Frutiger Aero Archive Forum

I want color, nowadays everything is all muted colors or shades of grey or beige and it makes everything look so miserable. The clothes now are so bland compared to what they were in the 90s and 2000s and I hope that cool designs and vibrant colors come back!

Something I just thought of was REAL hacking. Aside from Defcon events these days, hacking culture was a lot more fun and it was closer to its actual roots: making electronic devices do cool stuff they weren't intended to. There was also dumb fun stuff like salting vending machines, using dial up networking tricks to bump people off the internet, writing Javascript functions that made your computer automatically open up your CD-ROM tray by itself. The internet was less security conscious so it was also easier to learn how to try some of the more blackhat stuff like hacking e-mail accounts using easily acquired personal data (Yahoo was particularly easy), blind SQL injections attacks, and war dialing and port scanning were basically unknown and easy to do. Nowadays it seems like the closest thing I can get to that is attacking direct print printers to print out warnings about how they need to secure their printers.

Phreaking was still a thing since pay phones still existed. I enjoyed sticking it to Ma Bell by using hacked tone dialers (the old phone systems in the 90s/early 2000s used tones to verify you inserted coins, so you could simulate the tones for coin inserts and button presses so you could make free calls and be kind of invisible). Unfortunately later (I think) they changed the tones, but eventually they just muted the line when dialing or inserting coins and that killed it.

Bumhug wrote: Mon Nov 17, 2025 5:51 am

Phreaking was still a thing since pay phones still existed. I enjoyed sticking it to Ma Bell by using hacked tone dialers (the old phone systems in the 90s/early 2000s used tones to verify you inserted coins, so you could simulate the tones for coin inserts and button presses so you could make free calls and be kind of invisible). Unfortunately later (I think) they changed the tones, but eventually they just muted the line when dialing or inserting coins and that killed it.

I actually heard of phone phreaking. Anyone who's curious about it or simply nostalgic for it should go watch "the secret history of hacking (2001)". It's a good documentary on the subculture at the time and it also features Steve Wozniak.

Spikelets, kandi, loom bands, rubber bracelets, robo dogs, usable cameras, teen friendly spaces (nephews are always stuck inside) and probably less cars. I have my reasoning for some of this but it can mostly be summerised as "all my friends have incredibly depressed younger siblings or i see kids acting like adults"

I haven't read through the whole thread yet but I wanted to add, god I want translucent housing on electronics please! Or hell color! I miss Neon Green cases for my desktop and laptops. Yes, I know the black, and silver, and the grey can look good (I do own a m2 macbookpro), But man I miss color in designs.