We all had laptops in highschool, and apparently our IT admin couldn’t figure out how to disable the “Upgrade to windows 10 for free!” Popup everyone was getting. Anyone that upgraded to windows 10 got called down to IT had their laptop reimaged. When I heard about it, I figured that they must have been checking OS by our user agent or some other web-based method, as upgrading to windows 10 appeared to kill all of the group policy things. Assuming they had everyone’s mac address recorded, you could correlate laptop to user pretty easily.

From then on, every week I would USB boot a different OS. Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 10, Windows XP, etc. I would run each OS for a few days until I got called down to IT, had my laptop inspected, and sent back to class when everything checked out. Drove them nuts, I thought it was funny.

This was back in the 90s… we figured out a simple way to make ‘empty’ files using the spacebar ascii and qbasic. We’d have a simple interface, flashing cursor, and you’d type in a number; it would then create an ‘empty’ file of that many MB.

Of course being 14 yr old little shits, we wondered, how big can the file be? Someone created a file big enough that first it filled the student partition; then the teacher partition; then the temp partition; then the system partition, at which point the entire network slowed to a transfer speed of a couple of bytes. When we realised we could do this, it was happening several times a week.

After that, anyone caught with a blank screen and flashing cursor got in deep shit. They deleted the attrib command so we couldn’t un-read-only / un-hidden things, but we just copied it from our own DOS at home and brought it in on a floppy drive

When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.

Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.

Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.

Create a folder with intriguing name on desktop, take screenshot, set screenshot as wallpaper, delete folder. (Didn’t everyone?)

Ok, I’m old and this wasn’t a computer prank but it’s along the same lines.

I used to have a digital watch that functioned as a small universal remote. (It looked like an 80’s calculator watch with tiny numbers.)

You did have to program it with the universal code for that brand, but my middle school had bought their TVs in bulk, so the ones permanently mounted in the rooms were all identical models.

I simply programmed my watch to that model, and I’d occasionally keep turning the TV on during a lesson. I did it fairly infrequently, and always in different classes so as not to give myself away.

I never got caught. Back then Tvs only went to channel 100-120ish without special equipment for satellites. If they went higher I would have LOVED to keep changing it to channel 666.

Put some VB script (I think) that opened and closed the CD-ROM 50 times inside a startup folder. Did it on all computers. Also put a batch file there that shuts down the computer one second after logging in on all teacher computers.

And last but not least, I created a phishing Facebook page, opened it on some browsers in school, rewrote the URL to a Facebook one (without pressing enter) and left it there, collected some passwords.

Edit: Also installed Ubuntu (dual booted) on the computer I usually used.

Edit2: Disabled the tracking software for a computer I used. Damn, it’s all coming back to me! Good times.

Installed VNC software on the classroom computer. Simply added a random character when teachers tried to login to various websites, or closed the current page when they weren’t looking.

Got caught after a week, for laughing too obviously on the back row.

Nearly got expelled for “hacking”, and all staff was recommended to change their passwords for everything.

for several days in a row i’d get to class before the bell. the teacher would hang out in the halls.

i’d hop on his unlocked PC, open command prompt, run shutdown /r /t 600, minimize the prompt, and walk away.

he’d be mid attendance and his computer would reboot on him. a few days in he stepped into the room mid me typing the command. he was madder than i expected, but just “yelled” at me.

Not in school.

But i have written a .bat scipt in notepad on an unlocked laptop in a store

Then added the script into the startup folder.

The script would restart the pc after 30 seconds.

shutdown -r -t 30

(R for restart, t for time, 30 means 30 seconds) its harmless… but also super frustrating

Write it in a notepad file. Save it as a .bat file

I ran a cgiproxy instance with proper ssl certs that totally bypassed and trivialized the school’s internet filter. It was password protected with unique passwords per user and I had it set up in such a way I could tell when a password “got out” and I’d cancel it. It got added to the blocklist a couple times, but I was ready because I’d already registered like 20 dynamic dns services to point to the server. It would take them months to add it to the manual blocklist but just a minute to change a link on my forum so people used the next address in line. It was an open secret that I was running it, but I was pretty smart in how I ran it and who I provided access to. I also ran a forum that was popular with the student body and the passwords to the proxy were given out there, but only to people I trusted and could reasonably deduce who they were. Even then they didn’t know it was me running the whole thing.

I mean most people probably did, but again I did it in such a way there was never any real paper trail. I never made any money or wanted any clout for it. I just thought it was fun that I got pissed off at the internet filter blocking newgrounds one day and thought “absolutely not”, and basically trivialized the filter schoolwide.

At my school, we quickly discovered that the admin password for all the networked printers was the name of the high school. All these HP laser jets had a function where you could upload custom translations for the status messages on the printer displays. So we downloaded the English string set (XML) and made some changes, “translating” for example, “Printer Ready” to read “Paper Jam”, “Replace Toner” and so on. As well as changing the admin password. The school actually RMA’d them back to HP thinking the paper jams were some sort of actual defect, as opposed to an altered status message, and eventually replaced them all with Brother printers. Oops lol

In high school, I noticed that our home directories were school ID # + first few letters of last name. The ID numbers were vaguely in alphabetical order, I forget if by first or last name. While the contents were hidden by permissions, I figured out the school ID # of a classmate who had a near school ID # just from the directory name. That was a bit problematic because teachers would use them to post grades in an pseudo-anonymized fashion, the lunchroom used them for accounts, and who knows what else.

I didn’t mess with anything, but I did say something to the my tech teacher. She knew I was a sweet kid with a knack for tech and some extra curiosity. She passed me off to the school system administrator, who happened to be a family friend. We talked it over, he asked me not to share my discovery, and that was that. It’s been a good twenty years since then so hopefully they’re switched to a way of provisioning home directories that doesn’t spew PII everywhere.

Disabled secure boot

Loaded windows pe

Backed up utilman

Replaced utilman with cmd

Rebooted

Installed a ninite package containing steam

Booted into windows pe again

Restored original utilman

Reenabled secure boot

Turned out I couldn’t launch steam because of AppLocker

Well, back in the day the image file for the boot up screen and shut down screen was easy to find and change. I made some screens images that stated that the computer is being destroyed or they messed something up and the computer memory was wiped.

I feel like this is minor compared to what I’ve been reading on here.

During computer learning in a computer lab 15 years ago, I figured out that the student passwords were sequential, so I could easily guess other students’ passwords. If I logged in to their account while they were logged in, they would get booted and I’d hear the inevitable “Mrs Teacher! It says my session expired!”

I did that 2 or 3 times over the course of a few minutes before I got caught. The vice principal rambled on and on about how I was “disrupting learning” and how I “should be suspended for this” before finally telling me, “my mentor taught me a really important lesson. If your students don’t hate you, you aren’t doing your job.”

What a horrible piece of shit.