[1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...
Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops.
There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me.
Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents.
High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.
Microsoft security baffles me. You could run Windows Update in the browser (and also antiviruses using ActiveX). Who would think of making it possible to alter the OS… from the browser?
My school disabled right click in Windows Explorer, I'm still not sure why.
Of course, despite every PC being on a domain, there was still the local administrator account, which was easily obtained by leaving an unused computer running ophcrack overnight. Eventually I found out that the roaming network administrator account password was simply ford, as the admin left a local account on a computer that wasn't networked; this pretty much lasted me through high school. For bypassing the firewalls? That was simple; I got a free shell account, and later my own server, an early openvz vps.
Once I got my own server, I spent long amounts of time trying to increase the amount of RAM available to me (since it was fair-share CPU on a decent server, building and similar jobs ran far faster than my current digital ocean VPS). At this point, I found out about sshfs on my own computer, and spent ages trying to find a decently cheap Xen VPS so I could use kernel modules for sshfs and swap. Eventually, I gave up. One period of my last semester I was a TA, rarely with any work to do, so I spent most of my time on IRC and setting the wallpaper to be Cyanide & Happiness comics.
/me trouts Piper around a bit with a large slap
1: this used to be available at https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader but not anymore. This might be the source, not sure. https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader