retrocomputing

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BearOfaTime , in Idle Windows XP and 2000 machines get infected with viruses within minutes of being exposed online — legacy OSes compromised by just connecting to the Internet

Well, no shit.

This would likely happen to any machine directly exposed to the internet that hosts any kind of service intended for local networks only... (which is the network stack on Windows, and has been so since 1990 with NetBEUI/NetBIOS), and has been intentionally left insecured to boot.

Hell, in the 90's we put windows desktops directly on the internet just to see what would happen (yea, our bosses would yell at us when they caught it). They didn't get hacked much or very fast then, which shows how much automated intrusion scripting is happening today.

Bunch of clickbait nonsense.

Local machines aren't servers. And servers aren't directly exposed to the internet without routers/firewalls/IPS/IDS, etc. The only devices that should be directly connected to the internet are edge routers. And even they should have very secure, layered setups to ensure malicious traffic can't transit to the LAN.

Neato , in Windows 2000 professional
@Neato@ttrpg.network avatar

I miss holographic stuff. Objectively made it harder to read but was still cool.

pearsaltchocolatebar ,

I also miss all of the clear cases on electronics from the same time period.

Anticorp ,

These CDs looked legit. They were thicker too, to make you feel like you bought something substantial.

Peffse , in Idle Windows XP and 2000 machines get infected with viruses within minutes of being exposed online — legacy OSes compromised by just connecting to the Internet

I wonder how many people still directly connect to the internet without a gateway. It seems sensational to say "INSTANTLY INFECTED" and then tiny print (in a way that nobody connects to the internet since 1999). But maybe I'm just ignorant to how large a market still use direct connection.

cmnybo ,

I doubt many people would do that. You would have to intentionally set it up that way. Residential ISPs almost always supply a modem with a built in router which will have a firewall. You would have to set it to bridge mode, enable the DMZ, or use your own modem.

I haven't connected a computer directly to the internet since I used dial-up.

CosmicTurtle0 ,

I remember back in the days of broadband being brand new. Comcast insisted that you had to pay for each device that connected to the Internet. Using a router was considered against the TOS.

I do not miss those days.

ThatKomputerKat ,
@ThatKomputerKat@lemmy.world avatar

We had a router hooked up to our first RCA cable modem on Comcast, but then we were only comcast customers because they bought the company that originally hooked us up.

cable Companies though. Don’t miss cable internet at all. Fuck Comcast any decade.

brian ,

The takeaway I think they were trying to give was that the same experiments done on a more modern OS does not have these same "instant" infections (they reference having windows 7 under the same conditions without any issue)

Peffse ,

What are they going to write about next, the dangers of unsigned drivers and how easily they infect Windows 98? lol

TORFdot0 ,

I saw someone suggest they connect their switch dock directly to the internet elsewhere on Lemmy. Granted the attack surface for a switch is basically non existent but if people are suggesting that then certainly people are still connecting their other machines directly to their modems/CPEs as well

Peffse ,

That would be Nintendo themselves. The fools recommend port forwarding everything to the Switch.

How to Set Up a Router's Port Forwarding for a Nintendo Switch Console

DarkDarkHouse ,
@DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

It’s not a DMZ, at Nintendo we say your Switch is now in Donkey Kong Country

khannie , in Windows 2000 professional
@khannie@lemmy.world avatar

Best MS operating system ever IMO. Rock solid. Absolutely could not fault it. I switched to Linux before XP.

thayer ,

Classic theme ftw, and arguably the best version of the classic theme too.

khannie ,
@khannie@lemmy.world avatar

So functional!

For the non command line folks it was peak.

ramble81 ,

Yeah I don’t think 2000 gets enough love because it was a server OS but I preferred using it to XP even on my desktop.

picnicolas ,

I used it on my gaming PC for years and loved it. It’s crazy how it’s been downhill for over two decades now.

Trainguyrom ,

I was too young to really know what was going on at the time but when my parents upgraded me from my Windows 98 spare parts PC they tossed Windows 2000 on the new PC and I remember it being quite wonderful. I never did get to experience Vista nor ME because my parents were well enough tapped into the computer scene to know what was up. Now I get to help them setup their first home server this weekend

tasankovasara ,
@tasankovasara@sopuli.xyz avatar

same! came to say that this was the last windows I ever installed.

Anticorp ,

I greatly preferred XP to 2000. 2000 still needed a ton of configuration, and device specific drivers that were difficult to find. XP simplified a lot of that with their PNP support, but they still had robust configuration options for power users.

lightnegative ,

Me too. 2000 seemed.... Slow compared to XP on the same hardware, but to be fair the hardware I had was cobbled together from parts that my father's employer was going to throw out

Anticorp ,

It looked a lot sleeker too. I had my UI heavily customized, including the boot and login screens, and it made me feel like such a hacker. 2000 made me feel like I was working at an office.

toddestan ,

Microsoft put a lot of work into speeding up the boot times with XP. Windows 2000 booted glacially slow by comparison. Though I'd say once booted, 2000 was a bit leaner and quicker.

Eheran , in Windows XP can run on an Intel CPU from 1989 thanks to dedicated modder

Really amazing how people sink so much time into something like that. Port a super outdated CPU to a somewhat outdated OS. Why not? Well done.

cmnybo ,

People also make Linux run on low powered microcontrollers that take hours to boot and don't have enough processing power to do anything useful just because they can.

MNByChoice , in Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic)

Like MOSH? https://mosh.org/
Mosh has some predictive output and will resume sessions automatically.

Or more like tmux/screen?
Has some fancy "nohup" like functions.

CanadaPlus OP ,

That's really helpful. Thank you! MOSH might work, I'll have to play around with it.

Could you go into more detail about the tmux functions? If it's a way to write everything to files instead of a STDOUT in a predictable way, that would be great, since each packet could be a (compressed) shell script that explicitly includes which data to send back, if any.

zeppo , in Sealed Windows 2000 Advanced Server floppy disks
@zeppo@lemmy.world avatar

How many disks did this come on, haha? Like 40?

toni_bmw OP ,
@toni_bmw@lemmy.world avatar
someguy3 ,

If you have a machine with no current operating system on it that will not boot from a CD-ROM, you must use this method. Setup disks are a set of four disks that form a minimal installation of Windows 2000

I wasn't aware there were CD-ROMs that you couldn't boot from.

Zachariah ,
@Zachariah@lemmy.world avatar

Booting from CD wasn’t a feature for at least a couple years after the drives because common. Usually you’d use a boot floppy that had drivers for the CD drive.

fuckwit_mcbumcrumble ,

Windows 95 (by default) wasn't CD bootable, you HAD to use a boot disk before you could use a CD for the rest. I think right after 95 came out the standard came out for CD booting. But before that OEM would make bootable CDs for their recovery media for 95.

Evil_Shrubbery ,

I still have those, never ever successfully used them.

floofloof ,

I think at least some editions of Windows 98 couldn't boot from the CD-ROM either but had a boot floppy with the drivers. I hit this problem recently when trying to set up a Windows 98 machine.

Bitrot ,
@Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I think it was primarily BIOS limitations, just like some old machines now don’t support USB boot.

Windows XP could also be installed using boot floppies, but I think was the last version to do so.

brbposting ,

Hmm but you could always boot from DVD right? Thinking back to live operating systems run from disc.

orbitz ,

I may be wrong but I think it'd be the same issue in that the bios wouldn't boot the OS from that sort of drive. For whatever reason that caused it I think it'd be a similar issue. That said by the time DVD drives being common enough for a server drive, most BIOSs would be able to handle it fine and a fair bit of time after this was needed.

Though I kinda thought with proper configuration cd rom drives were all bootable, but I wasn't working with servers in that era either so there were probably some mobos/bios that didn't work properly for booting a cd/DVD drive. Closest to the time I was familiar with was XP and pretty sure that was expected to be CD bootable in 2001. So maybe this kicked in the bios support for bootable non floppy disc drives?

Gurfaild ,

I think early CD-ROM drives with proprietary interfaces were basically never bootable unless there were controller cards with option ROMs and I've never seen one.

These drives were from the early 90s, so that wouldn't have been the reason why Windows 2000 could use a boot floppy - maybe some computers had SCSI drives connected to controllers that only supported booting from hard drives

DABDA ,
@DABDA@lemm.ee avatar

El Torito:

El Torito is an extension designed to allow booting a computer from a CD-ROM. It was announced in November 1994 and first issued in January 1995 as a joint proposal by IBM and BIOS manufacturer Phoenix Technologies. According to legend, the El Torito CD/DVD extension to ISO 9660 got its name because its design originated in an El Torito restaurant in Irvine, California.

A 32-bit PC BIOS will search for boot code on an ISO 9660 CD-ROM. The standard allows for booting in two different modes. Either in hard disk emulation when the boot information can be accessed directly from the CD media, or in floppy emulation mode where the boot information is stored in an image file of a floppy disk, which is loaded from the CD and then behaves as a virtual floppy disk. This is useful for computers that were designed to boot only from a floppy drive. For modern computers the "no emulation" mode is generally the more reliable method.

I vaguely remember fighting with getting burned OS install discs to reliably boot. Another fun thing from around that time is if you happened to plug in the floppy drive cable backwards any disks inserted would be erased. That's a great way to accidentally nuke your boot disk and be screwed if you weren't near another working machine with a floppy drive. Lots of little headaches like that really drilled in the concept of redundancies and lots of backups (as well as not mindlessly installing a floppy drive).

gregorum ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Back in the day, you needed a floppy drive to boot from a CD ROM (or a special reboot command). It wasn’t until a new BIOS firmware came out that allowed you to boot from CD ROM.

leftzero ,

I remember installing Windows 3.0. (Or possibly 3.1..?)

It came in exactly way too many disks. (Like, a dozen or so, maybe..? Though it felt like at least double that...)

Reversi was nice, though...

raktheundead , (edited )
@raktheundead@fedia.io avatar

I've still got my copy of Windows 3.1 on 3.5" 1.44 MB disks; there are seven in total.

Now, Windows 95, that was a monstrosity on floppy disks.

floofloof ,

I bought Windows 95 on floppy disks when it first came out. I think it was 13 disks.

Microsoft used a special format for these floppies, called Distribution Media Format (DMF). It allowed them to fit 1.68MB onto each disk instead of the standard 1.44MB. I just went looking for information about that and found a web page that has not been changed since 1997:

https://www.winimage.com/wimushlp/wini1a1y.htm

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

iirc word 3.1 needed 20 floppy discs.

wjrii , (edited ) in Gateway 2000 Computer - Brand New - Free to a good home!

They might want to wait until winter to un box it, when that P4 can double as a space heater.

lost_faith ,

You want a space heater try an AMD K6-2, First pc I ever had to get an aftermarket heat-sink for cause it would shut down in the summer for overheating. Normal operating temp was like 80C

Schorsch , in Finding And Resurrecting Archie: The Internet’s First Search Engine

I use Archie btw.

BigTrout75 , in Windows 2000 professional

A simpler time. A time before the ads and telemetry.

CarbonatedPastaSauce , in Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic)

Ask NASA

CanadaPlus OP ,

Do they post their software somewhere? What they use for space probes is exactly what I would need, but I kind of figured it would be a trade secret.

CarbonatedPastaSauce ,

I was kidding. 😁 There’s nothing real time about C&C with space probes. And the ISS is close enough I doubt it’s an issue.

CanadaPlus OP ,

Yeah, I want not real time. The goal of having containers in the first place is to enable as much as possible without needing to put a human in the loop, since you have no idea how long each packet will spend in transit.

If I could emulate Curiosity's onboard computer that would be a decent starting point.

CarbonatedPastaSauce ,

In that case it might not hurt to reach out to some NASA email addresses. The people who write that stuff are, after all, nerds like us, and would probably be happy to share whatever they are allowed to share.

It’s funded by taxes so, security issues aside, there shouldn’t be a lot of trade secrets.

CanadaPlus OP ,

Government agencies, in my experience, tend to believe in security through obscurity; even the ones that don't worry about spies as much as NASA. That said, maybe it's worth a shot. I'll have to figure out who's the best person to bug.

kalimari , in 8-Bit Homebrew Processor

Oh Ben Eater? He’s got a fairly large following and his other 6502 breadboard computer series is super relevant to this forum

me OP ,
@me@social.jlamothe.net avatar

Yeah, I found his videos by jumping down a 6502 rabbit hole.

ooterness , in Windows 2000 professional

Do not cite the deep magic to me, OP, I was there when it was released.

lightnegative ,

I was there, 3000 years ago...

MajorHavoc , in Is there a precedent for a really delay-tolerant command line interface? (A bit off-topic)

The 'ed' editor was designed for high latency networks. I would pull on that thread. That is, in your shoes, I would read up on 'ed' and related tools.

scroll_responsibly ,
@scroll_responsibly@lemmy.sdf.org avatar
MajorHavoc ,

Delightful!

"Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!"

Gave me a giggle. That 100k loss has got to hurt for a user who still tries to run 'vi' on a classic system, I imagine.

Edit:

Another gem:

"Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity."

CanadaPlus OP ,

Ed is great (in this context). I think there's been posts about it on here before. It's just a text editor, though.

MajorHavoc ,

Yeah. I've had mentors regail me of other tools they used alongside 'Ed', but I wasn't listening very attentively. Hopefully that's something that can be dug out of the history of the Internet.

I would definitely choose the old reliable stuff over something new and fancy, if I had this use case.

HakFoo , in Gateway 2000 Computer - Brand New - Free to a good home!

Don't toss the Technics reciever either.

czardestructo OP ,
@czardestructo@lemmy.world avatar

Want to come get it? There is no market for this stuff and I'm on a time crunch. I need this stuff out fast. There are a bunch of speakers and decks.

HakFoo ,

I'm not there. You might try a forum like Audiokarma.

Num10ck ,

thats the most valuable piece in the set, timeless.

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