Greentext

In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.

In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.

A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:

while (true) {
    fork();
}

Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. 🤣
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. 😂
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.

I don't know why I'm taking mental notes like "don't forget to change the system clock before doing crimes!" like I'll ever need it.

I unplugged the monitors from the wall and wrapped a single hair-width strand of copper wire around the positive and negative terminals, and put the plug pins just barely back in the socket so it looked loose.

When the person investigating the faulty monitor pushed the plug in, the copper would evaporate in a bright flash.

Later that night I would dumpster-dive behind the computer lab at the school for the thrown-out, 'faulty' monitor. That's how I got my first 17" CRT monitor for gaming on Counterstrike.

Why porn of all things? It's one of the few things that could get you in serious trouble at a school, why not a meme or silly drawing.

Waaaaaaaay back in my Visual Basic 5 days I used to hide easter eggs in my corporate apps. It was always just a dialog box that would pop up randomly saying something kinda funny. To keep them from being discovered by the other developers, I would put the code in some obscure file and instead of a (searchable) string variable containing the text for the popup, I would convert it to a concatenated series of CHR(ASCII#) statements, and then each line of code would start with a couple of hundred spaces, so it would only ever be seen if someone happened to open the file and also happened to notice that there was a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom. We got many bug reports about the easter eggs but nobody was ever able to locate the code that was producing them. I might have been fired for this but probably not - nobody really cared much about shit like this in 1999.

hid the folder deep within the drive.

My brother in Christ you can right-click the desktop, personalisation, check the folder linked to the slideshow. You didn't hide shit.

Ah man I have so many stories about my high school schenanigains.

Every student had a folder named as their student ID on the smb network, all in one big folder. I created a folder there with a fake student ID just 1 above mine, so all I had to do was change my path from /students/1234 to 1235 and bam - I'm in my alt account. I had cracked copies of halo, starbound, gmod, powder toy, Terraria, Minecraft... all sorts of goodies!

Eventually I found that since this phony user folder 1235 wasn't tied to a domain user, its read/write permissions weren't locked down - so anybody on the network could access or add to the folder, so I shared it around with friends and it grew quickly! Didn't realize that meant deleting stuff, too; some kids just had chaos in mind, and would randomly delete shit because hAHa I DelEted the FolDer!!1! Ah, high school.

So eventually I got a system down where I'd keep backups elsewhere, and I'd refresh the war-torn main folder every so often, or switch to a new bogus ID to keep it among my friends - but better yet, if I was lucky enough to catch it disappearing in realtime, I'd often throw it right back up with something flashy and new in there, like a new CoD game or something, with surface level 'shortcut' links to the game executable right at the top of the directory, complete with a convincing custom icon. Instead of running a game or something, though, it instead ran scripts that either identified the leak (CD tray eject in a library computer bay? Immediate audio queue locating the assholes), or in later stages when patching the leak still failed, I'd bait them into a script that'd nuke their PC somehow 😂

my personal favorite, I built what I called the 'tree bomb' - a recursive .batch file that launches itself in another window, then runs "tree C:". Within around a second you'd go from a functional PC to a screen filled with terminals spitting out a representation of your hard drive's contents 🤣 in retrospect, I made a malware! 😅

2001 I figured out a way to get a NES emulator and games on all the computers in the lab. School was pissed but never figured me out. I played so much Kirby.

I changed a bunch of school computers BIOS splash screen to goatse.

I remember the times when our school got our first computers: three C64 with C1541 and one printer. The math teacher who wanted to learn computer science to one day teach it vs. us three who were fluent in assembler, knew the key routines of the OS by heart, and even knew the hardware inside out.

I exchanged the C64's OS ROMS for EEPROMs with four different OS images and hid the switches inside the extension slot. Yes, for this I opened the computers, de-soldered parts, soldered other parts in, etc. The teacher never noticed. Spare keys are fun. Modern school IT would probably faint if a student tried this.

Occasionally, I exchanged the EEPROMs for other variants, like one day where I had an image where the printer suddenly printed everything in reverse. OK, I did not turn around the letters (no space in the code for that, and the printer only had eight user-definable characters, so this would have been a major operation).

The teacher was confused, he just wanted to print a small basic program he had written, and it produced something like "olleH" tnirp 01 instead of 10 print "Hello" (not the actual program he had written). Switching the computer off and on did not help, either. So he asked for help, and I took his C64, turned it upside down, knocked on the bottom three times, and placed it back on the table. During this last motion, I knocked back the switch for the EEPROM selector to the standard ROM image. And then I made the teacher print his text again...

During my college years, we'd have fun lan parties until the room monitor would send a command to shutdown all machines. This was ~2009 and we mostly played counter strike 1.6 (portable that was less than 100mb) or Digital Paintball 2. Sometimes emulated Bomberman, too :)

back in the 90s my highschool had a computer lab and we would go there for certain assignments. I think it was history class when we went to do “research” which consisted of clicking links in an html doc from a shared drive and summarizing the articles on them. Someone changed some of the links to go to a porn site. The only thing that happened was the teacher said “whoever did this is a sick person”. I don’t know if they investigated but I was never caught.

If I had been running a school in 2018 you wouldn't have been able to get to the control panel anon.

I got suspended cos I figured out u could do the old boot a Linux USB and then do a renamed copy of cmd.exe to sethc.exe and get a system command prompt on the login screen when u activated stickykeys. U can do a lot with an admin account.

This wasnt a prank but i grew up with linux on all my computers and they didnt allow linux on school computers but the it admin allowed me to install the windows hypervisor(idk the name) on it(apparently even if you have standard edition windows you can still install the packages for pro edition stuff) so from then on i just booted up windows to boot up linux.

Takes me back to the good ol' days of adding echo commands to autoexec.bat so the computers would display stupid shit on boot.

Probably got the idea from fight club, you know, in the hypothetical scenario that this is neither fake nor gay

We had printer drivers that would show a notification for net send. The broadcast went out to several schools for some reason and it was basically a spell to summon our head of IT.

One time I sent something after it was forbidden and the guy came crashing through the door, demanding who was using a specific laptop. Turns out that laptop was broken and sitting in its receptacle and a friend of mine tried to use it just a minute earlier.

Good times.