🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's my experience with win95.

Actually, Win95 is quite a bit of clever engineering. I installed it,
but said no to the RW option. However, I've got a cheap phone, the kind
that click when another phone picks up the line, and I heard it click
when I said no. Picked up the phone, but just got a dial tone. I believe
that Win95 picked connected to the modem, turned off the speaker, and
did a carrier detect.

Later, around 4am EDT, I was still up, and I had left the machine up in
Win95, when I heard that click again. I could see the lights
on my external 28.8k USR modem flashing, but if I had an internal, like
most people, and not had the phone the clicks, I would have never known.
Suspecting win95 was at it again, I picked up the phone, only to hear 
the modem dialing. Another modem picked up at the other end of the
line. I pulled the phone line out of the wall while the modems were hand
shaking.

As soon as the connection was lost, I heard my hard drive
thrashing. Win95 must be covering up it's tracks. Quickly, hit the power
switch while it was still accessing the disk.

Next, I booted linux, and looked through all my dos
directories. Thankfully, linux displays all the hidden directories as
well. When I did an ls -alt on my c:\w95tmp directory, there seemed to
be some binary files that had been created within the last 20 minutes. 

I suspected that the these files must have be encrypted or compressed, 
so I wrote a simple program that would try to figure out the
information by trying some standard compression/decompression algorithms
and simple encryption decryption techniques, and pipe the result to "strings"
It's a good thing I took that cryptography class last term. Well, I let
run all night, it's a good think I had that phone, let me tell you.

The results:

1 file: full directory listing of my c: drive.
1 file: full directory listing of my d: drive.
1 file: personal informations. All strings in any of my files that 
	match zip codes, phone numbers, and the surrounding lines in
	those text files.
1 file:	lists my name, win95 serial number, my disk partitions,
	like the output of fdisk. (the linux one, dos fdisk.exe can
	only identify dos and non-dos. This one indicated my linux and
	swap partitions) There was also some sort of ranking:
	the top line was:
	
		Priority: 89

1 file:	linux-specific information, like /etc/passwd /etc/HOSTNAME/
	/etc/rc.d/*, pgp keyrings, etc. This was pretty
	scary. Apparently, win95 can mount ext2 partitions and read
	them.

I don't know what files were successfully deleted before I shut the
power off.

:^) <- this is included for the humor-impaired.

BTW. I have no interest in buying win95, or any other MS
products. Fortunately, I know how to use mor powerful tools that I've
got for free with linux, like emacs, gcc, etc. and I can write my own
apps as I need them. I'll buy native ports if they are priced
reasonably, but I like my 32-bit machines running 32-bit OSes, with
reliable PMT. =)

Just thought I'd try to lighten things up on this thread. It would be
scary if I found out this fiction did resemble the truth.

Dave Hwang
martus@mit.edu