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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's now two decades since I first found how to overwrite BIOS passwords from MS-DOS QBasic in order to break into school computers. Somehow reassuring that kids are still doing the same thing.

The comments about bitlocker and TPM are a good reminder that he who controls the boot sequence controls the computer / phone / car / IoT toaster.

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You can of course also make quite convincing BIOS password prompts with QBasic.

that's how I got in trouble for hacking in high school; used our pascal IDE (in DOS) to make a perfect replica of our fancy ASCII login. It would capture your username and password, and then spit you back out to the real prompt. I only got caught because I kept all my stolen logins in my home dir, in passwords.txt.

I talked the teacher into canceling all of my detentions in return for showing him how to secure his bootdisks. Man, kids today would just get expelled or go to jail. I'm glad I grew up when I did.

I graduated from HS 9 years ago and I almost got suspended from all computer access, ended up getting some detentions, and various other punishments just for using Firefox. (Would have hated to see what the naive principal would have dished out if I wasn't one of the top students in my class)

That's the truth. I went to s particularly safe middle school, so when we had a random weapons sweep with metal detectors, only 3 students got caught. I was one of them; I had my little 1" swiss army knife, one girl had a steel nail file with a sharp point, and a mexican kid had a 3" folding buck knife.

Me and the girl were white honor students, and we were let off with a stern warning, and our "weapons" were handed to our parents. The mexican kid with poor english skills got sent to an alternative school (the kind for disciplinary risk kids).

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