3 ms·

In the early 90s in middleschool (6-8th grade) we had access to a macintosh lab - the original macs - and they were all networked and relatively locked down. Wh

In the early 90s in middleschool (6-8th grade) we had access to a macintosh lab - the original macs - and they were all networked and relatively locked down. What they didn't do however, was lock down access to shared network drives. In the lab we had a limited number of games on 3.5" floppy disks and if you didn't get there early enough, no games for you. In one of the classes held in the lab we were instructed as to how to save our work to the network instead of a floppy. This was in the heyday of Hypercard and so that's what was usually stored by students on network drives. When my father showed me how to copy data from a disk to a drive at home, I connected the dots. I went into the lab after school one day and copied all of the games I liked playing, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, from disk to the network. At 13 years old, I thought I was slick. No more waiting for games. I enjoyed this advantage for about a week, until I was called into the Principal's office and had a talking to by the network admin and the lab teacher. I had absolutely no concept of storage size, and at ~60mb I had taken up a considerable amount of storage on the network at the time.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Did something similar in the late 90’s / early aughts. Figured out the default password scheme for teachers. Found several teacher accounts that didn’t change their default password. Teacher accounts could write to network drives when students couldn’t. Put games like it, quake 2 and c&c ra2 on the network. Lasted about six months. A student I had confided in ratted me out. I was no longer permitted to touch another school computer. I failed every class that required me to use a school computer. Despite the fact I brought my own laptop to school, they wouldn’t let me use it. Formal education and I never got along after that.
- stallmanite 8y ago
  That's ridiculous, maybe I'm over-involved with my kids but I'd think your parents would go to bat for you in that one. The school making you fail other classes over that is unacceptable
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    There's a reason why "The Mentor"'s Hacker Manifesto has disdain for schools. I've had similar things happen at high school. Still, anecdote. Unless your parents can and will sue, the public schools (SPIT) will do as they choose.
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    They tried. I wasn't exactly a stellar student anyway. We switched me to another school district to finish out high school. I'm convinced that I would have had a more useful education if I had dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley, and lived out of a van working for minimum wage at a startup than if I had finished high school.
- smcl 8y ago
  I had a similar ban from using my high school's computing equipment for an even tamer reason - sending messages to my friend in the same classroom using "net_send", which the school claimed DDOS'd their network and blew it out of proportion like I was some hardcore out of control hacker.
  - ewoodrich 8y ago
    I was given 20 hours of "community service" (school punishment, total joke) in middle school after discovering the messaging feature in Novell (the admin didn't disable it). For a couple weeks the school was absolutely convinced my friend and I were responsible for taking a few computer labs in the district offline and claimed we created a virus.
    - smcl 8y ago
      I suspect we both had the same frustrating conversation with our head teacher :-)
      - godzillabrennus 8y ago
        I was suspended for three days in a separate incident at another school system I started going to the following year for using Winpopup to send messages.
cl0ne 8y ago
We had a mac lab in late 90s/early 2000s and they didn't lock down shared network drives either. A friend and I discovered this one day and we were looking around on the network and found that we could access teacher's gradebooks lol. We also weren't allowed to install games, but found a way around that by scheduling a task to run the installer a minute in the future.

godzillabrennus 8y ago

Did something similar in the late 90’s / early aughts. Figured out the default password scheme for teachers. Found several teacher accounts that didn’t change their default password. Teacher accounts could write to network drives when students couldn’t. Put games like it, quake 2 and c&c ra2 on the network. Lasted about six months. A student I had confided in ratted me out. I was no longer permitted to touch another school computer. I failed every class that required me to use a school computer. Despite the fact I brought my own laptop to school, they wouldn’t let me use it. Formal education and I never got along after that.

stallmanite 8y ago
That's ridiculous, maybe I'm over-involved with my kids but I'd think your parents would go to bat for you in that one. The school making you fail other classes over that is unacceptable
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  There's a reason why "The Mentor"'s Hacker Manifesto has disdain for schools. I've had similar things happen at high school. Still, anecdote. Unless your parents can and will sue, the public schools (SPIT) will do as they choose.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  They tried. I wasn't exactly a stellar student anyway. We switched me to another school district to finish out high school. I'm convinced that I would have had a more useful education if I had dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley, and lived out of a van working for minimum wage at a startup than if I had finished high school.
smcl 8y ago
I had a similar ban from using my high school's computing equipment for an even tamer reason - sending messages to my friend in the same classroom using "net_send", which the school claimed DDOS'd their network and blew it out of proportion like I was some hardcore out of control hacker.
- ewoodrich 8y ago
  I was given 20 hours of "community service" (school punishment, total joke) in middle school after discovering the messaging feature in Novell (the admin didn't disable it). For a couple weeks the school was absolutely convinced my friend and I were responsible for taking a few computer labs in the district offline and claimed we created a virus.
  - smcl 8y ago
    I suspect we both had the same frustrating conversation with our head teacher :-)
    - godzillabrennus 8y ago
      I was suspended for three days in a separate incident at another school system I started going to the following year for using Winpopup to send messages.

cl0ne 8y ago

We had a mac lab in late 90s/early 2000s and they didn't lock down shared network drives either. A friend and I discovered this one day and we were looking around on the network and found that we could access teacher's gradebooks lol. We also weren't allowed to install games, but found a way around that by scheduling a task to run the installer a minute in the future.