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Fun with ASCII folders
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ASCII stands for "American Standard Code for Information Interchange".
Because computers only understand binary all characters have such a
numerical value.
e.g. the binary value of 'A' is 1000001 which is 65 in decimal.
65 is the Ascii code of 'A'.

Ascii folders are simply folders that have a name which contains
chars Windows can't represent so it's impossible to open them
with Explorer. This is not possible on xp and 2k. NT may be
invulnerable too, I'm not sure.

To enter ascii code you have to hold down ALT and then
type the ascii value of the char you want to type.
e.g. ALT+65 types an 'A'.

Creating an ascii folder
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Create a new folder with Windows Explorer (for example C:\afolder)
and put some files in it.
Fire up a dos prompt: Start -> Run -> command
Now cd to the right directory, e.g.

C:\windows>cd..
C:\>

Rename your folder like this:

C:\>ren afolder asecretALT+255

The character the ascii value 255 represents cannot be displayed
by Windows. If you try to open that folder you'll get an error message
saying: "The folder C:\asecret_ does not exist".
Note that only certain values can't be displayed by Windows.

"Cracking" ascii folders
----------------------------

cd to the folder your folder is located in, in the example:

C:\windows>cd..
C:\>

type dir to display the folder's content and echo it into a file:

C:\>dir > afile.txt

Now open in edit using binary mode and wrapping lines to 70 chars wide:

C:\>edit /70 afile.txt

At the right bottom you'll see "Value: avalue" where avalue represents
the ascii code of the character at the current cursor position.
Find your foldername and put the cursor at the location where the ascii
code is typed to find out what it is. Of course it's 255 in our case
but this is if you need to find out about a folder created by someone else
using another ascii code...

Now you can rename the folder back to a name Windows does understand,
in the example:

C:\>ren asecretALT+255 stuff