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Comment by tickthokk | Hacker News Reader

I was suspended in high school for "hacking"; this was in 2000. I added two (crudely named) folders to an old DOS style typing teaching software.

My presentation would have just been "I pressed F10, and typed in bad words", but it would have been preferable to a three day suspension, haha. I hope this is the outcome!

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Ahh those were the days. I once sent a WinPopup message to every computer in the school board. So thousands probably.

As an idiot I used my account and immediately got suspended.

Yup, I did the same. A contractor replaced all our Classic Macs with Windows 9x boxes and never taught any of the staff how to secure them.

We were using winpopup to send messages to each other, when I worked out how to send them to the entire subnet (or domain - I forget). Three months later I was hauled in front of the Deputy Rector to explain how I managed to 'write my name' on the admin office server. It turned out that they never turned on the monitor connected to the print server until the printer stopped working and they jumped to blaming me.

It took some really fast thinking to wriggle out of that one - I was warned 'he'd be watching me' from then on though.

So you wrote your name on a Winpopup that you sent out to the entire subnet? That's just asking to be punished lol

Yeah, but not quite. When you sent the message it used your network I’d as for the ‘from’ field. I was even that dorky that the message I used to prove it worked was “Hello, World!”. Try explaining geek memes to high school teachers in the late 90’s.

The stories seem to be going backwards in time, so I'll chain my 80's version of this. I wrote a fake login prompt on our VAX that looked exactly like the normal login prompt on the VT100 terminals. It would record the userid and password in a log file, give the "wrong password" message, then exit/logout so the real prompt was there for their second try.

I'd launch that on a few terminals on my way out of the lab.

Never did anything notable with it, but didn't get caught either.

I believe this sort of thing is the primary reason for needing to ctl-alt-del to login to windows. Though I'll bet most people wouldn't think much of a (fake) login screen just being there ready to go...they'd probably try to login anyway.

Thankfully the time i took down the high school's network using a looping bat file that opened looping NetSend commands to the entire domain the teacher of the CCNA class I was in thought it was hilarious and more of a shame on him than a shame on me.

I used NET SEND to do something similar, a little later on. In my previous experiments, this caused a message to appear on all laptops on the local network, so when it didn't, I started sending... less than savory messages. Screaming into the void, as it were.

Unfortunately, the messages were appearing... on the domain controller.

I think I got a detention and a couple weeks ban from using the computers. Fair enough.

How would a presentation be preferable to a 3-day holiday from prison^W school? At least at home I could read my textbooks in peace.

I got a five day suspension for showing a teacher I could log in before accounts were authorized while they were watching. Loaded the school's official website in a browser. Best week of high school.

My high school solved that by making all suspensions "in school" suspensions. You were sequestered in a classroom with the other miscreants. You were not allowed to talk to anyone but the ISS teacher, who was a mean wrestling coach. You were assigned double or triple homework, which had to be completed before you were allowed out of ISS, and you automatically received Fs on all that homework.

Those things removed all motivation for 'vacation.' No one wanted to get suspended.

Oh wow, that sounds educational, or rather its opposite. Sounds trivial to hack though. You have no incentive to actually do the homework other than the time, so just drag it out to the maximum time. I'm sure the coach would love to stay watching one kid to 2AM.

I guess it's just being older that you realize school is a fake world anyway, and expulsion is not a real punishment except to the school's budget. The community college path is cheaper and better anyway.

No, if the homework didn't get done, the coach went home at his usual time and the next day the kid had to come back to ISS instead of going back to regular classes.

Expulsion was a real punishment back then. It may be less so nowadays, I'm not sure, but when I was in high school, without a diploma it was very difficult to get any kind of job beyond something menial, and nearly impossible to get into any kind of higher education, including community college.

Then again, two generations earlier than mine, you could support a family on an 8th-grade education -- although an 8th-grade education a hundred years ago involved more than a high school diploma these days.

Ha I was “hacking” and “changing my grades” because I brought a laptop to school in 2002.

Around the same time I was one of the first kids to have a laptop in my highschool and was actually just doing homework on it in studyhall. The proctor was aghast and thought I was going to infect all the school computers with viruses. I tried explaining that I was not even on the school network and she tried to tell me that they could spread through the power supply.

Similar things happened to me. My main takeaway was that these supposed authority figures were so certain about this stuff, and they obviously had zero clue. Made me distrust authority in general for years, which led to several problems.

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