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

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.

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

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.

Somebody had put the Halo CE demo in some gym teacher’s shared folder and everybody in the school could access it and play LAN blood gulch

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.

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.

I replaced one of the DLLs (winmm.dll?) with a DLL of my own. It got loaded before the login dialog and installed a hook that saved your login details to a file. This was Windows for Workgroups so no access controls for files.

That way we managed to get the login info for a teacher that nobody liked, then we filled his home directory with porn. IIRC there was a quota of 5 MB and after that the admins got involved.

As a teacher: I would change the computer hooked up to the projector to Dvorak layout and forget to change it back.

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.

I put tor on a flash drive. It bypassed the schools website blocks, so I could go onto any website I wanted. I mainly just went to YouTube to listen to music while I worked. If I really felt like goofing off, I’d go to friv.com and play a bunch of flash games.

Of course a couple friends had me to go to a porn website, but we quickly realized it was awkward and not as fun to be horny when you couldn’t do anything about it.

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…

Not in school.

But i have written a .bat scipt in notepad on an unlocked laptop in a store

Then added the script into the startup folder.

The script would restart the pc after 30 seconds.

shutdown -r -t 30

(R for restart, t for time, 30 means 30 seconds) its harmless… but also super frustrating

Write it in a notepad file. Save it as a .bat file

Our school had a local TV station. They broadcast school board meetings and a slideshow of random updates about the township. I figured out how they controlled the music in the background and changed the music to heavy metal.

I came into class the next day and my TV production teacher told me that the school received multiple calls complaining about the music.

My school had a web filter to block YouTube and various other sites that they didn’t want students to go to. On the block page, there was a “report site blocked incorrectly” button, as well as a password override for admins to do a one time bypass.

One of my classmates registered a domain that all it did was log the IP address of whoever visited it. He then attempted to visit the site from class, it was blocked, and he clicked the report button. Later on one of the IT admins reviewed the report to see if the site should be unblocked or not, by visiting the site. My classmate then had the public IP address of the IT admin.

This IT admin must not have been very good, because he had a password unprotected, open, telnet port pointing to his computer. So we were able to telnet into his PC and poke around. He had an Excel file on his desktop with the web filter override passwords for every school in the district. That Excel file was promptly shared to as many people as who asked for it and we thought wouldn’t rat us out.

We gloriously had unrestricted Internet for several months before the teachers caught on. We were told that anyone who used this password would be found out, and that the school was going to have a “volunteer” community service day for 4 hours on Saturday, picking up trash around the school. Anyone who attended would be pardoned for using the password, anyone who didn’t attend and who was found out for using the password would have been “punished” (very ambiguously defined). I did not go to the volunteer day, nor was I punished in any way. I do think that it was just a bluff and they didn’t have good enough logging to tell who actually used the password.