Sitting Here at skool, designing an OS, and Being a Geek

[mystran]

Also, try to avoid buying a laptop with a failed battery. Finding replacements can be a pain, and they can sometimes cost as much as you paid for the laptop.

Also checking that harddrives and batteries can be replaced (that is, they are still manufactured) before buying might be a good idea.

[Candy]

Also, try to avoid buying a laptop with a failed battery. Finding replacements can be a pain, and they can sometimes cost as much as you paid for the laptop.

Also checking that harddrives and batteries can be replaced (that is, they are still manufactured) before buying might be a good idea.

if possible, borrow a harddrive of over 8GB for laptops and take it along, to test whether it can take it. My first one plain crashed on my new 40GB disk, the second one called it 8GB but using linux does plain work.

If you're planning on using windows, make sure it actually recognises the full disk.

[Xqzzy Rcxmcq]

Hm...what did I do at school that I wasn't supposed to do...

broke into the grading system!

Well, of course, the idiots at the place overreacted and they were trying to hook me up to lie detector machines, they were planning on calling the FBI, the Secret Service, they had the State Police haul my computer off to the US Marshall's office (which I still have not gotten back) and now I'm in "alternative school" which basically means being placed in a little room all day all by myself, can't leave except to go to the bathroom. If I talk to the other students I get suspended. They call this "lockdown".

And of course the school is intent on calling me a computer terrorist and a felon. Whee. This happened in December.

So everyone, don't do this at school!

(As far as being caught, I was able to do this for five months before some kid found out what I was doing and turned me in.)

[Oliver]

I sure hope you did some heavy "paybacking" to the kid who turned you in. I sure as hell would have.

[jelleghys]

Police, FBI, detector machines, "If I talk to the other students I get suspended."... djee, what's that all about man?! You broke into the grading system of your school... allright, you shouldn't have and now you should get punished (whether or not what you did was just for fun, it's probably against the rules of your school, so...), but the police?!!! Why the * do they have to be involved? I don't get it.

Last week I met the headmaster of my old school. We had a little chat and I told him we once ran a script on the computers in school and found some teachers passwords. His reply: "Oh? So... what were the passwords?" I must mention I have a good relation with this man, but still, if it ain't about drugs or something like that, the police have no business in schools.

[I Lostalim]

I can see, perhaps, a small school freaking out and calling the local PD - but that's as far as it would go... unless they bring up some obscure law about electronic invasion, but even then the worst you'll probably get a fine and some Community Service - plus whatever the school gives you say a suspension or something.

If somebody rang the FBI about it - Federal Authority would probably hang-up half way through the phone call... and they certaintly wouldn't bring out the Lie-Detector test. Those tests are useless to Law Enforcement because they are unreliable and can not be used as evidence.

[Xqzzy Rcxmcq]

Fine, community service, and lie detector details - I figured as such.

I took care of the little squealer

I had to build a new computer from junk parts. I have to keep this in my closet, because my parents would explode if they found this. I have to sneak onto the Internet when my parents aren't home.

The people at the school aren't very bright. When being questioned, they found my IF/AGI stuff along with some C++ programs I wrote. The C++ program was just a hacking program, and I had a list of people whose computers I wanted to break into. They called this a "hit list" and then they called the C program a "virus". Then, they saw the adventure stuff and called the IF/AGI compilers/studios "malicious programs" too.

Coming soon: Virus Quest! ::) I really think it would be hard to make a virus in AGI. You could *maybe* make something with Inform or SCI, because both understand assembly. But I really don't think that would work.

To reinforce how horrible that little cubicle is, I have enclosed a picture. It burns!

[Candy]

I and a friend of mine made a program that would take over a remote computer in VB a long time ago. We used all the plain farmers logic solutions for things we didn't know yet (and I still don't know some of them, but I stopped caring), such as abusing a network drive for communicating over a network, and instead of hiding the process spawning a new one and then shutting down gracefully when killed. It worked quite nice for a few years and then they all moved the computers to NT4, which was set to be secure enough for convicts to use. That boils down to, the sysadmin told me not to break it and I didn't.

Before all of this we plain used the computers after school time (3pm to around 5-8pm depending on when the sysadmin wanted to leave) for gaming, since the internet hadn't come up quite as popular as it is now. We used to do network games, quake 1, diablo 1, C&C 1 etc. against one another. Earned me my nickname in quake 1 even (shooting people at times when they felt 100% secure, such as people with a temporary god mode... nobody could kill you then, but the candyman can )

If you play by the rules, you can play. If you don't, expect them to freak out.

[I Lostalim]

I really think it would be hard to make a virus in AGI. You could *maybe* make something with Inform or SCI, because both understand assembly.

Anybody remember BASIC - I'm not talking about VBASIC, just BASIC for DOS.... Or even Quick BASIC?

BASIC standing for Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instrucion Code - and if you saw some of my random musings with that, I wouldn't put it past somebody being inventive enough to write a virus with something crazy like SCI.

Anyway, Wise-Man say: "If you're stupid enough to stick your effing head out of the trench expect them to bloody well shoot at you."
I went to a public Middle School, where most teachers thought Digital Watches were too advanced for them - except the IT teacher, who I still knew more than, but the SysAdmin...
Well let's say you couldn't sneeze on the keyboard without it being logged in triplicate (I should know I did work experience with him and got to review all the security programs and thier log dumps) So all I can say is if you're going to "hack" a network server, from the same network, you deserve to get caught.

[Xqzzy Rcxmcq]

I had been doing this for MONTHS before they finally were tipped off. They had a simple logging little program, but here's the funny part: the sysadmin guy didn't even read the log files. He would just delete them when they were taking too much space on the server.

So, basically, there was really no security. The teachers in two computer labs had this program called "SynchronEyes", which is like Candy's VB program except with a $900 site license price tag. I downloaded the teacher's program (which lets you control other computers with the client software installed) and would take control of other people's computers. They had no idea what was going on. Also, I disabled the student program from activating on startup so nobody could monitor me. Actually, the teacher caught on to this and thought the program was malfunctioning! He would tell me to restart and I wouldn't, I would just simply reactivate the program. So, I had about 20 minutes of monitor free time to do whatever I wanted.

[I Lostalim]

E-gad and I thought I had no life - what's the point of all that, messing about wiht school computers, seriously.

In College (or Senior high to you Americans) all we ever bothered doing in our Advanced IT Course was make a shortcut to command.com and then mess about with installing some mildly illicit software - nothing major just childish stuff to keep ourselves amused between completing one excercise and being briefed on the next excercise - and through the DOS window on Win2K we made sure to bury it deep

Of course there were others who had no idea what they were doing and went about installing full version software (like Tribes 2) across a number of ocmputers on the network - and they just left it sitting in plain sight on the HDD... not to mention playing network games IN CLASS

Funny thing was that they got caught on breach of contract and coped some heavy fines and severe loss of privilages at school - Because you had to sign an agreement before you could join an IT class... and Security was so tight you needed a personlised access card to get into any computer room.

[bubach]

Lol. Reminds me of when I was in the 7th or 8th grade and used a keylogger. The computers at that school used w95 with all it's security issues.
First of all, if i didn't feel like login into my account, I could press CTRL+ESC (most keyboards didn't have the win-key) and get a small window to open whatever i wanted with. Of course the login window was always open, but who cared?
Anyway, the school used poledit(?) for the logins so I did all kinds of funny stuff. Ran polkill etc.
But funniest of all was the keylogger which i put in autostart. Voila, I had some "good to know" passwords..

And as I hated the administrator on that school (he blamed me for everything that happened to the computers, every breakin & stoalen computer), I decided to crash the network (maybe take over and format the servers) before I quit the 9th grade.
Unfortunatly I never did. Forgot about it or something. :-\

/ Christoffer

[mystran]

Do you people realize that breaking into computers, using keyloggers to steal sensitive information, and all that stuff is illegal in a lot of countries?

Then you people probably also realize that you are not really anonymous on this board; if necessary, your IP address could be traced back to you. In fact, we the necessary authority, it's easier than most people think.

Unless you have confirmed with your lawyer that what you did is too old to prosecute where you live, then it might not be wise to share your experiences here, on this public forum, unless you did have the necessary permissions (and local law doesn't have anything to say about those).

Just my 0.02?.

[Candy]

Then you people probably also realize that you are not really anonymous on this board; if necessary, your IP address could be traced back to you. In fact, we the necessary authority, it's easier than most people think.

Unless you have confirmed with your lawyer that what you did is too old to prosecute where you live, then it might not be wise to share your experiences here, on this public forum, unless you did have the necessary permissions (and local law doesn't have anything to say about those).

No need to warn them now, I kind of also work at the detective lab of the dutch police occasionally.

[Kon-Tiki]

Besides, the stuff they say here's like stealing an apple from an orchard. The worst you can get for that's an angry farmer with a pitchfork after you, but you won't get sued or jailed or anything like that for it.