Internet Hall of Shame. Maybe you only did it once, maybe it was a decade ago, and maybe you regretted it later -- but chances are, you did at least one of these. Tell us about it. Have you ever...

I've only done the chain letter thing, and I do it with the funny jokes sometimes (but I strip off all the middle forwarding text).

HAH! I've done NONE! of these!

Chain letter, though I mostly ignore them, and using a college friend's account. And I currently don't have any email outside of work, but I use a friend's account for web access and mudding.

I approached the internet too cautiously to make most of the newbie mistakes. Plus I had lots of prior BBS experience. I have guessed a few passwords, which I guess could be considered "cracking". One embarrassing moment: I erased my entire home directory on my second day of work at Stratus. My boss was less than impressed.

Wow, cool survey. I haven't done too many of these things - I clicked on the 4 I did, and they aren't too severe. I used to like to telnet to port 25 on a machine and send people mail with weird From: addresses. Needless to say, I wasn't very sophisticated. There should have been listings for starting flame wars in public newsgroups - I started a doozy in alt.fan.warlord in my younger days.

And just what's wrong with 5+ MB of email?

You forgot "accidentally sent a personal reply to the whole frigging mailing list". Doh! And what about reading someone else's email? I've never done it, but it's been done to me (by an ex-boyfriend).

Most of mine date back to 1990, and sound much worse than they really were... but if I'm not letting anyone else get away on technicalities, I have to 'fess up as well. :)

*** ATZILUT: Hmm... I'll have to try harder next time, then, and come up with some more. ;)

*** DAVER: Nothing, so long as it's your machine, and/or you've got the quota for it. I've... pushed the limits, fairly often. I know I've got more than that on hotblack right now.

No.

Nope.

I accidentally crashed the mailserver for the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid!

Some of these I did a long time ago (10 years?); I'm a good doobie now. I habitually keep ~30MB of mail around now, but not on a Unix server (on my PCs)

I've never done any of those things. I guess it's really telling that I wouldn't know how to do 75% of them anyway...

I feel so vanilla! I keep all my mail, so it has gotten to be larger than 5MB, but I keep it on my home machine, so who can complain? I have also "forged" an e-mail message, but in a manner that it was obviously a joke (from god@heaven.org, for example), and only to prove I could (I would guess that most unix folk have done this at one time or another). So far as I remember, I haven't done any of the other things. I've been the victim of an unintentional mail problem, where one (shared) userid had a procmail set up to forward to a number of us, including itself, the result of which was a mail generator requiring but a single seed to spin out of control.

I've had my share of regretable net mishaps. Yes, I am one of those deviants who has had his access pulled by his ISP. I won't go into the gritty details, you may imagine whatever you will. ***Daver, there is nothing wrong with 5+megs if it is sitting on the server at work.

i did have a friend get an account for me at his school while i was in high school, but thats it. i'm an email goody two shoes

None. I'm very kind.... :) And I really hate some of these practices.

I post to cascades now and again, but only in newsgroups where they're not really reviled. Stream-of-consciousness is not necessarily always off-topic. In addition, I and a bunch of other idiot students managed to crash a Cray 2 by accident about 10 years ago. It was an accident, of course -- there's no way we could have pulled it off if we'd wanted to ...

None of the above.

yes, I've crashed and cracked other people's systems intentionally, and had more than 5MB of mail in my account, and have forged email, and done more nasty things than that. Actually I don't think any of those things were shameful.

Just a wee bit more than 5MB of mail: from a "du -k" in my Mail dir: 17894KB. It's my machine, so :P.. And yeah, I used to be sorta l33t. No shame there. And I had my account suspended a long time ago on a 12-line BBS run by the Worcester Public School system, for saying "couche avec moi ce soir?" to a girl I knew on there. Mind you, I was about 11 or 12 at the time...

Not necessarily more regretable, but definitely goofier: I was in two relationships, one was a commited deap relationship, the other was, well, uh, a friend I was boffing. I changed my GCOS field to "someone who loves you," sent a letter to the former, then kept reading my mail. The next day, I sent mail to the other. Then, immediately realizing my mistake, I sent a way too verbose letter explaining my error, and what my feeling really were and apologizing profusely. THEN I realized that I had, in fact, changed my GCOS field back before sending out the second letter, and had forgotten.

I used to forge email and mailbomb people at WPI a lot, but I grew out of it.

logger@california.com (aka Erik Beckjord) is a lunatic in the San Francisco area who delights in joining mailing lists and harassing people. His very email address was created when he wanted to harass environmentalists. He insults people personally and posts absolutely ridiculous lies (posting to a pro-bicycle newsgroup that "bicycles cause more pollution than cars") etc etc. i encourage anyone looking for a victim to perpetrate anything on this guy you can. if you don't believe me just do a search on his name or email address and see what comes up.

I've actually used AOL to surf the net.

I am pure as the driven snow.

Ran a BBS for pirating games and phone access codes back in HS

Most done when I was new to the scene :(

The only other I did was as an obvious newbie try to engage users in the Twilight Zone on IRC (but that was many years ago when there weren't usually more than 2000 users at a time).

I've done only three and regret none of them. I've posted to cascades occasionally, accidently crashed systems, and intentionally crashed systems... in fact I'd do the first again if it was interesting enough, maybe the 2nd (I can't tell if it's going to truly be an accident ;)) and the third if the situation called for it.