this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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This is kinda funny. During a family vacation as a kid, I went down to the hotel business center to use a computer kiosk but it required payment. I was bored so I was clicking around on the locked screen's hotel logo and got to their company about page, and a bit more link clicking eventually got me out of the company's website and to a google search page. I browsed for free for what seemed like an hour and did it again the next day before we went home.
I have a memory of something similar at a travel tourism kiosk. Kiosk was locked to their webpage. Right clicked an image, chose "save as", navigated to something with a folder, right clicked and chose "Open in New Window" (might be misrembering -- older version of windows) to pop up Windows Explorer. Windows Explorer, at the time, embedded Internet Explorer 4 if you typed a URL in the address bar, so off the races I was.
Life before smartphones, man.
The older versions of IE back in the Windows 9X era would essentially turn into Windows Explorer if you put a local file path into them. I remember using this exploit back in the day on our school computers that ran a locked down version of Windows where you couldn't browse anything in Windows Explorer beyond your personal network folder. I found that by typing C:/ into the IE address bar it would turn IE into Windows Explorer mode and from there I had full access to the C drive and could even open up the folder tree sidebar thing and browse the local network, finding all sorts of folders that I wasn't supposed to be able to access.
Right! Just typing C:\Windows\command.com in the address bar was usually enough to completely control a system :)
That is evil genius and I love it.