Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubyfan | Hacker News Reader

Around 2000 there was a dial-up service called Juno. It took about 15% of your screen to show a rotating banner ad and had some time limit for use. As far as I recall every restriction was implemented in the client.

As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.

A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.

My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.

View on HN

Juno was great. There was another company similar to Juno with the same idea which I think started with an "N" if I remember correctly.

My dialup of choice was MetConnect. It was entirely free and fast no ads just dial in and use the Internet.

NetZero, who eventually bought Juno after they went under in the dot-com bubble.

I set up a local BBS-like system and used the real NetZero* dialer to call it and attempt to log in. Then I changed my password and repeated the process several times.

That gave me the key to the Caesar cipher they used for the password.. so I could create a fresh account with a scrambled password any time I wanted.

At runtime, in the OS-provided ad-free dialer, I'd use the unscrambled password.

I also pre-created some accounts with unscrambled passwords like "apple" and "bicycle" to share with friends.

NetZero* ceased operations mere weeks after I started this.. Hm.

(* Was it NetZero specifically, or some clone? I forget..)

Reminds me of free dotcoms back in the late 1990s just up until the dotcom bubble burst: free but with a frame with a banner. 14 year old me enjoyed learning how to load (and then design around) my own page in that frame.

We weren't technically savvy at all, but still found a loophole. There was a version of the software that crashed after you had successfully connected. As long as you didn't update, you were ad-free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com