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HP32SII got me through physics & maths II exams without all the tedious memorisation. It looked innocuous enough - certainly not programmable to the extent it actually was... a godsend for high-school.

I had one of those in middle school c. 1990. It had function and program support. The problem with modifying one of those would be it's physically small and lacks I/O.

Upgraded to an HP 48GX sophomore year of high school. It worked well for math and physics coursework, AP Calculus BC, and the SAT-I math section. The IR serial port's LED was so powerful, there was a learning TV remote app that could control TVs from ~60-100' (20-30m) away. The ability to beam software to other calculators was just shy of the invention of the app store.


This is called an evil portal, it's super simple to do - Flipper has inbuilt functionality for this. It's super simple, broadcast an SSID with "Amazon Free Wifi" - when the user connects serve up a simple login page with Amazon logo, prompt for username and password - save the username and password, and just do nothing... end user doesn't understand why it didn't work, but it's too late at this point. Remarkably simple.


Seems he was able to do the technical part, but not the not getting caught part. He's is probably not so smart if he's doing it on flights. The police would just need 2 reports from 2 different flights, and then check the passenger lists to find that he was on both flights...


Please don't spread misinformation about Flipper Zero, there is enough of that already. The device has no Wi-Fi capabilities without hardware modifications.


There's a widely used add-on to the flipper zero that adds wifi capabilities though.


But the original claim was "Flipper has inbuilt functionality for this"?


Still, it's capabilities are extended by the WiFi dev board

https://blog.anthares101.com/how-to-setup-the-flipper-zero-f...


Yes, but that is very much different than claiming this is an inbuilt function.

My car has the ability to be loud and annoying, but I’d have to cut the muffler off first.


Let’s be honest.

The dev board is not some obscure or custom part. It’s sold alongside the flipper zero. I think mine came as an official bundle and you need it to do pretty much any coding for it. Every review promotes it for WiFi pen testing.

This has no comparison to junk car mods.


Seems that downvotes are used to disagree in this place still though.


...


Netscape would probably disagree. :-)


Technically Netspace wasnt a startup, they IPOd early and were bought by AOL for 4 billion in 98. They were real large scale contenders where such a dynamic could really be do or die.

There's degrees to market manipulation and market position where this sort of explanation would hold water as being the root cause of death knell.


Communication protocols and file formats IMHO.


but.. file systems


having failed to learn objective-c back in the day from their intro book... now I realise that I don't have a degree in astrophysics from Cal; there is a distinct possibility that I may be stupid. :-)


To be honest, I also “failed to become a real dev” from these books. It wasn’t until I watched Stanford’s iOS courses (Paul Hagarty) at 2x that I finally understood enough to build my first app. Such is the journey!


Would be cool to have a "don't scan me bro" list of IP's that engage in this that we could share - is there such a thing?


The problem is that becomes a concentrator of IPs behind which privacy conscious individuals exist, which probably has higher value to "whoever's buying". It's a conundrum.


It sounds like what GP is suggesting is to collect ips of all the scanners, and share the list of ips among ourselves, so we can collectively route their traffic to /dev/null.


aaaaah, that makes sense. See the links in my original post.


Why not also sell the scans of scanners to the scanners customers and make a little pocket change?


There's a comment downthread discussing something similar; I haven't tried it though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40695179


You're being sarcastic, right? We did this for telephone numbers and saw how it turned out...


Socratic questioning is quite amazing, I created my own prompting for this and found it to be invaluable in exploring my beliefs.


Sounds interesting. Do you mind sharing these prompts?


I'm impressed that Microsoft seems to be listening to the tech community - now if only they would address telemetry I'm back in!


I work on dev tools at my company. Telemetry really helps a ton to figure out if you're prioritizing the right things and if changes that you made are really for the better


Opt-in, or opt-out?


For the company there’s no opt-anything, its internal tools, of course we need metrics, and presumably you have nothing to hide with your work :) I’ve become a lot more tolerant of telemetry since starting to work there, because I see the use. If you really care about privacy (as a company/provider), you can anonymize and aggregate the data and still get nearly all the benefits, but I can totally understand why people put telemetry into their product, including opt-out only


The most impressive thing to me was the inbuilt BBC Basic, and the availability of every system function to basic with SWI calls.

This contrasts with languages like GW Basic or even commercial QuickBasic (QBX) or Visual Basic: second class citizens when it came to accessing system calls under Windows (or dos).

In fact, I wrote simple basic code to access the undocumented random number generator within the BCM2835 chip - it worked perfectly under RiscOS and even a dedicated BBC Basic emulutor for the Pico.

This is what the code looks like for those that are interested:

REM MAP MEMORY

SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104000,32 TO ,,,RNG_CTRL%

SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104004,32 TO ,,,RNG_STATUS%

SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104008,32 TO ,,,RNG_DATA%

SYS "OS_Memory",13,&2010400C,32 TO ,,,RNG_FF_THRES%

SYS "OS_Memory",13,&20104010,32 TO ,,,RNG_INT_MASK%

REM CHECK WHERE THE REGISTERS ARE MAPPED

PRINT “RNG_CTRL MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_CTRL%)

PRINT “RNG_STATUS MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_STATUS%)

PRINT “RNG_DATA MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_DATA%)

PRINT “RNG_FF_THRES MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_FF_THRES%)

PRINT “RNG_INT_MASK MAPPED AT &”;STR$~(RNG_INT_MASK%)

REM THESE INTS BECOME REGISTERS R0-R7 RESPECTIVELY

A%=1

B%=RNG_DATA%

C%=RNG_INT_MASK%

D%=RNG_STATUS%

E%=RNG_CTRL%

F%=&1

G%=&4000000

REM GET A RANDOM NUMBER FROM THE RNG

DIM RNG% 30

P% = RNG%

[ OPT 1

SWI “OS_EnterOS”

LDR R0,[R1]

SWI “OS_LeaveOS”

MOV PC,R14

ALIGN

]

REM INIT THE RNG

DIM INIT% 30

P% = INIT%

[ OPT 1

SWI “OS_EnterOS”

STR R5,[R4]

STR R6,[R3]

SWI “OS_LeaveOS”

MOV PC,R14

ALIGN

]

REM LETS INIT…

CALL INIT%

A%=0

X%=0

FIRST%=0

REM KEEP READING RANDOM NUMBERS UNTIL THEY ACTUALLY BECOME RANDOM

REPEAT

  X%=A%

  A% = USR (RNG%)

  PRINT “WARMING UP &”;STR$~(A%)

  IF FIRST%<50 THEN X%=A%:FIRST%=FIRST%+1
UNTIL X%<>A%

REM DISPLAY RANDOM NUMBERS (RETURNED FROM R0)

REPEAT

  A%=USR (RNG%)

  PRINT “&”;STR$~(A%);" ";
UNTIL 1=0


This was fixed around Visual Basic 5, when it got AOT compilation with VC++ backend, OCX tooling in VB, it got a sweet spot in VB 6. Naturally this was kind of triggered by Delphi's competition, and then .NET came around.


At first I thought you were joking; however a quick search reveals that indeed God has forsaken us.

https://microsoftcasualgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1...

The OS is now "free" and Solitaire is now paid product? Is this the pure definition of irony?

OP: You've done a wonderful job with this!


I had to use Windows machine to test an app recently and the amount of ads and other annoyances there is just mindblowing. I wanted to show Solitaire to my kids but it's so ad-ridden it's painful to play.

I'm strongly considering just reformatting the drive and putting Linux in there.


All credit goes to the original creator, I just posted the link :-)


Consider Windows a live-service, free-to-play OS.


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