this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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This is kinda funny. During a family vacation as a kid, I went down to the hotel business center to use a computer kiosk but it required payment. I was bored so I was clicking around on the locked screen's hotel logo and got to their company about page, and a bit more link clicking eventually got me out of the company's website and to a google search page. I browsed for free for what seemed like an hour and did it again the next day before we went home.
boredom has made me the man I am today, its tough now a days to get bored and not pull out your phone and browse lemmy instead of doing your hobbies
Oh, yeah. Anyone who complains they don't have any hobbies actually does have a hobby, because I'm quite sure they're not spending that time staring blankly into space. It just happens to be something like TV or scrolling a lot, and if I don't do that I get bored enough to read, draw, etc fairly quickly. Turns out I don't draw like I used to as a kid because I'm not bored in class.
My only current downfall is it's REALLY hard for me to take a walk without music like I used to now that I have access to traveling entertainment for the first time. It's healthier to be able to sit with yourself in boredom and distress because it forces you to process your thoughts, but it's not fun and we don't have to do the un-fun work thing now, and that's probably damaging psychologically
I have a memory of something similar at a travel tourism kiosk. Kiosk was locked to their webpage. Right clicked an image, chose "save as", navigated to something with a folder, right clicked and chose "Open in New Window" (might be misrembering -- older version of windows) to pop up Windows Explorer. Windows Explorer, at the time, embedded Internet Explorer 4 if you typed a URL in the address bar, so off the races I was.
Life before smartphones, man.
The older versions of IE back in the Windows 9X era would essentially turn into Windows Explorer if you put a local file path into them. I remember using this exploit back in the day on our school computers that ran a locked down version of Windows where you couldn't browse anything in Windows Explorer beyond your personal network folder. I found that by typing C:/ into the IE address bar it would turn IE into Windows Explorer mode and from there I had full access to the C drive and could even open up the folder tree sidebar thing and browse the local network, finding all sorts of folders that I wasn't supposed to be able to access.
Right! Just typing C:\Windows\command.com in the address bar was usually enough to completely control a system :)
That is evil genius and I love it.
Haha, yes! Sounds about right. Someone could create a puzzle game where you trying to escape a vendor kiosk and it gets progressively more complex as you go on.
I took every chance at exploiting internet browsing kiosks for free access before the age of smartphones 😅