this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2023
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From back before you accessed all your sites by using a search engine and instead you typed whatever that thing was and then ".com" (e.g. you wanted info on Cocoa Puffs, you would go to cocoapuffs.com) into your URL bar (yes, before that bar was a unified search/URL bar). If you mistyped or spelled something wrong, you would get porn almost every time. And then that porn would take over your whole computer. Even if you closed your web browser, it was your desktop background now. And trying to change it back didn't work. And you basically just had to restart your computer because your OS was completely compromised until you rebooted, then it would go back to normal after the reboot.
I loved this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of "Britney Spears Nude!!!" and I loudly asked him "what does 'Britney Spears Nude' mean?" in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.
Golden days!
~15 years ago my friend's mom was trying to go to "dicks sporting goods", commonly referred to as just "dicks". She types in "dicks.com" and was not pleased with the result. Looking now, it seems they bought the domain so it will redirect to dickssportinggoods.com