251–260 of 399 posts
My first thought when I read the headline was "another kid with a felony following them around for a prank that didn't harm anyone". Nice to see they weren't prosecuted.
Working in IT/tech for school district is the worst. My experience from many years ago - around 2002, I think: 1. First day on the job, email to boss: "Hey, the computer lab at Springfield High has a ton of known security flaws that are begging to be exploited." 2. Reply, 1 week later: "Sorry, we don't have any money for that. Just keep everything up-and-running." 3. 3 weeks later the computer lab at Springfield High…
They always have the money. They just don't care about doing things properly. It simply isn't a priority for them.
Makes me feel good when someone comes and exploits their negligence. It's like divine retribution and they're doing god's work. They tempt fate and the gods punish them by making them pay more than they would have paid had they done things right. Amazing.
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If I broke into your home tonight to play a prank on you and then handed you a white paper about how to better secure it, how would you feel?
Breaking and entering vs. playing a harmless video at the end of the day in school. False equivalence.
So perhaps you’re right that it is a false equivalence.
Working in IT/tech for school district is the worst. My experience from many years ago - around 2002, I think: 1. First day on the job, email to boss: "Hey, the computer lab at Springfield High has a ton of known security flaws that are begging to be exploited." 2. Reply, 1 week later: "Sorry, we don't have any money for that. Just keep everything up-and-running." 3. 3 weeks later the computer lab at Springfield High…
> we don't have any money for that They always have the money. They just don't care about doing things properly. It simply isn't a priority for them. Makes me feel good when someone comes and exploits their negligence. It's like divine retribution and they're doing god's work. They tempt fate and the gods punish them by making them pay more than they would have paid had they done things right. Amazing.
of course, this was in the days when pad-pad was a thing out in the real world, so false logins on vt100/vt220 terminals was all too easy to fake.
I am still thankful that they decided to set that up (we even had physical machine access) - such a better solution than just letting us go wild on the local network.
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> All the computers displayed a popup window When I engaged in `net send` shenanigans at the local community college, at least the IT staff was smart enough to know where to scramble a runner whenever those dialog boxes popped up across campus. "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" was quite the meme then, but apparently they thought it was some form of cyber-terrorism.
I haven’t thought of net send in years. Circa 2000 I worked at Cisco and added some javascript to my profile in the corporate directory that sent me a net send message with the hostname of the computer that viewed my profile. At that time the hostname usually included the employees username, so I had a nice heads up that somebody was looking me up. I should have left it at that, but Ingot cheeky and also did a net se…
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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
it's like those awesome ubuntu login motd's, I look forward to them every time I log in, just in case the ad changes.
er ...
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Sounds way overly complex for a high schooler to pull off. At least the OP sounded legitimate, the details didn't sound over the top.
Not really. Sounds like this was class of '08, and at the time BackTrack would have been readily available and popular enough for a curious highschooler with a bit of computing background to find. As I recall etercap was built in and I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were tutorials for setting up scenarios almost exactly like what is described. Even the ARP balancing thing is the kind of too-clever-by-a-half so…
I feel so dumb when I read kids doing these things. Back in High School all I knew was how I could run arbitrary executable files by renaming them to calc.exe. We also did the classic "take a screenshot of the desktop, set it as the wallpaper, then remove all icons and the start menu" thing.
Another good one on that level was using the Windows keyboard shortcut ctrl-alt-down to rotate the display upside down - totally harmless, but absolutely maddening if you don’t know how to undo it
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Posts like yours validate the insane over criminalization of what essentially amounts to a prank. I had literally the exact same experience in high school. Got expelled and had to get a GED. They could have easily pressed charges. Part of the issue is people like you who advocate for respecting "the system" and essentially scaring kids into not doing anything. Except that simply re-enforces the draconian laws that ar…
> a prank Why do we tolerate pranks? You shouldn't be able to interfere with someone else and say 'just a prank bro'. Leave other people's things alone. Don't create work for other people. Don't bother people just trying to do their jobs. Don't impose your sense of humour on others. These all seem like basics to me? If you think someone's funny? Great. Just don't bother other people with it. Do it with your own stuff…
(Maybe we just have different experiences and thus different definitions of the word.)