Right. This is the biggest problem with learning attacks --- the historical attacks no longer work, but they are absolutely essential to
1) get in the mindset of how to find and exploit vulnerabilities, and to learn from the masters. RTM, for example, wrote the first internet worm and one of the attack vectors was a stack smash. Learn from the masters, and how they thought.
2) Since today's systems are built with an understanding of all these exploits, you have to learn these exploits to understand today's systems. So finding an old linux kernel and writing a stack-smasher is one way to experiment.
1) get in the mindset of how to find and exploit vulnerabilities, and to learn from the masters. RTM, for example, wrote the first internet worm and one of the attack vectors was a stack smash. Learn from the masters, and how they thought.
2) Since today's systems are built with an understanding of all these exploits, you have to learn these exploits to understand today's systems. So finding an old linux kernel and writing a stack-smasher is one way to experiment.