4 ms·

This sounds super similar to a prank I pulled in high school. At school, it was sort of a cat-and-mouse game between the students and the sysadmin. Kids would

This sounds super similar to a prank I pulled in high school. At school, it was sort of a cat-and-mouse game between the students and the sysadmin. Kids would find new ways of evading the school blocks (different proxies, someone getting a bypass login, etc so they could access myspace) that the admin would then catch a couple weeks later and close. A lot of these proxies were distributed on the fileserver that was shared between students. One day, I wrote a small piece of software in my programming class (in VB6!!) that would wait a random length of time, and then open and close the CD tray. I wrote a short batch script that would copy that file to startup and then open the current popular proxy software. I then changed the icon on that script and placed it where people expected to find the proxy software, giving them reason to run my script. Students then unknowingly disseminated my software all over the school, and the next day (after PCs were rebooted overnight) the software would take effect and randomly open/close the CD trays of computers all over the school. They ended up tracing it back to me (windows user permissions/ownership, probably) and I was promptly banned from computers at school through the end of the year and for most of the next.

mittermayr 6y ago
VB6 was the worst and best kind of software. You were NEVER (even as a professional) sure if it ran on the other/target machine, so you just hoped for the best. Also, I quite like the cat-and-mouse analogy you mention, because I feel it was (mostly) a harmless way to hone skills, to level up knowledge essentially, with a (at the time) reasonable amount of risk involved, which kept it exciting enough to learn more. It would be cool to see schools have a bug-bounty type of environment here or there, just for those few kids who actually want to spend their time on getting better at networking.
- jhamilton 6y ago
  Luckily the school was rather new so all of the PCs across the entire school were identical, whether they were for a teacher's use, the programming class, or the graphic design and yearbook clubs so I was luckily able to avoid any of those shortcomings. Cant say my school had anything of the sort (they'd prefer to punish and force you back in line with other students) and while I like the idea, I know that in HS it'd feel too akin to snitching on my classmates to participate in that.
surfsvammel 6y ago
We had a battle with the sysadmins, we trying to do pranks and the sysadmins trying to find us. This was around 1996 or so (I remember this because Quake had just come out). Anyway. I remember us communicating with the sysadmins by writing small messages in files we where not supposed to be able to access.

mittermayr 6y ago

VB6 was the worst and best kind of software. You were NEVER (even as a professional) sure if it ran on the other/target machine, so you just hoped for the best. Also, I quite like the cat-and-mouse analogy you mention, because I feel it was (mostly) a harmless way to hone skills, to level up knowledge essentially, with a (at the time) reasonable amount of risk involved, which kept it exciting enough to learn more. It would be cool to see schools have a bug-bounty type of environment here or there, just for those few kids who actually want to spend their time on getting better at networking.

jhamilton 6y ago
Luckily the school was rather new so all of the PCs across the entire school were identical, whether they were for a teacher's use, the programming class, or the graphic design and yearbook clubs so I was luckily able to avoid any of those shortcomings. Cant say my school had anything of the sort (they'd prefer to punish and force you back in line with other students) and while I like the idea, I know that in HS it'd feel too akin to snitching on my classmates to participate in that.

surfsvammel 6y ago

We had a battle with the sysadmins, we trying to do pranks and the sysadmins trying to find us. This was around 1996 or so (I remember this because Quake had just come out). Anyway. I remember us communicating with the sysadmins by writing small messages in files we where not supposed to be able to access.