I’ll never forget downloading Max Payne. A single .exe. “This can’t possibly work…an entire game!?”
Son of a biiiiitch. And I paid nothing!? Napster changed my life, for real.
Napster was just mp3 files. There was a roundabout way around that where they had that method of zipping up an installer and changing the extension to .mp3.
Maybe it was Kazaa.
You mean Kazaa Lite K++, right?
I loved so much that one of the top downloads on Kazaa was a ripped version of the paid version of Kazaa.
When you see a cmd window or two flash into and out of existence after trying to open something:
The amount of legitimate software that’s just batch scripts is pretty amusing. I always make sure to read and understand what it’s doing in that case, though
My elderly parents both have laptops with Windows 11 (don’t @ me, they can’t possibly learn a new OS at this point). Every once in a while they briefly throw up like 100 cmd windows. I have no clue what they are.
They would put a bunch of spaces between the mp3 and the .exe so the other information columns would hide it
Back circa 2000 I was a Visual Basic developer. In my corporate apps I would always put in easter eggs that would randomly throw up message boxes saying stuff like “No matter where you go, there you are.” This always pissed off the c-suite types and they would demand that the source be found and eliminated, but none of the other developers ever found it. All I did was convert the message string to a series of CHR(n) commands, and for the MsgBox command I just put like a thousand spaces in front of it in a small, rarely-used file. A search for the text of the message would return nothing, and a manual inspection of the file wouldn’t reveal anything unless you happened to notice the horizontal scroll bar this produced at the bottom. One of the applications I wrote is still in use at this company (and still occasionally throwing up these easter eggs) and it was basically a front end wrapping a mainframe program dating to the 1970s, which means that thing is still running.
Something mildly similar is how spam emails made it through our filters. In the email it’d advertise dick pills but when copying the email to notepad it looked like gibberish. I made the suggestion to highlight the email text and change the font-color and size to something uniform. Turns out they would insert 3 random characters in between each letter, and those 3 characters would be font size 1 and white while the letters of the actual message were 12 and Black.
…I’ve actually never heard of that trick.
deltree is the latest alt band blowing up! Download their whole discography!
“Break Stuff” is what you were looking for tbf
Hahaha. Back when you could format reinstall if thing went wrong and only lose a day.
Ah limewire. I miss the simplicity of those days.
Limewire, ares, bearshare, kazaa, imesh…
Soulseek is still around
Ahh, good old VirusWire. Simpler times.
I absolutely did not use that exact excuse when I was a teenage foreign exchange student and ruined the family’s computer. Nope, no siree.
It was tricky to get used to the Linux mentality of not really having a dedicated double-clickable “executable type”. But it makes sense - if you want to run code, that should be a planned action by an app that is dedicated to the task of setting up new code. (Package manager, IDE)
