I remember the times when our school got our first computers: three C64 with C1541 and one printer. The math teacher who wanted to learn computer science to one day teach it vs. us three who were fluent in assembler, knew the key routines of the OS by heart, and even knew the hardware inside out.
I exchanged the C64’s OS ROMS for EEPROMs with four different OS images and hid the switches inside the extension slot. Yes, for this I opened the computers, de-soldered parts, soldered other parts in, etc. The teacher never noticed. Spare keys are fun. Modern school IT would probably faint if a student tried this.
Occasionally, I exchanged the EEPROMs for other variants, like one day where I had an image where the printer suddenly printed everything in reverse. OK, I did not turn around the letters (no space in the code for that, and the printer only had eight user-definable characters, so this would have been a major operation).
The teacher was confused, he just wanted to print a small basic program he had written, and it produced something like “olleH” tnirp 01 instead of 10 print “Hello” (not the actual program he had written). Switching the computer off and on did not help, either. So he asked for help, and I took his C64, turned it upside down, knocked on the bottom three times, and placed it back on the table. During this last motion, I knocked back the switch for the EEPROM selector to the standard ROM image. And then I made the teacher print his text again…
Probably got the idea from fight club, you know, in the hypothetical scenario that this is neither fake nor gay
Why porn of all things? It’s one of the few things that could get you in serious trouble at a school, why not a meme or silly drawing.
Why porn of all things?
It’s one of the few things that could get you in serious trouble at school
Question and answer in one. It’s hard to understand risk-seeking behavior as a risk-averse person, but that’s exactly why
Right? This is what I was thinking lol
We had printer drivers that would show a notification for net send. The broadcast went out to several schools for some reason and it was basically a spell to summon our head of IT.
One time I sent something after it was forbidden and the guy came crashing through the door, demanding who was using a specific laptop. Turns out that laptop was broken and sitting in its receptacle and a friend of mine tried to use it just a minute earlier.
Good times.
During my college years, we’d have fun lan parties until the room monitor would send a command to shutdown all machines. This was ~2009 and we mostly played counter strike 1.6 (portable that was less than 100mb) or Digital Paintball 2. Sometimes emulated Bomberman, too :)
Ah man I have so many stories about my high school schenanigains.
Every student had a folder named as their student ID on the smb network, all in one big folder. I created a folder there with a fake student ID just 1 above mine, so all I had to do was change my path from /students/1234 to 1235 and bam - I’m in my alt account. I had cracked copies of halo, starbound, gmod, powder toy, Terraria, Minecraft… all sorts of goodies!
Eventually I found that since this phony user folder 1235 wasn’t tied to a domain user, its read/write permissions weren’t locked down - so anybody on the network could access or add to the folder, so I shared it around with friends and it grew quickly! Didn’t realize that meant deleting stuff, too; some kids just had chaos in mind, and would randomly delete shit because hAHa I DelEted the FolDer!!1! Ah, high school.
So eventually I got a system down where I’d keep backups elsewhere, and I’d refresh the war-torn main folder every so often, or switch to a new bogus ID to keep it among my friends - but better yet, if I was lucky enough to catch it disappearing in realtime, I’d often throw it right back up with something flashy and new in there, like a new CoD game or something, with surface level ‘shortcut’ links to the game executable right at the top of the directory, complete with a convincing custom icon. Instead of running a game or something, though, it instead ran scripts that either identified the leak (CD tray eject in a library computer bay? Immediate audio queue locating the assholes), or in later stages when patching the leak still failed, I’d bait them into a script that’d nuke their PC somehow 😂
my personal favorite, I built what I called the ‘tree bomb’ - a recursive .batch file that launches itself in another window, then runs "tree C:". Within around a second you’d go from a functional PC to a screen filled with terminals spitting out a representation of your hard drive’s contents 🤣 in retrospect, I made a malware! 😅
That’s not even the best one, though. For a brief window I tried my best to create a little portable Ubuntu environment on a USB drive so I could just bring all my software with me, games and all, and just boot into it when I got to school!
Well, eventually I had the thought that I could potentially install it on a second hidden partition, and select it from boot time… But I guess in the heat of the moment (I had a little group of friends standing behind me blocking the librarians’ view, all cheering me on), I ended up misclicking and overwriting the OS, wiping the hard drive in the process 😅😅
Needless to say, they were not thrilled. Unfortunately, believe it or not, a group of kids crowded around one guy at a computer is a fucking beacon when you’re searching video feeds for suspects 😅 they had found me out by the next day and banned me from the computers for a year. (My friends just gave me their logins anyways 🤘)
I installed (not live) fedora onto a portable hard disk, and just hid it behind the computers, plugged into one of them.
hid the folder deep within the drive.
My brother in Christ you can right-click the desktop, personalisation, check the folder linked to the slideshow. You didn’t hide shit.
I unplugged the monitors from the wall and wrapped a single hair-width strand of copper wire around the positive and negative terminals, and put the plug pins just barely back in the socket so it looked loose.
When the person investigating the faulty monitor pushed the plug in, the copper would evaporate in a bright flash.
Later that night I would dumpster-dive behind the computer lab at the school for the thrown-out, ‘faulty’ monitor. That’s how I got my first 17" CRT monitor for gaming on Counterstrike.
Holy shit that’s some serious preplanning and manipulation. It’s impressive and kind of fucked up all at once. Everyone else was here was just fucking around.
I changed a bunch of school computers BIOS splash screen to goatse.
Waaaaaaaay back in my Visual Basic 5 days I used to hide easter eggs in my corporate apps. It was always just a dialog box that would pop up randomly saying something kinda funny. To keep them from being discovered by the other developers, I would put the code in some obscure file and instead of a (searchable) string variable containing the text for the popup, I would convert it to a concatenated series of CHR(ASCII#) statements, and then each line of code would start with a couple of hundred spaces, so it would only ever be seen if someone happened to open the file and also happened to notice that there was a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom. We got many bug reports about the easter eggs but nobody was ever able to locate the code that was producing them. I might have been fired for this but probably not - nobody really cared much about shit like this in 1999.
I don’t know why I’m taking mental notes like “don’t forget to change the system clock before doing crimes!” like I’ll ever need it.
In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.
In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.
A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:
while (true) { fork(); }Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. 🤣
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. 😂
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.:(){ :|:& };:or (more clearly written):
function forkbomb() { forkbomb | forkbomb & ## background the process whilst recursing ## the pipe ensures that both instances are called at the same time, instead of waiting on the other ## without the pipe, you just get a linear increase in processes. Slow bomb. We want fast. }; forkbomb ## start it all offI’d scold the sysadmin instead for not cofiguring critical systems in a secure way. Ulimit exists for a reason.
Huh. I never made that connection before. I always thought ulimit was to prevent excessive disk writes or something
ulimit -H -u 10will (hard)limit the current process (the shell) to 10 subprocesses. You can also use it to limit the number of open files etc.To globally configure that for a user/group you’d use
/etc/security/limits.confinstead.If you want to prevent users from filling up the disk, take a look into quota.
What does that command do?
Creates a new process. So, it would create an infinite amount of processes filling RAM.
That reminds me of back when I was in high school. The IT guy was a big gamer and had installed RainbowSix on all the machines in the computer lab so we could play against each other during lunch time including himself.
One stuck up, self-righteous teacher heard about the game and tried to have the IT guy delete it from all the computers because they were “violent games that had no business being in school”. He refused and the school’s administration seemed to have his back on it. So during a computer class she instructed the entire class to delete the game folder from their computer and empty the recycle bin and then leave the file explorer open so she could walk around and see that it has been done.
While everyone else were deleting theirs I copied the game folder on my machine elsewhere, then deleted the original to show her that it wasn’t there anymore. After she was gone I moved the folder back where it belonged and shared it on the network so everyone else could copy it back into their computer. The following lunch break it took less than 5 minutes to get the game back on everyone’s computer and we kept playing like nothing happened. Get fucked, hag.
The surprising part here is that the school sided with the IT guy.
That, plus a school computer lab running without something like Faronics Deep Freeze (even my shitty Mississippi public school in the 90s had that or something similar), and the lack of permissions control that apparently allows student users to delete and restore program files at will is giving the story some real “that happened…” energy.
You give woefully underfunded school IT departments too much credit, especially in the “desktops are new tech” days.
Honestly, sounds like your Mississippi school was ahead of the curve from a lockdown perspective.
It was one of the main city schools, so I suppose they could have been. That place was a shithole, otherwise, despite the best efforts of some really good teachers with the misfortune of being stuck working there.
All I knew from my perspective was that this teacher was angry at the existence of those games and the IT guy never removed them so she tried to circumvent him. To me that tells me that the school management either allowed it or simply didn’t care.
The computers weren’t really that locked down or secure from user tampering. Some idiots would even install malware all the time on them like Bonzi Buddy for shits and giggles. The IT guy didn’t strike me as the hard working type and would only re-image a computer if it was no longer functioning.
I actually got all of Civilization 2 by finding it randomly installed on a single PC in one teacher’s classroom.
Copy and pasted the entire directory to a zip disk that I uh… borrowed… brought said zip disk to another computer in the school computer lab that had both a zip drive and a cd burner, burned it onto a blank cd i had, cleared the zip disk, returned it, brought the cd home, copied over the game files, played civ 2 on my piece of shit eMachine that did not have a zip drive.
We just played Counter Strike 2D from a flash drive.
Those LAN parties with the entire class were insane and there was nothing they could do since it wasn’t installed.
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2001 I figured out a way to get a NES emulator and games on all the computers in the lab. School was pissed but never figured me out. I played so much Kirby.
Someone figured out that you didn’t have to install starcraft to play it, just copy/paste the files. Those were some good times.
We were able to put the emulators on our network drives, so the admins couldn’t revert your change when the ghosted the machine.
My favorite accomplishment from that era was discovering that I could make the single core machines beep themselves to death and sneaking that into the shortcut icon for IE in the ghost image. Man was the IT admin mad about that 🤣
I think it was the network drive for us as well. Shit was so long ago. I just remember everyone had it and was playing games and it was my fault.
NESticle?
Probably, I remember it being a different one but that could have been a SNES emulator. I can’t find one that rings bell that was around then. My memory is decent but it was 24 years ago.
IT is incompetent. You could easily disable ability to change desktop backgrounds for students
It’s school IT, so it was probably a teacher who ‘knows computers’ and not anyone with IT training.
All of the school districts (rural area so each town large enough for its own schools has its own school district and the smaller ones will share a “unified” school district) near me go through the same MSP so it’s better than the teacher who’s good with computers but not as good as having an actual IT department
Or have student logins to track whodunnit.
When I was at school you could just boot Linux off a USB and had full access to the HDD.
Wow, amateur hour at the IT Dept.
