Bard spotting on Bluesky 04 December 2024

Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):

At age 17, in the early 1990's, before there were specific laws addressing such behaviour, I sat down at a terminal in my high school compsci lab, and proceeded to

C:> ECHO [litany of ALT+xxxx inputs] > LOGIN.COM

and thereby intercept the netadmin password later that day

Jess O'Thomson (@jessothomson.bsky.social):

I support installing invasive "safeguarding" software on kids' devices because there is no better way for kids to learn how their tech works than the stuff they will figure out trying to circumvent that shit.

Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):

Microsoft only closed the "command line environment will search for and run the invoked .COM extension file before the .EXE extension file" oversight like, 3? 4? years ago

J to the (@josbrowsing.bsky.social):

Wait, freaking what? Oh god I forget it's Microsoft, must've noticed it was interfering with some telemetry module so that's why they fixed it instead of securing the system.

That's nuts.

Ms. Penny Oaken, SkyWitch (@skywitches.net):

Microsoft … for reasons that only make sense from a Big Iron Programming perspective … has a long standing directive on backwards compatibility, & .BAT -> .COM -> .EXE as precedence was backwards compatibility

J to the (@josbrowsing.bsky.social):

That's something I wasn't aware of but makes a lot more sense to consider with how whacked out every other release of Windows is. But also from having worked in corporate environments some places will not upgrade until it's fatal to profit. One place still had workstations using Win98 in 2016.