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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

As with many here I'm sure, during "computer lab" I was often done with assignments quite quickly all through school.

The teachers rarely had any extra work to assign me so they pretty much gave me carte blanche to use my time however I wanted as long as it was on the computer.

Great memories of trying to skirt school "blockers" in order to get to gaming websites in high school (this would have been in the early 00s). Glad to see this spirit is still alive and well and probably even moreso now than ever.

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I once got suspended because I figured out how to bypass my schools lockdown policies on the computers in the lab and wouldnt tell them how i did it.

(Hint: i learned they kept the "bypass" code in clear text in the registry, and later simply killed the processes from a command prompt with a batch file).

I also had a small apache server and ftp box i would tunnel though or get executables from i wanted to play (like pinball, the monsters blocked pinball). Since it was the very early days of the internet my morning routine generally consisted of waiting for folks to leave, firing up the server and taking over the fax line for the day and getting the IP before heading off to school.

I used a scheduler (probably cron, i dont remember) to bring it all down around 3pm before my parents got home.

Did they ever notice anything amiss with the phone bill?

My pops was in sales. The fax line itself was a write off. That said, at one point he told a colleague to fax him something and he would pick it up at home and it was busy, which got me busted. Mostly the fax line was used then for him to send his receipt scans into accounting though.

I was grounded for that as well. But it was also near/around the time that broadband/docsis was rolling out so they moved to it at some point soon after.

My tech inept dad was what got me into tech honestly. He had a nack for turning off the computer by just holding the power button back in the windows 95 days. Eventually he corrupted the thing, blamed me and forced me to "fix" it with gateway support. I ended up searching up how to install an OS at the school lab, and just re-installed windows for him and stopped using a computer at home until i could get my own.

oh man I remember the days of converting gamespy.com's IP to octal to get around the school's firewall block thing

Hell I even made a counter-strike map of the campus and surrounding suburban downtown where the terrorists bomb the school's proxy server so the students can have unrestricted internet!

Man that would have gone over so well nowadays...

edit: or the time I got around their EXE blocking by changing a bunch of strings in UnrealTournament.exe to look like Norton Anti-virus. Got a couple weeks' suspension for that!

The network admin (a friend of mine) told me he gauged his skill as an admin by how quickly I was able to break past whatever blocks he had in place.

> edit: or the time I got around their EXE blocking by changing a bunch of strings in UnrealTournament.exe to look like Norton Anti-virus. Got a couple weeks' suspension for that!

OMG That's awesome!

I always made the exe look like mspaint

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