cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34182616
I once got detention for “hacking.” All the school computers were on the same network, so if you opened Computer Management, then selected a different computer on the network, you could… get this… eject the disc drive on unsuspecting people. They’d be on their computer, 15 feet away, and then I’d click a button and their disc drive would eject, momentarily confusing them.
Librarian saw me using the “My Computer” folder to get to Computer Management, apparently that was proof enough. How is using available folders on the computer “hacking”? I have no idea, didn’t seem to be relevant.
I was banned from using computers at my highschool for hacking. I installed Firefox. Turns out the parental control program the school used only worked on Internet Explorer, so you could visit any site you wanted with Firefox. Hackerman!
My parents installed “Net Nanny” to keep me from watching porn or spending too much time on the internet as a middle-schooler. (Trust me, they’re good and accepting parents.) Anyway, I figured out that all you had to do was not click “okay” on the startup-induced message window and Net Nanny never started the controls or timer.
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I come just imagine sometime reading too much into it, that’s all… It’s the internet.
Unfortunately, school networks are often set up by people better qualified for teaching other subjects and as such they often leave things open for enterprising, morally undeveloped, children to get their metaphorical tendrils into.
This is how I ultimately ended up being banned from all computers in my school except one. It took them a while to figure out how to do that but I guess it became a priority what with all the “scary” things I was doing.
As I understand it, I was still getting the blame for things after I left.
way back in the early oughts i was in a tech enjanced learning program - on paper it was a solid idea. Small class size with hands-on support from our schools more tech literate teachers.
in practice we pretty much just tried to play quake 3 with each other withojt getting caught.
our teacher was on a years long crusade to find the server hosting the quake 3 installer, as we had software that locked the hard drives so any changes would be undone when rebooted. to my knowledge he never did, and the entire drama around it was hollarious.
Classic story
I was once fired from a helpdesk job because a security guy overheard me summarizing a Kevin Mitnick book to a coworker, thought I was planing to do what I was explaining and notified my supervisor, who informed his supervisor and so on until it went all the way to the fucking CEO and back.
I was summoned to HR the next day and I had to explain in writing to 5 different people that they’re all idiots and show them the book I was referring to.
I applied for a different position in the same company 3 months later and was hired for another 8 months.
Yea, that happened.
I live in the US. People are absolutely that fucking stupid.
Maybe if this happened in the 1990s, but I seriously doubt it in the last 25 years. That post said other students were using chromebooks so we know it wasn’t in the 1990s. Middle and High school kids are flashing ROMs on their phone by themselves these days. Even those that don’t understand command line know its used more than just “for hacking”.
Also on the high school “trouble” list, I have a hard time imagining the overstretched school system cares about anything other than students committing violence against teachers or each other, teen sex, drug use/sale on campus, possibly nicotine use, or possible consequences of poverty on students (hunger, clothing, hygiene). You know, normal teen stuff.
Middle and High school kids are flashing ROMs on their phone by themselves these days
No.
Some do. They other 98% are absolutely clueless and wouldn’t even know that there are alternatives to the stock OS. In fact they wouldn’t even know what an OS is or that “Android” isn’t a device brand.
cares about anything other than students committing violence
Many are just like bad police. They care about showing off how well they work by catching someone. Doesn’t matter that there wasn’t a problem in the first place or that there are actual real problems that could use the ressources. As long as they can catch and punish someone (for purely imaginary stuff even…) to pretend how well they are doing their job they are happy.
Yeah this is spot on. Tech literacy is at an all time low, today’s kids and young adults are having to be taught during work orientation what a file browser is now.
People who are currently between the ages of 30 and 60 are the generation that learned how to use their technology effectively. Older than that and you’re likely to be the “clueless boomer” trope, younger than that and you’re likely to be a tablet baby.
Not to mention that in my experience at least, public school teachers cared about basically every single petty problem except for the ones that would have actually benefitted anyone. You’ve been punched straight in the face every single day for two years by the same bully? I sleep. One of the girls wore shorts this morning and has visible knees? Get sent straight home immediately. Do not pass Go. This is a sin that cannot be tolerated.
All that to say, this story is definitely made up but there are places in America today where it could happen 100% as written.
All time low, so far. We haven’t seen the full might of the generation that was raised by Tiktok and educated by chatbots.
Have you seen Wall-E?
I think this story is fake as fuck, but with regards to school resource officers and the school I went to, if it was a non white kid it definitely would’ve received more scrutiny. It’s hard to say, because you couldn’t have laptops period when I was in highschool.
Regardless, as evidence for your point, remember when they arrested a 14 year old kid for having a DIY clock they thought was a bomb? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident
I was sent to the principal for doing my HTML homework for a web design class in the library because the librarian accused me of hacking.
I was told by the superintendent of the school district’s IT department to never do that again.
Obama was fresh out of his tan suit debacle.
I got in trouble for playing Pokémon cards in the library because “playing cards is gambling” according to the librarian.
The next week we played with actual 52 deck cards and put money on the table just to spite her (we still weren’t gambling)
I have a friend that has been trying for the past 2 years to get me to stop using Linux because its a “security risk”. My wife is also scared of piracy and adblockers. This is what most people are like.
You are in a tech-literate bubble.
Uhh, kids today dont know the ctrl+f command in a pdf viewer. They grew up with ipads.
Its rare I see one that knows anything about how computers function. Most dont know what a folder is.
*the above are all real things I had interns ask in the last few months.
Even those that don’t understand command line know its used more than just “for hacking”.
I don’t think Hollywood has caught up yet. It doesn’t even have to be a console, just any window with some code scrolling by fast equals hacking.
I was on my Gentoo linux laptop trying to find an open WiFi network on a sidewalk when someone came out of the nearby bank to shoo me away because she was told I was “trying to hack the bank”.
I was just trying SSH into my school account to send an email using PINE to let my parents know my train was 5 hours delayed. This would have been 2005 or so.
How long have you been away from high school? Either as a student or a parent?
I dunno, when I come across someone who has done the following to a PDF:
- Resized all the PDF pages into one size
- Bookmarked the PDF
- Bates numbering
- OCRed
- All the documents in one PDF
I give them a silent congrulations.
Far too often it’s “I printed all the documents and then scanned them as one PDF. Also what the fuck is bookmarking or OCRing or bates numbering?”
Not even in the 90s since many people would have known what a command prompt was since we used it to launch programs. The only way someone is acting like op’s greentext is if they had never used a computer but had watched a bunch of “hacker” movies. And for an entire school and police department to believe it and no one says “that’s how I launch my Doom”? Not happening.
The cops were the only ones in this story who didn’t believe it was hacking. They actually hired someone to check what was hacked.
I mean this is literally what I do in front of non-tech people to make them think I live in the Matrix. It’s honestly kind of hilarious how well it works. Their eyes go wide and they think I’m Mr. Chip Hackerman.
It’s literally how scammers scam people every day too. Just open up command prompt and run
tree c: /fAnd say it’s them visualizing the hacker, or scanning for viruses or something stupid.
Most people today do not understand computers at all. Even those freshly graduating with CS degrees often have little to no knowledge of how their OS’s work.
My wife was thinking I was hacking while I was troubleshooting my VPS. She is way more educated than I am. She loves watching CSI, so that’s probably why she thought that.
Its entirely possible. You have no idea how ignorant people are if you don’t think its plausible.
Happened to a friend. His teacher had problems with the class room pc and he knew a quick cmd line fix so he asked if he could help. Teacher started screaming that he was hacking the pc, took him to the principal and called his parents.
Fortunally everyone could see how stupid it was, and he promised his parents to not offer his help again…
People are dumb. I used dark mode on my laptop and people thought I was doing some serious shit.
It’s true, I was the shell command
What linuix hacker uses “.exe”? Should compile from source. That will get the girls in class attention.
bigfuckinmistake.rpmchmod +x bigfuckingmistake ./bigfuckingmistakeit needs an uninformative but funny file extension.
can we have a .deb too pliz
sudo alien -d bigfuckinmistake.rpmJUST GIVE ME A TAR BALL SOURCE AMD I WILL MAKE THE DEB MYLSELFA
anon uses wine
Yeah, a lot of people don’t know shit about computers. When I was working as a commissioning engineer, we would ping devices after using bootp to make sure the setup was successful. I got so many comments from electricians, millwrights and plant personnel just for using command prompt. “Oh wow you’re hacking!” Or “You have logged in to the matrix!” I’m sure sometimes they were just joking but most of them truly believed I was doing some high level stuff.
I once was reported by the high school programming class for “plagiarism” because I used visual studio’s auto-generated template to start my homework.
The teacher reported it to my parents, he wanted to make me fail. I was also reported for creating a “hidden” chat app that I shared with my friends. (It didn’t show in the taskbar.)
Next Christmas, they bought me a visual studio license at home!
I got in “trouble” for visiting hackthissite as a freshman in high school and junior year I got an NSA pamphlet specifically sent to my guidance counselor for me.
i didn’t get as far as sql injections. Maybe they thought I was good at covering my tracks.
I believe this to a degree based on my personal experiences with being thought of as either a brilliant wizard or evil hacker for unimpressive things. It even would happen at different jobs until my current job where my boss is the opposite. he thinks that anything and everything is possible and should be “easy” despite being technically illiterate. His new AI obsession has made it so much worse. I actually miss the super annoying “OMG you can do that? You’re a wizard/hacker/demigod!” days.
This reminds me of when I was in middle school and did a Scratch game dev class. I decided to use multiplication instead of simple addition and subtraction to make my character jump because the latter looks horrible and janky. My teacher accused me of cheating the moment I pressed the space button. Even after I explained how it worked to her she still didn’t believe me. I still got a good grade but after that she started watching me like a hawk; I assume she thought she would catch me cheating but never did since I was never cheating.
apt install -y hollywood && hollywood
nix-shell -p hollywood --run hollywood
We’ve come a long way since burning ‘witches’ at the stake. /s
there was an art to boot disks. getting one just right, so you could load that one program and nothing else. I kinda miss that. not really, but kinda. kids these days will never know. now that was hacking.
This was before my first boxed Linux purchase of Mandrake, but learned to dual boot on the home’s 300 ton HP w/ 2gb hdd (98SE, I think) and was fucking around with alternate shells like Afterstep, GeoShell, bbox, LiteStep, etc.
Learned about doing away with the standard ui completely and putting all the menus into right click, so there were times I’d walk away leaving just a wallpaper and cursor. Family couldn’t figure how to do anything, so I pretended I’d hit some key combo to bring menus which just baffled the fuck out of them, got labeled a “hacker”.
Very first os was, as a 7 yo, DOS 2.0 on my grandfather’s dual-floppy IBM (to keep a text file of my baseball cards), and a friend of the family who worked at JHU/APL in video production would let me mess around with the 3.11 boxes at the Kossiakoff center.
I envy your childhood !
I’m really grateful for having had it and the support structure I had at the time, and have tried to make the most I can of what was given to me, and what I learned.
Meanwhile im just starting now to grasp basic coding even though I’ve been computing for 25 years , ha! Gotta start somewhere.
That’s about where I am. I’ve mostly been hardware and futzing around, but coding wasn’t really ever my bag, I guess.
Yeah I more enjoy building pcs from spare parts and making stuff work
my friend and I used to use net send to message each other on the school network (this is back in the 90s), then someone worked out you could send to all PCs on the network, sysadmins were not happy
I’ve worked IT in schools and the hoops kids have to jump through to do similar stuff on our networks is so much harder
I believe that at least one student saw and jokingly asked if it was hacking.
