Waaaaaaaay back in my Visual Basic 5 days I used to hide easter eggs in my corporate apps. It was always just a dialog box that would pop up randomly saying something kinda funny. To keep them from being discovered by the other developers, I would put the code in some obscure file and instead of a (searchable) string variable containing the text for the popup, I would convert it to a concatenated series of CHR(ASCII#) statements, and then each line of code would start with a couple of hundred spaces, so it would only ever be seen if someone happened to open the file and also happened to notice that there was a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom. We got many bug reports about the easter eggs but nobody was ever able to locate the code that was producing them. I might have been fired for this but probably not - nobody really cared much about shit like this in 1999.
I don’t know why I’m taking mental notes like “don’t forget to change the system clock before doing crimes!” like I’ll ever need it.
In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.
In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.
A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:
while (true) { fork(); }Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. 🤣
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. 😂
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.What does that command do?
Creates a new process. So, it would create an infinite amount of processes filling RAM.
I’d scold the sysadmin instead for not cofiguring critical systems in a secure way. Ulimit exists for a reason.
Takes me back to the good ol’ days of adding echo commands to autoexec.bat so the computers would display stupid shit on boot.
2001 I figured out a way to get a NES emulator and games on all the computers in the lab. School was pissed but never figured me out. I played so much Kirby.
Someone figured out that you didn’t have to install starcraft to play it, just copy/paste the files. Those were some good times.
We were able to put the emulators on our network drives, so the admins couldn’t revert your change when the ghosted the machine.
My favorite accomplishment from that era was discovering that I could make the single core machines beep themselves to death and sneaking that into the shortcut icon for IE in the ghost image. Man was the IT admin mad about that 🤣
I think it was the network drive for us as well. Shit was so long ago. I just remember everyone had it and was playing games and it was my fault.
NESticle?
Probably, I remember it being a different one but that could have been a SNES emulator. I can’t find one that rings bell that was around then. My memory is decent but it was 24 years ago.
back in the 90s my highschool had a computer lab and we would go there for certain assignments. I think it was history class when we went to do “research” which consisted of clicking links in an html doc from a shared drive and summarizing the articles on them. Someone changed some of the links to go to a porn site. The only thing that happened was the teacher said “whoever did this is a sick person”. I don’t know if they investigated but I was never caught.
If I had been running a school in 2018 you wouldn’t have been able to get to the control panel anon.
That reminds me of back when I was in high school. The IT guy was a big gamer and had installed RainbowSix on all the machines in the computer lab so we could play against each other during lunch time including himself.
One stuck up, self-righteous teacher heard about the game and tried to have the IT guy delete it from all the computers because they were “violent games that had no business being in school”. He refused and the school’s administration seemed to have his back on it. So during a computer class she instructed the entire class to delete the game folder from their computer and empty the recycle bin and then leave the file explorer open so she could walk around and see that it has been done.
While everyone else were deleting theirs I copied the game folder on my machine elsewhere, then deleted the original to show her that it wasn’t there anymore. After she was gone I moved the folder back where it belonged and shared it on the network so everyone else could copy it back into their computer. The following lunch break it took less than 5 minutes to get the game back on everyone’s computer and we kept playing like nothing happened. Get fucked, hag.
The surprising part here is that the school sided with the IT guy.
That, plus a school computer lab running without something like Faronics Deep Freeze (even my shitty Mississippi public school in the 90s had that or something similar), and the lack of permissions control that apparently allows student users to delete and restore program files at will is giving the story some real “that happened…” energy.
You give woefully underfunded school IT departments too much credit, especially in the “desktops are new tech” days.
Honestly, sounds like your Mississippi school was ahead of the curve from a lockdown perspective.
It was one of the main city schools, so I suppose they could have been. That place was a shithole, otherwise, despite the best efforts of some really good teachers with the misfortune of being stuck working there.
All I knew from my perspective was that this teacher was angry at the existence of those games and the IT guy never removed them so she tried to circumvent him. To me that tells me that the school management either allowed it or simply didn’t care.
The computers weren’t really that locked down or secure from user tampering. Some idiots would even install malware all the time on them like Bonzi Buddy for shits and giggles. The IT guy didn’t strike me as the hard working type and would only re-image a computer if it was no longer functioning.
I actually got all of Civilization 2 by finding it randomly installed on a single PC in one teacher’s classroom.
Copy and pasted the entire directory to a zip disk that I uh… borrowed… brought said zip disk to another computer in the school computer lab that had both a zip drive and a cd burner, burned it onto a blank cd i had, cleared the zip disk, returned it, brought the cd home, copied over the game files, played civ 2 on my piece of shit eMachine that did not have a zip drive.
We just played Counter Strike 2D from a flash drive.
Those LAN parties with the entire class were insane and there was nothing they could do since it wasn’t installed.
deleted by creator
I got suspended cos I figured out u could do the old boot a Linux USB and then do a renamed copy of cmd.exe to sethc.exe and get a system command prompt on the login screen when u activated stickykeys. U can do a lot with an admin account.
This wasnt a prank but i grew up with linux on all my computers and they didnt allow linux on school computers but the it admin allowed me to install the windows hypervisor(idk the name) on it(apparently even if you have standard edition windows you can still install the packages for pro edition stuff) so from then on i just booted up windows to boot up linux.
IT is incompetent. You could easily disable ability to change desktop backgrounds for students
It’s school IT, so it was probably a teacher who ‘knows computers’ and not anyone with IT training.
All of the school districts (rural area so each town large enough for its own schools has its own school district and the smaller ones will share a “unified” school district) near me go through the same MSP so it’s better than the teacher who’s good with computers but not as good as having an actual IT department
Or have student logins to track whodunnit.
When I was at school you could just boot Linux off a USB and had full access to the HDD.
Wow, amateur hour at the IT Dept.
I don’t get the “thin white line across” part. Could someone explain?
I guess anon wanted to mark the “trapped” computers
Certain types of computer monitors can get a hardware issue (read: broken) that results in a permanent thin white line across or down the screen.
Hmm, but if it was a hardware issue the thin white line should appear regardless of if the screenshot was edited.
I remember our stupid prank back in the day was to take a screenshot of your desktop, make it your background and delete all your icons.
Don’t forget to flip the screenshot upside down, then flip the display on the monitor also upside down.
The computer will look normal, but the cursor will be move in the opposite direction.
I was a fan of leaving the orientation normal, but moving the start bar and setting it to auto-hide. A long time ago I put a simple bat file (like “shutdown -l -t 0” or similar) in a coworkers startup folder… I guess that was a step too far though and he thought I broke his computer. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
delete
You know you can just hide/show them in two clicks right?
Hide desktop was the way to go on XP with this prank.
Don’t you have to be 18 to post on 4chan?
everyone was born January 1, 1970 or something when that question is asked for purposes of age verification
They said 2018 and the post was made in 2022
I think the person you responded to might not have fully realised their own age maybe? It’s happened to me before.
I was at a festival waiting for a band to come on. Talking to people in the audience one of them asked me if I’d seen this band before. I said “yes, in X year”. A girl there says " Wow, I was born in X year". For a second I wondered how she got the beer she was holding then quickly calculated that X year was 18 years previous to the current one and realised I was talking to a group of people roughly half my age. Nothing wrong with that but it just felt kind of weird that I hadn’t really been cognisant of it before that moment.
We actually required active monitoring, because we knew how to change the .pwd files.
Net send *
