today we can't trust anyone.

It's tempting to say peoeple were nice and didn't abuse the system, but I think more likely some people just didn't know the amount of money they could make from the abuse.

[meowface]

Nah, it was actually a nightmare. The small number of people who understood this and exploited it lived like Gods. It gave malevolent people far too much power.

And while a smaller percentage than today were in it for the money, a lot still were. Plus the ones not in it for the money were sometimes worse, since they were motivated solely by ego, power, and sociopathy.

[spzb]

> The default voicemail password always worked

That kept newspaper editors in scoops for years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...