Tell us your naughty stories

When I was in 8th grade I was really into security and decided to try my luck at hacking into the teachers terminals and downloading the bimestrial exams into a floppy. I got all the exams but one. Erased my tracks and went on my way passing all the exams (as did the rest of the class)... The day before the last one, I decided to try again, but I got booted out of the system before erasing my tracks and got caught with the floppy when I tried to leave the school.

Funny thing is that the biology test had to be remade and the teacher made it really difficult as it had pissed her off. Most people did mediocrely (though I think only the class dumbo failed), but my parents made me study biology all that day to make sure I was punished. I got an A.

Also I was supposed to get expelled for my breach, rather than that, I got extra credits if I spent a week in the summer helping secure their network, and I didn't have to take any computer classes (which consisted of "hey lets do html!") the rest of that year.

"Anyone else leave a time bomb or easter egg?"

Years ago I had a client who promised me thousands of dollars to develop a website. At first he tried to convince me to work in exchange for a percentage of the company, but when I refused he said he would pay me cash.

I built the site but never trusted him to pay me so I included a "delete script" that would erase all the code on every html page of the website when a set of three unique parameters were passed to a specific page of the site in a URL.

When I was nearly finished with the site he suddenly called to tell me he was on a plane to meet investors and needed me to upload the site to his live server "immediately" so he could do a demo in a few hours. I uploaded it just as he asked, and then he seemed to become invisible or unavailable for more than a week. Hmmm ...

After many unsuccessful attempts trying to get him to respond to my calls and emails I finally decided to trigger my delete code. He called within the hour to ask what I might have done to "his" website.

I told him he does not own the website because it was still mine until he paid for it. He claimed that I had agreed to wprk in exchange for a percentage of the company, and I laughed.

Eventually he asked if I had a copy of the website that I could send him if he paid me, and an hour after I said "yes" the full amount appeared in my bank account.

I sent him new copies of the html files (without my delete script) and thankfully I never heard from that dishonest unethical opportunistic client ever again.

Lesson learned: Never trust a programming client to do what he promises, even when it is in writing.

From that point on I have always asked my clients to prepay for my programming labor. Most of them complain at first, but I give them a discount when they prepay, and that's usually enough to convince them to trust me to do what I say I will do -- instead of me trusting them to pay me later.

When they learn that I'm honest and always send a refund when they overpay, they never complain about my payment system again ... but they really appreciate the price break I give them when they prepay.

Depends on where you are (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_hour#Backlash)

Happy hour has been illegal in Massachusetts since 1984.

the fancy boarding school i went to had a monopoly on book-selling. Every year students would pay full price for textbooks in the fall and sell them back to the bookstore for a fraction of the cost at the end of the year.

I decided this was retarded and made a riskless market in textbooks at the end of my senior year by matching buyers and sellers and pocketing the spread (often >50%). I think I made like $800.

Essentially they were converting the euro coupons which they got for free to cash with the expected value of a bet on the roulette wheel (which is slightly negative giving the house an edge over time). For example, if the avergage expected value of the bet is -5% (the house edge), then for a single bet, on average, you would expect to get 95% back of your original bet amount. Since they got 10 euros each time for free they would expect to get back 9.5 euros on average over all their bets, given this house edge (which I made up).