..ping ping ping.. ping... what is this mystery program, welp it is more than you think it is... on the out side, it looks like a helpless little program that tells you if you are lagging... but on the inside it is a lean, mean, destruction machine... the average doesn't even really know what ping is, and most everyone else thinks that all it does is tell you how bad you are lagging... welp, it is much more than that... it has the power, to crash, or even reset a computer when it is used right... the way that ping works is simple.. it sends a packet to the ip address(computer).. when the computer that you sent it to gets the packet, it sends it back.. when the packet gets back to the originating computer, the round trip time is then calculated, and that will tell you how bad that you or they are lagged... the beautiful thing about this is that the packet size can be varied to be any where from like 24 bytes, or to like 64k (64528 to be exact).. 64528 is supposed to be the largest packet that you can send... but there are a few ping programs out there that will let you send a packet size larger than that... having program like this can be of great advantage; this is what will allow you to crash some computers... since it is supposed to be impossible to send a packet greater than 64528, the computer that is recieving this packet doesn't know what to do with the extra packets, it causes overflows and stuff like that that will make the computer to halt, or reset... since alot of computers have patches for it now, windows 95 patch 1, linux has this fixed in 2.0.24 and up... there are still some computers that are vulnerable, but not all that many.. although, if someone is pissing you off, and you know what they are on a ppp or slip account, you can do what is called a ICMP or ping flood... what you will do is to get a bunch of ping programs going, sending larger packets (around 1k is good) over and over and over, maxing out there modem, and unfortunalty yours also... but this will piss them off, because they aren't going to be able to do anything because there computer is too busy to do anything else but reply to the ping packets, if they are on irc, most likely they are going to be kicked off because they are unable to reply to the ping from irc, and it will time out.. the most beautiful part about all this, is there is almost no way that you can disable pings =) execpt with like firewalls and all that tre leet stuff.. use this information wisely, and try not to piss to many people off... have fun.. -lagger