Wow this brings back memories. Got a talking to by the computer lab "teacher" for using chrome rather than internet explorer. At the beginning of the year she gave us this quiz on computer peripherals. One of the questions was: "What device is used to take pictures to transfer to the computer?" Obviously, a webcam. I got that wrong. The correct answer..... camera.
Exactly! In middle school, I was caught (and subsequently) banned for downloading stuff on the school WiFi. They said it'd "stop everything they were doing." I obliged, but I stills mell bullshit.
My high-school never gave out laptops to its students. However, my school had a teacher who taught networking and programming who was amazingly cool. One of the things he had in his classroom was giant stacks of old dead laptops with all kinds of defects. It could be something simple like a corrupted OS or something more complex like dead hardware. His policy was that if any of his students could pick one from the junk pile, fix it up, and get an OS to boot, then congratulations: it's theirs now. What a hell of a guy!
I had some classes like that in my school. One time I had a class in the room next to his and we had to use the crappies laptops ever. They still had WinXP on them. Thankfully not vista. This was during the win7/8 erra. I tried using my iPod touch as much as possible but it sucked. I wanted a Windows tablet so badly that I held off buying an iPad. Now a day I actually prefer android sometimes over Win 10. Not sure if it's cuz I'm so use to it or if it is definitively better for some tasks. There was one time I used an Nvidia Shield as my main device when my phone broke.
I got in trouble for discovering the change password and locking out the adults from everything they gave me. Thankfully when they called my parents for the new password they just said no to them.
I remember getting talked to by the police for pinging an IP in school... That was also the same school where I got told off for having asthma As you can tell, they're not very smart there
If you type in the IP address of a website you can sometimes bypass blocked sites. I did that in primary school to go on youtube since that was blocked.
I got berated by my teacher for checking a software version (It was during the pandemic and since we where in the middle of a new wave, we had to do our assignments at home instead of at school. One of our assignments required that we needed to use a software and its database. The IT department had to update the software to a new version and because I never booted up my PC, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to get my PC before the afternoon. I did saw the memo and checked the version by clicking on About. When I told what I did, the teacher told me that I wasn't supposed to do that, that I was supposed to bring the computer back to the IT guy to check for me. So you're telling me, that I must do a 3km walk from home to school just to check a stupid software version? Forget it!)
It's a shame that intelligence, skill and initiative are so often punished in schools. Presumably, the administrators are unfamiliar with these traits, or perhaps see their jobs as being primarily about teaching obedience. You did something good and deserved better treatment by far. It's certainly funny in hindsight, of course.
I teach, and TBH, I wish we had a more bespoke platform. Like some sort of e-ink word processor. I’d love to find my kids being creative, but all I see is them watching basketball highlights and airdropping fights to each other :-/
For decades they've been all about indoctrination. I saw it when I was in school and things have only gotten worse. Granted you will find exceptional teachers that are the exception to the rule, but they are very few and very far between.
I basically did literally this like last year and the IT admin for our entire school district came down and gave this long speech about some kid who "hacked the network" and who later got in trouble with the FBI for "stealing credit cards" and then acted like I was gonna do that.
@BA5ED-_-HAX™(ross3695) My principal at my school thinks he's cool for harassing me for dumb shit, glad I'm graduating next year, right into high school
@@bruhmoment3106 He never deleted or reinstalled any OS. He made a clever use of a hole the IT department left with the unlocked F12 menu and half empty drive.
@@minisammich892 he literally said he installed windows by that F12 command prompt . Again not very impressive just messing around with school equipment and obviously got called out on it by his school.
@@bruhmoment3106 yes yes, I'm sure you were a tech genius right out of the womb, but for us people that actually don't need to stroke their ego to make up for their parents considering them an utter failure, for a 15 year old highschooler he's been pretty smart.
When I was in secondary school my friend David and I made the discovery that when IT were restricting literally everything fun on all student accounts, they'd missed Notepad. We used it to make a batch file to open the registry editor and through a lot of trial and error managed to switch off a considerable amount of the restrictions on our accounts. Somewhere along the line when making registry changes we discovered that most of the edits didn't come into effect until you log off and back on again. This is when we discovered the edits we'd made allowed us to see all network mounted drives of which there was about 10, we only normally saw 2 of these. We had some fun swapping folder names about, deleting teaching material of staff we didn't like, and sending all sorts of shit to printers all over the school. We saved our registry configurations on to usb sticks, so we could easily load them, log off and back on and quickly be in our customised windows environment with no school logo wallpaper, or classic windows theme, and the ability to install Firefox as our schools website blocking only worked in IE. One good thing was that as long as the computer you used was either restarted or had someone else log on to it, your account would return to normal. Then one day my ICT teacher spotted that I had the XP blue taskbar and a minimised Firefox window because she was using a piece of software called Vision to monitor the whole class, my account was suspended. Then David somehow found the user directory, and discovered that there where 12 accounts called survey1-survey12 that I think were used on open evenings. I tried Survey1 with the schools default Password1 and I was back in and loaded into custom registry, and days later suspended 😂
did a similar thing where i got an admin password for a bunch of the school computers because of the command prompt password requirement just glitching out and not happening, teachers know and just don't care at all about it one of the more chaotic things was using it to bypass the print credit system and spam one of the printers with rick astley, it's amazing the level of not caring at all about it the teachers have since we've got full control over those computers and just use them like we own them, at one point we installed windows 7 on one just because why not also got the school's single non-chromebook, if everyone had regular laptops there'd probably be things like what happened in the video going on with them, but i did get in trouble for unintentionally wiping one lol
This is exactly why when programming networked applications, you NEVER trust the client. With enough skill, every single piece of a client can be completely modified, down to individual bits in memory. The only way you can trust any security-related checks is when they're done on the server side, as the server is the only code running on your own hardware that you know you can trust. The fact that IE was being used tells me this was long before people were incredibly worried about such a thing, but it's always an important consideration to remember. In any case, I do wish modern school blocking systems didn't consider this, it would be so fun messing around with the network.
Imagine stopping you from changing the wallpaper I think I was the first to get in trouble with a new "behaviour system" for doing this. Fuck that teacher in general.
@@tbuk8350 Yeah, never trust the client or anything coming from the client, this includes sanitizing user inputs, even those you don't expect the user to actually interact with. At my high school it was possible to crash the school's printing credit system, you could go to a paginated, uh, page that would show your printing history, and if you set the page value in the URL to a value it didn't like it would take it down.
@@burp2019 Speaking of accidental wiping: at my HS they used MS SCCM to manage their boxes, a part of this is a PXE server that deploys Windows images over the network. The server was configured in such a way that upon pressing F12 at boot it would immediately start formatting and redeploying the machine, no image selection or password prompts. It was a really competent and automated process but as it took oh say an hour+ to complete and a class was 45 mins it would be so easy to wreak havoc on a class by preemptively starting a redeploy on every machine in the lab. I of course never did this because i'm not evil (read: a little bitch).
I actually did this exact same thing on my school laptops, except they ran Windows 10 by default, so I just re-installed a clean copy that wasn’t locked down. Since the school couldn’t tell the difference between my re-install and the original, all it took to get the school wi-fi password was asking the tech lady to type it in for me, since I’d randomly “lost access to the wi-fi” somehow. Then, with my admin privileges, you know the rest of the story🤷🏼♂️
I did the same thing, but it was because a device in my Coding class was using Ubuntu (and I thought I needed Visual Studio for this class). I just installed windows and since the computer used Ethernet, didn’t have to deal with any problems with Wi-Fi. I then used my admin privileges to do whatever the hell I wanted.
I almost got my laptop taken away in school because I got into the teacher intranet page (they literally left it up in class on the projector and I just copied down the URL) and I found out they just had a spreadsheet with all of the locker combinations so I screwed with a couple of my friends and the teachers found out and got super angry
When I was in high school, the punishment for missing too many days of school was suspension. They punished missing school by making you miss more school.
@@brandoncullen4189 I know when I was in school, when someone got suspended out of school they often were not allowed to make up any assignments for a grade during that period, and of course like usual have their parents or legal guardians called who typically would make that time unpleasant at home too depending on what caused it.
@@MasicoreLord Well, knowing where I'm from, I don't think many kids parents really cared. I looked it up and not too long ago my high school changed the punishment from out-of-school suspension to in-school suspension, so I think they realized kids liked getting suspended lol
At my high school, kids were getting suspended for selling drugs, vandalism, and coming to school drunk. Meanwhile, this guy got suspended for being more intelligent and resourceful than his entire school's IT department
Exactly! The school seems extremely strict. Also, why would the school's contract with Microsoft be threatened, exactly? A senior person at Microsoft would be better off giving him a job offer at the company! In fact, in our school, around 1996, a (student) computer geek got a job offer paying £20,000 to work in IT, which was a great salary at the time, especially for a 17-year-old without a university degree.
At my school, we weren't allowed to run any downloaded .exe files, but I soon discovered that the installed 7-zip ran with some kind of elevated permissions. It could actually launch exe's from *within* zip files. We ended up doing a Halo PC LAN party in my Architecture class after the final, and played some Minecraft in another class. Surprisingly I never got in trouble for that.
I read a comment years ago where someone noticed that the security software the school put on their computers only checked the magic bytes (the first few bytes of a file) of exe files. They changed the magic bytes from MZ to something else (as well as changing the file extension) and they could run exe files
I love how you went all the way into making a VM, partitionning the hard drive, setting the date to 2011, installing period-accurate software etc. so you can illustrate the video! If it wasn't for Google's 2022 design i could have believed it :p
Reminds me of the time I ARP spoofed my high school’s network the first week after summer and redirected all traffic to a website I made that just asked “How was your break?” and displayed all the responses for everyone to see. Turns out my crappy laptop wasn’t powerful enough to handle an entire district’s traffic, so it ended up just DOSing most people and disabling the internet at large. When they found me, they were *not* pleased. Got suspended for two weeks- worth it
And I thought I was good because I managed to get halo CE into the school computer network restore point (meaning it would be reinstalled on every computer, every time a restore point was used) But this is on another level
My magnum opus was having a teacher allow me to connect my notebook to a wired internet at school. She didn't know better and the IT guy was sloppy, all the routers had the admin admin password, so I got all the passwords for all the wifis including the teachers wifi that actually worked. It came a point where the teachers asked me the password in normal class
Ugh... I know a lot if people who does this and it's so annoying. My aunt would often get mad at my cousin just because he uses Firefox instead of Chrome. My mom is like this too.
Oh boy this reminds me of me at age 13 So, I live in Europe, schools work a bit different here - while we didn't get laptops or anything, we had public computers in the hallway for students to use. With my parents working late, I was at school after classes were over for maybe 3-4 more hours with time to kill. I spent it watching UA-cam (which wasn't against the rules, especially after the classes were over) and eventually some random teacher asked for my name and (without telling me) restricted my account for 2 weeks, meaning I couldn't log in anymore. I found out that by rebooting the computer and logging in fast enough, you could simply bypass the restriction - for doing that, I got my account *banned* by another teacher for an entire year, due to, I kid you not, "Hacking" - that landed me in a conversation with our admin, explaining that I did nothing more than pressing a power button. God, I hated our IT
Our school macs have the same thing. If I log out, log in, then move fast enough there's a short period of time where I can do whatever I want. It's helped me so many times.
I‘m glad that we have admins who actually know something about their jobs. No wonder parents often threaten schools for legal action, I‘d do the same for false accusations.
I remember back in high school I was one of the first people I could remember to figure out a basic VPN to go over the schools filters and watch UA-cam, it eventually spread to the point that certain teachers would do the same just to show their classes certain educational videos on UA-cam.
I'm a hs senior, and every year since 7th grade, within the first month of school I figured out the school wi-fi password, and regardless of their restrictions getting tighter, its actually become easier as the years went on. But needless to say, I taught a bunch of freshmen how to do it, to keep the tradition of the IT department trying to catch kids with the Wi-Fi password, alive.
I'm College rn but when i was in Secondary School (Junior High in the Philippines) particularly in Grade 9, since i was the IT Guy in the class, my Advisory teacher gave me the password of WiFi with one conditon that i will not share the password of School Admin's WiFi so i can surf the web while lunch break if the Free WiFi provided in my school goes nuts. It's just interesting that i didn't get suspended after that and heck! even my principal is okay with it.
Our schools all have the same WiFi. You just log in with your school account and you get free WiFi in any school in the country. So even now, years after graduating, I get free WiFi any time I pass a school.
If I was an IT teacher and I knew you figured that out, I'd probably keep quiet and try and get you an internship at an IT place after completion of school.
I mean judging by the fact; all the School IT administrator did was reimage the exact same image on the laptops to correct the dual boot and didn't bother putting any further checks and limitations on, speaks to me like a lazy IT admin, doubt he would go out of his way to get the kid a leg up
All I would say is "The problem can be fixed by rebooting and choosing the first option" and then act as if nothing unusual happened because dual booting is not unusual. Probably.
I actually do have story like this. Our school gave us the option to replace all our books with a tablet and everyone was on board. They got their tablets and lined up at IT to install restrictions. The problem was, after the school day was over, u still couldn't do anything on the tablet so it was basically useless unless for reading which my mature 13yr old self thought was total bs. I started fucking with the tablet and eventually found out restarting it basically killed the restriction software and I could just uninstall it after. These things weren't connected to a networks it was held up on that restriction app. Then I proceeded to pirate Minecraft apks on the thing and played at school and naturally everyone wanted in. I complied and soon everyone was playing cracked Minecraft on wifi direct servers. Inevitably someone got caught but at that point everyone had it so no could rly trace it back to me. Good times.
@@Clone-up2ge I think it was a factory reset. Some restriction software could even prevent that if it is configured correctly. Google has one such app and it locks the device down so much you can hardly do anything with it. All it needs then is an Apple logo on the back at that point LOL!
Back in high school the IT admin was constantly playing whack-a-mole with my friends and I in an attempt to prevent us from downloading games off the internet. We'd find a hole through the blockade and he'd close it. Each time he found us somehow downloading things, we'd get suspended from the computers for a few days. Eventually in grade 12 I took Grade 11 programming in the first semester and Grade 12 programming in the second. Full year of programming had its benefits. Our IT admin ran both classes. He got to know me and I quickly gained more privileges and freedom on the school computers than ever before, becoming student IT support and going around re-imaging computers all over the school usually because they would end up riddled with viruses on a weekly basis. Still remember his name to this day. I'm 37 now. ^_^
We had classrooms where everyone had his own PC (media school). No restrictions though, youtube etc worked fine. But the teacher had to turn on the internet for the whole room. A lot of the time we where alone in class. One time I found a "turn on internet" shortcut on the teachers PC. I copied it and was able to turn it on even from my student account from that day on. Felt good.
that'd piss me off. the amount of times ive just wanted to look something up quickly while doing something would make it tedious to ask for the internet to be turned on every time.
things I got detention for in school: 1) Sending a winpopup message to the entire county school system's shared AD domain (this is literally something you can do in Winpopup by default) 2) Dumping the lanman hash for the local admin password on the media room's computers and cracking it with rainbow tables, which ended up being the local admin password for every computer in the school. I did this so I could install drivers for a USB dongle that created a bridged 802.11b wifi access point so I could use my PSP. things I got away with: 3) taking half of the RAM out of the overspec'd workstation computers that used RAMBUS RAM in our media room and replacing them with CRIMM modules, then selling the unbuffered RAMBUS ram on ebay to fund the building of my first self-built desktop computer.
Reminds me of the story where I "hacked" the school PCs. Got suspended from IT class. The principal and IT teacher where so mad even though I didn't even really did anything. They couldn't even believe that those PCs just didn't had an admin password. At least my parents where proud of it
Reminds me of the story where l "hacked" the school PCs. Got suspended from lT class. The principal and IT teacher where so mad even though l didn't even really did anything. They couldn't even believe that those PCs just didn't had an admin password. At least my parents where proud of it
That's hilarious. I have a similarly stupid story from school that got me in deep. One day this huge standalone XP unit appeared in the atrium. One of those boring types with an all-in-one monitor/metal mouse ball and keyboard built directly into the stand. It was running sandbox software that locked it to the school's homepage, but it wasn't an offline HTML file or anything. It had full internet access. Of course there was no way to navigate off the page since all the browser elements were hidden, so no-one really went near the thing. One day I figured out a way to bang on the side of it in just such a way to force it to reboot. When this happened, you just had to knock it again during startup and it would prompt you with the 'Windows XP didn't start correctly' screen and you could just enter safe mode with networking and do whatever you wanted. People started to notice I was leaving it on dumb pages like that one 'lol, limewire' YTMND or the website that just had an infinite loop of the breadfish animation by weebl. It would just blast out of the speakers at full volume and it would take the teachers like 20 minutes to shut it down every time. I was quick, and I never got caught. I had so much fun, made it worth getting to school early just to confuse the hell out of everyone. People would surround the machine just laughing at the teachers trying to take it off. It didn't last. A group of friends figured out it was me. I walked them over at lunch and I showed the entire process, once it was booting into safe mode I realised everyone behind me was all of a sudden very suspiciously quiet and I turned around to see a teacher pulling the most disappointed and mildly angry face I'd ever seen in my entire life. They fully let me do the entire process without saying a word, the snakery was unbelievable. I got walked over to the pastoral office and was told to wait outside while he went in to speak to them. You would only go there if something very serious happens, so as soon as that door closed I mingled in with the crowd that was going back to class from lunch and sat in there for a while until the teacher realised I wasn't supposed to be there. I just apologised, left and walked to my actual class through the outside area and up the back stairs. He never found me. Good times.
I got an unauthorized copy of my teacher's program and decompiled it cause I wanted to know what makes it tick. I was kinda scared he might not approve of what I did but I told him what I did anyway to have a clean conscious. Now he loves me.
Such a nostalgic story. I did the same with MacBooks that were even more crippled. The notorious 'beach ball of death' was seen more than your mouse pointer. I pulled out the drive, used some HFS software on windows and installed fresh Yosemite over the bloated lion. It was fantastic running downloaded flash games and having a useable laptop. It all ended when the IT admin caught a glimmer of my desktop. Didn't stop me though, my senior year I loaded WaW and Bo1 zombies onto all the CAD desktops in a small non-wiping partition. We played over LAN every day, no one ever figured out, and now I wonder if anyone after us noticed.
I have a similar story. At middle school we were given Chromebooks, which were also locked down a lot (They disabled the ability to use any Chrome extension, even removed the No-WiFi dinosaur game) plus internet filtering. We all had our own laptops but those Chromebooks are the only ones allowed at school. I saw a tutorial of how you can enter "developer mode" by pressing a key combination at startup. This then enables you to dual-boot Linux on those Chromebooks, free of all restrictions. Once I managed to do it, I bragged about just like Matt did, then got tonnes of requests by other people. As of how I was found out: those developer-mode chromebooks make SUPER loud beeps at boot which weren't disabled (only possible by flashing firmware, which requires disassembling the machine). Initially I just told my friends to turn their Chromebooks on before lessons, but as the number of modded Chromebooks grew, teachers started noticing blarring beeps in lessons... The funniest thing is, the school IT guys are so incompetent, they can't even reset those Chromebooks. So guess what I had to do in my detention? Restoring the very 18 Chromebooks I've dual-booted! 😂
Oh man. Sooooo many memories of “naughty” computer usage in school (this is all safe for work). I was in high school just after the turn of the century. We used DXDIAG’s network tools to chat in computer labs. Kids were constantly finding methods around the filters to get to games websites. The best was my senior year in high school. We all had a rudimentary form of cloud storage. The school gave each student 5 GB of network storage, each their own folder. Someone managed to upload Quake 3 arena on their share, and the school computers were just powerful enough to run it at 600x800. Within the week, hundreds of kids had copies as you could just drag and drop between file shares. Best part is that ALL computers in the high school were networked, so once you grabbed your net stats, you could join LAN games with anyone in the school. This is right when most kids were getting simple phones with text, so setting up a LAN game during computer lab time was easy. Eventually, IT caught on and deleted the game out of file shares. But the poor fools woke a beast. One kid wrote a script that would copy the game from his directory and upload it to ALL student file shares that didn’t have a copy. He named it something innocuous (“English PowerPoint 1” or something similar) and would execute it several times a day. So IT would keep manually deleting the game out of student shares, and it would keep popping up. They could never pin down who was doing it. There were announcements about it, and punishments were threatened, but in a school of 2500+ students, you can keep hundreds of kids after school without word getting out. I’m pretty sure they tried to keep it contained to avoid looking incompetent. Eventually, IT gave up and the whole school enjoyed Quake 3 for the rest of the year. It took maybe 2-3 weeks after the deletions stopped for the novelty to wear off, and everyone moved on to the next thing that was against the rules.
In my school I put unreal tournament on the network share, and played in the in the library with my friends during lunch. With frantic alt-tabbing whenever the librarian walked past of course (we weren't supposed to game in the library). They also never password protected their BIOS.
Guys, I kinda wrote a dark 9/11 joke on a paper plane and the teacher saw it. WHAT DO I DO? GUYS I NEED HELP IM IN THE USA AND IM SCARED OF GETTING EXPELLED
it would be amazing if the english powerpoint 1 kid made a similar script that gave everyone a ping script that would automatically give them quake again when run
my most interesting school computer story is the fact that once a kid in my class went on the dominoes website and ordered a pizza to the school. paid for it with his own card and everything, so i don’t really see the issue. he still got a strict talking to though, and the school had to hold an assembly about how we shouldn’t order pizza on the school computers.
Stories like this make me feel so inadequate. I never would have thought to do this, never knew how, never would have thought to learn how, and wouldn't know how to learn how.
You reminded me of when I was in high school. The school computers had a monitor program so that the teachers would be able to see and control our computers when they wanted (those computers weren’t personal, they were just used for classes and we couldn’t take them). They also had a “freezer” (it was called something like that), which was a different program that would reset the computers to the state they were before we did anything after powering them off, which means everything we did would be erased after it turned off, and when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING, we could even erase the windows folder or system32 and it would restore after rebooting. So me and some of my friends found a way to turn off the monitor program so that we could play games / watch UA-cam during the class without being discovered, and then, when some teacher noticed that the computers weren’t showing up in their computer, we would “accidentally” press the power off button and explain that we rebooted the computers by mistake, since when they rebooted the monitor program would be back because of the freezer one. They never discovered us and I still remember that to this day.
Had a similar experience with my secondary school. Made a proxy to bypass their filters for games. Ended up getting spread around like crazy and of course no one took any precaution to hide that I was the one who made it. Within a few weeks, the schools higher-ups found out and were not exactly happy. They couldn't block it either as I was using a ddns to just give it random domain names. When one was blocked, I switched it over to a new one. Basically just was asked to please take it down as there's nothing else they can do to stop it. They even tried getting police involved but they couldn't do anything but also politely ask to have it taken down. I obviously did take it down, but the cool part of it is that the IT support for the school loved it and actually let me help out doing IT support with them after school. Not as a punishment, but just because it's what I liked doing.
I've been trying to do that with my school but it seems its not possible due to how they have the internet connection setup (the only way in and out of the internet through the schools wifi is through a proxy, with what I know has contentkeeper installed on it) I should try to find a way around that, if possible
"I am not in danger, I AM THE DANGER. Someone bricks their computer by installing Windows 8 - 1 wrong and you expect that from me? No. I AM the one who dual-boots."
Man, such a great High School tech incompetence story. Reminds me of the time I brought in a USB to a computer class and we all played Unreal Tournament, Minecraft and Garry's Mod in the downtime. The teacher joined in too sometimes!
Ahaha that reminds me one time I was playing minesweeper on the school computer and got stuck, the IT admin messaged me the solution through a dialogue box.
The Firefox story reminds me of the time I was accused of “hacking” my elementary school network because I realized their only control on who had access to which programs was what accounts was which logins had shortcuts to open them. I hand-typed the shortcut for Firefox and a few other “teacher only” tools then got caught because I made the mistake of sharing the trick.
I'm in primary (elementary) school, and I do that. I also get accused for modifying the local HTML. I mean, doing that as a 9 year old is fun, but my favourite thing is to remove the s in the HTTP protocol, similar to what @IcySon55 does.
i got in trouble for opening up inspect during a computer game about mental health (it pretty much made my mental health worse than better) and some kid yelled out to the teacher that i was hacking (since i was known to be the computer guy) and i had to sit beside the teacher and not just that but she would allawys pick up my labtop each second and check every tab and window like if i was some super crazy criminal mastermind
@@userrrr32reminds me of 5th in general i just open something like windows 93 or 96 'HACKING!!!!1!1!!11!1' i open linux on my asus chromebook? 'HACKING!1!1!!!1!!11!' i open inspect? you guessed it, 'HACKING!1!!1!!11!!!'
When I was in high school, SSL certificates were just beginning to be a thing. The school’s filter rules hadn’t yet accounted for it. So one of us, I’m not sure if it was me or one of my friends at this point, figured out that adding an ‘s’ to the http route in the browser would bypass the content filter entirely. We used it for innocent things like play games and getting on social media.
I might have helped people in a similar way. I think also by accessing some websites via IP instead of hostname. It was a while now, I don't really remember.
Considering how everyone in this story seemed chill when they found out (Except the principal), I think it's fair to guess they didn't really care. They're just kids and security was somewhat less of a concern back then
To be honest, you really have to be foolish like Matt’s friend to not know the difference between XP and 7. You don’t have to be a tech nerd to know. XP has this blue taskbar and green fields. 7 had this glassy taskbar and big windows logo. I don’t know if like the school had set a wallpaper but when he installed 7, it definitely had to have used the default 7 wallpaper. 7 also had higher fidelity than XP. XP’s fonts and icons were pixelated while 7 was smoother.
I have a bunch of these stories, but the most memorable one was when I made a cheating tool for online exams. The answers to these exams were available on the internet, so I put them all in a database, created a tool that would let you drag a crosshair to the Internet Explorer window used to take the test, which would inconspicuously hook it to the window. Then while taking the test what you had to do was highlight the question, press CTRL+C, and it would display the answer in the title bar of the Internet Explorer window. Teachers knew something was up because everyone was suddenly getting 80%+ scores. So one day the teacher told us to put our keyboard behind the monitor, and everyone failed the exam because they could no longer press CTRL+C. Thats the day they introduced a practical test.
Man, tech shenanigans in school were hilarious. I remember in 7th grade I got suspended for 6 days and got my laptop outright confiscated because I was able to log in to the school's security cameras and view them live. Basically, I was messing around with an IP scanner on the school's wifi and I found several individual Axis cameras (which, for some reason, showed up on the student network) but I couldn't log in. Then, at some point, I scanned again and found the login page for the ENTIRE DISTRICT'S camera system, meaning the high school, 2 middle schools, and all the elementary schools could be accessed from this one web frontend. Now, they happened to be using Exacqvision software and it said that in the corner of the page. I googled "exacqvision default password" and the very first result told me to use the username "admin" and the password "admin256." I put it in, thinking "surely they can't be that stupid" but, to my surprise, it worked and I was in. The real mistake that got me caught was when I showed it to a few friends and one particular kid caught on, then proceeded to view the cameras directly in front of a teacher. Apparently he snitched on everyone when asked about it, and soon enough my laptop was confiscated and I was suspended (I think 4 or 5 other kids had their laptops taken as well, for using the cameras but also for scripting and web filter circumventing antics.) I'm in 11th grade now and I can use my phone in school and also bring in my own laptop, so trying to cheese the school computers is kind of pointless, but that bit at the end about "a tight-knit community bonding over breaking the rules" really reminded me of those exciting times a few years back. Thanks for telling your story.
I literally sent this to my friends and went "HEY REMEMBER WHEN I DID THIS". Your story was the exact same as mine, except it was with crappy windows 10 laptops and i didn't get caught :)
I've got alot of those stories. The schools student PC monitoring software was trash and the process could just be repeatedly killed using a simple batch script. I did that in middle school and got like 2 weeks banned from the computers. Fast forward to sophomore year of highschool and it spread throughout the entire district. Since I had already gotten in trouble, they couldn't just punish me again. They had to buy a new monitoring software, only it was worse, the teacher version was available online and i would screw with my classmates. I also got the school wifi password and turns out it was the same password throughout the entire district. Including the football stadiums. Just remember, education1sfun 😉 I would also routinely bypass the school firewall by SSH tunneling to my home server and poof, all the websites unblocked. Plenty more of those stories too
oh yeah, the days of the school wi-fi password. it was the same in our district too but this was a decade ago and i didn't use it very often, can't remember it at all xD pretty much everyone knew the password.
Schools now have gotten to the point that they (try to) require all devices to be on the wifi, because that way they can be monitored for shit like Yik Yak, when that was a thing.
What a great story. It sounds like we had similar school experiences, though, I suspect mine was a lot earlier. I graduated in 2000 so my days of getting in trouble were the mid to late 90s. Our school district didn't do suspensions. We had what they called DOC. That normally stands for Department of Corrections, as in jail and prison, but the school's DOC was something else. It was a separate, tiny school where kids from all over the district who got in serious trouble were sent. So, instead of being suspended for a time, you'd have to go to DOC for a time. After school detention at each school was called "Opportunity Class". So, some kids thought DOC stood for "Downtown Opportunity Class" which is silly but I don't remember what it really stood for. I had a reputation for being able to do things with the school computers that were not allowed or against the rules. I used things like Netbus to take control of teachers computers and see their lesson plans and grade books. I'd find ways around the firewall and user privileges to install software like games and Napster. Yeah, this was the late 90s. I don't remember what exactly was the final straw. I think it had to do with experimenting with viruses and trying to learn how they worked. I heard an internet myth that there was a virus that could tell a hard drive or CD ROM to spin too fast which would physically break them. I think I was testing some viruses to try and find that particular one. Now, like you, I never tried to do anything malicious or break anything. I was just curious. I had my virus collection on an air gapped computer and I only ran them inside a VM. I think I was tinkering with virtual drives inside the VM trying to find that hardware breaking virus. Anyway, an adult found out, I was sent to the dean's office after they searched my locker. He had a bunch of stuff on his desk that belonged to me. It was things like the red lineman's handset I bought from a student who had an uncle who worked for the phone company. I was getting into payphone phreaking at the time. He had my various floppy disks and CDs with pentagrams and stuff drawn on their labels. I was sent to DOC for 10 days. It all worked out in the end, though. The following school year, my senior year, the librarian took an interest in me. She took me under her wing and pointed my interests in the right direction by giving me access to the new web server the school had just bought. I set up the schools first website and got an award, photo in the newspaper, and a small scholarship for it. I am probably lucky that that librarian realized I was just curious and interested in tech and pointed me in the right direction.
@@memes4life118 Two weeks after graduating high school, I started my new job with AOL doing tech support in the day and going to classes at ITT Tech at night. That lasted about 18 months. I then changed jobs closer to home doing tech support for Gateway Computers via an outsource call center called Sykes Inc. Gateway ended their contract with Sykes so I moved over to the MSN side of the call center. Then, through the years, I've worked for companies like Cingular which became AT&T. I was with them when the very first iPhone came out. That was fun. I worked there through the iPhone 4. I worked for RadioShack and Circuit City, two defunct electronics stores. My last job, which was my dream job, was at ADP (Automatic Data Processing) where I maintained and troubleshot the payroll software, databases, and servers for fortune 500 companies. That was a really fun job because it was a little bit of everything. Every day I had my hands on server management, networking, hardware, software, databases, ect. But, I'm disabled now. I have epilepsy and migraines so I haven't worked in about 4 years. Random seizures and migraines make it hard to be reliable and show up every day.
Honestly that sounds like and insane degree of strictness lol. My computing teacher is fully aware that ive been pirating games to play at lunch with my friends for years, and he literally encouraged me to get more stuff working.
I have a similar story from when I was in HS. I’m a bit older, 2006 is when I was a junior in HS. 802.11g was still relatively new and public/guest Wi-Fi wasn’t widely available places yet. The school started experimenting with letting kids bring laptops, but they couldn’t be on the school Wi-Fi. They only school issued laptops came from a video production class for the school’s student news program. To make a long story short, the WEP (yes this predates WPA as well) key was stored in plain text in the registry. I borrowed a school laptop for 5 minutes, extracted the key, and then for the rest of the year had Wi-Fi on my personal laptop. Started showing off to my friends who also wanted the WEP key, and even a couple cool teachers wanted it for their own personal stuff. Long story short, one of them got caught, which means I got caught too, and I was suspended for 5 days. Thing is, no one was mad at me except the principal. It was the week Kingdom Hearts II came out, and so I spent 5 days chilling and playing video games. It was honestly great. To this day, my WPA passkey is that same WEP key.
One time in high school my district blocked Canvas. Y'know, the website all the teachers used to distribute homework, give class-wide announcements, upload note pages... yeah, that Canvas. Someone figured out how to get around the block to get to their class pages again and they got banned from the school network for two weeks. This poor kid was literally doing the right thing by trying to see his classes but noooo that's too much
I was banned from being within 1 meter of any of the school computers after I made a website on the school intranet to allow kids to download a registry file to change proxies on the computer to the staff network to get around the schoolsnet filter. Lasted half of year 9 and all of year 10. Had to re enrol a few subjects and the attendance list in the mornings had a reminder to all staff to keep me away from the PCs. Good times.
My friend got suspended for computer shenanigans in high school: he hosted a proxy that basically everyone used to get around the filters. That wasn't why he got suspended, though! We had elections for class president, and my friend basically announced that if Charlie didn't win the election, he'd take down the proxy. I guess this is where the school drew the line, because they suspended him for a couple of days.
Did a similar thing with a VPN server using my fiber connection, but only shared it with friends bc I knew better than to share it with random ppl (plus, didn't wanna get IP banned). The reason I never got in trouble is that everyone else was just using one of those free VPN apps and so it completely went under the radar 🤣🤣🤣
@@inqurity "Don't associate with murderers" "Associating with people is important not just because they are not murderers, you know" Brilliant non-argument.
Myself and a friend got banned from the computers for an entire term in primary school because we set the Windows theme on a computer to high contrast. The IT staff didn't care, the teachers wanted us punished though, and it was a harsher punishment than the guy that downloaded Line Rider onto a network share got.
Could have argued you needed hi comtrast to read properly on screen :"i even wanted to increase the zoom to 300% but was afraid of being punished for beeing different " :( :)
We made an entire minecraft server in the pc of the IT department and they didn't notice it for 2 years. Meanwhile we were just playing at school or at home in this minecraft server with always over 50+ people, and people not from the school started playing too. Until the server became too laggy because the world is big, and the IT department found out what was going on. 7 classes of the school were suspended for 2 months.
What a story Mark. The most interesting school computer-related thing I ever did was browse TV Tropes on the school computer during one of my computer-based classes because for some reason it wasn't blocked. Actually school laptops weren't even a thing until after I graduated so I never got to taste that sweet 8 - 1 myself.
Whoa, this is a stark contrast to the situation on my school in the early 00s when I was a teenager. We (that is a group of three or maybe four guys in the entire school) were way more talented with computers than the majority of the other students (and almost the entirety of the teachers) so, after giving some advice and helping out here and there, we eventually became the school’s de-facto on-site IT admins. We were called upon every time teachers had trouble with their systems and they didn’t want to call the service contractor and wait for someone to come over by car from a town 20 km away. Nonetheless, we also did our fair share of shenanigans, i.e. trying out backdoor trojans or just abusing elevated permissions. But this aspect became boring rather quickly and we lost interest in messing around with something we have kind of a responsibility for. As a bonus: When the older one of the two computer labs was dissolved, the teachers asked me if I want to keep three of the machines (COMPAQ i386 machines with DOS and Win 3.1) for home. That was a nice gesture.
I almost always consider getting to keep a machine at the end of the year a good ending. Emphasis on almost. My brother will get to keep his Chromebook when he graduates in two years (simply because they're phasing out the old models for new ones) and if it wasn't for the fact that Developer Mode was locked down, I offered to help him get custom firmware and install an OS that was actually usable. Unfortunately, as far as my knowledge goes, he's stuck with ChromeOS, and since it's an HP, it'll most likely have some sort of hinge problem by the time he graduates, anyway.
MattKC stories are a highlight of UA-cam honestly. You have such a treasure trove of interesting stories from your youth as a neardy kid who understands computers, but I think what makes yours more interesting than others is that you're a relatively young guy, so all of these youthful stories have a modern twist to them.
tech stories from school are the best, Matt! Thanks for sharing with us. I have a story that I think y’all are gonna like. So one day in my freshman year of high school, we were sitting in our health science class and generally not paying attention to the teacher as she was rambling on about cell diffusion or something. Anyways, she gets a little fed up and presses a button on her computer. Instantly, all of our screens go blank, except for a logo in the corner named “netsupport”. Of course, she was using a program to control our computers remotely. But instead of just groaning and forcing myself to concentrate on the lesson, I was intrigued by the logo. I snapped a photo of it before It disappeared and we got our screens back. Later that day, I looked up the program online, and discovered that there was a free-trial version of the software available on its website. I installed the most over-powered form of the program, called the tech console, onto my personal laptop. The next day, I was in my debate class and ready to test out the program. When I booted it up and connected to my school’s desktop pc network over Ethernet, I suddenly had full control over every computer. Not just the computers in the building I was in, but every computer in the entire district, elementary, middle, and high schools. Of course, I immediately tried it out on my friend when he was in his engineering class. The options the program gave me were insanely overpowered: shut down/restart the computer, enable the microphone (you could hear what was going on in the room the computer was in), disable mouse and keyboard input, send a message (it would pop up as a dialogue box), annotate (draw on the screen of the computer), file transfer (quietly transfer files to and from the host computer), and a few other features that I never got the chance to test. I was so confused that the school could let a security risk this huge slip through their fingers, since our school was very well funded and we had a large IT department. Anyways, I decided to take control of my friend’s computer and began typing gibberish into his search bar. After messing with him for a while, I decided to log off and stop pushing my luck. But the next day, my urge to mess with people returned and I couldn’t help but convince the class that the computers were being hacked (which was completely true, but I tried to make it look like the hacker wasn’t one of their friends but some evil outsider) one time, one of my friends even told me what was happening and I just put on my best poker face and exclaimed “what? Really? That’s crazy!” By the end of the year, I ended up telling my best friend what was really going on, and over the years I told a few more people. During my high school career, I would randomly log into that program and mess with kids who were slacking off and playing games, because if they tried to tell the teachers what was going on, they would expose themselves in the process. I only ever had kids telling the teacher what was going on once, and she just didn’t believe them at all. She must’ve thought it was impossible, and it definitely should’ve been. During my senior year of high school, I really had fun with it. I was taking a computer science class, and the shenanigans that took place were insane. Once, I sent a spam message to everyone in the class about how terrible the school security is, I turned on the microphones on all the computers and created a massive feedback loop (like holding two phones close together but so much worse), copied stupid minion memes onto everyone’s desktops, and other things. One time, we had a guest speaker come into class, giving a talk about the importance of cybersecurity, while my friend and I were trying to hard not to bust out laughing in the back row. At the end of it all, I can’t believe I didn’t get caught after all the crap I pulled, and after telling probably too many people about it, but I graduated and it’s all behind me now. It’s fun looking back on those times though, I’ll never forget it. P.S. one more short story, one time my friend found out that our school kept all the yearbook photos in a network drive that everyone could access, and none of the photos were write-protected. So, we loaded up our photos in ms paint. I drew a smiley face on my photo, and my friend drew a mustache on his. The yearbook team only caught the mustache edit, so my senior year yearbook photo has a little blue smiley-face drawn in the top-left corner. We weren’t caught either, since the lady who found it assumed that someone drew a mustache on my friend’s face with malicious intent, so they saw him as the victim! Haha.
Amazing story, Im actively trying to make some stories, but my intentions are failing. Currently ive got multiple things I want to do, as I live in a dorm for school. Their wifi is MAC address whitelisted and phones arent allowed onto the network, so I was thinking to just change the MAC of my phone, but sadly I cant do that as it isnt rooted, if I root it, some banking apps stop working, which just isnt worth it. Enabling wifi hotspot on my laptop works, but for some reason I get HUGE ping spikes every 12s. Their network is decently secured, also it has a 10Mb/s speed limit, which I dont know if it is AP side or switch side, if its AP side, there maybe is a possibility I can use the console port on the cisco aironet 1830 series AP (guessing 1832), but there is a possibility the port just is RJ45, but uses a serial connection, so I would need converters to usb and then it MAYBE would give me access. Now im currently thinking to try using one old rooted phone I have as a hotspot, will check if I can change the mac address of it today. The other thing is cloning the room NFC card, so we dont have to share 1 card for 2 ppl. My phone cant dump the sector 0 of the card, but I can read the ID, etc, which I will clone onto the cheap chinese gen 2 magic tag, also will write everything else thats on it, I havent received the tags yet, hopefully will arrive in the following weeks so I can try it out.
@@funkepop ours isnt that bad, im not even able to access the local setup, they either time out or refuse connection. Their setup is serious, 100% a switch going to the APs
I have a couple very similar stories, one involving using Command Prompt to try to send a message to my friends computer, and "accidentally" sending it to EVERY computer, it somehow wound up on the computer that controls the school's TV channel (must have been a computer with powerpoint running updates about school stuff or something) and it froze the TV channel. I got called down to the dean of students office and had my computer privileges revoked for like what amounted to 3 hours, because one of my teachers was like, "yeah they need to use computers in my class, so can you give them back access?" and I got it back that same day.
amazing, i remember sending a couple harmless messages to a friend in another class one time, i mentioned it after and they were like "oh my god that was you?" the one thing that wasnt harmless however is when some of us figured out how to remotely shut down other's computers, i dont recall using it maliciously but i think some others did. the it department fixed that soon after
Actually I did something remarkably similar. One of my friends' kids who was a decent techie but not tooo advanced was in a school that was *_trying_* to "get with the times" using cheap chromebooks, but didn't understand them at all and their own IT would lock them down so much that they'd break things, asking him for help. So, since they're incompetence was becoming a chronic problem, I offered to crack it. It was a pain in the ass to bypass the write protection on the firmware but, sure enough, I was able to bypass it and install, I think it was some arch derivative? And after that I could theme KDE to look basically identical to chromeOS. I was even able to bind shortcuts to simulate the artificial lockdown signal, modify the .desktop file for brave to look like it was just glitching out and showing two different entries for chrome, (iirc it was chrome and chrorne) and generally make it look damn near identical. All the while having better trackpad controls, running faster, not being locked down to hell, and just generally being better.
i like the vm footage used. he specifically used versions of software released in 2011, web pages from 2011, and even recorded the windows boot manager when he could've easily used an image (focus on the seconds until highlighted choice is selected automatically)
To answer your licensing question, I ran a tech department at a public school close to the same time as your incident (I was fired for being opposed to what they called "1 to 1" where every student got a take-home laptop - we had a Windows domain infrastructure and I thought it was absurd to ditch all that, shut down the computer labs, and go to Chromebooks, but of course every Board member thought they knew better than me, so I didn't have a job for much longer). Anyways, we had Microsoft volume licensing, and my understanding of the agreement was that we were allowed to install any version of Windows, going all the way back to 98, on any computer that had any version of a Windows COA sticker. I'm pretty sure a dual install would be covered since you're never logged in to both versions at the same time, and that COA would technically cover either OS. As an aside, I ended up buying bulk Windows 2000 COA stickers I found on ebay to slap onto our custom-built lab computers, rather than pay for the full license, I just used those under our volume license. I think the dept. paid like $5 per sticker - my rep at CDW was fascinated at how I did that. Ahhh...the memories of managing a $140,000 annual budget.
My school has no IT budget. They make the 90 yo liberty admin do IT and not well at that. She only knows one answer to questions pertaining to computers: "Use the district help desk form" which doesn't help us at. all they do is send you a new laptop and a bill for $200(even though the school still owns the laptops?).
@@unhhgcrxexhjvuvujchcrzwzwz7956 Not only was it a nice budget, I bought so much stuff on ebay it wasn't even funny. In my time there, I brought in probably 700 laptops and desktops, all running Windows 7 on solid state hard drives. I upgraded the entire district to SSD's by 2014 and those really breathed some life into the mid-level Core2Duo lab computers. Which was part of the reason I was opposed to them ditching literally everything that had approved for purchase in the previous 2 years and downgrade to a bunch of Chromebooks.
I actually do have a similar story! Being Australian as well, i benefitted from that same government program, granted a handful of years after you did. The laptops we received were reminiscent of the Lenovo Thinkpad X131e. The way our school handled everything was via a locked boot menu, supposed tracking chips, shitty school wifi (they were unblocked on home networks), and ultimately the big "make kids not open games" program, was a patched version of windows' own explorer.exe. EDIT: I totally forgot to mention that these laptop were running Windows 7 At the time, no one in my school had any idea, about how they were unable to play games, they just didn't open. After many hours on the internet, i found a forum of kids discussing how to break these new laptops, and someone had left a link to a .jar program that killed their patched explorer.exe's process, and then loaded the unpatched version, allowing you to open any executable file, like God and Microsoft intended. The next hurdle was the internet, surely their had to be a way to get the schools wifi to not be shit. Ultimately, this is less of a hacky solution, and more that we noticed that kids who took extra credits in a school-run TAFE program would get a password specifically for TAFE that was not under the same blocking that the regular school passwords would be. So everyone was more or less incentivized into taking a short course from a government ran community college (for the Americans, thats what TAFE is) Ultimately, i did not get in trouble, one kid did, but that's because he was actively spreading the .jar file, granted, i did give it to that kid, but he was the one who became the "spreader" so to speak.
Was that WIFI called Conference? Because in my HS we had a wifi called that which was for people that did an aviation course or smth, but the password was spread everywhere. You couldn't do it on the school laptops though, only phones, but if you changed the registry a bit then you would be able to get it. (btw I live in Australia too)
The "tracking chips" they talked about were kinda real. I believe it was called "Computrace" or something. It didn't actually use gps but it would inject software into Windows that periodically phones home to see if the laptop needed to be remotely disabled as well as send certain tracking information (IP address, wifi network etc.)
in 6th grade I also showed people how to use screen savers on their computers it got very very popular and kinda annoyed the teachers because if the laptop was forced to stay in a window by the teachers the screen saver would close out of it
Reminds me of the time I managed to disable a guardian program on my school chrome book by booting into developer mode, and that apparently broke the program so it stopped working. Only did it for 2-3 other people, but ended up getting caught because the program was also used to monitor pcs and it detected that we weren't on it anymore.
I once had a similar thing happen. The school had blocked cmd... I found a script to access cmd, and I shared it with some friends. I used it to install Steam, and then Portal, and I helped my friends install it too. ... we didn't get caught.
In my final year of college, the school implemented the same content filter on dorm internet as what they had in campus building internet, which blocked out mainly porn and "offensive" websites like Maddox's Best Page In The Universe (and yes, the latter's decline still hurts). After helping some close friends bypass it with a stupid easy fix (a simple VPN extension), I decided to start charging people for it. People gladly obliged and I cleared a pretty several hundred bucks from it. Charging for this was also a way for me to compensate for the school killing my job (working at the school's IT help desk), since the cunts decided to outsource their IT to a firm a couple states away instead right before my senior year began.
My school experience was FAR more advanced than what you went through. I actually cracked everyone's passwords, but I won't go into details on what exactly happened. We did not have our own laptops. Your 8 - 1 story was very interesting. I really do miss those days when we were young and knew how to operate computers more than the school does, but at the same time I was sick of the fact that they had us locked down. Which country did this take place in?
i know i bricked some computers and would remove the spyeyes software with linux. only got caught becuase stupidly logged in before i bricked it. i did it becuase the computer guy was kinda a dick and looked at everyone as a stupid. and im like whats installing windows pressing a few buttons and smoking a joint?
Oh memories. When I was in year 9 in about March 2000, I'd been trying to get round the various restrictions the school had in place in their desktops and was getting pretty good at "hacking". This lead me to learning a lot and staying up late, going to various forums, reading text files, and downloading dodgy software to help me with my nefarious missions. I ended up discovering packet sniffers and decided to bring one in to school with me on a floppy disk. While watching the packets fly by while watching over my shoulder I saw something that looked suspiciously like a username and password combination. Turns out the crappy educational network software the school was running (made by RM) sent credentials in plain text. All I had to do was wait for the right person to log in on the same subnet that the computer room was on. It didn't take long before the IT teacher (and defacto network god) was fixing something on a machine the other side of the room and I knew what to do. Now I was the network god, no more limit of 10 printer credits per week for me! Didn't take long before I was bragging and giving the other geeks unlimited printer credits and removing internet filters and everything. This lasted about a month before someone who I'd stupidly given a teachers password was caught and they immediately grassed me in. They threatened me with suspension and banned me from touching the computers for 2 months. My mum was raging but surprisingly not at me. She marched up to the school and demanded a meeting with the head master and said they should be encouraging me to learn. I didn't get suspended in the end but they kept the ban. This unfortunately overlapped with when we were choosing our GCSE subjects and for some reason that meant I wasn't allowed to do IT. Makes no sense and I will always be bitter. Those days were fun and it set me up for my future career as a software engineer
I had a day of in-school suspension for "being the mastermind behind student access to youtube" I had set up Firefox to use a different port on a few student accounts (4 or 5, in a school of about 160) Apparently 2 of the 4 had used up all the bandwidth, and it delayed state testing by a month. (I originally was going to be suspended for 3 days, but since I wasn't the one who used all the bandwidth, it got lessened)
This brings back fond memories of me and one of my best friends managing to get access to the SAM file on our schools domain controller and cracking every staff and student password using RainbowCrack on an old computer at home. We never did anything malicious, but we did release class lists for the next school year over the summer holidays, and I kick-started my MP3 collection by copying the tens of gigabytes the schools I.T team had on a server. Them constantly torrenting back in 2005 probably was a legitimate reason for the schools "unstable network".
@@eDoc2020 The class lists weren't part of the domain information, they came from an internal timetabling tool that we didn't have access to until after we had a password for a privileged account. We were 15 or 16 and had very little idea about what we were doing, a lot of the success was predicated on luck.
yes i was like this when i was in second grade. i used to fix the TVs back in school for presentations and stuff, but i actually didint fix anything i just changed the input connection and yes most of the teachers where dumb back in the days
I am about 95% sure that my last school used me as a free pentester. Since I was usually bored in any computer related subjects I'd use my time to try and find creative ways to get around the internet locks that were in place so that I could play my browser games or just do stuff on my home server. This was initially pretty easy as the school was running a somewhat old and convoluted setup with Citrix but mixed with some programs that we'd run locally on our clients. Well, turns out that if you downloaded something using the locally installed Internet Explorer (downloading was supposed to be blocked, but wasn't) you could then run it on the server (which was supposed to be blocked, but wasn't) and get elevated privileges (which was absolutely supposed to be blocked, but... you get the idea). Anyway, the thing is that any "exploit" I'd use would quietly get fixed within a couple of weeks. Every time. I never got in trouble though and my working theory is that since I never did anything actually malicious they just let me be because after all, I was showing them what to fix. I even talked to my old IT teacher years later and hinted that I'd always get around the internet locks and he just smirked and said something along the lines of "yeah, I know". He didn't want to comment anything more than that however :D All of this stopped mattering in my last year anyway because they installed a completely new system with way less silly exploits and also one of my teachers just gave me his login so that I could unlock the internet whenever I wanted :D Although when they switched to a web filtering proxy that was blocking some categories like games I'd just register a bunch of domains, set up some basic fake websites and submitted them to the company curating the list for the proxy under various categories that weren't blocked. I'd then install a web proxy on my server and access any blocked sites that way - they never could "fix" that one, for obvious reasons. Which is funny because at my previous school I quite literally got almost kicked out for "hacking" the library computer. I found a way to open Windows Explorer (which was supposed... you know) and was then able to navigate to the system files and launch dangerous programs like... Microsoft Pinball. Anyway.
In year 11 (the last year of secondary school), I was in immense trouble for trying to find how many parts of their file server i could access. I found the folders where they kept their install programs, their CCTV footage (which unfortunately was blocked) and the directories for other users home folders, none of which I could access. Stupidly, I had links to their file server root and the C drive in my explorer favourites bar like a badge of honour. They were made crosser by the fact they discovered a copy of Half-Life 2 in my home folder. So naturally they came to the conclusion I was “hacking the system to put half life 2 on everyone’s users.” That was the deputy headmaster’s actual quote. In the end I received 5 lunchtime detentions, of which I only served 2 due to GCSE exams. Plus, my own computer science teacher told me the police would come round my house and seize my home computer, which they didn’t funnily enough.
@@kyv979 ikr, she later said to me “if I had it my way your computer would be seized by the police and you’d have been arrested.” Like she had any power over how the police worked
@@infrared752 the audacity lol this reminds me though, there was a way you could access other users' folders on the network at my high school too, i never did anything crazy with it other than drop in .txt files to my friends and wait to see how long it would take for them to see them.
I used to bypass the school filters for flash game sites by putting them into the Google translate webpage translator, everything was in basic text, but the flash still worked, I can't believe it worked!
My school started to use a learning site for some classes, where you had to answer some questions and submit them to get your score, at which point it'd tell you what you got wrong and what the right answer was. I found out that if you disabled wifi on your laptop you'd still get the correct answers but your answers wouldn't be submitted. So you could even answer randomly, disable wifi, see the correct answers, and redo the test. That wasn't the only problem with that site, people could also just take turns doing the test first and sharing the answers with others, but I still kinda felt like a hacker for doing it. We didn't use that site next year
Loved this story! At my school, and this was the Windows 3.1x days, it was mostly standard stuff like sneakily installing Wolfenstein 3D and such. The furthest boundaries we ever pushed (that I know of) was making annoying little programs in Quick/QBasic; starting on boot or disguised as school software, no exit button, loud beeping, pretending to format the computer etc... Good times.
my school blocked multiple websites for "Friendship" the block reason on the warning thing for when we go to a blocked website just said blocked reason: "Friendship"
I remember that time we were required to bring flasg drives and we just ended up passing DoTA and CS:Source to each other and playing in the computer lab. The whole class was just alt tabbing whenever the teacher was in sight. We were also playing on the school's network. I wonder why we were never caught, even if we were playing it in the classroom when people brought their own laptops.
Some rooms in my school had a LAN which connected all the dedicated pc set ups, meaning that we could play games as a class. We installed a quake mod called xonotic, and it was the shit, especially when playing it with multiple people In it class
I did something similar in high school, but as I'm a zoomer, instead of Windows laptops we had Chromebooks. And I flashed a custom BIOS onto the Chromebook so I could boot off an external USB drive to use Ubuntu. It was quite slow and not as speedy as Chrome OS, but I could play light games like Minecraft. I only got a few bad eyes from a couple of teachers, but no one practically cared as I could still boot into Chrome OS like nothing had ever happened.
@@DiosPerroSandia at the time there was a command line tool that allowed installing custom BIOS into Chromebooks, not sure if it’s active anymore or if it works on newer laptops.
@@Piipperi800💀 what's even worse is that at my school these chromebooks were sold through the school, and they cost upwards of $500 dollars for no reason other than the fact that the school was trying to scam the hell out of the parents for a Chinese peice of junk 💀
I tried to do this too funnily enough. It never worked out in my favor tho since for some reason a lot of important drivers didn’t work for whatever reason on my linux install and later on they rolled out even more locked down chromebooks that literally can’t do anything.
11:10 "What do you know about eight minus one?" sounds a lot more funnier out of context just to imagine Matt being questioned in elementary arithmetic
I was definitely one of those kids in high school too. They had Macbook Airs and once I figured out how to bypass some of their restrictions, lots of shenanigans went down. And of course quickly followed with me telling my friends lol. Luckily I never got in trouble.
I used to do CAD/CAM on my engineering courses. I would bring a USB with Quake and System Shock 2 around since I would often finish my task before the end of thr class. Also a bunch of newer computers had Blender on them.
I remember running a pirated game distribution “racket” when I was in high school and only ever got told off by the principal once, I never even got detention for it
Wow this brings back memories. Got a talking to by the computer lab "teacher" for using chrome rather than internet explorer. At the beginning of the year she gave us this quiz on computer peripherals. One of the questions was: "What device is used to take pictures to transfer to the computer?" Obviously, a webcam. I got that wrong. The correct answer..... camera.
Bro i didn't know sal watched Mattkc
salc1 is a watcher of mattkc? wild
Hi SalC1!
But... that's in the name?
skittlemc
"it makes the network unstable" has been an excuse by teachers for DECADES to stop any digital shenanigans
When there’s school events the teachers live stream it so our school keeps telling us to not use our Chromebooks
imagine telling those same teachers all the ways that Internet Explorer is IN FACT how most viruses get introduced to computers.
In Australia the network is constantly unstable even more so 10 years ago
Exactly! In middle school, I was caught (and subsequently) banned for downloading stuff on the school WiFi. They said it'd "stop everything they were doing." I obliged, but I stills mell bullshit.
That would bring me to say “citation needed”. I always brought my own laptop, but programmed in the background instead of playing games.
My high-school never gave out laptops to its students. However, my school had a teacher who taught networking and programming who was amazingly cool. One of the things he had in his classroom was giant stacks of old dead laptops with all kinds of defects. It could be something simple like a corrupted OS or something more complex like dead hardware. His policy was that if any of his students could pick one from the junk pile, fix it up, and get an OS to boot, then congratulations: it's theirs now. What a hell of a guy!
w teacher such an epic teacher that you have
That school must be a young geek's heaven
I would of gotten a pile of those if I was in your classroom
I had the exact same situation, we also helped cleaning a classroom full with tech and we could keep anything we wanted.
I had some classes like that in my school. One time I had a class in the room next to his and we had to use the crappies laptops ever. They still had WinXP on them. Thankfully not vista. This was during the win7/8 erra. I tried using my iPod touch as much as possible but it sucked. I wanted a Windows tablet so badly that I held off buying an iPad.
Now a day I actually prefer android sometimes over Win 10. Not sure if it's cuz I'm so use to it or if it is definitively better for some tasks. There was one time I used an Nvidia Shield as my main device when my phone broke.
School: gives students a laptop, an empty hard drive partition and a valid Windows 7 key.
Students: install Win7.
School: shockedpikachuface.jpg
“HOW DARE YOU USE RESOURCES IN A SMART WAY WHICH IS KINDA THE POINT OF SCHOOL!”
"HOW DARE YOU MAKE OUR COMPUTERS BETTER!"
I got in trouble for discovering the change password and locking out the adults from everything they gave me. Thankfully when they called my parents for the new password they just said no to them.
@@djcloaker6387Based parents
I remember getting talked to by the police for pinging an IP in school...
That was also the same school where I got told off for having asthma
As you can tell, they're not very smart there
lol thats not even remotely hacking
typical school in Ohio
What in the name of fuck do the police have to do with some kid pinging google or whatever... Fucking schools man...
Wait, so you got in trouble for doing what a web browser does, but manually?????
If you type in the IP address of a website you can sometimes bypass blocked sites. I did that in primary school to go on youtube since that was blocked.
Imagine getting banned/suspended for using a superior browser
Australian rules I guess
ikr ie < firefox
Lol
Why’d you spoil the video :(
Australian skill issue I guess
Out of context, being pulled out of class and being asked, in an extremely serious manner, "what's 8-1" is hilarious
7
the longest level in the game.
@@theevilsnips cool fact, didn't know that! also haha, _The Game_
@@mootwo_ you mother fucker. You got me good. Well done, fellow player.
As others said, I would have said "It's 7, is that a trick question?", or gone "It's a level in New Super Mario World for the DS, and it's hard"
the definition of "it's not about the money it's about sending a message"
I hate when adults punish kids for standing out, being original, or being smart. Great story!
basically what i was gonna comment lol
yes that is totally why he was suspended
exactly
i got my laptop locked for coding before
I got berated by my teacher for checking a software version (It was during the pandemic and since we where in the middle of a new wave, we had to do our assignments at home instead of at school. One of our assignments required that we needed to use a software and its database. The IT department had to update the software to a new version and because I never booted up my PC, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to get my PC before the afternoon. I did saw the memo and checked the version by clicking on About. When I told what I did, the teacher told me that I wasn't supposed to do that, that I was supposed to bring the computer back to the IT guy to check for me. So you're telling me, that I must do a 3km walk from home to school just to check a stupid software version? Forget it!)
It's a shame that intelligence, skill and initiative are so often punished in schools. Presumably, the administrators are unfamiliar with these traits, or perhaps see their jobs as being primarily about teaching obedience. You did something good and deserved better treatment by far. It's certainly funny in hindsight, of course.
@@creepysmilingcarl9742 I think you nailed it.
I teach, and TBH, I wish we had a more bespoke platform. Like some sort of e-ink word processor. I’d love to find my kids being creative, but all I see is them watching basketball highlights and airdropping fights to each other :-/
@@OnnieKoski That's certainly the other side of the coin, I won't deny it.
For decades they've been all about indoctrination. I saw it when I was in school and things have only gotten worse. Granted you will find exceptional teachers that are the exception to the rule, but they are very few and very far between.
@@anon_y_mousse then there’s getting kids to pass telpas and starr when all they want to do is play FPSs on their phones :(
I love that you got kicked out for an entire term for using firefox but only two days for dualbooting the school's entire computer repository
kicked off the computers for a month, not the whole school
@@soup_pigeon still pretty overkill, two days off school is peanuts to 28 days computer ban
@@soup_pigeon that was for pivot. For Firefox it was a while
@@soup_pigeon when I was at school, I remember it being as easy as flicking the switch on a power strip lol
l love that you got kicked out for an entire term for using firefox but only two days for dualbooting the school's entire computer repository
I know the moment where my IT teacher noticed that my school ipad was jailbroken, and he litterly just asked me if i could jailbrake his ipad too ☠
i didnt know he was chill like that
@@Freakishink292 The teacher could usually be chill. The administrative folks would be chill and bring the hammer down regardless.
I basically did literally this like last year and the IT admin for our entire school district came down and gave this long speech about some kid who "hacked the network" and who later got in trouble with the FBI for "stealing credit cards" and then acted like I was gonna do that.
They probably just made it up
@BA5ED-_-HAX™(ross3695) lmao
@BA5ED-_-HAX™(ross3695) im sorry what the fuck?
@BA5ED-_-HAX™(ross3695) cap
@BA5ED-_-HAX™(ross3695) My principal at my school thinks he's cool for harassing me for dumb shit, glad I'm graduating next year, right into high school
Public school be like: "This child proved to be incredibly smart, resourceful and knowledgeable in the IT field for his young age. SUSPEND HIM!"
"This guy is smarter than the entire IT department, I'm gonna harass and suspend him"
If you think deleting OS and just reinstalling OS is considered “incredibly smart” then i think you still need to be in school
@@bruhmoment3106 He never deleted or reinstalled any OS. He made a clever use of a hole the IT department left with the unlocked F12 menu and half empty drive.
@@minisammich892 he literally said he installed windows by that F12 command prompt . Again not very impressive just messing around with school equipment and obviously got called out on it by his school.
@@bruhmoment3106 yes yes, I'm sure you were a tech genius right out of the womb, but for us people that actually don't need to stroke their ego to make up for their parents considering them an utter failure, for a 15 year old highschooler he's been pretty smart.
When I was in secondary school my friend David and I made the discovery that when IT were restricting literally everything fun on all student accounts, they'd missed Notepad. We used it to make a batch file to open the registry editor and through a lot of trial and error managed to switch off a considerable amount of the restrictions on our accounts.
Somewhere along the line when making registry changes we discovered that most of the edits didn't come into effect until you log off and back on again. This is when we discovered the edits we'd made allowed us to see all network mounted drives of which there was about 10, we only normally saw 2 of these. We had some fun swapping folder names about, deleting teaching material of staff we didn't like, and sending all sorts of shit to printers all over the school.
We saved our registry configurations on to usb sticks, so we could easily load them, log off and back on and quickly be in our customised windows environment with no school logo wallpaper, or classic windows theme, and the ability to install Firefox as our schools website blocking only worked in IE.
One good thing was that as long as the computer you used was either restarted or had someone else log on to it, your account would return to normal.
Then one day my ICT teacher spotted that I had the XP blue taskbar and a minimised Firefox window because she was using a piece of software called Vision to monitor the whole class, my account was suspended. Then David somehow found the user directory, and discovered that there where 12 accounts called survey1-survey12 that I think were used on open evenings. I tried Survey1 with the schools default Password1 and I was back in and loaded into custom registry, and days later suspended 😂
did a similar thing where i got an admin password for a bunch of the school computers because of the command prompt password requirement just glitching out and not happening, teachers know and just don't care at all about it
one of the more chaotic things was using it to bypass the print credit system and spam one of the printers with rick astley, it's amazing the level of not caring at all about it the teachers have since we've got full control over those computers and just use them like we own them, at one point we installed windows 7 on one just because why not
also got the school's single non-chromebook, if everyone had regular laptops there'd probably be things like what happened in the video going on with them, but i did get in trouble for unintentionally wiping one lol
This is exactly why when programming networked applications, you NEVER trust the client. With enough skill, every single piece of a client can be completely modified, down to individual bits in memory. The only way you can trust any security-related checks is when they're done on the server side, as the server is the only code running on your own hardware that you know you can trust.
The fact that IE was being used tells me this was long before people were incredibly worried about such a thing, but it's always an important consideration to remember.
In any case, I do wish modern school blocking systems didn't consider this, it would be so fun messing around with the network.
Imagine stopping you from changing the wallpaper
I think I was the first to get in trouble with a new "behaviour system" for doing this. Fuck that teacher in general.
@@tbuk8350 Yeah, never trust the client or anything coming from the client, this includes sanitizing user inputs, even those you don't expect the user to actually interact with. At my high school it was possible to crash the school's printing credit system, you could go to a paginated, uh, page that would show your printing history, and if you set the page value in the URL to a value it didn't like it would take it down.
@@burp2019 Speaking of accidental wiping: at my HS they used MS SCCM to manage their boxes, a part of this is a PXE server that deploys Windows images over the network. The server was configured in such a way that upon pressing F12 at boot it would immediately start formatting and redeploying the machine, no image selection or password prompts. It was a really competent and automated process but as it took oh say an hour+ to complete and a class was 45 mins it would be so easy to wreak havoc on a class by preemptively starting a redeploy on every machine in the lab. I of course never did this because i'm not evil (read: a little bitch).
I actually did this exact same thing on my school laptops, except they ran Windows 10 by default, so I just re-installed a clean copy that wasn’t locked down.
Since the school couldn’t tell the difference between my re-install and the original, all it took to get the school wi-fi password was asking the tech lady to type it in for me, since I’d randomly “lost access to the wi-fi” somehow. Then, with my admin privileges, you know the rest of the story🤷🏼♂️
I didnt know you were a mattkc viewer
ITS HIM
I did the same thing, but it was because a device in my Coding class was using Ubuntu (and I thought I needed Visual Studio for this class).
I just installed windows and since the computer used Ethernet, didn’t have to deal with any problems with Wi-Fi. I then used my admin privileges to do whatever the hell I wanted.
Ben Esherick!?!?
I almost got my laptop taken away in school because I got into the teacher intranet page (they literally left it up in class on the projector and I just copied down the URL) and I found out they just had a spreadsheet with all of the locker combinations so I screwed with a couple of my friends and the teachers found out and got super angry
wow lol
impeccable security
also known as "i got suspended for wanting more privacy"
wait, they really didn't set up a password?
@@superpou184 they did after I got in trouble
Sounds more like a reward than a punishment. What a strange way for a school principal to assert their authority
When I was in high school, the punishment for missing too many days of school was suspension. They punished missing school by making you miss more school.
@@brandoncullen4189 lmaowut
@@brandoncullen4189 I know when I was in school, when someone got suspended out of school they often were not allowed to make up any assignments for a grade during that period, and of course like usual have their parents or legal guardians called who typically would make that time unpleasant at home too depending on what caused it.
@@MasicoreLord Well, knowing where I'm from, I don't think many kids parents really cared. I looked it up and not too long ago my high school changed the punishment from out-of-school suspension to in-school suspension, so I think they realized kids liked getting suspended lol
He got rewarded for making the laptops faster
At my high school, kids were getting suspended for selling drugs, vandalism, and coming to school drunk. Meanwhile, this guy got suspended for being more intelligent and resourceful than his entire school's IT department
Schools are truly living in the middle ages and it's not the fault of the teachers (mostly) but the ministry's
Exactly! The school seems extremely strict. Also, why would the school's contract with Microsoft be threatened, exactly? A senior person at Microsoft would be better off giving him a job offer at the company! In fact, in our school, around 1996, a (student) computer geek got a job offer paying £20,000 to work in IT, which was a great salary at the time, especially for a 17-year-old without a university degree.
@@MrVaskorjesus, now that is 47,000 quid. Very good on him
@@MrVaskor sweet, which company?
Sorry, I don't know.
the school blocking a website with just “fun” as the description is kind of crazy
NO FUN ALLOWED
YOU ARE FORBIDDEN FROM HAVING FUN AT SCHOOL
I have, no joke, seen at least two separate sites blocked, with the description of "education". School is hell
@@Lassie23how the actual fuck
@@bubgamingandvlogs3870 that's exactly what I thought
At my school, we weren't allowed to run any downloaded .exe files, but I soon discovered that the installed 7-zip ran with some kind of elevated permissions. It could actually launch exe's from *within* zip files. We ended up doing a Halo PC LAN party in my Architecture class after the final, and played some Minecraft in another class.
Surprisingly I never got in trouble for that.
Common 7 zip W
Pretty sure after finals no one really cares
I noticed that to
I read a comment years ago where someone noticed that the security software the school put on their computers only checked the magic bytes (the first few bytes of a file) of exe files. They changed the magic bytes from MZ to something else (as well as changing the file extension) and they could run exe files
I love how you went all the way into making a VM, partitionning the hard drive, setting the date to 2011, installing period-accurate software etc. so you can illustrate the video!
If it wasn't for Google's 2022 design i could have believed it :p
That’s how chrome use to look like
@ScrappyWriter73 but what does it changes
I felt like I was really there!
imagine if he bought a similar laptop and a capture card
Reminds me of the time I ARP spoofed my high school’s network the first week after summer and redirected all traffic to a website I made that just asked “How was your break?” and displayed all the responses for everyone to see. Turns out my crappy laptop wasn’t powerful enough to handle an entire district’s traffic, so it ended up just DOSing most people and disabling the internet at large. When they found me, they were *not* pleased. Got suspended for two weeks- worth it
You could've done much more malicious things than that, but you didn't. Good. Simply did a bit of a prank with some unforseen side effects.
@@nikkiofthevalley that’s probably why I only got suspended for two weeks! Things could’ve been waaaaay worse for them
And I thought I was good because I managed to get halo CE into the school computer network restore point (meaning it would be reinstalled on every computer, every time a restore point was used)
But this is on another level
Oh no *plays it on a laptop*
dude...wtf
LMAO. I put a pirated version of Minecraft on the school's shared network drive. So you could launch Minecraft on any PC in the school.
My magnum opus was having a teacher allow me to connect my notebook to a wired internet at school. She didn't know better and the IT guy was sloppy, all the routers had the admin admin password, so I got all the passwords for all the wifis including the teachers wifi that actually worked. It came a point where the teachers asked me the password in normal class
Getting banned/suspended for using an alternate browser is basically software racism
I believe in Technologism, every user has freedom on their hardware!
Imagine being a browser racist (a browsist)
@@tubbunny the next thing the radical left will riot about /s
Ugh... I know a lot if people who does this and it's so annoying. My aunt would often get mad at my cousin just because he uses Firefox instead of Chrome. My mom is like this too.
@@papeleradereciclaje4375 My sister rags on me for using Chrome because of Google's assholery, at least she has a valid reason
Your anecdote about Pivot was wild to me because my first exposure to that was _in school_ as part of a digital art class. Was a pretty neat class.
Same
Same
my first experience with it was the school library computers
Oh boy this reminds me of me at age 13
So, I live in Europe, schools work a bit different here - while we didn't get laptops or anything, we had public computers in the hallway for students to use.
With my parents working late, I was at school after classes were over for maybe 3-4 more hours with time to kill.
I spent it watching UA-cam (which wasn't against the rules, especially after the classes were over) and eventually some random teacher asked for my name and (without telling me) restricted my account for 2 weeks, meaning I couldn't log in anymore.
I found out that by rebooting the computer and logging in fast enough, you could simply bypass the restriction - for doing that, I got my account *banned* by another teacher for an entire year, due to, I kid you not, "Hacking" - that landed me in a conversation with our admin, explaining that I did nothing more than pressing a power button.
God, I hated our IT
Sucks for you, i'm having a great IT for computers
@@szymonbit That happened over 13 years ago lol
Our school macs have the same thing. If I log out, log in, then move fast enough there's a short period of time where I can do whatever I want. It's helped me so many times.
Sounds farmiliar.
I‘m glad that we have admins who actually know something about their jobs. No wonder parents often threaten schools for legal action, I‘d do the same for false accusations.
"There's no way they'd catch him. He must have told all his friends.... Yup, there it is." 😂
I remember back in high school I was one of the first people I could remember to figure out a basic VPN to go over the schools filters and watch UA-cam, it eventually spread to the point that certain teachers would do the same just to show their classes certain educational videos on UA-cam.
I'm a hs senior, and every year since 7th grade, within the first month of school I figured out the school wi-fi password, and regardless of their restrictions getting tighter, its actually become easier as the years went on. But needless to say, I taught a bunch of freshmen how to do it, to keep the tradition of the IT department trying to catch kids with the Wi-Fi password, alive.
I'm College rn but when i was in Secondary School (Junior High in the Philippines) particularly in Grade 9, since i was the IT Guy in the class, my Advisory teacher gave me the password of WiFi with one conditon that i will not share the password of School Admin's WiFi so i can surf the web while lunch break if the Free WiFi provided in my school goes nuts. It's just interesting that i didn't get suspended after that and heck! even my principal is okay with it.
@@NewRepublicMapper dude, it's so dependent on the school, some are chill about their internet, and some aren't.
Our schools all have the same WiFi. You just log in with your school account and you get free WiFi in any school in the country. So even now, years after graduating, I get free WiFi any time I pass a school.
I figured out that there was a pattern for every single school WiFi in the district, which was pretty damn funny.
We had WEP in highschool and I just got into wardriving so... yeah
If I was an IT teacher and I knew you figured that out, I'd probably keep quiet and try and get you an internship at an IT place after completion of school.
I mean judging by the fact; all the School IT administrator did was reimage the exact same image on the laptops to correct the dual boot and didn't bother putting any further checks and limitations on, speaks to me like a lazy IT admin, doubt he would go out of his way to get the kid a leg up
i will dual boot all of my laptops with 8-1 in 2023 and see if i can get a job (am in highschool)
All I would say is "The problem can be fixed by rebooting and choosing the first option" and then act as if nothing unusual happened because dual booting is not unusual. Probably.
Bruh me rn
What’s ironic about the “slows the network down” is that it’s still used to this day used when you are doing something not school related
and it's usually still because the school's internet itself that's trash and useless
I actually do have story like this. Our school gave us the option to replace all our books with a tablet and everyone was on board. They got their tablets and lined up at IT to install restrictions. The problem was, after the school day was over, u still couldn't do anything on the tablet so it was basically useless unless for reading which my mature 13yr old self thought was total bs. I started fucking with the tablet and eventually found out restarting it basically killed the restriction software and I could just uninstall it after. These things weren't connected to a networks it was held up on that restriction app. Then I proceeded to pirate Minecraft apks on the thing and played at school and naturally everyone wanted in. I complied and soon everyone was playing cracked Minecraft on wifi direct servers. Inevitably someone got caught but at that point everyone had it so no could rly trace it back to me. Good times.
Teacher from your school reading this comment: That was you!?!
you'd think someone would have restarted the tablet at some point while testing it?
@@Clone-up2ge I think it was a factory reset. Some restriction software could even prevent that if it is configured correctly. Google has one such app and it locks the device down so much you can hardly do anything with it. All it needs then is an Apple logo on the back at that point LOL!
why wouldn't you just take the tablet and not line up at IT to install the restrictions
Back in high school the IT admin was constantly playing whack-a-mole with my friends and I in an attempt to prevent us from downloading games off the internet. We'd find a hole through the blockade and he'd close it. Each time he found us somehow downloading things, we'd get suspended from the computers for a few days. Eventually in grade 12 I took Grade 11 programming in the first semester and Grade 12 programming in the second. Full year of programming had its benefits. Our IT admin ran both classes. He got to know me and I quickly gained more privileges and freedom on the school computers than ever before, becoming student IT support and going around re-imaging computers all over the school usually because they would end up riddled with viruses on a weekly basis. Still remember his name to this day. I'm 37 now. ^_^
I can relate, but it only took me 4 months to become student i.t., and I get free broken laptops almost on a weekly basis!
@@imsmart. IIRC the downloading and suspensions only started in late grade 10. ^_^;
That cool
@@imsmart. that's awesome. I would love to have a constant supply of broken laptops. Sometimes it only takes two donors to make one working machine.
That's alot of words for I like men
We had classrooms where everyone had his own PC (media school). No restrictions though, youtube etc worked fine. But the teacher had to turn on the internet for the whole room. A lot of the time we where alone in class. One time I found a "turn on internet" shortcut on the teachers PC. I copied it and was able to turn it on even from my student account from that day on. Felt good.
that'd piss me off. the amount of times ive just wanted to look something up quickly while doing something would make it tedious to ask for the internet to be turned on every time.
things I got detention for in school:
1) Sending a winpopup message to the entire county school system's shared AD domain (this is literally something you can do in Winpopup by default)
2) Dumping the lanman hash for the local admin password on the media room's computers and cracking it with rainbow tables, which ended up being the local admin password for every computer in the school. I did this so I could install drivers for a USB dongle that created a bridged 802.11b wifi access point so I could use my PSP.
things I got away with:
3) taking half of the RAM out of the overspec'd workstation computers that used RAMBUS RAM in our media room and replacing them with CRIMM modules, then selling the unbuffered RAMBUS ram on ebay to fund the building of my first self-built desktop computer.
TIL there was a DDR RAM competitor!
Reminds me of the story where I "hacked" the school PCs. Got suspended from IT class. The principal and IT teacher where so mad even though I didn't even really did anything. They couldn't even believe that those PCs just didn't had an admin password. At least my parents where proud of it
Same thing here. I love Kent! (Kent, UK, not Kentucky, US)
Reminds me of the story where l "hacked" the school PCs. Got suspended from lT class. The principal and IT teacher where so mad even though l didn't even really did anything. They couldn't even believe that those PCs just didn't had an admin password. At least my parents where proud of it
@@Theunicorn2012Carbon copy.
That's the joke...
Saying you hacked into a computer with no password is like trying to say that someone broke into your house when you left the door wide open
That's hilarious. I have a similarly stupid story from school that got me in deep.
One day this huge standalone XP unit appeared in the atrium. One of those boring types with an all-in-one monitor/metal mouse ball and keyboard built directly into the stand. It was running sandbox software that locked it to the school's homepage, but it wasn't an offline HTML file or anything. It had full internet access.
Of course there was no way to navigate off the page since all the browser elements were hidden, so no-one really went near the thing.
One day I figured out a way to bang on the side of it in just such a way to force it to reboot. When this happened, you just had to knock it again during startup and it would prompt you with the 'Windows XP didn't start correctly' screen and you could just enter safe mode with networking and do whatever you wanted.
People started to notice I was leaving it on dumb pages like that one 'lol, limewire' YTMND or the website that just had an infinite loop of the breadfish animation by weebl. It would just blast out of the speakers at full volume and it would take the teachers like 20 minutes to shut it down every time. I was quick, and I never got caught. I had so much fun, made it worth getting to school early just to confuse the hell out of everyone. People would surround the machine just laughing at the teachers trying to take it off.
It didn't last.
A group of friends figured out it was me. I walked them over at lunch and I showed the entire process, once it was booting into safe mode I realised everyone behind me was all of a sudden very suspiciously quiet and I turned around to see a teacher pulling the most disappointed and mildly angry face I'd ever seen in my entire life. They fully let me do the entire process without saying a word, the snakery was unbelievable.
I got walked over to the pastoral office and was told to wait outside while he went in to speak to them. You would only go there if something very serious happens, so as soon as that door closed I mingled in with the crowd that was going back to class from lunch and sat in there for a while until the teacher realised I wasn't supposed to be there. I just apologised, left and walked to my actual class through the outside area and up the back stairs.
He never found me. Good times.
I got an unauthorized copy of my teacher's program and decompiled it cause I wanted to know what makes it tick. I was kinda scared he might not approve of what I did but I told him what I did anyway to have a clean conscious. Now he loves me.
chad teacher
lucky bastard
Ghidra?!
Such a nostalgic story. I did the same with MacBooks that were even more crippled. The notorious 'beach ball of death' was seen more than your mouse pointer. I pulled out the drive, used some HFS software on windows and installed fresh Yosemite over the bloated lion. It was fantastic running downloaded flash games and having a useable laptop. It all ended when the IT admin caught a glimmer of my desktop. Didn't stop me though, my senior year I loaded WaW and Bo1 zombies onto all the CAD desktops in a small non-wiping partition. We played over LAN every day, no one ever figured out, and now I wonder if anyone after us noticed.
I have a similar story. At middle school we were given Chromebooks, which were also locked down a lot (They disabled the ability to use any Chrome extension, even removed the No-WiFi dinosaur game) plus internet filtering. We all had our own laptops but those Chromebooks are the only ones allowed at school.
I saw a tutorial of how you can enter "developer mode" by pressing a key combination at startup. This then enables you to dual-boot Linux on those Chromebooks, free of all restrictions. Once I managed to do it, I bragged about just like Matt did, then got tonnes of requests by other people.
As of how I was found out: those developer-mode chromebooks make SUPER loud beeps at boot which weren't disabled (only possible by flashing firmware, which requires disassembling the machine). Initially I just told my friends to turn their Chromebooks on before lessons, but as the number of modded Chromebooks grew, teachers started noticing blarring beeps in lessons...
The funniest thing is, the school IT guys are so incompetent, they can't even reset those Chromebooks. So guess what I had to do in my detention? Restoring the very 18 Chromebooks I've dual-booted! 😂
Oh man. Sooooo many memories of “naughty” computer usage in school (this is all safe for work). I was in high school just after the turn of the century.
We used DXDIAG’s network tools to chat in computer labs.
Kids were constantly finding methods around the filters to get to games websites.
The best was my senior year in high school. We all had a rudimentary form of cloud storage. The school gave each student 5 GB of network storage, each their own folder.
Someone managed to upload Quake 3 arena on their share, and the school computers were just powerful enough to run it at 600x800.
Within the week, hundreds of kids had copies as you could just drag and drop between file shares.
Best part is that ALL computers in the high school were networked, so once you grabbed your net stats, you could join LAN games with anyone in the school.
This is right when most kids were getting simple phones with text, so setting up a LAN game during computer lab time was easy.
Eventually, IT caught on and deleted the game out of file shares. But the poor fools woke a beast.
One kid wrote a script that would copy the game from his directory and upload it to ALL student file shares that didn’t have a copy. He named it something innocuous (“English PowerPoint 1” or something similar) and would execute it several times a day.
So IT would keep manually deleting the game out of student shares, and it would keep popping up. They could never pin down who was doing it. There were announcements about it, and punishments were threatened, but in a school of 2500+ students, you can keep hundreds of kids after school without word getting out. I’m pretty sure they tried to keep it contained to avoid looking incompetent.
Eventually, IT gave up and the whole school enjoyed Quake 3 for the rest of the year. It took maybe 2-3 weeks after the deletions stopped for the novelty to wear off, and everyone moved on to the next thing that was against the rules.
IT: *deletes Quake 3 *
That kid: YOU ACTIVATED MY TRAP CARD!
In my school I put unreal tournament on the network share, and played in the in the library with my friends during lunch. With frantic alt-tabbing whenever the librarian walked past of course (we weren't supposed to game in the library). They also never password protected their BIOS.
epik
Guys, I kinda wrote a dark 9/11 joke on a paper plane and the teacher saw it. WHAT DO I DO? GUYS I NEED HELP IM IN THE USA AND IM SCARED OF GETTING EXPELLED
it would be amazing if the english powerpoint 1 kid made a similar script that gave everyone a ping script that would automatically give them quake again when run
my most interesting school computer story is the fact that once a kid in my class went on the dominoes website and ordered a pizza to the school. paid for it with his own card and everything, so i don’t really see the issue. he still got a strict talking to though, and the school had to hold an assembly about how we shouldn’t order pizza on the school computers.
Reminds me of when some idiot at my primary school decided to order pizza but over the phone I think
What happened to the pizza?
@@hulias3107 I wonder the same 😂
What were the reasons for not ordering pizza on the computers
@@plumjet09 The reason was probably because they can. I did the same thing and got in trouble, shitheads on a power trip.
Stories like this make me feel so inadequate. I never would have thought to do this, never knew how, never would have thought to learn how, and wouldn't know how to learn how.
You reminded me of when I was in high school. The school computers had a monitor program so that the teachers would be able to see and control our computers when they wanted (those computers weren’t personal, they were just used for classes and we couldn’t take them). They also had a “freezer” (it was called something like that), which was a different program that would reset the computers to the state they were before we did anything after powering them off, which means everything we did would be erased after it turned off, and when I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING, we could even erase the windows folder or system32 and it would restore after rebooting.
So me and some of my friends found a way to turn off the monitor program so that we could play games / watch UA-cam during the class without being discovered, and then, when some teacher noticed that the computers weren’t showing up in their computer, we would “accidentally” press the power off button and explain that we rebooted the computers by mistake, since when they rebooted the monitor program would be back because of the freezer one. They never discovered us and I still remember that to this day.
That what I would call, getting away scott free. :)
Damn, they played themselves.
Had a similar experience with my secondary school. Made a proxy to bypass their filters for games. Ended up getting spread around like crazy and of course no one took any precaution to hide that I was the one who made it. Within a few weeks, the schools higher-ups found out and were not exactly happy. They couldn't block it either as I was using a ddns to just give it random domain names. When one was blocked, I switched it over to a new one. Basically just was asked to please take it down as there's nothing else they can do to stop it. They even tried getting police involved but they couldn't do anything but also politely ask to have it taken down. I obviously did take it down, but the cool part of it is that the IT support for the school loved it and actually let me help out doing IT support with them after school. Not as a punishment, but just because it's what I liked doing.
I've been trying to do that with my school but it seems its not possible due to how they have the internet connection setup (the only way in and out of the internet through the schools wifi is through a proxy, with what I know has contentkeeper installed on it) I should try to find a way around that, if possible
ah, yes. the karen solution to something you don't like: call the cops as it must be illegal...
This whole thing was essentially Matt's version of Breaking Bad. Matt is the Heisenberg of Windows 7 installs
best windows 7 installs in the country, 99.1% pure with an iconic aero glass look
Jesse, we need to dual boot
This is a much underrated comparison Rey!
"Matt is the Heisenberg of Windows 7 installs" _perfect_ :D
"I am not in danger, I AM THE DANGER. Someone bricks their computer by installing Windows 8 - 1 wrong and you expect that from me? No. I AM the one who dual-boots."
But then, who would've been his Saul Goodman?
This is my new favorite UA-camr. This story was amazing. Too bad all your other vids are on Lego Island
low level lemmy!?
Man, such a great High School tech incompetence story. Reminds me of the time I brought in a USB to a computer class and we all played Unreal Tournament, Minecraft and Garry's Mod in the downtime. The teacher joined in too sometimes!
The teacher joined in to play too? What a cool teacher
Ahaha that reminds me one time I was playing minesweeper on the school computer and got stuck, the IT admin messaged me the solution through a dialogue box.
Times like that we treasure in our lives
That's one of the best teachers I've ever heard of
The Firefox story reminds me of the time I was accused of “hacking” my elementary school network because I realized their only control on who had access to which programs was what accounts was which logins had shortcuts to open them. I hand-typed the shortcut for Firefox and a few other “teacher only” tools then got caught because I made the mistake of sharing the trick.
I'm in primary (elementary) school, and I do that. I also get accused for modifying the local HTML. I mean, doing that as a 9 year old is fun, but my favourite thing is to remove the s in the HTTP protocol, similar to what @IcySon55 does.
Those pesky snitches
i got in trouble for opening up inspect during a computer game about mental health (it pretty much made my mental health worse than better) and some kid yelled out to the teacher that i was hacking (since i was known to be the computer guy) and i had to sit beside the teacher and not just that but she would allawys pick up my labtop each second and check every tab and window like if i was some super crazy criminal mastermind
@@userrrr32reminds me of 5th in general
i just open something like windows 93 or 96
'HACKING!!!!1!1!!11!1'
i open linux on my asus chromebook?
'HACKING!1!1!!!1!!11!'
i open inspect?
you guessed it, 'HACKING!1!!1!!11!!!'
When I was in high school, SSL certificates were just beginning to be a thing. The school’s filter rules hadn’t yet accounted for it. So one of us, I’m not sure if it was me or one of my friends at this point, figured out that adding an ‘s’ to the http route in the browser would bypass the content filter entirely.
We used it for innocent things like play games and getting on social media.
... and then someone else must have started watching I guess
I might have helped people in a similar way. I think also by accessing some websites via IP instead of hostname. It was a while now, I don't really remember.
Same exact thing at my elementary school, I think the alternative after that was something in Google Translate that allowed you to view an entire site
I remember doing that in my high school days before I had a smartphone, never did much with it but it was a fun trick to show people.
im in high school now and we all just use free vpns
10:52 for us tech nerds, it's hard to imagine someone seeing windows 7 and not immediately recognising it.
Considering how everyone in this story seemed chill when they found out (Except the principal), I think it's fair to guess they didn't really care. They're just kids and security was somewhat less of a concern back then
I more reckognise Windows 10, but think back a second saying 'Wait, is that 10 or 11?" and then I say 'It could be 11 because of Explorer Patcher"
To be honest, you really have to be foolish like Matt’s friend to not know the difference between XP and 7. You don’t have to be a tech nerd to know.
XP has this blue taskbar and green fields. 7 had this glassy taskbar and big windows logo. I don’t know if like the school had set a wallpaper but when he installed 7, it definitely had to have used the default 7 wallpaper.
7 also had higher fidelity than XP. XP’s fonts and icons were pixelated while 7 was smoother.
when you literally upgrade the school's laptops for free and the principal gets mad:
if you watched he literally said that no one was mad xd
@@NightmareNarratives-z6bthe principal was fuming
you make it sound like the school didn't have things in place to police what they did. they punished him cause he was avoiding it.
@@NightmareNarratives-z6b If you'd watched you'd know that you're wrong xd
11:43@@carrotwizard3900
I have a bunch of these stories, but the most memorable one was when I made a cheating tool for online exams. The answers to these exams were available on the internet, so I put them all in a database, created a tool that would let you drag a crosshair to the Internet Explorer window used to take the test, which would inconspicuously hook it to the window. Then while taking the test what you had to do was highlight the question, press CTRL+C, and it would display the answer in the title bar of the Internet Explorer window. Teachers knew something was up because everyone was suddenly getting 80%+ scores. So one day the teacher told us to put our keyboard behind the monitor, and everyone failed the exam because they could no longer press CTRL+C. Thats the day they introduced a practical test.
Man, tech shenanigans in school were hilarious. I remember in 7th grade I got suspended for 6 days and got my laptop outright confiscated because I was able to log in to the school's security cameras and view them live.
Basically, I was messing around with an IP scanner on the school's wifi and I found several individual Axis cameras (which, for some reason, showed up on the student network) but I couldn't log in. Then, at some point, I scanned again and found the login page for the ENTIRE DISTRICT'S camera system, meaning the high school, 2 middle schools, and all the elementary schools could be accessed from this one web frontend.
Now, they happened to be using Exacqvision software and it said that in the corner of the page. I googled "exacqvision default password" and the very first result told me to use the username "admin" and the password "admin256." I put it in, thinking "surely they can't be that stupid" but, to my surprise, it worked and I was in.
The real mistake that got me caught was when I showed it to a few friends and one particular kid caught on, then proceeded to view the cameras directly in front of a teacher. Apparently he snitched on everyone when asked about it, and soon enough my laptop was confiscated and I was suspended (I think 4 or 5 other kids had their laptops taken as well, for using the cameras but also for scripting and web filter circumventing antics.)
I'm in 11th grade now and I can use my phone in school and also bring in my own laptop, so trying to cheese the school computers is kind of pointless, but that bit at the end about "a tight-knit community bonding over breaking the rules" really reminded me of those exciting times a few years back. Thanks for telling your story.
@textmeontelegrammattslays0880 Nigerian
I literally sent this to my friends and went "HEY REMEMBER WHEN I DID THIS". Your story was the exact same as mine, except it was with crappy windows 10 laptops and i didn't get caught :)
I've got alot of those stories. The schools student PC monitoring software was trash and the process could just be repeatedly killed using a simple batch script. I did that in middle school and got like 2 weeks banned from the computers. Fast forward to sophomore year of highschool and it spread throughout the entire district. Since I had already gotten in trouble, they couldn't just punish me again. They had to buy a new monitoring software, only it was worse, the teacher version was available online and i would screw with my classmates. I also got the school wifi password and turns out it was the same password throughout the entire district. Including the football stadiums. Just remember, education1sfun 😉 I would also routinely bypass the school firewall by SSH tunneling to my home server and poof, all the websites unblocked. Plenty more of those stories too
oh yeah, the days of the school wi-fi password. it was the same in our district too but this was a decade ago and i didn't use it very often, can't remember it at all xD pretty much everyone knew the password.
Schools now have gotten to the point that they (try to) require all devices to be on the wifi, because that way they can be monitored for shit like Yik Yak, when that was a thing.
What a great story. It sounds like we had similar school experiences, though, I suspect mine was a lot earlier. I graduated in 2000 so my days of getting in trouble were the mid to late 90s.
Our school district didn't do suspensions. We had what they called DOC. That normally stands for Department of Corrections, as in jail and prison, but the school's DOC was something else. It was a separate, tiny school where kids from all over the district who got in serious trouble were sent. So, instead of being suspended for a time, you'd have to go to DOC for a time. After school detention at each school was called "Opportunity Class". So, some kids thought DOC stood for "Downtown Opportunity Class" which is silly but I don't remember what it really stood for.
I had a reputation for being able to do things with the school computers that were not allowed or against the rules. I used things like Netbus to take control of teachers computers and see their lesson plans and grade books. I'd find ways around the firewall and user privileges to install software like games and Napster. Yeah, this was the late 90s.
I don't remember what exactly was the final straw. I think it had to do with experimenting with viruses and trying to learn how they worked. I heard an internet myth that there was a virus that could tell a hard drive or CD ROM to spin too fast which would physically break them. I think I was testing some viruses to try and find that particular one. Now, like you, I never tried to do anything malicious or break anything. I was just curious. I had my virus collection on an air gapped computer and I only ran them inside a VM. I think I was tinkering with virtual drives inside the VM trying to find that hardware breaking virus.
Anyway, an adult found out, I was sent to the dean's office after they searched my locker. He had a bunch of stuff on his desk that belonged to me. It was things like the red lineman's handset I bought from a student who had an uncle who worked for the phone company. I was getting into payphone phreaking at the time. He had my various floppy disks and CDs with pentagrams and stuff drawn on their labels.
I was sent to DOC for 10 days.
It all worked out in the end, though. The following school year, my senior year, the librarian took an interest in me. She took me under her wing and pointed my interests in the right direction by giving me access to the new web server the school had just bought. I set up the schools first website and got an award, photo in the newspaper, and a small scholarship for it. I am probably lucky that that librarian realized I was just curious and interested in tech and pointed me in the right direction.
so what do you do now? cybersecurity or any other IT work?
@@memes4life118 Two weeks after graduating high school, I started my new job with AOL doing tech support in the day and going to classes at ITT Tech at night. That lasted about 18 months. I then changed jobs closer to home doing tech support for Gateway Computers via an outsource call center called Sykes Inc. Gateway ended their contract with Sykes so I moved over to the MSN side of the call center. Then, through the years, I've worked for companies like Cingular which became AT&T. I was with them when the very first iPhone came out. That was fun. I worked there through the iPhone 4. I worked for RadioShack and Circuit City, two defunct electronics stores. My last job, which was my dream job, was at ADP (Automatic Data Processing) where I maintained and troubleshot the payroll software, databases, and servers for fortune 500 companies. That was a really fun job because it was a little bit of everything. Every day I had my hands on server management, networking, hardware, software, databases, ect.
But, I'm disabled now. I have epilepsy and migraines so I haven't worked in about 4 years. Random seizures and migraines make it hard to be reliable and show up every day.
@@xliquidflames damn man, im really sorry to hear that. hold on king👑
Honestly that sounds like and insane degree of strictness lol. My computing teacher is fully aware that ive been pirating games to play at lunch with my friends for years, and he literally encouraged me to get more stuff working.
Based teacher
I have a similar story from when I was in HS. I’m a bit older, 2006 is when I was a junior in HS. 802.11g was still relatively new and public/guest Wi-Fi wasn’t widely available places yet. The school started experimenting with letting kids bring laptops, but they couldn’t be on the school Wi-Fi. They only school issued laptops came from a video production class for the school’s student news program. To make a long story short, the WEP (yes this predates WPA as well) key was stored in plain text in the registry. I borrowed a school laptop for 5 minutes, extracted the key, and then for the rest of the year had Wi-Fi on my personal laptop. Started showing off to my friends who also wanted the WEP key, and even a couple cool teachers wanted it for their own personal stuff. Long story short, one of them got caught, which means I got caught too, and I was suspended for 5 days. Thing is, no one was mad at me except the principal. It was the week Kingdom Hearts II came out, and so I spent 5 days chilling and playing video games. It was honestly great. To this day, my WPA passkey is that same WEP key.
One time in high school my district blocked Canvas. Y'know, the website all the teachers used to distribute homework, give class-wide announcements, upload note pages... yeah, that Canvas. Someone figured out how to get around the block to get to their class pages again and they got banned from the school network for two weeks. This poor kid was literally doing the right thing by trying to see his classes but noooo that's too much
I was banned from being within 1 meter of any of the school computers after I made a website on the school intranet to allow kids to download a registry file to change proxies on the computer to the staff network to get around the schoolsnet filter. Lasted half of year 9 and all of year 10. Had to re enrol a few subjects and the attendance list in the mornings had a reminder to all staff to keep me away from the PCs.
Good times.
My friend got suspended for computer shenanigans in high school: he hosted a proxy that basically everyone used to get around the filters. That wasn't why he got suspended, though! We had elections for class president, and my friend basically announced that if Charlie didn't win the election, he'd take down the proxy. I guess this is where the school drew the line, because they suspended him for a couple of days.
Did a similar thing with a VPN server using my fiber connection, but only shared it with friends bc I knew better than to share it with random ppl (plus, didn't wanna get IP banned). The reason I never got in trouble is that everyone else was just using one of those free VPN apps and so it completely went under the radar 🤣🤣🤣
The school like: Noooo we are losing our free service. Punish him!
This is why you always have to make sure you don’t go making friends with less than common sense intelligent people.
@@inqurity
"Don't associate with murderers"
"Associating with people is important not just because they are not murderers, you know"
Brilliant non-argument.
In my school district, they hand out Chromebooks that are so locked down, that you can't even get chrome extensions.
Myself and a friend got banned from the computers for an entire term in primary school because we set the Windows theme on a computer to high contrast. The IT staff didn't care, the teachers wanted us punished though, and it was a harsher punishment than the guy that downloaded Line Rider onto a network share got.
wtf
Could have argued you needed hi comtrast to read properly on screen :"i even wanted to increase the zoom to 300% but was afraid of being punished for beeing different " :( :)
Yeah I hated those kind of teachers. My principal was like that. I got suspended for printing off a USB stick, instead of the allocated network drive.
LeftAlt+LeftShift+PrntScrn !
I always set one of the display computers at various pawn shops to hicontrast just for fun 😄
We made an entire minecraft server in the pc of the IT department and they didn't notice it for 2 years. Meanwhile we were just playing at school or at home in this minecraft server with always over 50+ people, and people not from the school started playing too. Until the server became too laggy because the world is big, and the IT department found out what was going on. 7 classes of the school were suspended for 2 months.
it shouldda been called "SchoolSMP" lol
@@IAmComicallyCartoonyYKnow we had 1k+ people before the fun ended
@@ydboss what happened on the server? im interested.
@@IAmComicallyCartoonyYKnow we just got snitched
@@ydboss im talking about the minecraft world it took place on, its sad it got snitched on though.
What a story Mark. The most interesting school computer-related thing I ever did was browse TV Tropes on the school computer during one of my computer-based classes because for some reason it wasn't blocked. Actually school laptops weren't even a thing until after I graduated so I never got to taste that sweet 8 - 1 myself.
Who the hell is Mark.
my highschool gave us chromebooks so basically we were stuck in a software hell cage for the entire 4 year term
@@xmlthegreat Hello everybody my name is Markiplier and welcome back to Five Nights At Freddys
@@kafino Markipiler
@@kafino I did not her, I did not.... Oh hi Mark!
Whoa, this is a stark contrast to the situation on my school in the early 00s when I was a teenager. We (that is a group of three or maybe four guys in the entire school) were way more talented with computers than the majority of the other students (and almost the entirety of the teachers) so, after giving some advice and helping out here and there, we eventually became the school’s de-facto on-site IT admins. We were called upon every time teachers had trouble with their systems and they didn’t want to call the service contractor and wait for someone to come over by car from a town 20 km away. Nonetheless, we also did our fair share of shenanigans, i.e. trying out backdoor trojans or just abusing elevated permissions. But this aspect became boring rather quickly and we lost interest in messing around with something we have kind of a responsibility for.
As a bonus: When the older one of the two computer labs was dissolved, the teachers asked me if I want to keep three of the machines (COMPAQ i386 machines with DOS and Win 3.1) for home. That was a nice gesture.
I almost always consider getting to keep a machine at the end of the year a good ending. Emphasis on almost. My brother will get to keep his Chromebook when he graduates in two years (simply because they're phasing out the old models for new ones) and if it wasn't for the fact that Developer Mode was locked down, I offered to help him get custom firmware and install an OS that was actually usable. Unfortunately, as far as my knowledge goes, he's stuck with ChromeOS, and since it's an HP, it'll most likely have some sort of hinge problem by the time he graduates, anyway.
MattKC stories are a highlight of UA-cam honestly. You have such a treasure trove of interesting stories from your youth as a neardy kid who understands computers, but I think what makes yours more interesting than others is that you're a relatively young guy, so all of these youthful stories have a modern twist to them.
And for Aussies that are familiar with the school system here, it gives us Nam flash backs hardcore
tech stories from school are the best, Matt! Thanks for sharing with us. I have a story that I think y’all are gonna like.
So one day in my freshman year of high school, we were sitting in our health science class and generally not paying attention to the teacher as she was rambling on about cell diffusion or something. Anyways, she gets a little fed up and presses a button on her computer. Instantly, all of our screens go blank, except for a logo in the corner named “netsupport”. Of course, she was using a program to control our computers remotely. But instead of just groaning and forcing myself to concentrate on the lesson, I was intrigued by the logo. I snapped a photo of it before It disappeared and we got our screens back. Later that day, I looked up the program online, and discovered that there was a free-trial version of the software available on its website. I installed the most over-powered form of the program, called the tech console, onto my personal laptop. The next day, I was in my debate class and ready to test out the program. When I booted it up and connected to my school’s desktop pc network over Ethernet, I suddenly had full control over every computer. Not just the computers in the building I was in, but every computer in the entire district, elementary, middle, and high schools. Of course, I immediately tried it out on my friend when he was in his engineering class. The options the program gave me were insanely overpowered: shut down/restart the computer, enable the microphone (you could hear what was going on in the room the computer was in), disable mouse and keyboard input, send a message (it would pop up as a dialogue box), annotate (draw on the screen of the computer), file transfer (quietly transfer files to and from the host computer), and a few other features that I never got the chance to test. I was so confused that the school could let a security risk this huge slip through their fingers, since our school was very well funded and we had a large IT department. Anyways, I decided to take control of my friend’s computer and began typing gibberish into his search bar. After messing with him for a while, I decided to log off and stop pushing my luck. But the next day, my urge to mess with people returned and I couldn’t help but convince the class that the computers were being hacked (which was completely true, but I tried to make it look like the hacker wasn’t one of their friends but some evil outsider) one time, one of my friends even told me what was happening and I just put on my best poker face and exclaimed “what? Really? That’s crazy!” By the end of the year, I ended up telling my best friend what was really going on, and over the years I told a few more people. During my high school career, I would randomly log into that program and mess with kids who were slacking off and playing games, because if they tried to tell the teachers what was going on, they would expose themselves in the process. I only ever had kids telling the teacher what was going on once, and she just didn’t believe them at all. She must’ve thought it was impossible, and it definitely should’ve been. During my senior year of high school, I really had fun with it. I was taking a computer science class, and the shenanigans that took place were insane. Once, I sent a spam message to everyone in the class about how terrible the school security is, I turned on the microphones on all the computers and created a massive feedback loop (like holding two phones close together but so much worse), copied stupid minion memes onto everyone’s desktops, and other things. One time, we had a guest speaker come into class, giving a talk about the importance of cybersecurity, while my friend and I were trying to hard not to bust out laughing in the back row. At the end of it all, I can’t believe I didn’t get caught after all the crap I pulled, and after telling probably too many people about it, but I graduated and it’s all behind me now. It’s fun looking back on those times though, I’ll never forget it.
P.S. one more short story, one time my friend found out that our school kept all the yearbook photos in a network drive that everyone could access, and none of the photos were write-protected. So, we loaded up our photos in ms paint. I drew a smiley face on my photo, and my friend drew a mustache on his. The yearbook team only caught the mustache edit, so my senior year yearbook photo has a little blue smiley-face drawn in the top-left corner. We weren’t caught either, since the lady who found it assumed that someone drew a mustache on my friend’s face with malicious intent, so they saw him as the victim! Haha.
Man, great story. You earned a sub!
Amazing story, Im actively trying to make some stories, but my intentions are failing.
Currently ive got multiple things I want to do, as I live in a dorm for school.
Their wifi is MAC address whitelisted and phones arent allowed onto the network, so I was thinking to just change the MAC of my phone, but sadly I cant do that as it isnt rooted, if I root it, some banking apps stop working, which just isnt worth it. Enabling wifi hotspot on my laptop works, but for some reason I get HUGE ping spikes every 12s.
Their network is decently secured, also it has a 10Mb/s speed limit, which I dont know if it is AP side or switch side, if its AP side, there maybe is a possibility I can use the console port on the cisco aironet 1830 series AP (guessing 1832), but there is a possibility the port just is RJ45, but uses a serial connection, so I would need converters to usb and then it MAYBE would give me access. Now im currently thinking to try using one old rooted phone I have as a hotspot, will check if I can change the mac address of it today.
The other thing is cloning the room NFC card, so we dont have to share 1 card for 2 ppl. My phone cant dump the sector 0 of the card, but I can read the ID, etc, which I will clone onto the cheap chinese gen 2 magic tag, also will write everything else thats on it, I havent received the tags yet, hopefully will arrive in the following weeks so I can try it out.
@@LatvianVideo i can probably help for the first one, ive actually onced hacked into my schools router as a joke (default password smh)
@@funkepop ours isnt that bad, im not even able to access the local setup, they either time out or refuse connection. Their setup is serious, 100% a switch going to the APs
Interesting, but you need to learn how to use Paragraphs.
I have a couple very similar stories, one involving using Command Prompt to try to send a message to my friends computer, and "accidentally" sending it to EVERY computer, it somehow wound up on the computer that controls the school's TV channel (must have been a computer with powerpoint running updates about school stuff or something) and it froze the TV channel. I got called down to the dean of students office and had my computer privileges revoked for like what amounted to 3 hours, because one of my teachers was like, "yeah they need to use computers in my class, so can you give them back access?" and I got it back that same day.
amazing, i remember sending a couple harmless messages to a friend in another class one time, i mentioned it after and they were like "oh my god that was you?"
the one thing that wasnt harmless however is when some of us figured out how to remotely shut down other's computers, i dont recall using it maliciously but i think some others did. the it department fixed that soon after
how did you do that, was it an ssh thing?
@@llynxfyremusic it was probably via net msg
Actually I did something remarkably similar. One of my friends' kids who was a decent techie but not tooo advanced was in a school that was *_trying_* to "get with the times" using cheap chromebooks, but didn't understand them at all and their own IT would lock them down so much that they'd break things, asking him for help. So, since they're incompetence was becoming a chronic problem, I offered to crack it. It was a pain in the ass to bypass the write protection on the firmware but, sure enough, I was able to bypass it and install, I think it was some arch derivative? And after that I could theme KDE to look basically identical to chromeOS. I was even able to bind shortcuts to simulate the artificial lockdown signal, modify the .desktop file for brave to look like it was just glitching out and showing two different entries for chrome, (iirc it was chrome and chrorne) and generally make it look damn near identical. All the while having better trackpad controls, running faster, not being locked down to hell, and just generally being better.
i like the vm footage used. he specifically used versions of software released in 2011, web pages from 2011, and even recorded the windows boot manager when he could've easily used an image (focus on the seconds until highlighted choice is selected automatically)
To answer your licensing question, I ran a tech department at a public school close to the same time as your incident (I was fired for being opposed to what they called "1 to 1" where every student got a take-home laptop - we had a Windows domain infrastructure and I thought it was absurd to ditch all that, shut down the computer labs, and go to Chromebooks, but of course every Board member thought they knew better than me, so I didn't have a job for much longer). Anyways, we had Microsoft volume licensing, and my understanding of the agreement was that we were allowed to install any version of Windows, going all the way back to 98, on any computer that had any version of a Windows COA sticker. I'm pretty sure a dual install would be covered since you're never logged in to both versions at the same time, and that COA would technically cover either OS. As an aside, I ended up buying bulk Windows 2000 COA stickers I found on ebay to slap onto our custom-built lab computers, rather than pay for the full license, I just used those under our volume license. I think the dept. paid like $5 per sticker - my rep at CDW was fascinated at how I did that. Ahhh...the memories of managing a $140,000 annual budget.
Dude what school has a budget like that
My school has no IT budget. They make the 90 yo liberty admin do IT and not well at that. She only knows one answer to questions pertaining to computers: "Use the district help desk form" which doesn't help us at. all they do is send you a new laptop and a bill for $200(even though the school still owns the laptops?).
@@unhhgcrxexhjvuvujchcrzwzwz7956 Not only was it a nice budget, I bought so much stuff on ebay it wasn't even funny. In my time there, I brought in probably 700 laptops and desktops, all running Windows 7 on solid state hard drives. I upgraded the entire district to SSD's by 2014 and those really breathed some life into the mid-level Core2Duo lab computers. Which was part of the reason I was opposed to them ditching literally everything that had approved for purchase in the previous 2 years and downgrade to a bunch of Chromebooks.
I actually do have a similar story!
Being Australian as well, i benefitted from that same government program, granted a handful of years after you did. The laptops we received were reminiscent of the Lenovo Thinkpad X131e. The way our school handled everything was via a locked boot menu, supposed tracking chips, shitty school wifi (they were unblocked on home networks), and ultimately the big "make kids not open games" program, was a patched version of windows' own explorer.exe. EDIT: I totally forgot to mention that these laptop were running Windows 7
At the time, no one in my school had any idea, about how they were unable to play games, they just didn't open. After many hours on the internet, i found a forum of kids discussing how to break these new laptops, and someone had left a link to a .jar program that killed their patched explorer.exe's process, and then loaded the unpatched version, allowing you to open any executable file, like God and Microsoft intended.
The next hurdle was the internet, surely their had to be a way to get the schools wifi to not be shit. Ultimately, this is less of a hacky solution, and more that we noticed that kids who took extra credits in a school-run TAFE program would get a password specifically for TAFE that was not under the same blocking that the regular school passwords would be.
So everyone was more or less incentivized into taking a short course from a government ran community college (for the Americans, thats what TAFE is)
Ultimately, i did not get in trouble, one kid did, but that's because he was actively spreading the .jar file, granted, i did give it to that kid, but he was the one who became the "spreader" so to speak.
Was that WIFI called Conference?
Because in my HS we had a wifi called that which was for people that did an aviation course or smth, but the password was spread everywhere. You couldn't do it on the school laptops though, only phones, but if you changed the registry a bit then you would be able to get it.
(btw I live in Australia too)
The "tracking chips" they talked about were kinda real. I believe it was called "Computrace" or something. It didn't actually use gps but it would inject software into Windows that periodically phones home to see if the laptop needed to be remotely disabled as well as send certain tracking information (IP address, wifi network etc.)
in 6th grade I also showed people how to use screen savers on their computers it got very very popular and kinda annoyed the teachers because if the laptop was forced to stay in a window by the teachers the screen saver would close out of it
Reminds me of the time I managed to disable a guardian program on my school chrome book by booting into developer mode, and that apparently broke the program so it stopped working. Only did it for 2-3 other people, but ended up getting caught because the program was also used to monitor pcs and it detected that we weren't on it anymore.
I once had a similar thing happen. The school had blocked cmd...
I found a script to access cmd, and I shared it with some friends.
I used it to install Steam, and then Portal, and I helped my friends install it too.
... we didn't get caught.
In my final year of college, the school implemented the same content filter on dorm internet as what they had in campus building internet, which blocked out mainly porn and "offensive" websites like Maddox's Best Page In The Universe (and yes, the latter's decline still hurts). After helping some close friends bypass it with a stupid easy fix (a simple VPN extension), I decided to start charging people for it. People gladly obliged and I cleared a pretty several hundred bucks from it. Charging for this was also a way for me to compensate for the school killing my job (working at the school's IT help desk), since the cunts decided to outsource their IT to a firm a couple states away instead right before my senior year began.
My school experience was FAR more advanced than what you went through. I actually cracked everyone's passwords, but I won't go into details on what exactly happened. We did not have our own laptops. Your 8 - 1 story was very interesting. I really do miss those days when we were young and knew how to operate computers more than the school does, but at the same time I was sick of the fact that they had us locked down. Which country did this take place in?
Australia
i know i bricked some computers and would remove the spyeyes software with linux. only got caught becuase stupidly logged in before i bricked it. i did it becuase the computer guy was kinda a dick and looked at everyone as a stupid. and im like whats installing windows pressing a few buttons and smoking a joint?
Oh memories. When I was in year 9 in about March 2000, I'd been trying to get round the various restrictions the school had in place in their desktops and was getting pretty good at "hacking". This lead me to learning a lot and staying up late, going to various forums, reading text files, and downloading dodgy software to help me with my nefarious missions. I ended up discovering packet sniffers and decided to bring one in to school with me on a floppy disk.
While watching the packets fly by while watching over my shoulder I saw something that looked suspiciously like a username and password combination. Turns out the crappy educational network software the school was running (made by RM) sent credentials in plain text. All I had to do was wait for the right person to log in on the same subnet that the computer room was on. It didn't take long before the IT teacher (and defacto network god) was fixing something on a machine the other side of the room and I knew what to do.
Now I was the network god, no more limit of 10 printer credits per week for me! Didn't take long before I was bragging and giving the other geeks unlimited printer credits and removing internet filters and everything. This lasted about a month before someone who I'd stupidly given a teachers password was caught and they immediately grassed me in. They threatened me with suspension and banned me from touching the computers for 2 months. My mum was raging but surprisingly not at me. She marched up to the school and demanded a meeting with the head master and said they should be encouraging me to learn. I didn't get suspended in the end but they kept the ban. This unfortunately overlapped with when we were choosing our GCSE subjects and for some reason that meant I wasn't allowed to do IT. Makes no sense and I will always be bitter. Those days were fun and it set me up for my future career as a software engineer
IT was the most awful GCSE subject, be glad you didn't take it, I'm sure you learned more in the subject you took over it.
I'm from Australia, and I took IT in 11 and 12 in 2005 and 2006, for us, it was just a way to bludge and play Unreal Tournament on the computers
teach me pls
I had a day of in-school suspension for "being the mastermind behind student access to youtube"
I had set up Firefox to use a different port on a few student accounts (4 or 5, in a school of about 160)
Apparently 2 of the 4 had used up all the bandwidth, and it delayed state testing by a month.
(I originally was going to be suspended for 3 days, but since I wasn't the one who used all the bandwidth, it got lessened)
This brings back fond memories of me and one of my best friends managing to get access to the SAM file on our schools domain controller and cracking every staff and student password using RainbowCrack on an old computer at home. We never did anything malicious, but we did release class lists for the next school year over the summer holidays, and I kick-started my MP3 collection by copying the tens of gigabytes the schools I.T team had on a server. Them constantly torrenting back in 2005 probably was a legitimate reason for the schools "unstable network".
Hacking SAM files to get a user list? I just did net user /domain to get that info.
@@eDoc2020 The class lists weren't part of the domain information, they came from an internal timetabling tool that we didn't have access to until after we had a password for a privileged account. We were 15 or 16 and had very little idea about what we were doing, a lot of the success was predicated on luck.
yes i was like this when i was in second grade. i used to fix the TVs back in school for presentations and stuff, but i actually didint fix anything i just changed the input connection and yes most of the teachers where dumb back in the days
i hope the dude who did the cod montages is doing great, hes clearly the hidden cool guy, id be proud to be his friend
I am about 95% sure that my last school used me as a free pentester. Since I was usually bored in any computer related subjects I'd use my time to try and find creative ways to get around the internet locks that were in place so that I could play my browser games or just do stuff on my home server. This was initially pretty easy as the school was running a somewhat old and convoluted setup with Citrix but mixed with some programs that we'd run locally on our clients. Well, turns out that if you downloaded something using the locally installed Internet Explorer (downloading was supposed to be blocked, but wasn't) you could then run it on the server (which was supposed to be blocked, but wasn't) and get elevated privileges (which was absolutely supposed to be blocked, but... you get the idea).
Anyway, the thing is that any "exploit" I'd use would quietly get fixed within a couple of weeks. Every time. I never got in trouble though and my working theory is that since I never did anything actually malicious they just let me be because after all, I was showing them what to fix. I even talked to my old IT teacher years later and hinted that I'd always get around the internet locks and he just smirked and said something along the lines of "yeah, I know". He didn't want to comment anything more than that however :D All of this stopped mattering in my last year anyway because they installed a completely new system with way less silly exploits and also one of my teachers just gave me his login so that I could unlock the internet whenever I wanted :D Although when they switched to a web filtering proxy that was blocking some categories like games I'd just register a bunch of domains, set up some basic fake websites and submitted them to the company curating the list for the proxy under various categories that weren't blocked. I'd then install a web proxy on my server and access any blocked sites that way - they never could "fix" that one, for obvious reasons.
Which is funny because at my previous school I quite literally got almost kicked out for "hacking" the library computer. I found a way to open Windows Explorer (which was supposed... you know) and was then able to navigate to the system files and launch dangerous programs like... Microsoft Pinball. Anyway.
I do the same thing, but I just tell them.
Me with mynusb drive with minecraft
In year 11 (the last year of secondary school), I was in immense trouble for trying to find how many parts of their file server i could access. I found the folders where they kept their install programs, their CCTV footage (which unfortunately was blocked) and the directories for other users home folders, none of which I could access. Stupidly, I had links to their file server root and the C drive in my explorer favourites bar like a badge of honour.
They were made crosser by the fact they discovered a copy of Half-Life 2 in my home folder. So naturally they came to the conclusion I was “hacking the system to put half life 2 on everyone’s users.” That was the deputy headmaster’s actual quote.
In the end I received 5 lunchtime detentions, of which I only served 2 due to GCSE exams.
Plus, my own computer science teacher told me the police would come round my house and seize my home computer, which they didn’t funnily enough.
wow your computer science teacher had a power trip thinking that the police cares that much about a student messing around
@@kyv979 ikr, she later said to me “if I had it my way your computer would be seized by the police and you’d have been arrested.” Like she had any power over how the police worked
@@infrared752 the audacity lol
this reminds me though, there was a way you could access other users' folders on the network at my high school too, i never did anything crazy with it other than drop in .txt files to my friends and wait to see how long it would take for them to see them.
ooh man, this video brought back A LOT of memories - thanks for sharing
I used to bypass the school filters for flash game sites by putting them into the Google translate webpage translator, everything was in basic text, but the flash still worked, I can't believe it worked!
My school started to use a learning site for some classes, where you had to answer some questions and submit them to get your score, at which point it'd tell you what you got wrong and what the right answer was. I found out that if you disabled wifi on your laptop you'd still get the correct answers but your answers wouldn't be submitted. So you could even answer randomly, disable wifi, see the correct answers, and redo the test. That wasn't the only problem with that site, people could also just take turns doing the test first and sharing the answers with others, but I still kinda felt like a hacker for doing it. We didn't use that site next year
you could have used the dev console to see networks packets and maybe collect every answers before even starting the test 🤣
Loved this story!
At my school, and this was the Windows 3.1x days, it was mostly standard stuff like sneakily installing Wolfenstein 3D and such. The furthest boundaries we ever pushed (that I know of) was making annoying little programs in Quick/QBasic; starting on boot or disguised as school software, no exit button, loud beeping, pretending to format the computer etc... Good times.
my school blocked multiple websites for "Friendship" the block reason on the warning thing for when we go to a blocked website just said blocked reason: "Friendship"
“no friendship in this school”
I remember that time we were required to bring flasg drives and we just ended up passing DoTA and CS:Source to each other and playing in the computer lab. The whole class was just alt tabbing whenever the teacher was in sight. We were also playing on the school's network. I wonder why we were never caught, even if we were playing it in the classroom when people brought their own laptops.
Some rooms in my school had a LAN which connected all the dedicated pc set ups, meaning that we could play games as a class. We installed a quake mod called xonotic, and it was the shit, especially when playing it with multiple people In it class
I did something similar in high school, but as I'm a zoomer, instead of Windows laptops we had Chromebooks. And I flashed a custom BIOS onto the Chromebook so I could boot off an external USB drive to use Ubuntu. It was quite slow and not as speedy as Chrome OS, but I could play light games like Minecraft. I only got a few bad eyes from a couple of teachers, but no one practically cared as I could still boot into Chrome OS like nothing had ever happened.
@@DiosPerroSandia at the time there was a command line tool that allowed installing custom BIOS into Chromebooks, not sure if it’s active anymore or if it works on newer laptops.
Goofy ahh chromebooks with 10gb storage and 4gb ram 💀
@@junahsong130 mine had 16 GB of storage, which is why I had a 64 GB USB drive I used for Ubuntu.
@@Piipperi800💀 what's even worse is that at my school these chromebooks were sold through the school, and they cost upwards of $500 dollars for no reason other than the fact that the school was trying to scam the hell out of the parents for a Chinese peice of junk 💀
I tried to do this too funnily enough. It never worked out in my favor tho since for some reason a lot of important drivers didn’t work for whatever reason on my linux install and later on they rolled out even more locked down chromebooks that literally can’t do anything.
11:10 "What do you know about eight minus one?" sounds a lot more funnier out of context just to imagine Matt being questioned in elementary arithmetic
Imagine helping schools for free and principals getting mad at you since you did them a major favour.
I was definitely one of those kids in high school too. They had Macbook Airs and once I figured out how to bypass some of their restrictions, lots of shenanigans went down. And of course quickly followed with me telling my friends lol. Luckily I never got in trouble.
Snitches get stitches, after all ;)
I wish he gave us more storytime videos like this
Edit: How the hell does this have more than 150 likes but no comments?
don't know
I have a 3D modeling class and I used my free time in that class to install steam, I'm still baffled I haven't gotten in trouble for it.
I used to do CAD/CAM on my engineering courses. I would bring a USB with Quake and System Shock 2 around since I would often finish my task before the end of thr class. Also a bunch of newer computers had Blender on them.
It'd be funny if you then installed the Steam version of Blender.
I remember running a pirated game distribution “racket” when I was in high school and only ever got told off by the principal once, I never even got detention for it