Good time for me to finish my DEFCON talk: Spoofing UEFI to play Fortnite on a Chromebook at 60FPS :)
Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
11–20 of 204 posts
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#12So many good memories here, like making a website that curated flash games on unblocked domains and sharing floppy disks with emulators and a ROM or two.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#13I kind of miss the days of school-sanctioned educational games, like those from MECC / The Learning Company. Of course the quality varied, but it made sense as a reward for finishing an assignment, where it could still be fun, but still be educational.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#14This relates to something that has been bugging me lately, which is as a parent I have zero parental control over the devices that our school board issues to my children. My kids have iPhones and iPads, which are part of my Apple family account, and I can both monitor what they are doing and also set limits on screen time including hours of usage and for particular apps. However, I recently became aware that my son w…
You control the network that device is on. Block and/or track access using that fact. I use a combination of DNS via https://1.1.1.1/ and WiFi/DHCP via https://eero.com/ . Works great. Yes. This should be way easier.
Until your kid learns how to boot linux and run aircrack-ng to get into the neighbor's wifi because you're restricting the internet access...
Ask me how I know
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#15This relates to something that has been bugging me lately, which is as a parent I have zero parental control over the devices that our school board issues to my children. My kids have iPhones and iPads, which are part of my Apple family account, and I can both monitor what they are doing and also set limits on screen time including hours of usage and for particular apps. However, I recently became aware that my son w…
Easy, no devices in their hands after bedtime. Your child isn't some busy tech professional that needs to be on call for work emails. They can live without having their iPad and iphone in their room. When I got caught as a kid playing my Gameboy when I should have been asleep, I lost my free access to it and could only use it when homework and chores were completed. Once play time was over, they took it back because I was a dumb kid who wasn't responsible enough to manage my own screentime.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You control the network that device is on. Block and/or track access using that fact. I use a combination of DNS via https://1.1.1.1/ and WiFi/DHCP via https://eero.com/ . Works great. Yes. This should be way easier.
Until your kid learns how to boot linux and run aircrack-ng to get into the neighbor's wifi because you're restricting the internet access... Ask me how I know
Then at least they are learning some critical thinking and some valuable IT skills.
I think that's probably a win for most parents.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#17Good for them. As long as it's not dangerous, I'm on the side of the kids on this one. And it looks like there are plenty of adults supervising the situation to keep it reasonably safe (it is the internet after all). The kids are going to learn a lot of useful skills and develop a fascination with computers that will stay with them for years if not their whole lives.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#18My generation was writing games on school computers. Now they struggle to play them.
Kids these days! Happy to consume content endlessly. It has to mean something.
{ Old man shakes his cane at young people. }
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#19As 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)…
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.
Re: Kids trying to play video games on school laptops
#20Back in my day it was easy: Mac OS used the 4-character "creator code" to check what applications your user could open, so you just set the creator code to a known allowed one and could run anything you want.
Of course you don't have access to run ResEdit, so your bring your own copy of that on a flash drive with its creator code already fixed.
"RASM" was my go-to. That was the remote access status monitor, and any user account had access to it.
For the less technically inclined, you could create a custom "Launch Application" toolbar button in Apple Works (or Claris Works before that). It would give you an error that you don't have permission to launch the application, and then it would open anyway.