This isn't actually an April Fools joke, but was probably the funniest thing
that I ever did in retrospect. At some point (I think I have it in my files)
I was doing some analysis of usenet security (such as it was) and ended up
writing a short paper explaining exactly, in complete, gruesome detail, how
to forge news articles and make them essentially non-traceable. This was
pre-nntp (which makes it even more trivial to be non-traceable. No
challenge).
I sent this paper off to backbone and moderators to get feedback (what I
missed, what I got wrong, what can be done...) from the folks -- and the
Risks moderator misinterpreted it as a submission and posted it in a Risks
digest. So there it was, in all its glory, telling any bimbo who can read
exactly how to screw with USENET. That was the last thing I wanted, and it
was syncronicity that it happened to be the RISKS group that did it, which
is what is funny about the situation -- it also didn't matter, because
evidently the only people who read RISKS knew all the hacks already or
aren't into it. The thing more or less sank without a trace...
This page last updated on: Jul 1 09:16