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 Fantastic book, although its a bit out of date, unless you use a ZX Spectrum on a day to day basis.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. 
One of the great thing about Unix systems, no viruses. Well, nothing like Netsky or MyDoom, perhaps something that prints a rude message. Anyway, Computer Viruses have always interested me. The way they work, the reason for there creation, the creator, ect. Hell, I can’t write in C to save my life, I can just about get away with PHP, yet on the net there are noobs who think they can. What does a noob do when they want something but can’t get it? They beg for it.
“can someone help me with saving a file?, im having alot of trouble. Im running windows xp pro and i wanna save a .txt file. So i go into notepad and under file it says “save” im not sure if i should click on this because i dont want to get a virus, can someone help me ? I would also like to be a hacker, but i dont know how when im a hacker i will hack everybody”
The full FAQ is here. God, why don’t they look in the historic yet interesting Virus Source Code Database. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about virus code.
Bahh, there will always be noobs, and there will always be viruses. Yet there will always be Unix. Well, till 2038 anyway.
I was at school today and we often have to do work that we need to send home. Email is personly, the only way, but due to my school soon to moniter what is going though our email, I want some privacy. Also, they blocked Flickr (oh poo!) so there is no way to create photo editing. Now, i often travel to friends houses as well, I want to access my data there as well.
Thats when I thought, I want a office suite, note pad, Flickr and my files on the go. Hmm, so what to do. I rember, after having a look at Goowy, that I could do this. I want my own Goowy. Thankfully, there is a product. eyeOS.
eyeOS is a system that allows you to make your own OS on the Internet, with all these features. All it needs is PHP, so MySQL can bugger off. Looks like I could make this system in about two weeks. So dev continues.
Hi
Yesterday i had the “Pleasure” of visting Q (or is it Kew?) gardens. Now, if you are there, with friends, its bloody great, but with your mother, its a hell pit. I searched and searched for Free WiFi but only found some when i went to the Fish & Chip shop, and thats only a coupal of mineutes from my house. Ah ha 
