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Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the era of primitive DIY security. Those were the days. It's kinda of sad that today's kids have to deal with industry-grade encryption and professional best practices, instead of going toe-to-toe with an underpaid self-taught middle-aged "computer guy" like my generation did...

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I had a few amusing tactics. Even with 'professional best practices' (debatable), the human element was still vulnerable.

One example was that my school refused to give out the Wi-Fi password as a form of security, so they'd demand to manually type it in themselves on your machine. A simple keylogger and now the whole school just ignored that rule for a few months.

Another is that while they tried to block things like SSH, VPNs, etc... to get around the school's internet filtering, turns out you could just run SSH over port 80 and have a tunnel out :)

Hilariously, I'm thinking of doing that(using SSH over port 80) at my school.

I setup sshd on the pop3 port back in high school in the 90s, so I could connect to my home machine and chat on irc during study hall.

> industry-grade encryption and professional best practices

You overestimate "professional best practices" in many places...

Our computer guy was pretty cool, he set up Starcraft LAN parties during recess. However he also used passwords like Spring1998, so everyone could get year-round admin rights if they knew his pattern.

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