In high school we would screenshot the windows 98 desktop, make it the wallpaper, hide everything, and watch people fluster about.
Read peoples creds and store somewhere, then issue a 'wrong password' msg and exit, resulting in the real login message.
People will just assume they made a typo and continue as if nothing happened.
I've argued before for a genuine out-of-band independent display on machines which can only be written to by some very high privilege process.
Incidentally, this is why Face ID is strictly worse than Touch ID in my opinion.
Touch ID with wet or slightly dirty fingers are not good. I've been doing some gardening over Easter and Touch ID is barely working because my fingers are more rough than they normally are.
Face ID on the other hand, works just as expected. It doesn't work optimally if I'm lying down, but that's not a problem for me personally.
Show a fake login prompt. Write down what gets entered, show wrong password and exit to real prompt.
Heh, I don't think so. Teachers don't like to send their pupils to court for silly things. They'd just get told why not to do it again and probably get some detention and stuff.
At a uni, the consequences might be more severe.
He busted me by booting up the system from floppy and typed in the commend to format the hard drive and waited for me to return to the lab after school. I asked him what he was doing and he said he had no choice but to reinstall from scratch because someone changed the password. He then moved to hit the Enter key.
Not wanting my fellow students to lose their projects, I confessed. I logged him in and he changed the password.
He then gave my account admin privileges. I guess I had earned them.
I kept silent about this until years afterwards for fear of being chucked out of college, which to be honest would've been a good thing seeing as the course was a waste of time.
Made me and my friend laugh.
Next session the teacher ask us to sit at the same computer, and after 20mn a guy come to me and ask « Are you pseudo ? »
Turns out that the computers really had viruses and they thought it was me !
They threatened to expel me (more to frighten me I think since they had no proof), and made me the cleaning guy for all the semester.
It gave me an undeserved reputation of the guy who hacked the university computers. And a better sense of caution.
I definitely had too much free time at the times. :)
If you ever wondered why you have to press ctrl-alt-del to log in, that is why (nobody ever fixed this for Linux).
Seems you're not familiar with Linux. It had SAK since forever.
It should be "Press ctrl-alt-delete to log in", not "By the way you can press ctrl-alt-delete if you want" because then nobody will bother!
It works by killing everything on that particular terminal, no matter if it's text based or graphical. That's the whole point: whatever spawns after that is created by the init system.
> But most importantly you don't have to use the SAK to log in! That's kind of the whole point of it.
> It should be "Press ctrl-alt-delete to log in", not "By the way you can press ctrl-alt-delete if you want" because then nobody will bother!
I can guarantee you, if I were to copy the design of the login screen that shows up after you press ctrl-alt+del, 99.999% of people who don't work in IT won't bat an eye and enter their credentials straight away. It comes down to educating your users. If you don't explain your users why they have to press it before logging in, they will write it off as just random computer stuff they don't understand and only do so because they get prompted to do so. If next time around they don't, they don't care.
So it comes down to educating your users, and I could very well train them to press alt-print-k before logging in, whereas I agree that a friendly reminder on the login screen is a plus.
The idea is interesting, and it could've been puppies or some other corny wallpaper that did the trick.
It worked quite effectively on 3.x because you could just minimize progman.exe
Frankly though, I preferred the actual BBC Micros and Amiga's that those IBMs were meant to replace.