31–40 of 399 posts
Neat story, and this is clearly harmless. But isn't the most basic, fundamental, number one rule of security/pen testing to try to break into a system (no matter how weak) if and only if you've been given clearance beforehand? Why doesn't that hold here?
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Being a minor probably helps. There are so many laws today. It's too risky to do this. It's not like it was 25 years ago.
I was suspended for a week for creating a network share in my typing class and dividing the work among my friends and we copied and pasted into a single document on the share. This was on Windows NT though so a LONG time ago. It's also I guess "cheating". But they got us on "computer hacking"
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Credit where credit is due, we all WISH *nix had something like PowerShell. Passing strings from program to program is a pain, passing around .NET objects instead is a great step forward, as can be seen by the several attempts at similar shells passing around JSON objects.
PowerShell has been available on Linux via .NET Core since 2016 and version 6.0. Even my Windows box with PowerShell 5.1 likes to remind me of this fact every time I start it: Windows PowerShell Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6
Therefore I decided I would email Tetris to every student (I emailed the executable, not a link to Tetris), making it easier for everyone to play also. As soon as I did this the entire system got very slow...apparently the server had no quotas or partitioning and the hundreds of copies of Tetris filled up 100% of the hard drive space. It was a disaster. The computer "specialist" had no idea how to fix the system and she was teaching an adult education class that evening that required the system to work. She was furious and wanted me to get suspended. It didn't happen though because I spoke up about the problem right when I knew there was a problem and also some other teachers intervened on my behalf.
The woman who was responsible for the computer system back then is now the superintendent of the school system. I wonder if she remembers me.
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Being a minor probably helps. There are so many laws today. It's too risky to do this. It's not like it was 25 years ago.
I was suspended for a week for creating a network share in my typing class and dividing the work among my friends and we copied and pasted into a single document on the share. This was on Windows NT though so a LONG time ago. It's also I guess "cheating". But they got us on "computer hacking"
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I'm glad to see a kid using bash and not something like gulp PowerShell
You're glad to see them using the ancient clusterfuck that is Bash, and not a modern relatively sane shell that is indisputably the most seminal shell in the last 30 years?
The fact that the administration didn't choose to sue them to oblivion is refreshing. I hope we'll see a trend in the future of educator being smart enough to admit that they made a mistake and to encourage the students to develop their talent. One can only hope.
I'm glad to see a kid using bash and not something like gulp PowerShell
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Being a minor probably helps. There are so many laws today. It's too risky to do this. It's not like it was 25 years ago.
It can get pretty messy. For example, they could wait until they're 21 to try them as an adult, even if it was committed at 17 or younger [0 p. 128]: > a person who committed the offense before his eighteenth birthday, but is over twenty-one on the date formal charges are filed, may be prosecuted as an adult.... This is true even where the government could have charged the juvenile prior to his twenty-first birthday,…
Many here, I am sure, got in trouble in high school for exposing security issues in school IT. So I imagine we're all very happy to see a sane response from school administration for once!
I went to a small private Christian school back in the late 200X's, and not the type of private school that had gobs of money. For two years, our desktop computers in the computer lab and the English classroom ran Ubuntu Linux (presumably because Windows licenses were >$0). The only students with Linux experience were myself and a friend that I introduced to Linux (who is also now an IT professional).
For a month or two we systematically changed the remote desktop preferences to automatically accept new connections and not to display any messages saying that there is a connection. We tried to never sit at the same computer twice so that we could "adjust" as many computers as possible and to make a secret map of where each computer was by hostname.
If we were in the computer lab and feeling mischievous (always), we'd poll around English classroom hostnames to see if any were in use, or vice versa. We'd "help" people write their papers (very creatively, I might add), speedrun through other students' typing lessons, open a terminal and run "telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl", or whatever else we could come up with.
Well, wouldn't you know it, word gets around this is happening and we naturally get called in to the principal's office (because who else?). While expecting the worst, we were told "we know what you're doing, we don't know how to stop you, but we encourage you to stop and use your technical abilities productively instead" and were let off without punishment. We both came out of it with great respect for the administration because they showed us respect we didn't deserve, and we stopped.