[mjlee]

When I was in high school I brought in a copy of The Hacker's Dictionary to show a friend. A teacher saw it.

A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.

Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under their keyboard.

[bingo-bongo]

I started studying IT back in ‘99 and got a strict warning from the school my first year, because I had used the schools network to access the internet from my own laptop. I had “gained access” by plugging an ethernet cable into a random socket in the wall, and was doing some homework, when radom employee walked by. Since there wasn’t any rules (yet), that allowed nor disallowed it, I got of with only a warning ... from a school, that teaches IT :|

[kotaKat]

We had a single wireless AP (really, a WRT54G) chilling in the high school library in my last couple years. I may or may not have factory defaulted it a few times to hop on an open linksys SSID...

... they only seemed to put a sign on it to say 'stop defaulting it' yet did zero oversight, so I'd just keep on walking over to the printer next to it, reset it, and keep on trucking.

Getting a CR48 from the Google Chromebook pilot program was my next trick to defeat their WRT shenanigans - that 200mb of free 3G every month actually went a long way back then in the halls, and a McJob paid for the rest of the wireless freedom ;)

[kotaKat]

I remember trying to argue with the IT folks at school because hackaday.com was blocked for "hacking"... damn, guess all those fun electronics projects people were doing is Super Evil And Only For Criminals.

[QuantumNomad_]

When I was in middle school I used to download keygens and cracks for programs from the school computer and take them with me home on a floppy disk because I didn’t have internet at home.

One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.

The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.

Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.

[rationalist]

Obviously that teacher never tried to acces the WhiteHouse by assuming it was a dotcom (a porn site back then, now a crappy election betting site).

[baumschubser]

i earned myself a notice in the local newspaper in 8th grade for hacking the public library. what i did: on the PC terminal right click, show source, edit the HTML to leave a "i was here" note, click save :)

[TylerE]

Hey, under the keyboard is an advanced technique. In those days it was usually on the monitor.