[alxjsn]

This brings back good memories from High School. Here's a bunch of things we used to do:

1. Set fun messages on all the HP Printers: https://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/jetdirecthack

2. Bypass firewall restrictions by setting http:// to https:// (later had to resort to SSH tunneling using Putty). Got me banned from our library for a month when I was on Facebook and a teacher passed by.

3. Our student directory set a cookie to a 6 digit identifier in the cookie. We could access any student's grades and details by just setting it to another ID, or looking at their lunch card.

4. During finals we wouldn't be allowed to see our grades until after all the finals were submitted into our grading portal. Somebody picked up on the fact that if you stop the page load before it finished that the grades would show up. Using JS to block our grades after they loaded didn't stop even the least technical people.

5. Some of our labs had monitoring software to make sure we were working. We could just kill that process and they would lose access.

6. Invert MacOS screen colors using Control + Option + Command + 8. Teachers didn't know how to recover from this and would resort to restoring the entire Mac.

7. CTRL + ALT + Down to flip the Windows screens. Again caused issues for a lot of people who didn't know this shortcut.

What a bunch of troublemakers we were...

[13of40]

One of the labs in my highschool was for typing training, and it had something like 50 barebones PCs in it. Every day you'd sit down at a random machine, which booted from a 5.25" floppy. The autoexec.bat on the floppy let you log into the network where it ran another batch file from your user directory there.

As an experiment I wrote a piece of batch script that would append itself to both the network and local batch files if it wasn't already there (i.e if it was on the disk it would copy itself into your network account and visa versa), put it on one random computer, then forgot about it for a few days.

By the time I got around to checking again it had propagated itself to every computer in the lab and presumably every network account that had logged in during that time.

[nemo1618]

> CTRL + ALT + Down to flip the Windows screens. Again caused issues for a lot of people who didn't know this shortcut.

Oh man, that brings me back. We always went the extra mile by taking a screenshot of the desktop, rotating it 180 degrees, and hiding the taskbar and all the icons; everything seemed normal, but you couldn't click on anything, and the mouse pointer was upside down and had inverted movement.

[fudgefactorfive]

Definitely did 6. a good amount of times.

The best we got up to was the year we found the admin password for the default image root user in some cached Skype logs. First we would SSH into random people's systems and use Applescript to type random things etc., bonus points if they currently were presenting something. We got bored of that pretty quick and resorted to just selling the ability to do stuff as an admin like installing things.

Earlier in middle school we figured out that the MacBooks the school issued had an IR receiver and the apple remote available at the time could trigger some Fullscreen tools by hitting a button on the remote and aiming at a victims computer, again mostly to disrupt teacher presentations.

Both bits of fun came to an end when some kid figured it out and ratted us out. When they figured out I was selling root access (installed CoD4 for a friend's little brother and changed the root password for them at extra cost, when they couldn't remember what they changed it to the went to the admin) all hell broke loose and they confiscated the laptops to re-image... no fun.

[asabla]

Oh man!

This reminds of all the shenanigans we had back in school (in the prime of Windows XP). Among the things of:

1. Doing the same thing you did with #7, as in flippin the screen. However, our computers were so slow that you could spam the rotation combination for 30sec and it would go on for at least 5minutes or even more before it was finished. It was almost faster to just do a hard reset most of the times.

2. Our network was miss-configured, which let us to connect two ethernet ports on the same switch together and take out a whole class room. Or better yet, if someone had forgot to lock the room for building switch and do the same.

3. Pupils were not allowed on school wifi back then, but somehow our IT-department wasn't up to date when those popular WEP vulnerabilities were released. Didn't take long for pupils to dual boot Backtrack and sniff out the password. School had to invest in better security until next semester.

4. MSN was blocked on school network. This later became a source of inspiration for those studying programming back then. As an example: there was a program published unto the public network share (deep down) called msn-unlocker.exe which wouldn't unlock MSN for you, but rather create directories inside directories recursively until windows registry and harddrive just gave up.

There is of course a lot more stories here, but I'll keep those for reunions and bar nights with friends :)

[dmix]

> 3. Our student directory set a cookie to a 6 digit identifier in the cookie. We could access any student's grades and details by just setting it to another ID, or looking at their lunch card.

It still amazes me that weev went to Federal prison for doing essentially this on the internet and telling others how he did it

[somat]

With regards to point 6. invert macos screen colors. What is the use case for this? and more importantly why bind it to a key combo?

For example a left-right flipped screen could be needed in a rear projection setup, but I am at a loss for what you would use inverted colors for.

[xenonite]

For reading at night it is a delight to invert colors.

Sadly on macOS 11+, Apple changed some color management so it became unusable together with the f.lux app because the warm colors become cold/blueish instead.

Unfortunately, dark mode is no proper replacement because it does not invert standard web pages.

[noduerme]

I used to really used to like f.lux's darkroom mode for this (and coding at night - it just looks badass).

[metadat]

Heh, you've reminded me.

I used to go to Fry's Electronics computer department and screenshot the desktop with clickable stuff, then proceed to set that as the background and close all the windows and remove or relocate all desktop items. To an end user, it then seemed like the computer was frozen or otherwise fubar'd. Rinsed and repeated that for a whole row of machines a few times. It was entertaining to then watch people approach and try to interact with them.

I know this is weak kung-fu compared to many stories in this thread is but it was a good time! (at the time..)

[dilap]

I still occasionally accidentally do this to myself when I come back to my phone looking at a screenshot in full-screen... It's almost a sensation of vertigo when you realize what's going on and your brain readjusts.