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Comment by assimpleaspossi | Hacker News Reader

Road with a guy to visit a friend in a gated community. We didn't know the access code for the gate but the guy I was with is an Amazon delivery driver.

"Let's see if I can't get us in," he said. He got out of the car, walked over to the access panel and looked on top, bottom and sides. Then he punched in some numbers and the gate opened.

Turns out, so many people in gated communities and apartment complexes order things from Amazon, and other delivery services, and want front door delivery but don't give them any way to get in. Eventually, some frustrated driver who gets the code will write it on the side of the access panel to help everyone out.

"Apartments are awful," he said. "College campuses are the bane of our existence. You would think that college kids would be smart about these things but they are the absolute worst."

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> "College campuses are the bane of our existence. You would think that college kids would be smart about these things but they are the absolute worst."

This is a huge misconception about GenZ. Unlike Millennials and GenX who had to hack around on PC's to figure out how to torrent, run games, build our own lans for local multiplayer, and generally avoid our parent's prying eyes. GenZ has grown up on devices. You don't modify the OS on devices. You don't hack around on devices; Apps tend to just work with little configuration. GenZ is entering the workforce with lower baseline computer / computer security skills than people think they have.

Well - kind of. PC gaming is bigger than ever before, and PC gaming was how a lot of my generation got into computers.

My nephew for a while was very much one of those "grew up on devices" kind of kids - until he got off of gaming on phones and tablets, and got a gaming PC. Now he's reading about technology and tinkering and stuff.

Its not the same. Nowadays you press a button in steam and the game is installed for you and just works. It does not provide an entrance into technical layers like configuring the soundblaster irq in config.sys did.

It's not the same, but I don't know if it's worse.

My IRQ conflict resolution skills or knowledge about himem.sys aren't really useful these days.

But I've seen genz kids do incredible things with Minecraft mods and the like that make me reminisce about quake modding.

The masses are just blindly using devices, but the masses didn't even have a PC at home 30 years ago.

It used to be that if you wanted to do gaming on a PC you started by building the PC.

That hasn't changed. Of course there are pre builts but there were twenty years ago, too. I should know -- I had one. I built my third gaming PC myself.

There were pre builts many years before your 20 years ago too. I used to build my computers myself as well 30 years ago and my dad did 40 years ago ;)

I dunno... My C64 required very little assembly.

(Smile) 30 years ago was 1995, when most people did. You're thinking 1985. Forty years ago.

In 1995 around 1 in 3 US homes had a computer.

Yeah in Canada it looks like about 28% of homes had a personal computer in 1995, according to Stats Canada: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/56f0004m/2005012/c-g/c1-...

> My IRQ conflict resolution skills or knowledge about himem.sys aren't really useful these days.

Your ability to meticulously solve a problem using a systematic troubleshooting approach is always useful. You just happened to hone the skill w/ IRQ conflicts and himem.sys.

Agreed. And while what we did to get into the details and discover are different some kids still do.

Heck I did the same. Dip switches galore. Did I know what an IRQ actually is on the OS level while solving IRQ conflicts as a kid? Heck no! Only years later when I no longer needed to did I understand what those actually are/were.

The today equivalent of learning about autoexec.bat and config.sys to not load the cdrom driver because else this one game wouldn't start because it did not have enough memory is figuring out what's behind the Steam "Start" button and where the games "live" and how you can get what you want instead of doing everything through steam.

The kids that are the today equivalent of us in the old days do exist.

I think coding skills don't lag as far behind with those who enjoy coding. It's a hell of a lot easier to learn and more accessible than it ever was. Plus applications like modding make learning fun.

It's more systems, networks, OS fundamentals... i.e. how you pull all the pieces together and make them work especially among your "non-technical" user set.

I code more for fun now, because the proliferation of higher end languages and libraries for practically everything drastically reduces the time to that first "wow cool!" moment.

I'm sure it's the same with young people.

> It does not provide an entrance into technical layers like configuring the soundblaster irq in config.sys did

All that did was result in extreme frustration. My knowledge of creating game-specific boot disks to eek out 1k more memory did nothing for my ability to write software, except perhaps to appreciate having more RAM and good UX.

Many older games are shipped in a full DOSBox setup with preconfigured config.sys. The question is that is there any will to "conquer the past" and poke around, or not.

I've seen both sides- my nephew is large into pc gaming, but is woefully unaware of how to operate a computer in most capacities. I only realized this when trying to help him troubleshoot and realizing he didn't really understand the concepts of archives or even folders.

I don't even know how that's possible because he plays modded versions of some of his games- how you get by without knowing what a zip file works at the surface level is a mystery to me lol.

Yeah, I know someone who works in a high school and the average skill level is "struggles to figure out how to save a document on a USB stick". Kids know how to press the power button on an Xbox or tap an icon on their iPhone. The staff member I know is aware of ONE kid in the entire school who has used Linux. When I was a kid, basically every single kid who had a computer at home (and actually used it) knew how to defrag the hard drive (and probably install Windows lol), set IRQ values for their sound card, all that kind of stuff -- because you had to know this to even use it. My friends and I went on BBSes and later stuff like IRC and Hotline, ran Linux or pre-release versions of our respective OSes, set up our own bedroom LANs and personal game/web servers, etc. etc..

Indeed, as you say, I learned a lot about computers simply by wanting to circumvent the limitations that school admins put on the computers (especially as I wanted to utilize the full power the computers provided, as opposed to some sheltered/limited experience -- "At Ease" -- surprisingly reminiscent of smartphones/tablets today)... I went to great lengths to regain net access when my parents repeatedly revoked my access, again another huge learning opportunity.

I think we technical people have wrong perceptions of the past. When I was young, family members would say 'ah you know everything about computers, I can't get this (illegal) copy of game x working, please help.' 99 percent of people did NOT know how to resolve IRQ conflicts or even know that 'my documents' is just a folder on the C drive.

But we're talking about the current generation of "technical people" - CS students who don't know what a file system is. Or a command line. Or a compiler.

There are some Minecraft superbrains doing incredible things, but the median level of experience and insight seems much lower.

I know what you mean, but I'm also specifically calling out the "percentage of homes with computers" and their respective technical literacy.

My friends and I, as kids, knew "everything" about computers and how to operate them, and there was this base level of knowledge that pretty much every computer-owning kid had.

I remember one friend figured out himself how to hex-edit his WarCraft 1 save files, this would have been at the age of 10 or 11, with zero instruction/guidance from parents or anything. I'd be impressed today if you found a singular kid in an entire high school who can hex-edit anything, let alone game saves, despite probably every single household of every student in that school having at least one personal computer, if not more.

Simultaneously, there's an important aspect that computers and the software for them are more abstract than ever, so "hex editing" is a pretty obscure thing for someone to have any reason to do.

Regardless, being able to save the currently-open Microsoft Word document to the USB stick one just inserted is pretty much the bare minimum of technical literacy I expect from anyone who has a computer at home -- yet this is apparently not the case. I'm talking like, even on a Mac, students couldn't figure it out.

My conclusion here is that, as many people lament, there was a spike in time where computer enthusiasm was a real thing, where a relatively high % of kids wanted to "know everything about computers", but now computers are normal and boring and most people see them as "thing to launch game/chat/web on", for better or for worse (and for a wide variety of reasons).

I don't know if it's a "uses tech" issue or just not realizing the steps needed. Even we knew you had to go to the campus gate to meet Dominos after dark (when the gate would be automatically closed).

There was no fancy intercom ability to remotely open it.

Same I just was talking with my daughter (16) about this because she hated her intro programming class in high school. No biggie if it isn't for her, slightly disappointing that I can't share knowledge, but she should pursue what she enjoys.

What irked me was she claimed "I just hate being on the computer", but her screen time on the phone easily crests 8 hours daily. Maybe we are just entering a similar phase to auto mechanics. In the 1950s anyone who owned a car was at least somewhat proficient in its inner workings, now many people need to consult the manual to figure out how to pop their hood.

There's a reason for that. I ran across a video recently that talked about how his dad would replace an engine over the weekend. But then he showed what the old cars looked like under the hood (very simple with lots of empty space) and new cars (very complicated). More importantly, he showed the manuals that came with the car. The old car's manual showed how the engine was put together and explained what everything did, and how to rebuild it. The new manual was only full of warnings and told you to take it to the dealer for everything.

Think about how I (and probably you) learned computers. My IBM PC has a manual that has a page just to show where the power switch is and how to use your hand to flip it. It has a diagram for what the keyboard cable looks like when it's plugged in correctly. It continues on and on and tells you how to open it and what the dip switch settings do. People always thought I was a computer wiz kid when I all I ever did was read the manuals and try out what they said.

Same. I learned to code as a kid by reading the manual that came with my brother's TRS-80 Model 100 "laptop". The manual contained a complete documentation of the BASIC language that came on the computer. The computer itself, other than a couple simple built-in note-taking and calendar programs, was mainly designed for you to write your own programs for your own use. I remember the first time when I was 8 years old that I got past IF and GOTO and figured out what an array was. Suddenly all kinds of things were possible.

I think the crucial missing thing is being locked into undivided boredom. My mom would be getting her afternoon nap and I couldn't go anywhere so I just walked around the house, opened drawers and cabinets and boxes with old parts, magnets and whatnot and experimented with them. With zero distractions, no internet, no mobile phone, nothing. So either read a book (I read mine many times over) or tinker away. And I am still tinkering, just with software instead, while getting paid for it.

"Boredom is the fount of learning and creativity"

But, you must have tools. Some kind of tools.

I grew up in the 80s and we were strictly forbidden from watching TV. There were no video games in the house. I only got to see Nintendo at friends houses... and I barely understood how they could get through level after level. Tabletop RPGs were also forbidden. Encouraged: building stuff out of sticks and mud or whatever was in the yard, mandatory reading of history books, chess. In the 80s, my parents viewed computing with equal suspicion to video games. I had to really make a case that what I was doing with BASIC and Pascal and later Hypercard was educational for me... and even then I was restricted to 1 hour per day on the family computer. But I had this 16K TRS80-100 that no one considered a game or a threat... and I was already dialing BBSs at 300 baud and getting kicked off after the parents were asleep.

Um. So I've told this all to friends and girlfriends, and often they say "oh wow you were really abused" or something. I don't really fault my parents, I think it was good for me and my siblings in the end. But boredom is not the thing. Limited resources is the thing. Give a mind the ability to make the most of limited resources, and the mind will always find things of interest to stave off boredom. Boredom is the province of those with nothing to think about when not being stimulated. That's why "people who get bored are boring," as my ex used to say.

> Limited resources is the thing

I think that is true. When we didn't have access to a proper football at school, we took used notebook papers, made a ball out of it, put that in several layers of small plastic bags (for water proofing) and tightened that in with a thick string looped to cover the surface. It served perfectly as football for a bunch of noisy kids and was easily replaceable.

Paucity provides the spark for creativity.

There's definitely some truth to that. Consider the demoscene, where wildly creative stuff is typical made under certain limitations. For example, demos where the executable + resources is only 64kb [0] or 4kb [1] are often full of surprising creativity. That and of course demos made for primitive systems (by today's standards) like C64 [2] or Commodore Amiga [3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCjSG_15kcw

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCh3Q08HMfs

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCmUIcdG5wo

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqnZH7Pa3vo

Yep. When I was playing around with Linux, it was pretty much “spend all the time in the world editing config files until things work.” It’s a much different ballgame when you can’t google your boot errors because the only thing that can connect to the internet won’t boot, even when it does you’ll have to futz around in kernel driver source code for your particular brand of external modem, and finally once you’re online Google doesn’t even exist but at least you don’t need it anymore!

I learned BASIC to screw with the demo computers at Sears and setup print loops.

The empty space in older cars is definitely a big contributer to how much simpler it was to work on them. Plenty of project cars I owned or worked on that had more than enough room in the engine bay to actually STAND inside between the frame and engine with the engine / wiring / hoses still present and both feet planted on the ground.

Much less daunting and convenient to work on an engine or replace a part when you don't have to take off (and potentially break) a million other parts to get at what you want to replace and you actually have the room to see what you're doing instead of blindly groping around for something vaguely shaped like something you've only seen a picture of.

That and the absolute sheer amount of electronics in modern cars. Older cars had the absolute bear minimal amount of wiring to the point that it was entirely plausible to more or less keep the wiring schematic in your head and even (speaking from experience) redo the entire wiring harness front to back on your own with a few different colored rolls of wire from a hardware store yourself.

I can't imagine how people getting into the hobby now with newer cars feel looking at the unholy mess of endless amounts of wiring, sensors, mechanical parts all jammed together in tightly packed space efficient layouts probably designed by someone purely working on them in a digital space. On the bright side at least they have youtube and better resources on the Internet to look up how to actually do something though.

It’s definitely hard(er). I’ve found it’s impossible to get any diagrams or (repair shop) manuals for some dirt-common 2000s/early 2010s vehicles, and have been forced to play many a game of ‘trace the wire.’

That's true but YouTube has been a godsend. There's been some mid 2000s cars owned by family or friends I've helped them with (including a transmission swap) where we weren't able to get an entirely satisfactory answer from a service or repair manual but we were almost always able to find several hour videos of random guys on YouTube willing to talk their way through even fairly major jobs and even mention hangups/practical advice for doing it the way the manual wouldn't tell you to but will make the job easier in a home garage setting.

I’m comfortable doing mechanical work and when my Honda Fit said I had to remove a shitload of parts just to replace a spark plug I said fuck it and traded it in.

My brother had to have something (AC fan?) replaced and it involved removing the entire dash. I've seen photos of this and it looks like the car exploded.

Some fan in my (late 90s) Taurus wagon was buried behind a bunch of stuff in the engine area and while we didn’t have to take out the whole block, it was still pretty dense and a lot had to move and come out to replace it. And that’s still relatively “simple” compared to today’s cars.

In comparison my 80’s Bronco II, I bought it from my neighbor for $300 and my dad told me I’d fix whatever broke myself if I could. Gave me a service manual that had schematics and layouts of just about every part of that car that was serviceable, and the book wasn’t even that thick considering what it detailed. I was able to pin out some repurposed Christmas lights for the dash in a pinch, and we tore down and rebuilt some component from under the hood ourselves though I don’t recall exactly what now.

Friend has a Fiat 500 which had to have the engine removed to access the AC compressor to change it. Cost her $3000. Mostly labor.

I've had a knee-jerk reaction to that job too. But realistically optimizing spark plug changes isn't really important like the old days where you needed to change them every 10k miles or less. It's maybe 2-3 times in the entire life of the car.

Removing the wipers and windshield cowl is generally easy, just takes some extra time. Dealers/mechanics charge for time, not difficulty. So that simple 2hr job can easily be 500-600+. Still something that could be a rewarding Saturday morning project for someone who likes doing DIY type stuff.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/r9lfqt/install...

Idk man seems like plenty of space to me. Also comes with service mode which shows all the inner working and status of components:

https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/2046/tesla-service-mode-ho...

There's basically nothing you can even work on in there though.

Rich Benoit would disagree

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuAMczraBIM

It's definitely not a hard and fast rule for everything. You'll find older cars with head scratching design and poor engine bays. And newer cars with more room and sensible design than you'd expect. But as a general rule from experience the exceptions seem to be mostly outliers.

Not sure how fair of a comparison that is given how much of what makes that vehicle go is not in that bay, but an example more of what he's talking about...

A relative drives an old truck. This is more or less his engine bay: https://www.onallcylinders.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ch...

I've walked into his garage and found him inside the engine bay with a stool, sitting down and working on something.

Where-as I drive a newer car, and this is similar to mine: https://i.redd.it/4ks75mma4pmb1.jpg

My Prius requires a proprietary tool to change the oil.

I think a lot of the older cars either came with or were easier to buy the shop manuals. Those will tell you how to do basically everything. You can still get them for modern cars, but they're $100-250. Even then, many procedures require specialized equipment that most individuals do not have.

In some cases you can't even buy them anymore, they want a bloody digital subscription.

I am very fortunate that my local library maintains digital access to useful stuff.

I was stunned to see that Haynes went to that model I used to have a manual for every car I owned

TBF digital access and lookup is a far better solution for troubleshooting as opposed to gaining a holistic understanding of the car as an entity. It's more StackOverflow, less 'Inside Macintosh'.

More to the point, as cars evolve to digital control and signalling systems with associated firmware, the problems are increasingly diagnosed via the ODB or CAN-BUS and rectified at e.g. and Engine Management System level rather than at a mechanical level. This necessitates up-to-the minute sources of truth detailing the various firmware versions, caveats and advisories - much more suited to a digital medium and distribution channel.

The haynes manuals for newer stuff were generally trash but at least they provided information in the same format and order as every other haynes manual so they were useful for that.

I replaced the engine on my 1983 Ford Bronco in my driveway year ago. I wouldn't even consider it with a modern car.

Likewise, I found a studio tape recorder in a shop once (silver metal, so probably 80's or 90's era), it came with the manual which was mostly just electrical schematics so that you could both figure out exactly how it works, and figure out how to repair or replace components of it.

That's a fun analogy to think about. One side of it holds up: People don't know how to pop their hood now because they don't need to.

But on the other hand, cars before the 1990s were infinitely simpler to grok and to fix than modern vehicles. The learning curve was much gentler, and really no specialized knowledge was required. Changing the timing on your engine was easier than putting together an Ikea cabinet. Now it requires specialized equipment.

The opposite is true of computers. It has never been easier to snap together a cross-platform app to do almost anything than it is today. Friendly scripting languages, APIs for access to every kind of sensor and data imaginable, and devices fast enough to run terrible code at reasonable speeds. Almost everything you would have had to do from scratch hand in the 1980s has been done for you; a huge amount of coding now is just plug and play. And basically everyone in the first world has access to the necessary equipment to write their own code.

but for computers, it's the same

> People don't know how to pop their hood now because they don't need to.

you don't need to figure how to create your own note taking/list making/accountancy software, you just open your favorite/default search engine, write the query and get a plethora of options, for nearly any platform under the sun, because of all the work has already been done, as you pointed out in your last paragraph.

> It has never been easier to snap together a cross-platform app to do almost anything than it is today

Software engineering is weirdly harder today than it's ever been in many domains.

A cross platform app might have to support iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Android, Windows, Linux and the Web. Music and Video apps might additionally have to support various flavours of vehicle and TV platforms too.

On the server side your friendly scripting language will probably be running in a venv in a container on a VM on a cloud. Or potentially just a venv locally keeping the containerisation for the cloud.

Back in the day, emails could be sent from my computer to your computer if I knew your IP address. Nowadays my email won't get past your spam filters unless I buy and warm up a reputable domain on a respectable IP address and adhere to the correct content standards. The precise rules for these aren't documented anywhere.

> Back in the day, emails could be sent from my computer to your computer if I knew your IP address. Nowadays my email won't get past your spam filters unless I buy and warm up a reputable domain on a respectable IP address and adhere to the correct content standards. The precise rules for these aren't documented anywhere.

Funny enough, the ease of running a mail server and sending email back in the day is probably why it’s so scuffed these days. Email did hit a weird overcorrection though that never evened out, whereas everything else seemed to either standardize or die off (rip the days of telnet’ing into a random domain and being able to actually do things)

> now many people need to consult the manual to figure out how to pop their hood.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but auto manuals haven't included such technical information for close to two decades.

Are you sure on your timing?

Just asking coz whenever I try to talk about what computers could already do or when something was invented in the 1960s or 1970s I tend to start with "well 40 years ago..." and then I look at the calendar and notice that it's 2025 and I'm officially old now and 40 years ago was more like 60 years ago.

And my car in 2005 definitely had no such thing and it wasn't a 2005 model.

Just checked my 2024 Toyota Rav4 manual, I can confirm it is there.

Page 393.

https://cdn.dealereprocess.org/cdn/servicemanuals/toyota/202...

It's in a section called "do-it-yourself maintenance" that's pretty much entirely just topping off fluids. It doesn't even include instructions for replacing the battery.

I never thought about that, but it's true. My dad and every guy his age in my hometown can talk about cars nonstop. They'll go on for hours about changing the oil, messing with the transmission, or whatever (I don't know what they're saying--I'm a millennial and I'm used to vehicles that Just Work™).

Meanwhile, my friends and I can go on about the most banal computer stuff and my parents have no clue what we're talking about or why it's interesting to us. Kids probably don't either.

I saw someone joke that there's only one generation in the history of mankind that knows how to set the time on a microwave. Our parents couldn't do it. And now our children can't do it.

I have heard that told with “VCR” in place of microwave. We still have a microwave that needs clock set when power fails. We do not have a VCR.

Only our gen knows how to hook up and how to enter the main menu of a DVD player.

We won't be able to do it either soon, as they will mandate connecting with it through an app and we're like fuck that. (if we're not already there)

Yeah, younger generations have no clue how to use computers. They just know how to consume content. The level of IT literacy is at all times low.

[Millennial take] When older generations say "the kids these days are so good with computers", it's because they are incorrectly inferring competence from confidence. In a way, the kids are more capable, but mainly because of attitudes rather than knowledge.

The devices the (grand-)kids are using are much more explorable and idiot-proofed. Nobody is going to make a single "dd" typo and erase their drive.

> Nobody is going to make a single "dd" typo and erase their drive.

Alas, how does one learn if one cannot dd the wrong hard drive, wiping all the films you've spent most of the summer illegally downloading at night because you only had a dial up connection at the time.

I am very lucky that my youthful years were the mid 90s, when mp3s were still too slow to encode and DVD didn’t exist. I got to accidentally wipe or crash drives on purely experimental computers.

I mean, I'm considered gen Z and I've definitely dd-ed my fair share of drives...

You've never truly lived until you've had to recover an accidentally-wiped LUKS header to find that one semester-long final project buried in the depths of your computer's filesystem that's due tomorrow, where of course you never bothered to back it up anywhere :)

Perhaps these purported "itoddler" peers of ours were on to something, after all...

Definitely. I recently taught a class with a practical computer component and many undergraduates seemed to have a hard time understanding where their files were saved -- even at a GUI level, not talking about the command line. But it makes sense if their primary tech experience was with phones and tablets. The idea of a file system may never have occurred to them (even if most phones and tablets really run a UNIX-derived OS behind the scenes).

So true. Fortunately I had my kids (well one of them anyway) recently complain to me about how their teachers "don't know anything about computers" and how they "cheated" by using actual computer software that was much better than the "mandatory to use" software on the school tablets.

Not all hope is lost.

It's unbelievably bad.

I know 3rd and 4th year IT/Cybersecurity students that don't understand how to ssh into servers and the different layers of the OSI model.

I hate to sound insufferable, but I really truly believe some people are just too stupid for this field.

I'm so sick of dealing with them.

Yay job security?

We have the “get a job in tech because it pays well” generation entering the workforce. They have no passion, no true interest in the field. Thankfully, they’re pretty easy to spot in interviews.

Which is wild to me. My high school offered a technology course that included NET certification testing sponsored by Cisco. Our final was to setup a local network on hardware, leave the room, and come back in to troubleshoot whatever the teacher broke. She would change three things - it might be a typo in your DNS records, a barely loose cable between two bridges, or a wiped hosts file, etc. We knew the OSI model and understood IP masking and shakes fists at cloud (computing)

> (even if most phones and tablets really run a UNIX-derived OS behind the scenes).

Key phrase being "behind the scenes", iOS completely obscured the concept of files to its users for a long time. I don't remember how downloading files off of a website worked though.

GenZ also grew up in an era where doing anything mildly interesting on a computer risks getting expelled and having the feds called. The shit I did to learn my trade as a kid would absolutely not fly today.

Yikes – this GenXer remembers being told the tools found in my account were grounds for expulsion but the meeting ended with employment.

Netbus on a floppy, print out an enticing label and leave them around school. Half the teachers computers were infected. Good times.

Some can still learn in spite of that, however.

Arguably, that's even why some gravitate towards it in the first place.

The dark ugly places I travelled on IRC or BBS as a youngster. I saw a lot.

In high school (2000) I had a course where I downloaded some (freely available) videos for my project. The wrong person caught wind and hauled me in under the computer policy that everyone signed that said “I promise not to download anything”. I made my case that it was 1) condoned by my teacher, 2) relevant to my project, and 3) literally going to websites downloads files (cookies were just stored in a folder back then, as well as temp files for caching) so everyone is in violation.

Had they actually found out about the fact that we bypassed security measures on a bootable CD-ROM that allowed us full system access, including a nifty Visual Basic launcher to install Quake and GTA, or that we figured out every computer used VNC and they all had the same password stored in plaintext in the registry (which we accessed via that bootable media), or that we figured out the same password accessed every networked printer in the county so we could print our school’s logo on that week’s rival school’s printers in barely off-white ink…they’d have had a good case.

> Had they actually found out about the fact that we bypassed security measures on a bootable CD-ROM that allowed us full system access, [...] or that we figured out every computer used VNC and they all had the same password stored in plaintext in the registry (which we accessed via that bootable media)

Hey, sounds familiar!

Our school district had a policy that all new computers went to the high schools, then when those aged out and were replaced went to the elementary schools. They wanted iMacs for the elementary schools. That meant that for a couple years our high school had to have iMacs.

Of course literally everything we were trying to do, all the courses and curriculum, etc were built around Windows. So all of them were set up to dual-boot... Which is to say we didn't even need to haul in any bootable media.

Rebooted into mac, which had absolutely no respect for NTFS file permissions, and copied the SAM registry hive off. Took that home, ran the password hash through a cracker and a day later had the local admin password that was shared among all of the computers in the school.

It too was mostly used for running GTA.

There was also that time with a little light B&E and doing some network cabling under the cover of night. Though I think there's technically no statute of limitations on that so that's probably enough said.

"with lower baseline computer / computer security skills than people think they have."

I fear this is true with most life skills. Things are easier and it seems kids today are just handed more stuff. The freedoms and expectations in many areas are lower. Kids don't grow up due to age, they grow up due to experience. It seems we are pushing that farther down the road with each generation.

Huh never knew that. Kinda good for me.

I noticed that even the generation that came after me (I was born in the 70s) produced IT engineers with a bit less skills because they've never had to mess stuff. People these days are afraid to mess with the windows registry even. I used to manually patch blocks together when I deleted a file by mistake.

These skills are getting less and less useful though now that everyone is happy to give up their privacy to big tech in return for something that 'just works' :(

I realized this while working as a tutor for programming students at my college back in 2013... When people would ask or say they didn't know or understand really basic computer things (I can't remember what it was) I still showed them what they were, but I realized, not everyone grew up with computers the way I did. Some explore, but most people don't necessarily explore.

I think people who grow up with computer games have a lot more exposure than normal users. Smartphones somewhat made computers irrelevant for most people.

Ahh, the modern verson of the written note under the keyboard...

In my area, there is a universal access key (physical) for postal service and newspaper delivery people. So if you want access to a random building, all you need to do is apply as a newspaper delivery guy, or, find one that is willing to give you that master key. To add insult to injury, that type of job is extremely low paying, so much room for abuse.

Fact is, locks and closed doors are there to make the owners feel cozy and safe. If you ever needed a locksmith service and watched them do their job, you know your appartment door is just a prop.

Modern apartment building. Low rise. Full visibility of courtyard. Cycle gone missing with a baby seat attached. Nothing anyone can do about it. How did they get the key, who let them in, how did they manage to pry open the lock in full visibility? I was seething for a week. But somehow I knew this wasn’t really that big a security challenge for the thief.

That's not true. They raise the bar above the bare minimum. Lots of crimes are ones of opportunity. A gate is the difference between 0 effort and some effort. It makes it a bit harder for a petty thief to cruise through and find low hanging fruit.

When I lived in town, on a street that was somewhat common for people to walk down, twice (that I know of) someone had walked up, tried to open my door, then walked off after finding it locked. The amount of work to break into that house was quite minimal, but apparently a locked door did help.

You can just go over to Amazon, search for "pentesting keys" and for a the price of a decent dinner you can order oodles of master keys for most everything out in public. Elevators, police and fleet cars, mailboxes, file cabinents, RV external storage compartments, lift gates, tractors, electrical panels, toiler paper dispensers, etc.

One of my favorite talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9b9IYqsb_U (Deviant Ollam - This Key is Your Key, This Key is My Key)

Also for insurance.

It doesn't matter if it took a guy 10 seconds to break your lock, if you didn't lock your house, chances are your insurance won't pay.

I didn't propose to leave your door unlocked. It was a cynical take on how much hurdle most locked doors are when someone is determined to get access. Maybe I am that cynical because I attended a lockpicking tutorial once (CCC Camp summer 2003, fun with tech at 37C temperatures, good old times), and as a tech person with some interest in security, learnt my share about social engineering (mostly to pretect myself).

I bet you could examine the keypad for wear. The worn keys (or the shiny ones) are the ones for the code.

In the days before cell phones, a burglar alarm would dial the alarm company. The phone company likes to install the phone box on the outside of the building. The alarm is defeated by an axe to the cable going in the box.

I had a fight with the phone company at my house, as I wanted the box on the inside rather than the outside. They finally agreed on the condition that I maintain the wire to the box.

These days, of course, the alarms use wifi or a cell phone to call the alarm company.

> These days, of course, the alarms use...

And the crooks use RF jammers instead of axes.

These days, alarms use quantum entanglement. Beat that :)

I set the Fires of Gondor.

There's enough bandwidth to go around nowadays that alarms can send regular keepalives (which doesn't mean all of them do).

If the keepalives stop coming without a proper disarm signal, a fault is raised.

Some old alarms had a weaker version of this, where they would dial the security company whenever the door was opened, and then again when the alarm was disarmed. If the second call didn't come in time, the company would instantly know that something was up.

This protected against thieves that would enter the house and smash the alarm before it had time to activate.

That only works if there's a single code? I would think many keypad systems assign a code to each apartment (so the one written on the side is not a master key, just Joe in #303).

I've definitely worked somewhere they tell all the users they have individual codes, not to share them, and if there is unauthorized access it can be traced who leaked their code. Everyone gets told the same story and given the same code.

Do your alarms not have an actual - you know - alarm? Or won't the alarm go off if it can't phone home first?!

Here in the UK the alarms make a noise as the absolute minimum. Getting one that is "monitored" by a call center is not standard, especially one that calls the cops if it goes off or a panic button is pressed.

You can get those of course, but it costs extra. I pay something like £40-50 a month for the panic button service that will summon the police, but even then the police won't be summoned if just the alarm goes off without a panic button getting pressed (you can get that, but it is even more expensive)

In my area of London, burglary is a virtually abandoned trade.

Anyone with anything of value works from home at least part of the week. Why risk entering someone's actual house when you can make easy money on drugs, fraud, crypto, bicycle theft, phone snatching, or umpteen other hustles I don't even know about.

Bicycle theft especially. You could easily clear a grand or two a week with zero fear of prosecution.

I think general burglary is heading in that direction across the country.

The things people used to pinch like VCRs, stereos, TVs, laptops just aren't as expensive or sellable now.

Unfortunately if you live in a nice area, they assume everyone has a Rolex collection or loads of jewellery just hanging around. If nothing else they'll take the keys to your cars.

Just look at the prices those bring in the thrift store or the pawn shop. I just bought an HD Roku TV for $50.

> I bet you could examine the keypad for wear. The worn keys (or the shiny ones) are the ones for the code.

That still doesn't give you the order of the key strokes.

But it drastically reduces the number of plausible key strokes, so you might just give your luck a try.

Right. If it's 4 digits, you have 432 combinations. Exhaustive search then works.

If you have 4 unique digits, otherwise it gets even easier.

However, for a 6-digit combination, you'd have to try out 720 combinations in the worst case, so that's already quite a bit less feasible. Although given enough time...

It's far simpler than that. Ever gated community I've ever visited, press any digit 4 times. You're in. The only exception is community with a security guard. The guy obviously isn't just going to let some guy not on the guest list in

Gated communities around me have 2 lanes, one with a sensor activated gate for residents and a guest lane next to the guard hut

If it's busy and you pull up in a nice enough car and just wait in front of the sensor gate looking annoyed, the guard will eventually just let you in

911 or 9911 is usually a good shot too.

There's a door at work I regularly need to access. It used to be used for another purpose but now is just an extension of the work area. It's got a badge reader and simplex lock but I can't get badge access because I don't actually belong to that work area yet I'm there everyday anyway. However, someone wrote the simplex lock code on a sign in very small numbers for this exact purpose. Other simplex locks in the building use the default code you can find online. The whole building is secure so you'd never be able to walk up to these doors without proper credentials, they are mostly just there to keep out the curious or someone looking to borrow tools that they shouldnt.

> The whole building is secure

Given what you just said and the article you're commenting under, are you sure?

Anyone wearing a maintenance uniform and carrying a step-ladder could surely find a way in via an overly helpful victim.

Look like you belong and act confident and you can get nearly anywhere. Props help-- wear a high-vis vest and a hard hat, carry a tablet / folio / clipboard around an office, etc.

Confidence is the key, though.

You also have to fit a certain expected demographic.

Sadly, yes-- that's true. It's a game of playing to stereotypes, for sure.

The point isn't really for these communities to be Fort Knox. It is understood that if someone really wants to get in they will get in, similar to how if someone really wants to break into your house they will do it regardless of what brand of lock you have on your front door.

People live in gated communities because of what the gate represents – a very clear sign telling you and everyone else passing by that you don't belong here.

In a similar vein, 0911 or 9111 will often work too for communities in the US. EMS and other first responders run into the same issue with automated calls or panicked people, so they’ll try that first while waiting for dispatch.

That code was also used at our (EMS) depots to secure the controlled drugs as well, as if none of us could have guessed it.

My parents live in a very upscale country club community down in Florida and their gate security is laughable. They assign every household a 4 digit code to enter the community. Given how many homes are in this community, entering any 4 digit code > 1000 and < 2000 will work.

My girlfriend lives in an upscale, gated community. Her HOA has done the exact opposite. They change the gate code weekly as way to "protect" themselves from this situation. However, it's kinda had the opposite effect - tailgating has become totally acceptable, even the norm, as people can't keep up with the gate code changes. Amazon drivers usually just sit outside for a minute or two, then tailgate into the neighborhood.

The only gated community / apartment complex's I've ever seen where that was not normal are a subset of the ones that have an on-duty guard - specifically the subset with guards who recognize all the occupants and take the information of anyone they don't recognize.

Her community is not guard-gated, but it's extremely snooty/snobby. A number of years ago, before the weekly gate-code changes, the HOA started doing annual code changes on Halloween. Why Halloween, you might ask? Because the service staff of the community (landscapers, house cleaners, etc.) had the audacity to bring their children/grand-children to the neighborhood to trick-or-treat. Residents felt the service staff was just trying to guilt them into giving candy. Keep in mind, all these residents are multi-millionaires, mostly retirees, and they were bitching about having to spend 5 bucks in candy to make children happy.

Isn’t that usually how the rich stay rich? Does this really seem too surprising?

In my experience, and I’m generalizing a lot, the less people have the more generous they tend to be.

It's an over generalization. The other way the story goes is that the big house with the long driveway in my neighborhood is the one that gave out king sized candy bars on Halloween.

Considering the origin of trick-or-treating and Halloween customs, that carefree night of fun for kids sounds more like a protection racket.

They're doing a great job of "protecting" themselves from feeling anxious about Bad Things somehow happening.

For an all-too-large fraction of humanity, that's the "protection" which actually matters.

And of course, the gated communities have 6 ft high walls that any 8 yr old could climb over.

My townhouse HOA decided it was totally worth money to replace our fob system with a system that's deliberately incompatible with Homelink. They claimed without evidence that used car sales were a severe security risk.

Nevermind that you can wave any conductor under the gate to trigger the egress wire loop sensor, or just wait a minute or two for someone else to go through. From 6AM to 10PM the other gate is simply open, too.

Now I have to pay more for crappier fobs with worse range. It's deeply disappointing.

I was under the impression that delivery drivers had a book or something with these codes.

Like, the HOA just like calls the delivery companies and says "hey, here's a code to get in"

Missed the stories about these guys shitting in the backs of the trucks and vans for lack of time to do their jobs, eh?!

A route book or note is already an assumption drivers need to have some method to quickly get through gates. Where it missed out was there are even more efficient solutions to the problem. That's because of not knowing all of the options, not because of assuming drivers just have a lot of spare time to kill so must like the slower and more complicated option.

This is often left to USPS, UPS, and DHL drivers to figure out on their own.

You folks are living in a fantasy land.

No wonder it's considered socially acceptable to order multiple Amazon deliveries in a week....

Why are College campuses the bane of existence for your friend?

Because college kids write codes on the site of access panels? Wouldn't that make life easier for your friend as a delivery driver?

Because college kids don't write codes on the side of access panels? If so, why does your friend describe them as not smart? Isn't it smart to avoid writing codes?

I assume it's because they don't give the drivers the access code when they order

Here in our building they just ring the doorbell, there's always someone letting them in without even checking.

Unfortunately that caused several burglaries too including in my flat :( my alarm scared them off but still..

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