Gawd this takes me back...
Years and years ago, when "hi-speed internet" was a rare commodity, I lived in an extremely small town in deepest, darkest Tennessee, just over the state line from Kentucky, Internet there was ONLY dialup, unless you were a crazy kook like me that sprung for an ISDN line.
The local telco, BellSouth, stood up a website to gauge interest by region in Hi-speed - specifically DSL in this case.
A simple web page would let you pluck in your phone number and register your interest in the new hot DSL connection when it would become available. They claimed this would help BellSouth prioritize the rollout areas.
Of course, I went right to the page, typed in my number and "Submitted". After I did, I tried to enter a friends number as well, but was prevented as "MY IP address had already entered". However, by breaking and reestablishing a DHCP lease, I was able to enter my friends phone number as well. Interesting...
With a little scripting app (PerfectKeyboard IIRC) I doped out a macro that would establish a DHCP lease, go to the website, enter a phone number with our little town's prefix (615-325-xxxx) , then go to a different page, break the lease, poll a IP address, navigate back to the Bellsouth page, increment the phone number by one, register interest, and so on.
As all phone numbers in the town had the same prefix, I just had the script start at 0000 and run through all 9999 possible combinations. If I recall, it took about a day to run.
It was all just a little FU to Bellsouth who would never, ever extend their benevolence to our little town, as Cable internet was not even remotely available and therefore no competition to provide anything better....However...
When the DSL rollout actually happened a few months later, guess what small town got DSL before Nashville did? Someone at Bellsouth missed the fact that nearly 10,000 inquiries came from a town of less than 300 people.
As a bonus, the DSLAM ended up being located about 100M from my house.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
