Two nerds bullshitting about stunts on the internet.

Another idea I had a long time ago. That, unfortunately never deployed widely. I prototyped in the late nineties, it was called the Internet Random Mail Reader. For people who don’t know the way networks work is like your computer is just broadcasting all the packets out on the network and all the other computers on the network just ignore the ones that aren’t addressed to them.

This is how networks worked. And so you can just sit and listen to everybody else’s packets. And this is, network, packet sniffing. In the early days of the internet, there was no encryption at all. If you were on the same network as somebody, you could just collect everything.

And if you were the ISP, you could really collect everything. You could just see everything people were doing, every webpage they loaded, every email they sent. Instant messenger wasn’t invented yet, but you could see those too. We would write these scripts to just sit there.

The most famous ones now, they just sit there and sniff for passwords. They know how to parse everything going on in the network and just throw out stuff that’s not passwords. So we have these tools that just collect passwords off the network. That’s how hackers in the nineties and early two thousands would just collect passwords and eventually encryption caught on and made it a little harder and a little harder over time to get passwords as easily.

Most encryption was poorly implemented, so then we’d have to crack the crypto to do it. But anyway, internet random mail reader was just like this screensaver. The idea was just a screensaver where you sit there and random emails that other people sent to other people and you just, and it would just strip off the headers…

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Recorded on February 4, 2024

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