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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#191

Post by [deleted] »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #185
gymbeaux wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al. Anyway when…

Someone at my high school (late 90s/early 2000s) was apparently distributing something on CDRs. I got called into the police station , where a cop asked me, verbatim: "Son, did you copywrite them there CDs?"

[deleted]

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#192

Post by don-code »

shadowgovt wrote: post #109
dullcrisp wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.

Oh yeah. That'll get you. Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that, when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because apparently, computer services had cut off-campu…

We had a similar setup at my university - printing to a lab printer was disallowed from a machine that wasn't physically in the lab. The printers had routeable IPs, so I'm guessing they did some kind of whitelisting at the printer itself.

The problem was, we were a Sun campus, and my tablet PC ran Linux. So I could SSH in, open up StarOffice, and hit Print on a document - all from the tablet PC in the crook of my elbow - then walk into the lab and pick the documents up out of the tray.

I never got in "trouble" for this, per se, but I did have a lab technician once look at me as if to say, "that's not allowed..."

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#193

Post by xeromal »

shoozza wrote: post #184
xeromal wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a very similar story. In high school, our library was using a windows environment and through some luck, I discovered NET SEND or something like that. I figured out my friend's computer names and I started sending them messages. We eventually communicated this way even under the strict librarian and I eventually hatched a plan to annoy everyone. I put together a crappy batch file that iterated through every co…

Though no further work is being done on the original and the FLOSS forks aren't ready yet (soldank++ and opensoldat) the game is still playable on modern PCs and even free on steam ;) (Disclaimer: former maintainer)

I had no idea it was in steam but we used to play that game all the time. We had probably 10 or 15 guys playing in the library lol.

Thanks for making such a fun game!

I'll check it out

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#194

Post by _bin_ »

myself248 wrote: post #121

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction,…

We used to pull similar shenanigans in middle school. Teacher computers were finally on wifi, So I'd pull out my little android tablet and USB Wi-Fi card. Run an evil AP, deauth, downgrade to HTTP, and put whatever I wanted on the web page. Good times.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#195

Post by cloudwalk9 »

enlightens wrote: post #125
oldgradstudent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.

I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.

That sounds both wholesome and horrifying. Like we are well into the digital age but sometimes people are just stubbornly analog.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#197

Post by tdba »

Aardwolf wrote: post #13
mankyd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like this: ****.

hunter2 edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me

HOw did you get my password ??? Delete. it immediately. This is your Final warning.

Warm regards,

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#200

Post by autarch »

hnaccount_rng wrote: post #157
autarch wrote: post #64

At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.). Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could w…

> but one reason is that it was more challenging I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom

Absolutely. I had the same problem through most of school until college.
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