[bjackman]

I did almost exactly the same thing at my school (brought down the system with a VB6 script that wrote infinite text files to networked storage). They sent my mum a letter accusing me of terrorism.

At the time I thought I was pretty ridiculous and unfair (lucky my mum agreed), but now looking back with adult eyes I also see it as an almost criminal level of disregard for the job of raising children. Just absolutely irredeemably small-minded, truly pathetic, it makes me so angry to think that there are still young people growing up in that environment and being taught by those people.

[diggan]

People are afraid of what they don't understand - Someone, at one point

The adults in that situation didn't understand the full (or rather, how small) scope of what happened, so for them it looks wildly different than to you or me. To them, computers are black boxes that are not to fuck with, and the ones who do, are only out after destruction and ruining things. That's why they react like they do.

Not to excuse the behavior, they should of course have talked with people who understand what happened before trying to address it, but lack of resources, knowledgeable people and understanding often leads to being able to.

Similarly, I at one point (before I'd consider myself a programmer) worked as a customer support agent contracted out to a popular fruit technology company, saw efficiencies in how things were done manually and hacked together a browser extension. At first just me and my colleague next to me was using it. Eventually, it spread and eventually management found out.

Instead of trying to elevate the processes and seeing that things could be better, they decided to eventually get rid of me, too risky they said.

[mauvehaus]

I wasn't screwing around with the network in high school, but got called in to the principal's office to answer some uncomfortable questions because (and I swear on my life I am not making this up) I knew how to change the desktop background on my account. This apparently made them suspicious of me. Simpler times, I know.

It was an early lesson in the fact that there are a lot of people doing IT in schools who, frankly, suck at their job. Most of the good IT people are getting paid way more elsewhere. The crappy ones are working in an environment where easily 1 in 50 of the students know more than they do and some of them feel threatened and lash out when someone is outing them for being lousy at their job, intentionally or otherwise. Like you did (disk quotas much?). Like they suspected me of.

Fixing the structural problem would require paying IT people in schools a rate that more closely matches what they'd make in industry. Fixing the social problem would require hiring people who understand what you and the author figured out: that nurturing people and directing their impulses productively yields better long-term outcomes for everyone.

[seattle_spring]

Yup, absolute insanity. My good friend was expelled because he used "net send" while our teacher was giving a presentation. Wasn't even anything vulgar.

[jszymborski]

The first time I heard a Chuck Norris joke was via "net send" in a high school computer lab.