The Twilight Report

The year is 1997. The treacherous Lecturians have conquered the student residential network. But, from secret staging grounds from two of the campus dorms, the students prepare to SYN flood Steve Gilmore's PC.

White Dactyl The ResComp chronicles

So this obsession with the toothbrush picture of mine has more layers than an onion. I was re-reading the article Mitch Gitman wrote about ResComp back in 1997 and noticed it quotes Steve Gilmore's e-mail threat to crack down on software piracy and pornography. I greped for the e-mail in question using the text in the article and sure enough, I found it in my mail archive. [ side note: before there was the verb to google, there was the verb to grep. I never even thought about that because it seems like to grep has been around forever, but of course it has not. Even relatively pedestrian verbs, such as to search or to find have not. ]

( Gilmore's Rant... )

"What" "I" "find" "amusing" "about" "this" "e-mail" "is" "the" "words" "which" "Gilmore" "decided" "to" "put" "into" "double" "quotation" "marks". Whew! That's enough of that; beginning to sound like William Shatner. Take this sentence for example:

All you own is a "license" to "use" that software.

Steve Gilmore The ResComp chronicles

What is remotely confusing or foreign about the words "license" and "use"?

Some prankster then spoofed this e-mail in response to Gilmore's rant:

( Spoofed... )

Let me just say that spoofing e-mail is the lowest form of hacker expression. It was a little funny though. But anyway, it was a really sad comment on the state of affairs on the ResComp LAN that the mailing list was unsecured and apparently not moderated correctly. Gilmore was totally out of his depth. Tyler was called into his office once for using a port scanner. Actually they didn't call him into his office, they just turned the ports off in his room and Tyler had to do some digging to even find out why. The point is that when Tyler finally talked to him, it became quite clear that Gilmore had no idea what was going on at all; this is apparently why he didn't see disabling his port as an unreasonable escalation. If I recall, there was no specific ban on port scanners in the ResComp user agreement, although I base this statement in part on the fact that ResComp had difficulty dealing with spoofed e-mail let alone understanding the simplicities of port scanners.

( Gilmore's Response )

I wonder if they ever worked out who sent that spoofed e-mail.