Dude, Nuke 'em

I have written in the past about my unscrupulous youth and how I would delight in using WinNuke in high school and early college to ruin people's chat sessions.

Nuking a Windows machine became obsolete/impossible right about 1998, so it's been nine years since you could trash any Windows PC on the Internet with a simple network tool.

I miss it dearly.

It occurs to me that most spam today comes from infected residential Windows systems. And Microsoft has taken great care to ensure that you can't just send a packet to an IP address and ruinate it in the process. I envision an alternate history where Windows 95 botnets are mown down like Nazis in a 1940s comic book by vigilante hackers with some sort of wonderful seek-and-destroy WinNuke software.

Perhaps this world does exist, in a way. Perhaps, some day, I may be deputized.