June 28, 2007 at 8:35 pm
· Filed under School
I’ve just been reading a copy of The Hackers Handbook by Hugo Cornwall I got of Amazon (link to a text file). Fantastic book, although its a bit out of date, unless you use a ZX Spectrum on a day to day basis. It did remind however of “hacks” me and my friends managed to do at our (ex) school in days gone-bye…
Gluing two 2 pence pieces together would fool the drinks machine to think it was a £2 coin.
Although all of the internal and network drives were limited so that we could not access them in Explorer, if you created a link to one of them in HTML or Word, clicking the link would take you straight to that drive. We where only given 100mbs of space for all of are 5 years of work (including GCSE coursework) so we would use a little bit of the internal hard drives. Stealing a loaf of bread from a fat greedy baker.
We all knew a long list of proxies.
We caused Windows Media Player to be banded and blocked from all computers. The reason? If you renamed a program wmplayer.exe, it would run. No questions asked!
For one of my last years, I was allowed to bring a laptop to school (dyslexia you see). Anyhoo I plugged it into the network. Forgetting to disconnect it from the network (on the system) I connected it into another Ethernet port. I apparently created a “loop”. The system was down for a day.
Firefox was on most of our key-rings due to the schools decision to use IE6.
Teachers passwords where some of the worst. Password was a common one, as well as their first name.
In some boring classes where they foolishly let us on a computer, we used to have printer wars. Whenever somebody submitted something to the que., we deleted or diverted it. This used to really piss off the teachers!
We found that the “This site is blocked” web-page was automatically generated and not a single HTML file. What did we do? With a little HTML we made our own.
Bluejacking was a constant amusement. No matter where you were, people would send messages and images all over the class. God I love Bluetooth.
Not really a hack, but my laptop saved me and my friends backs many a lesson. Some ass-hole thought it would be great to steal the laptop and mess about. Stupid fucker. So I walk up behind him, one hand I put on the laptops lid, the second on the screen. “If you point here (points) it runs Tetris (or something).”. He puts his hands on the keyboard, and I slam down the lid. Taught him not to touch others property.
My friend tried to turn on his phone in class, but when it does it makes one hell of a noise. So he switches on the phone, hides it in his pocket. The teacher looks up at me and him. I slap the laptop, “bloody thing!”.
Sure, most of these “hacks” make me sound more like Dennis the Menace than Kevin Mitnick. But hey, its was the school days. The years of 2002 to 2007. The most other kids could do was print a picture of Goatse. I miss the days of 2002 to 2005 (July), 2005 (September) to 2007 can rot though. Simple times, simple pleasures.
Oh btw, most of these “hacks” took place on a Windows XP Pro SP2 Network. Unless your sysadmin has no social life, most of them will still work. 
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lgbsneak said,
June 28, 2007 @ 10:15 pm
That’s one of the things I would have fun doing if i went to school. The school i would go to is completely windows xp too from what I’ve heard.
I currently have a job at a plasma physics lab, and they have a very neat network. I have an account on the “unix cluster” and i can use finger to see all the other people logged on, and can forward x11 apps to the local machine. I’m not going to try hacking it though, cause I would surely get kicked out for that.
Jack said,
June 30, 2007 @ 11:15 am
Hacking Unix is like pissing on the mona lisa. It just shouldn’t be done (unless you want to be escorted out by security guards). Windows however, its got more holes than a pair of fish net stocking!
James said,
July 1, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
those were the days. The computer systems at westgate were really unsecure!