I nearly got expelled for learning how to use Flash 8 in middle school to make games.
When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
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Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#22Way back in 1988, I was in the sixth form of a school in the UK (that's for students aged 16-18). We had a bunch of BBC Micros networked together using Acorn EcoNet. Very detailed manuals for everything were just on a shelf in the classroom. I forgot how we did it, but we wrote something that gave us access to the place where the passwords were stored on the master server. I also forget why we did this, but somehow w…
Even further back, as third formers in 1968 or 1969 there were no computers in schools but we were keen chemists and discovered ammonium iodide.
As we were the best students we had access to the chemistry lab store room, so we made a big batch and painted it everywhere (under chairs, blackboards, waiting areas outside classrooms, etc.). It was hilarious. Again all we got was a stern talking to and a mop and bucket, and told to clean it up.
I suppose that today anything to do with explosives would be taken too seriously to be fun.
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#23In 1998 I installed the NetBus server on computers in the computerlab at my school. I would then run the NetBus client on a computer in a secluded corner, and watch the reaction from people while I messed with their computer. The best reactions I got from randomly opening and closing the CD-tray. Good times.
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#24I had to personally apologise to the IT department because I sent a message from 'God' saying "I saw what you did last night" to the entire network (long time ago but it was Novell something) by mistake (was aiming to send it to just the one computer lab). They thought it was hilarious and that was the end of the matter.
Select students in my high school had Novell emails, which led to interesting interactions during the tiny AP CS class. We figured out that you could edit the from field and with enough spaces the email address would overflow and be hidden from view. So after some girl broke the no mass email rule, I sent her an email as "Administrator" saying that she'd be expelled for sending a mass email. Luckily I only has to apologize.
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#25My 'episode' was in '93. I'd just learned about TSR's and execution vectors and really wanted to try to write a floppy disk boot sector virus. Coded it up in turbo pascal. Thought I was being ultra careful: promptly spread it everywhere.
My school was much more laid back, thankfully.
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#26In 1998 I installed the NetBus server on computers in the computerlab at my school. I would then run the NetBus client on a computer in a secluded corner, and watch the reaction from people while I messed with their computer. The best reactions I got from randomly opening and closing the CD-tray. Good times.
We did the exact same thing! This one time, me and my group of similarly nerdy friends sat in a different room and opened all of the CD-trays in the computer lab during a computer class. The teacher came running to the room we sat in, and we were so sure we had been caught. But no, she started explaining that all the computers were acting up horribly, and that we were the only ones who could help her. She didn't know how right she was :)
So we helped her naturally, undoing our own work and uninstalling NetBus. I'm not sure she ever figured out it was us, though.
They DID figure out who was spamming "net send" messages to certain people. A kind of war had started, where people would compete in sending the most net sends to each other, forcing the other side to click "OK" on a message box. It got sort of nuclear once we discovered batch scripts and for loops.
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#27Ah, good times. Win95 used to crash so much, that my brother and I became quite adept at resurrecting Explorer by causing a surviving process to trigger it. Eventually, we discovered the infamous "Login? No, just help yourself to the desktop" hack. No one cared, it was normal for stuff to be broken. https://imgur.com/rG0p0b2
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Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#28I had to personally apologise to the IT department because I sent a message from 'God' saying "I saw what you did last night" to the entire network (long time ago but it was Novell something) by mistake (was aiming to send it to just the one computer lab). They thought it was hilarious and that was the end of the matter.
Similar story here - mine was in the days of Windows 9x; everyone knew about "net send", but few bothered to look into the other options. I decided to poke at it and see what "/forest" did, ended up messaging the entire network with a harmless "Hello world". It's shocking to see the ordeal that mmccaff went through; for me it was just a couple of very confused teachers and an IT department that wanted to keep an eye…
Sometime in the mid 90s (must have been 1997 since there were web browsers) I was taking a college prep class at a community college, and I read about a thing that became popularly known as "the ping of death". Long story short, the school had all of its internet traffic running through a single, rather ancient NAT that locked up if you pinged it with a 64k icmp packet...
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#29I sorted some of my work product with bubble sort (I wrote maintenance procedures and docs for a defense contractor), in 1982 or 3; I figured out bubble sort "all by myself". I don't remember the mini-computer or the language. The system admin visited me and told me not to do that anymore. I went to school after that (where I learned that it was called bubble sort).
Hah. Any idea why the system admin didn't want you to bubble sort anymore? Was it noticed to be taxing on some system's resources or too long-running of a process or something?
Yes, that was why. It was long ago, I'm sure it was a particularly inept implementation. He didn't say "don't bubble sort," he said "don't run that anymore."
Re: When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
#30I had to personally apologise to the IT department because I sent a message from 'God' saying "I saw what you did last night" to the entire network (long time ago but it was Novell something) by mistake (was aiming to send it to just the one computer lab). They thought it was hilarious and that was the end of the matter.
I got suspended for teaching kids to use Winpopup in Highschool...