• rockstarpirate@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.

    Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.

    Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.

  • everett@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Create a folder with intriguing name on desktop, take screenshot, set screenshot as wallpaper, delete folder. (Didn’t everyone?)

  • rofoldos@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Situation: once in middle school, we had to present something for a class (don’t remember which one) with power point slides

    In those days, you had to bring the presentation in an usb pendrive.

    For some reason, most of the class didn’t finish it.

    I disabled usb ports from device manager.

    Saved the day.

    • rofoldos@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I also remember one time when one of our non-tech-savvy teachers almost lost it when her mouse pointer was out of control.

      Thing is, that was around the time when wireless mice with usb dongles came up.

      One of my classmates connected one on her pc and played with it in class.

      Good times.

  • cookie_lust@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    for several days in a row i’d get to class before the bell. the teacher would hang out in the halls.

    i’d hop on his unlocked PC, open command prompt, run shutdown /r /t 600, minimize the prompt, and walk away.

    he’d be mid attendance and his computer would reboot on him. a few days in he stepped into the room mid me typing the command. he was madder than i expected, but just “yelled” at me.

    • mvee@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Lol bold move. I suspect admin at my school would have accused you of hacking and threatened a bunch of ridiculous shit

  • frap129@lemmy.maples.dev
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    1 year ago

    We all had laptops in highschool, and apparently our IT admin couldn’t figure out how to disable the “Upgrade to windows 10 for free!” Popup everyone was getting. Anyone that upgraded to windows 10 got called down to IT had their laptop reimaged. When I heard about it, I figured that they must have been checking OS by our user agent or some other web-based method, as upgrading to windows 10 appeared to kill all of the group policy things. Assuming they had everyone’s mac address recorded, you could correlate laptop to user pretty easily.

    From then on, every week I would USB boot a different OS. Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 10, Windows XP, etc. I would run each OS for a few days until I got called down to IT, had my laptop inspected, and sent back to class when everything checked out. Drove them nuts, I thought it was funny.

  • aski3252@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

    So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

    I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…

  • james@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Take a screen shot of the desktop. Set that screen shot as the desktop background and delete some of the icons/shortcuts.

  • sparky@lemmy.federate.cc@lemmy.federate.cc
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    1 year ago

    At my school, we quickly discovered that the admin password for all the networked printers was the name of the high school. All these HP laser jets had a function where you could upload custom translations for the status messages on the printer displays. So we downloaded the English string set (XML) and made some changes, “translating” for example, “Printer Ready” to read “Paper Jam”, “Replace Toner” and so on. As well as changing the admin password. The school actually RMA’d them back to HP thinking the paper jams were some sort of actual defect, as opposed to an altered status message, and eventually replaced them all with Brother printers. Oops lol

  • Bleeping Lobster@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This was back in the 90s… we figured out a simple way to make ‘empty’ files using the spacebar ascii and qbasic. We’d have a simple interface, flashing cursor, and you’d type in a number; it would then create an ‘empty’ file of that many MB.

    Of course being 14 yr old little shits, we wondered, how big can the file be? Someone created a file big enough that first it filled the student partition; then the teacher partition; then the temp partition; then the system partition, at which point the entire network slowed to a transfer speed of a couple of bytes. When we realised we could do this, it was happening several times a week.

    After that, anyone caught with a blank screen and flashing cursor got in deep shit. They deleted the attrib command so we couldn’t un-read-only / un-hidden things, but we just copied it from our own DOS at home and brought it in on a floppy drive

  • justcoding_de@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Modified every boot floppy disk to display „<teacher name> is stupid“ before the prompt.

    I still feel bad about that. Mr. E., if you are reading this, I‘m sorry, you were a great teacher and taught us well.

  • mrmhm@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It started innocently enough, some friends writing simple C programs that would output an ever increasing text file containing the letter ‘a’. This rapidly devolved into a competition of who could output the largest files the fastest.

    We had progressed to recursively launching spaghetti programs competing with streamlined data-dumpers until we started to hit storage limits on the central server.

    10/10 great learning experience.

  • zephyrvs@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Gained access to the school’s domain admin account and fucked with th teachers remotely via Tor.

    Wanted to access the teachers calendar because he was a fucking Nazi and stumbled upon VPN credentials to a government-run education network and could’ve leaked hundreds of thousands of pupil’s personal data and school grades but decided against it and shared with admins how I got in and told them how to fix it. Never got into his calendar though. 😶

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    Put a backdoor and keylogger on the network engineer/networking teacher’s computer when I was a TA for his class and was able to get full control over the entire district’s network from home. I installed GTA2, Diablo 2 and Counter-Strike onto every machine in the system, then would play with my friends (and even a couple teachers) whenever I had the chance.

    The security was non-existent, and after just a month it felt like everyone knew about the games but no body ever found out who put them there. :)

  • BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com
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    1 year ago

    In college we had courses on Linux and we were able to SSH on other students’ computers. First I used innocuous commands that ejected the optical drive or that enabled the screensaver.

    But unfortunately it escalated quickly and soon every student would mess with each other by shutting down the computers…

    • electrorocket@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I used to do that with ICQ. I would just get people to run an exe then I would open their drive, print popup windows, screensaver, and I think even play audio files. Mostly fake satanic stuff so they’d think their computer was possessed.