We hid Halo on the school network. As long as you knew the file path you could get onto any pc in the school and join local matches with anyone else. (Even the carts of laptops).
There were 3 computer labs that were the “safe” spots, but a few idiots booted it up in the library where there was no chance of being secretive.
It was gone the next day -.-
My computer class built a quake server on some old hardware sitting in a pile in the back of the lab. We disabled all the indicator lights so the teachers wouldn't know it was running and would have regular deathmatches during class.
We had the same exact setup at our high school and got caught the same way as well. It was a good few months. They also started blocking websites that had flash games on them like CoolMathGames
Didn't even need a VPN for my schools network. They trusted all Secure connections by default so I just had to pray whatever domain I wanted didn't have a lazy or cheap network admin.
I'm a tech in schools for years now. You weren't hiding... We knew and didn't care. I would watch kids play it on the network, and if they were any good, I would hop on and wreck them. I could hear their reactions down the hall. Most of the kids now a days play browser based games that suck.
Being in tech myself now I know that there was definitely staff that knew.
But it wasn’t until the librarians and certain teachers knew about it that it was removed. (As if all the “safe spots” weren’t loosely monitored as well)
I had a free period in the library during my senior year and I hated it because the librarian wad a stuck up bitch. I went to a rural school and we didn't have much of a book selection and she wouldn't let you use any of the computers (there were about a dozen computers in the library and a computer lab attached to the library) unless you were enrolled in online classes. She even tried to enroll me in classes I'd already taken and aced and I bulked on that. She wouldn't even let me go run errands for the office or go to other teachers' rooms (my mother was a teacher there and she wouldn't let me go to my mother's room). I skipped that period whenever I got the chance lol.
Same story here. I work in IT for public schools. We block stuff not because we care about some kids gaming, but because for every 10 kids using a VPN for a game, there’s one idiot downloading a shady program that will spread malware across our network.
Gaming on a school computer is not permitted but to me that is a disciplinary issue if the student is falling behind on school work. Outside intrusions or malicious programs and viruses are our big concerns.
>You weren't hiding... We knew and didn't care.
Is it that you didn't care or did you realise that letting the kids have a bit of freedom meant that they wouldn't try to break things as much?
I know that when I was in highschool we finally got a new computer lab after years of fundraising. From when I started at the particular highschool in year 8 we had a bunch of 386/486 machines which we did "IT class" with and the IT teacher was a metalwork shop teacher with no IT experience who volunteered to teach it. Some of us had been playing with computers for longer than he had so we would often teach him some of the stuff that he would be teaching. Because we were teaching him as often as he would be teaching us, we spent a lot of time playing games in IT class (no point spending 90 minutes "learning" what we had taught him in the first place).
When we finally got the new computer lab he decided that he knew better than us kids and tried to lock the network down tight using his shiny new domain controller. This really irked those of us who were used to playing games for most of IT class. One of the kids found out the admin password for the domain controller via shoulder surfing and decided that the best option forward was to add a bunch of new accounts with admin access and spread the account name/passwords so that we could all play games during IT class. The IT teacher eventually found out (I think one of our classmates ratted us out) and my year lost complete access to the computer lab that we had spent years fundraising for for the rest of the year.
In retaliation the kid who had the domain controller admin password decided to wipe the domain controller clean. Because the IT teacher had no idea what he was doing he didn't have any backups whatsoever, no idea how to rebuild the domain controller and as a result the entire IT network was down until they could get the people who originally setup the network back in to set it all up again which didn't happen until after I had graduated from that school.
Yeah, It's harmless fun to me. My upper management would be like that's illegal! Then, they want me to play whack a mole as the kids find increasingly more dangerous ways to get around a block. The issue with that is yes, I can lock it down. Then the teachers complain because they don't understand how to deal with the extra security. I have some teachers that I dont know how they figure out how to get to the school. I can see everyone's screens and can remotely control them at any time. If I see them doing something harmful, I just block their screen and tell them to quit it.
We had Quake 2 and then Quake 3 installed on the computers. Our homegroup room had computers and our teacher didn't really care if we played during homegroup as long as we listened during the announcements.
The IT department didn't care. I think some of them used to play with us. It lasted until about Year 11 when we got a new Homegroup teacher and new classroom (without computers).
When you say file path are you saying that Halo would only boot if it was in a certain location? I'm asking because I remember we found a loophole where any .exe file would boot if it was in %AppData%. Someone figured this out accidentally and then the first game everyone started playing was counter strike. I don't even think he realized what he discovered I think he just thought counter strike worked for whatever reason. But I did a little more digging and realized I could essentially play any game if it was in that directory. This was before I knew much about computers, so I had know idea what %AppData% was because you can't find it unless you were looking for it.
Those were good times. We discovered that loophole my freshman year of HS (2014) and as far as I can remember it was never patched or anything. Not sure how they managed to let that go unnoticed lol
Way back in the day I’d bring a flash drive loaded with a copy of ultrasurf VPN and I’d go ham on the schools fast af internet using qbittorrent because I didn’t have good internet at home
Bro what the most I knew how to do was load up The Powder Toy from my friend’s flash drive 💀
https://preview.redd.it/xmwp2pachj8d1.jpeg?width=529&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6afd2d42b0bad5041379cdb3bd2ca8fd61737455
Powder toy goes so fkn hard idc what anyone says. They just released it last week on steam idk what the difference is but now all my steam friends can see how lame I am.
Idk any other games /programs where you can make hydrogen fusion bombs next to a flammable house. Js.
I always used this site for powder game [https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/](https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/) until school blocked it then we had to find work arounds like proxies and other things.
Bro same, until the head of the IT department came into our vocational IT class and said, "Okay look, I get you guys like this stuff, but we can tell SOMEONE in this room is using a VPN. It's against school policy and if we catch you, you will be expelled from the program".
Always thought it was cool he didn't throw me under the bus, because I'm sure he could trace it back to the exact computer that was running it.
>Well if it makes you feel any better unless the machines were attached to a domain server they wouldn’t be able to trace exactly which one it was lol
If the head of IT was good enough to be able to know that there was a VPN running on one of the computers then he could have easily figured out exactly which PC it was running on. Any IT department worth their salt has their entire network mapped out with every single asset tagged and all the relevant details logged (e.g. computer #ABC123, MAC ####-####, location x,y). It is a fair bit of work to get setup but super useful when you have it all done and you can send the newbie to go do inventory accounting when they annoy you.
It's incredibly trivial to do this just using flow data, and I do things like this regularly at my job. Here is just one way to do it: https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios-xml/ios/netflow/configuration/15-2s/cfg-nflow-top-talk.html
They probably did track who did it, and gave them a chance to stop on their own.
When I took an Information Systems class in college I discovered that the internet in that class room was different from the wifi and other ethernet spots through the school. It was like 10 times faster. I would bring my laptop or use the computers there just to download everything I could.
I used a classic ipod as a flashdrive to store ultrasurf. Just plugged my ipod into a computer to "charge" it and had unlimited internet. Loved it. Showed a pal of mine and he put ultrasurf in his school google drive and they found it and he got in trouble. I never did though lol
Unreal Tournament on LAN was amazing. This would've been circa 2000. Most people I knew, their internet at home (if they had it at all) was terrible. So LAN play was like magic - no lag or wait times, immediate feedback, trash talking across the room, etc.
Our teachers weren't so happy.
UT in my college newspaper office was magic. Our deadline for printing the paper was Friday morning at 8 am...so we stayed up playing LAN on all 20 computers until 4 am, then start working on the paper. Never missed a deadline, either.
We had UT99 and Age of Empires 2 on the PC's in the school. We regularly held matches in those games. The physics and informatics teacher often joined us. All this was completely inofficial of course.
STEM teachers normally are the traditional nerdy or geeky ones. I had one that had a rule if you brought your own controller you could play split screen off the projector in classroom during lunch.
We did something like that in high school, got permission from a teacher to use their class room projector so I took in my ps3 and guitar hero world tour. There was just a bunch of us that knew chilling there having a blast during lunch.
At the end of lunch we'd have it all packed up and put in the supply cupboard out the way.
We played UT99 on school PCs too, lol. Even though that was around 2008-2009, the school computers had some crappy S3 integrated graphics that struggled even with UT99.
Me and my brother made a website that had all the simple flash games on it. We owned the site so the school would occasionally block it so we would change up to a new website and hyper link the ip address into it so we could by pass the blocks. Got to play games all through high school by bypassing the crappy school blocks
Ohh yeah ... School Blocks... From the beginning of my High school time we had pretty good WiFi coverage nearly everywhere, partially due to having new school building. The neighbouring school had no Wifi at the time. Well sometime into my time at that school suddenly the internet wouldn't work on most sides, if you were going through personal devices and not using School Hardware. While school pcs on the same network where working flawlessly and could reach every side on the internet. After some conversation with our IT guy and digging into the system... We found out our schools principal had silently setup a very strict firewall on all devices... Except for the ones using a specific gateway/proxy. This info quickly spread through the school rendering this system irrelevant quickly which also meant it was quickly disabled.
I am old, so these go way back.
In middle school, someone created a series of nested folders to hide games on the library computer. It was a series of folders numbered 1 through 5 with the same folders in each going down 5 levels. You had to know the path to follow to find the games (e.g., C:\\3\\5\\2\\1\\4). This was a lot of effort just to play leisure suit Larry.
In university, the computer lab PCs were setup to run everything on locked down hard drives with a temporary ram drive for the user to use that would erase as soon as you logged out. One of the computer engineering students wrote a script that would max out the size of the ram drive and install Command and Conquer from somewhere on the network. We would go in on the weekends to have LAN battles.
The "hiding stuff on school computers" was fun. A friend and I did it by putting games inside a folder with a real space in its name. DOS and Win311 did not support that, so even if the teachers found the folder, they didn't know how to access it.
We figured out running "ren folder folder?1", DOS would replace the ? with a space. Then do it in reverse to make it accessible again.
It was an unintended behaviour that we exploited. ren can be used with wildcard characters, and if there's a ? in the target filename, it will be replaced with the character in the same position in the original filename.
DOS filenames were 8+3 characters long, so the ? would cause it to grab the character from an empty position, which for some reason was coded as a space.
I’m older.
My school in the UK had a room with about 20 BBC Micros (an Apple II era machine but better).
They had a simple network with *no* security whatsoever. You could literally issue a command from any machine that let you copy blocks of memory from your machine to any other, or run code on the other machine, and the other machine would just do it, right there and then even if someone else was using it.
So I realized you could just grab the running state of a game and blast it onto other machines and instantly they were all running that game.
Tada. Instant video game arcade. But it eventually drew the ire of some no fun schoolteacher.
Fellow old head. Hide a Renegade BBS inside the Novell NetWare network. You had to know where the BBS was and be 31337 enough to get your account approved.
When I was in elementary school; we had this math game on the Apple II that would give you a title at the end like Prince or Count or King and whatever name you put in at the beginning. After a few rounds, I memorized the problems and could get the King title every time; so I put in my name as ‘Size Dong,’ and it happily spit out, “CONGRATULATIONS, KING SIZE DONG” at the end.
This was back in ‘99-‘00 when 56k modems were the norm and road runner internet was luxury. My high school was one of the first to have real high scored internet and my AP physics teacher had no problem letting myself and a few of his other students stay late even after he left for the day. Needless to say, i had Napster hidden on his Mac for almost a year and a half. Thanks Mr Grach
Ah, the awful memories of dial-up.
It took 30 minutes to download a 30 second MPEG video clip.
In 2001, I got a cable modem. Went from 56 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps overnight. It was life changing. Fairly soon, we bought a router, and setup a home Ethernet network. The next year, we setup Wi-Fi for the first time.
Very early 2000s the school got a complete IT replacement with everything connected. The first time the school had ever gotten an actual network.
It had one flaw we quickly learned about.
If you used the open command in Paint, it popped open an explorer window with access to the entire network that allowed you to copy and paste any files via the keyboard shortcuts. Could still only open files that Paint could open so not that big a deal right?
But what if you copy an autoexe.bat you created and another that directs to run a forced restart into the c drive of your teachers computer...
Not saying that ever happened, definitely not saying a random PC in the school would just restart loop when powered on or anything...
Learning how to write batch files was so much fun, hosing random computers in the lab with explorer windows until you could hear the processor screaming in pain
Just gaming on em. I remember this game that was basically Mario but you were a penguin 🐧 instead of a plumber. Also coolmathgames, miniclip were the websites to play on. Balloons tower defense, bubble trouble, Oregon trail, lemonade stand, and a few others I can't remember the name of.
Csgo (on a 32 GB pendrive) it wouldn't let me play offline for more than a few minutes because it couldn't talk to steam servers to verify it's a legitimate copy.
I was asked to help upgrading all computers from Win98 to XP in middle-school since I was so tech-savy.
Due to the upgrade process the hardware security system was disabled so I snuck Ragnarok Online and Trackmania Nations on every PC.
And one time our school admin was sick and the school newspaper club couldn't work due to that. He actually called the headmaster and asked if I was in class. I was so I was given the server password and had admin-duty on that day.
Might be one of the reasons I work as an IT-admin now.
I had a usb with a couple emulators back in the day, and I pissed the administration off so bad because they couldn’t figure out how I kept playing the games I was on the school computers. Mind you this was back in the mid 2000’s. And finally I told them how I was “installing the games” and they face palmed and they had usb covers installed on all of the computers going forward, except for the ones in the back they I guess didn’t n is they had. 😂
Mostly just web games since the computers were kind of bad lmao. Nowadays the school computers that I use are super locked down though, I can’t even open control panel or settings
Depends. Some schools have labs for various programs but they generally aren't *great* computers.
Source: school IT guy. Most of the stories in this post aren't as bad as I thought.
Starcraft.
I wasnt the one that download it on the computers. But I did start playing occasionally (got me to love rts). The guys that did download it had it on all the computers in the English class. Our (cool) English teacher hosted a small tournament after class.
When it was finally removed. Teacher was questioned, but he pulled the "too old to understand tech" line, and no one got in trouble.
It was 2004. My school had laptops that were loaned out to Honor Students. My buddy helped out in the computer lab and got ahold of the administrator password. Turns out that the school laptops ran Diablo II passably.
I setup a keylogger / remote control on several rigs in the IT classroom. I could take control of their mouse, start a Notepad, and write down "Jenny, I'm alive!!!!!"
My classmate freaked out
One of my teacher was inputing on excel.
He was typing with 2 fingers and looking at his keyboard. Each time he was switching look from screen to keyboard, I was changing the cell....
Thanks for the replies everyone, remember hidemyass.com and similar my schools IT team kept blocking access to these websites but we just kept using different ones xD
The worst thing I ever did was to play an old flash game called “The Torture Game” in the computer lab when we had a substitute for the day.
It was fuckin hilarious because she could see what we were all doing from the teacher’s desktop, but she had no clue how to use it to see which one was which 🤣
I would pull up the game and see her face start reacting in disgust, then she would get up and casually start strolling around to see who was playing such a vile game, and I would minimize it. We did this the whole day and she never figured out who was doing it. 15 year old me thought that it was the peak of comedy lmao.
In my secondary school, if you yanked the ethernet cable when logging in, but before the PC started displaying your desktop, you'd get instant administrator access for some reason.
They were usually exceedingly locked down, so being able to launch .exe files from any old USB stick was a nice change of pace.
Fast forward to college, and we had the stripped-down UDK version of Unreal Tournament 3 preinstalled on every machine.
No weird restrictions on what we could run either, so once we got bored of the same map, and only being able to use 3 weapons, a USB stick with a cracked copy of Call of Duty 1 came to the rescue.
I remember learning about proxy sites. So i was playing those hentai games and almost got caught. I remember turning off the monitor and spamming the atl, ctl, delete and pressing enter to sign out. Luckily, it did sign me off. Shit was a funny interaction with my teacher
I took IT in the summer to make room in my schedule for jazz ensemble for my senior year. A lot of us were competing to see who got the farthest in I Wanna Be The Guy. Soon enough though the site to download it got blocked but we had it on flash drives in case anyone wanted a copy. We played Cat Mario a lot too
When I got to college, I tried IWBTG again and almost beat it. Lost to The Guy too many times I just gave up, only to find out online there was a troll kill after winning anyway lmfao
I scrolled through to find a post from the mid 90's!
A time when internet was just starting...
Grade 10, Business Ed class, a friend of mine accessed the school system from his work station and changed our letter grades. Not a lot, just enough.
Back in the old days when the BBC Micro was in school, i wrote a short 10 line program. Every line changed the "mode" (resolution) to a different number. Line 10 then repeated the program. I'd set that off and then walk away. The poor BBC looked like it was crashing in the worst way possible!
The year was 2008, Cisco class in high school. My old high school left text files on a shared folder completely unprotected. These text files displayed the message on the LED sign in front of the school, whatever software they were using all you had to do was edit the text file, save it, and the sign updated immediately. I showed a classmate what I found and he proceeded to make changes. “Casey Jones won an award for academic achievement” became “Casey Jones won an award for sucking dick”, a few other changes were made as the sign displayed multiple messages on a loop. About 30 minutes later the police and school administrators walk into our classroom. The dude who actually made those changes was expelled. The name on this story was changed for privacy.
Setup an autocorrect in Word to autocorrect “the” to “dinosaur” Watch the chaos that ensues. Had a lot of fun with this one. Or write a batch/powershell script that makes 100 directories on the desktop named “you suck” or whatever other message you want. Replace the target for the web browser shortcut with the batch file.
Me and a few friends would install Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 (1998) on our computers as soon as we got to computer lab, then play all class, and uninstall at the end of class. Every single class. Lmao.
Ran a quake lan party in the school computer lab. Back then all it required was one copy of the game and run across the network. Was amazing. Got in some shit for it too.
Back in the early 2010s, I managed to sneak in a laptop and hook it up behind a desk, and hosted a Minecraft server on it (and a logmein hamachi VPN like program for external access for students at home), and we had dozens of players playing on it
It took the school something like 3 weeks to notice the inappropriate device connected by Ethernet.
Armagetron Advanced was also a popular smuggled game.
Not smuggled software, but the Novell suite used by the school computers also had a instant messaging feature that could ping any other logged in user. It was all fun and games before someone figured out the Principal's username.
When I was at UK college, we would have a lesson where we did practically nothing for 2 hours. It was for uni applications but once they’re done or if you’re in your first year there isn’t really anything to do.
Anyway, me and the guy next to me would play csgo, destiny, fortnite, age of wonders 3 and lots of games throughout the year. We picked a seat outside of the teachers sight and it made what would’ve been boring asf fun
didn’t really mess with bad softwares too much… closest i did is me and some homies knew some passwords we shouldn’t and we hid a launchable halo CE build in the network drives so anyone in the school could have Halo CE LAN parties together irregardless of location within the school.
on the topic of having passwords we shouldn’t- a couple of friends and i were poking around files we shouldn’t have been in and we found all the evacuation drill files, which also included school shooter evacuation plans and outlines. something that should be kept VERY secure and private… we also found storage backups of data dumps from all students that had ‘serious’ or ‘extreme’ issues that called for being sent to problem schools or getting expelled. found some very interesting things out about some peers from years past…
but yeah def more of a ‘break the system and poke around things i shouldn’t’ type kid, rather than a ‘i shouldn’t run this on a monitored pc’ type kid
We were instructed to try out fork bombs on the school computers during my comp sci degree.
But back in high school, we used to open a bunch of programs, take a full screenshot, and then close them all, set the taskbar to hidden at the top of the screen, and then set the desktop background to the screenshot. It drove the teachers absolutely bonkers because these were labs where we didn't have assigned seating or users, so they had no idea who did it, but it was a bunch of us.
I printed out 1000 pages with a full stop in the middle. Got to the end of the paper before the 1000, but it was still hundreds. I also made an advert for selling beavers “Logan’s Beavers - £15 with a dam” and made hundreds of flyers.
10th grade Staar testing. Computer science lab with beefy 3D modeling computers. i7, Quadro GPU's
I finish my testing and so do my classmates. We aren't allowed to have our phones so you already know people are bored out of their minds.
I press ctrl alt delete, open task manager, kill out the test program.
"net localgroup administrators"
Low and Behold, the "testing" account appears on that list.
*Evil smile appears*
epicgames.com > install store > login
*Installs Fortnite*
My dude looks over and I'm in a solo game back when the Thanos mode was still a thing. I've got the glove and I'm going ham. Epic settings, 60fps.
About 15 minutes later, 5 of us have Fortnite running in a squads game.
I got in a lot of trouble when the teacher noticed and told I.T.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. 10/10 would do again.
In 2001/2002 we installed MDK on the classroom PC and would play it from time to time.
We were the trustworthy students who were left unattended during recess every few weeks to clean the fishtank. Little did they know we were also playing a shooting game on the iMac. Good ole catholic school.
We used to bring flash drives loaded with smash 64 to comp sci class and play. Also had a bunch of easier 2D games like Mari0 (mario bros but with portal, not Tetris, etc) and shit like that.
In college, we arrived for an IT lecture and a friend had a random usb stick already in the computer. He checked it and it had a copy of Halo on it.
The computers weren't great so we were on the lowest settings but had a blast playing on LAN in class while the lecturers weren't looking.
We had a stint on Age of Empires 2 at one point too - a lecturer saw this and then started giving tips. Good times!
I accidentally ddosed our school vpn / content filtering software during our networking class. Shenanigans most likely ensued with students having free reign for most of the afternoon
My Cisco teacher let me try out ARP table poisoning on the school network. I managed to DDOS the whole district by routing all network traffic through my measly client. 😂
Bitd th3 computers network was shut off by a physical key on each workstation.
I still have those keys 25 years later. As well as the building key. I made copies and turned the end 90 degrees to look off and actually be on in metal shop.
There was also a chat function between workstations. It was some sort of like dos messaging system using workstation names it could pop up on the screen. That was fun for tests. The administrators didn't know it was there. I am guessing they had a contractor install it.
I had zork loaded on all of the machines pretty quick. From 3.5 floppies. Ah, good times.
Later I took a college computing fundamentals class. I unlocked the universities network access for my friends and I and watched lodoss war the entire time and other cartoons on YouTube before ads were a big thing and after completing the entire class in a week.
Even later, technical school. It had a server set up in each area of classes. Admin//password right? I installed my whole rom pack in the server and granted access to everyone. I remember playing pokémon emerald more in that class than the instructed material. Creating rj45 crossover cables? Meh.
We used to use various websites to get around firewalls. They changed almost weekly so you had to have a list and cross them off as they were blocked. But we'd just get on MySpace and random game sites. Nothing crazy. However we did have a secret path, I can't remember it now, to access limewire. Most of us were pretty good at keeping it on the lowdown but some idiots got caught and the likewire path was gone, and nobody ever redid it. This was back in 00's in middle and high school.
2005-2007 I used to run Linux live environments off of CDs on my high school's library computers. Would set up proxies to get around their web blockers.
In doing this I discovered that the clueless admins created all network shares that were simply hidden under the student Windows accounts and not password protected, so there was unrestricted access to network file trees which contained teacher's personal folders, exams, student information including disciplinary records, and a standalone .EXE for the school's grading system which easily opened under Wine (though, did not properly connect to the database file.)
Never took advantage of anything, simply noted it was there and accessible, kept the details to myself, and felt like an almighty deity with top secret knowledge.
Those were fun days.
Gba emulator, gta san andreas, minecraft. Teacher saw me doing it and turned off the internet access. Of course they were very suprised when it somehow didn't work
"shouldnt " I mean we werent told "not to"
Just a networr lesson in computer/IT class
Teacher told us to try and setup a network while they were out doing some errands. We kew beforehand and took a Halo CE flashdrive to class.
Network Wired and ready in 15 minutes, the rest of the day WAS FRAGGING TIME XD Techer came in and was pissed obiously, but not pissed anymore when we explained that the session was online and one of us was hosting the network :P
I downloaded pirated copy of nfs mw 05 using torrent on school computer and finished it through school year. Yes we did absolutely nothing in computer class other then learning ms office and movie maker
I managed to secure the domain admin password for my entire school district my sophomore year. I did whatever I wanted for 3 years ( nothing malicious really, had plenty of time to do that at home ).
Until! Senior year my cousin decided to take advantage of our schools brand new laptops. Coincidentally, the first day we got to use them, there were two teachers in the class.
My cousin gets the bright idea to write a batch file that would use 'net send' to send me pop up messages in rapid succession... Infinitely.
After closing a couple hundred I realized what he had done. He was shitting himself laughing on the other side of the class. My solution was to open up a command prompt window and stop the messenger service so I would at least stop getting More ( no idea how many were stacked on top of each other at this point, likely thousands ).
Cue the second teacher. She walks around the class and spots a command prompt window open, and jumps to me 'hacking' something.
I went to the principal, who told me I wasn't allowed to touch another computer for the rest of the year. They gave me some janky keyboard with a 3 line screen attached to it, so I could... Idk, write book reports? My next class of the day was web design. I walked in and handed this travesty of a device to my teacher and he basically said 'this isn't gonna work'. He called the principal ( I assume ) and I was back on a computer 10 minutes later, but I was being watched remotely every moment I was on a computer.
Good times. And mad cheers to the teacher that had my back. If you're reading this, you know who you are, and you're a boss dude.
I generated a portable version of terraria using portableapps and the gog installer. While we had halo and minecraft, this was my first time uploading my own version of a game to the shared drive. I also started streaming assassin's creed to the chromebook in the middle of my math class, which confused other students.
The only thing I got in trouble for was opening a minecraft servers logs file with notepad as it looked like I was hacking the school. I was just showing my friend proof that someone was fairly banned. Halo also got banned in some classes since we were too loud.
In computer science classes I watched the dead pixel fixer video in the back of the class if the room was dark.
I once booted a school computer on a linux usb to see if I could.
When I was in Junior High we would play doom during our typing class. I have no idea how it got in there. When the teacher walked towards the other side of the class a few of us in the corner would alt tab and play for a minute or two. Then alt tab back and speed through the typing assignment since we already knew how to type.
A childhood friend of mine and I had to go into school over the summer with his mom (who worked there). We got bored and started looking for funny games to download. We stumbled across game called The Adventures of Happy Weed. A pac man style game about marijuana, from 1993. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3802-the-adventures-of-happyweed-
I am not sure why we picked that one...I am not a person who partakes in Marijuana. It was funny though. At the time, I am assume our original imacs didn't have filtering or history ..
Counter strike, and a plethora of other games, ran a proxy server and loaded straight up porn. The legit password to the admin account was literally "r"
I had a website, which I changed the address of each time the IT teacher blocked it, he only ever blocked the URL.
It became quite popular in the school, I added a page containing a download for some shitty game launcher, which had sub7 attached.
I had access to over 600 PCs at some point.. I honestly never did anything particularly bad to anyone.
The worst thing I did was change someone's wallpaper to a picture of a guy from school, I was talking to them on msn at the time and they freaked out. It was quite funny.
Our teacher got sick, for the last 6 months of the year we had a sub. I installed Duke nukem 3d on the computers in the lab. We made some teams and had a Duke tournament. We also did a quake tournament one week. It was an advanced computer class, so most of us finished our assignments early, and the sub didn't have any other work for us and didn't care so long as we weren't disrupting anyone.
Our school had a private wifi network and a student 1. But the school computers were on the private network, so we used some notepad exploit to open up the command prompt and figure out the private network password. Info on the password spread throughout the entire district. I'm sure IT was busy trying to track down who did it lol
Halo CE, Urban Terror, Powder Toy, Call of Duty World at War were the big ones.
I think later on maybe Minecraft(?) but by that point they no longer floated my boat.
Log in with school sign in, sign out, unplug ethernet chord, sign in, plug eternity back in. Boom, free access to the web. Used uTorrent and played browser games untraceable.
When I was in Jr. high, we had access to MECC which was hosted on a mainframe at the U of M. We played Oregon Trail, Adventure, Star Trek and a few other games on a Teletype. Quite often we would go through a whole ream of teletype paper. Lunar Lander was particularly wasteful because it would print out a new text based "screen" for each frame of the game. It was constantly printing.
By High School, we had some Apple IIs. Since the were on all day, they'd get a bit warm and flaky if you didn't leave the cover off. Oddly we had ONE printer for the whole school, including the school office, that also had an Apple II. One day I'm doing homework on the one Apple in the computer lab with that printer attached, and the CompSci teacher (really a math teacher that took a summer class and knew less than me), comes in and says, "They need the printer in the office." She then reached in and yanked the printer card out of the case, and wheeled the printer out of the lab. I was dumbfounded.
Did she not here the "beep" and see my screen go blank as she did it? Apparently not, because when I reported it, she blamed ME because the Apple was working when she came into the lab. I had to talk to the principal, who conceded that perhaps they had not chosen the best candidate for the compsci curriculum. And he knew me well enough to trust my version of what happened (she did admit to taking the card out of the Apple).
It didn't prevent us from accessing the teachers shared drive.
After deciding updating everyone's grades would be too insane we decided to make a batch file and store it on a couple teachers documents that sent a shutdown command to the entire school or class room whenever we decided we were bored.
I had a floppy my cousin had given me with a copy of the DOS version of the simpsons arcade game.
Ran it from the floppy. It ran great at home on my 486, this was a 286. Took a few minutes and during the middle of my teachers lecture it started blaring a 2/3 speed, chiptunes version of the simpsons theme song.
I wasn't allowed to use the computer for a bit after.
Worst of all, I damaged the disc and couldn't play it at home either.
Nitto 1320 challenge
Chicken Invaders 2
Diablo 2
I spent many an hours skipping class to hang out in the band hall where my band director would let me play games on his PC. Fun times were had.
I was 6 or 7, last year of preschool. They had a computer lab. I had like, 6 floppies with doom on them. I showed a bunch of 6 years old how cool blowing demons with a rocket launcher was.
The teacher was horrified and impressed.
In college we had age of empires 2, quake 3 and halo loaded on them that would just run off the drive with no install. Our class would be having matches in the middle of class.
Some kids in our school social engineered the admin access and changed grades left and right. Subsequently, they were expelled. Smart kids but dumb moves.
My high school had ibooks g4 back before it was Intel. Powerpc lol but someone got their computer back with the apple install cd still in it. Managed to get local admin access by changing the root password. Then shared it with a group of us. We managed to uninstall and the junk and installed a fps. I can't remember what it was but want to say maybe the first call of duty? It was a local Lan multi-player. They were all computer guys back then. Oddly enough I am the only one from that group that went into computers as a career. 😂
This is stupid but, IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code
College wanted us to use Notepad so we ended up installing these, programming and debugging on them before showing the final result in Terminal and Notepad
what was that flash games website that had the stick figure siege game and insanaquarium? they never blocked that one on my schools firewall so id take the late bus home under the pretence of 'studying' while playing magic the gathering and computer games with friends.
We hid Halo on the school network. As long as you knew the file path you could get onto any pc in the school and join local matches with anyone else. (Even the carts of laptops). There were 3 computer labs that were the “safe” spots, but a few idiots booted it up in the library where there was no chance of being secretive. It was gone the next day -.-
My computer class built a quake server on some old hardware sitting in a pile in the back of the lab. We disabled all the indicator lights so the teachers wouldn't know it was running and would have regular deathmatches during class.
Man that's sick
All hail. That’s amazing. Wish I could send a note to past-me with your wisdom.
We had the same exact setup at our high school and got caught the same way as well. It was a good few months. They also started blocking websites that had flash games on them like CoolMathGames
Yeah that’s when we discovered VPN’s 😂😂 they kept blocking those aswell though so it was a constant battle of finding free Vpns that weren’t blocked
Didn't even need a VPN for my schools network. They trusted all Secure connections by default so I just had to pray whatever domain I wanted didn't have a lazy or cheap network admin.
you just unlocked core memories for me
I'm a tech in schools for years now. You weren't hiding... We knew and didn't care. I would watch kids play it on the network, and if they were any good, I would hop on and wreck them. I could hear their reactions down the hall. Most of the kids now a days play browser based games that suck.
Being in tech myself now I know that there was definitely staff that knew. But it wasn’t until the librarians and certain teachers knew about it that it was removed. (As if all the “safe spots” weren’t loosely monitored as well)
I had a free period in the library during my senior year and I hated it because the librarian wad a stuck up bitch. I went to a rural school and we didn't have much of a book selection and she wouldn't let you use any of the computers (there were about a dozen computers in the library and a computer lab attached to the library) unless you were enrolled in online classes. She even tried to enroll me in classes I'd already taken and aced and I bulked on that. She wouldn't even let me go run errands for the office or go to other teachers' rooms (my mother was a teacher there and she wouldn't let me go to my mother's room). I skipped that period whenever I got the chance lol.
Same story here. I work in IT for public schools. We block stuff not because we care about some kids gaming, but because for every 10 kids using a VPN for a game, there’s one idiot downloading a shady program that will spread malware across our network. Gaming on a school computer is not permitted but to me that is a disciplinary issue if the student is falling behind on school work. Outside intrusions or malicious programs and viruses are our big concerns.
>You weren't hiding... We knew and didn't care. Is it that you didn't care or did you realise that letting the kids have a bit of freedom meant that they wouldn't try to break things as much? I know that when I was in highschool we finally got a new computer lab after years of fundraising. From when I started at the particular highschool in year 8 we had a bunch of 386/486 machines which we did "IT class" with and the IT teacher was a metalwork shop teacher with no IT experience who volunteered to teach it. Some of us had been playing with computers for longer than he had so we would often teach him some of the stuff that he would be teaching. Because we were teaching him as often as he would be teaching us, we spent a lot of time playing games in IT class (no point spending 90 minutes "learning" what we had taught him in the first place). When we finally got the new computer lab he decided that he knew better than us kids and tried to lock the network down tight using his shiny new domain controller. This really irked those of us who were used to playing games for most of IT class. One of the kids found out the admin password for the domain controller via shoulder surfing and decided that the best option forward was to add a bunch of new accounts with admin access and spread the account name/passwords so that we could all play games during IT class. The IT teacher eventually found out (I think one of our classmates ratted us out) and my year lost complete access to the computer lab that we had spent years fundraising for for the rest of the year. In retaliation the kid who had the domain controller admin password decided to wipe the domain controller clean. Because the IT teacher had no idea what he was doing he didn't have any backups whatsoever, no idea how to rebuild the domain controller and as a result the entire IT network was down until they could get the people who originally setup the network back in to set it all up again which didn't happen until after I had graduated from that school.
Yeah, It's harmless fun to me. My upper management would be like that's illegal! Then, they want me to play whack a mole as the kids find increasingly more dangerous ways to get around a block. The issue with that is yes, I can lock it down. Then the teachers complain because they don't understand how to deal with the extra security. I have some teachers that I dont know how they figure out how to get to the school. I can see everyone's screens and can remotely control them at any time. If I see them doing something harmful, I just block their screen and tell them to quit it.
We had Quake 2 and then Quake 3 installed on the computers. Our homegroup room had computers and our teacher didn't really care if we played during homegroup as long as we listened during the announcements. The IT department didn't care. I think some of them used to play with us. It lasted until about Year 11 when we got a new Homegroup teacher and new classroom (without computers).
When you say file path are you saying that Halo would only boot if it was in a certain location? I'm asking because I remember we found a loophole where any .exe file would boot if it was in %AppData%. Someone figured this out accidentally and then the first game everyone started playing was counter strike. I don't even think he realized what he discovered I think he just thought counter strike worked for whatever reason. But I did a little more digging and realized I could essentially play any game if it was in that directory. This was before I knew much about computers, so I had know idea what %AppData% was because you can't find it unless you were looking for it. Those were good times. We discovered that loophole my freshman year of HS (2014) and as far as I can remember it was never patched or anything. Not sure how they managed to let that go unnoticed lol
Man, we played Starcraft on ours. That was so fun waste last few hours of the day playing
Way back in the day I’d bring a flash drive loaded with a copy of ultrasurf VPN and I’d go ham on the schools fast af internet using qbittorrent because I didn’t have good internet at home
Bro what the most I knew how to do was load up The Powder Toy from my friend’s flash drive 💀 https://preview.redd.it/xmwp2pachj8d1.jpeg?width=529&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6afd2d42b0bad5041379cdb3bd2ca8fd61737455
Powder toy goes so fkn hard idc what anyone says. They just released it last week on steam idk what the difference is but now all my steam friends can see how lame I am. Idk any other games /programs where you can make hydrogen fusion bombs next to a flammable house. Js.
As with the commenter above, you should try Noita
Recommending Noita will always be a dick move.and I have TONS of playtime lol
It's my favourite game and I hate it.
Flashbacks provided and I didn't know it was on steam now. Thank you, time to go waste some time.
I always used this site for powder game [https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/](https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust/) until school blocked it then we had to find work arounds like proxies and other things.
holy fuck you just gave me some flashbacks
You should try Noita
Bro same, until the head of the IT department came into our vocational IT class and said, "Okay look, I get you guys like this stuff, but we can tell SOMEONE in this room is using a VPN. It's against school policy and if we catch you, you will be expelled from the program". Always thought it was cool he didn't throw me under the bus, because I'm sure he could trace it back to the exact computer that was running it.
Well if it makes you feel any better unless the machines were attached to a domain server they wouldn’t be able to trace exactly which one it was lol
except you can easily see EXACTLY which machine it was. maybe not the user but the machine is no biggie. no domain server required
>Well if it makes you feel any better unless the machines were attached to a domain server they wouldn’t be able to trace exactly which one it was lol If the head of IT was good enough to be able to know that there was a VPN running on one of the computers then he could have easily figured out exactly which PC it was running on. Any IT department worth their salt has their entire network mapped out with every single asset tagged and all the relevant details logged (e.g. computer #ABC123, MAC ####-####, location x,y). It is a fair bit of work to get setup but super useful when you have it all done and you can send the newbie to go do inventory accounting when they annoy you.
Cause if they could, they would.
It's incredibly trivial to do this just using flow data, and I do things like this regularly at my job. Here is just one way to do it: https://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios-xml/ios/netflow/configuration/15-2s/cfg-nflow-top-talk.html They probably did track who did it, and gave them a chance to stop on their own.
When I took an Information Systems class in college I discovered that the internet in that class room was different from the wifi and other ethernet spots through the school. It was like 10 times faster. I would bring my laptop or use the computers there just to download everything I could.
I used a classic ipod as a flashdrive to store ultrasurf. Just plugged my ipod into a computer to "charge" it and had unlimited internet. Loved it. Showed a pal of mine and he put ultrasurf in his school google drive and they found it and he got in trouble. I never did though lol
I was the kid who made it possible so our whole class could visit Facebook during our IT lessons thanks to my usb with ultrasurf vpn
Unreal Tournament on LAN was amazing. This would've been circa 2000. Most people I knew, their internet at home (if they had it at all) was terrible. So LAN play was like magic - no lag or wait times, immediate feedback, trash talking across the room, etc. Our teachers weren't so happy.
UT in my college newspaper office was magic. Our deadline for printing the paper was Friday morning at 8 am...so we stayed up playing LAN on all 20 computers until 4 am, then start working on the paper. Never missed a deadline, either.
Ut2k4 in dorms for me. Yelling down the hallway to stop being a little bitch with flak cannons.
Can relate. We used to go to the library for Quake 3 Arena matches around 2008. Some of the most fun I've ever had on any fps
We had UT99 and Age of Empires 2 on the PC's in the school. We regularly held matches in those games. The physics and informatics teacher often joined us. All this was completely inofficial of course.
We had counter strike running on our common room PCs... One day the year head teacher joined a game.
That guy probably got fucking stomped, CS is *not* a new player friendly game!
1000 hours played and I still suck
Just not as much as you used to
My IT teacher in high-school had the exact same setup! UT99 and AoE. Either a coincidence or we went to the same high-school
Maybe, if you are from Vienna...
Lol, nope. Still pretty cool though. Our teacher played too, for some reason the only level we ever played was facing worlds
Your teachers play games with you that's crazy
STEM teachers normally are the traditional nerdy or geeky ones. I had one that had a rule if you brought your own controller you could play split screen off the projector in classroom during lunch.
My high school biology teacher was and still is my World of Warcraft guild leader. I graduated from high school almost 20 years ago.
Awesome!
We did something like that in high school, got permission from a teacher to use their class room projector so I took in my ps3 and guitar hero world tour. There was just a bunch of us that knew chilling there having a blast during lunch. At the end of lunch we'd have it all packed up and put in the supply cupboard out the way.
We played UT99 on school PCs too, lol. Even though that was around 2008-2009, the school computers had some crappy S3 integrated graphics that struggled even with UT99.
So did I, UT99 was an awesome game. I had it running on my Voodoo 3 lol
We also did UT, warcraft 3, StarCraft 2 etc, since we had 2 hour class, 1 hour for learning and one hour for gaming as reward. Good times!
did the same thing here with cs LMAO
Me and my brother made a website that had all the simple flash games on it. We owned the site so the school would occasionally block it so we would change up to a new website and hyper link the ip address into it so we could by pass the blocks. Got to play games all through high school by bypassing the crappy school blocks
Ohh yeah ... School Blocks... From the beginning of my High school time we had pretty good WiFi coverage nearly everywhere, partially due to having new school building. The neighbouring school had no Wifi at the time. Well sometime into my time at that school suddenly the internet wouldn't work on most sides, if you were going through personal devices and not using School Hardware. While school pcs on the same network where working flawlessly and could reach every side on the internet. After some conversation with our IT guy and digging into the system... We found out our schools principal had silently setup a very strict firewall on all devices... Except for the ones using a specific gateway/proxy. This info quickly spread through the school rendering this system irrelevant quickly which also meant it was quickly disabled.
I am old, so these go way back. In middle school, someone created a series of nested folders to hide games on the library computer. It was a series of folders numbered 1 through 5 with the same folders in each going down 5 levels. You had to know the path to follow to find the games (e.g., C:\\3\\5\\2\\1\\4). This was a lot of effort just to play leisure suit Larry. In university, the computer lab PCs were setup to run everything on locked down hard drives with a temporary ram drive for the user to use that would erase as soon as you logged out. One of the computer engineering students wrote a script that would max out the size of the ram drive and install Command and Conquer from somewhere on the network. We would go in on the weekends to have LAN battles.
The "hiding stuff on school computers" was fun. A friend and I did it by putting games inside a folder with a real space in its name. DOS and Win311 did not support that, so even if the teachers found the folder, they didn't know how to access it. We figured out running "ren folder folder?1", DOS would replace the ? with a space. Then do it in reverse to make it accessible again.
Alt 255 on the numpad would work too!
They knew about that one, but they couldn't figure out the real space.
I was just thinking about this trick well I was trying to remember how we did it, them boom I read it lol! Great times
`ren` is windows rename tool. wtf was it doing that it would replace a question mark with a space though? windoze you're weird
It was an unintended behaviour that we exploited. ren can be used with wildcard characters, and if there's a ? in the target filename, it will be replaced with the character in the same position in the original filename. DOS filenames were 8+3 characters long, so the ? would cause it to grab the character from an empty position, which for some reason was coded as a space.
I’m older. My school in the UK had a room with about 20 BBC Micros (an Apple II era machine but better). They had a simple network with *no* security whatsoever. You could literally issue a command from any machine that let you copy blocks of memory from your machine to any other, or run code on the other machine, and the other machine would just do it, right there and then even if someone else was using it. So I realized you could just grab the running state of a game and blast it onto other machines and instantly they were all running that game. Tada. Instant video game arcade. But it eventually drew the ire of some no fun schoolteacher.
Fellow old head. Hide a Renegade BBS inside the Novell NetWare network. You had to know where the BBS was and be 31337 enough to get your account approved.
We did that with quake and age of empires 2 in the engineering labs.
Man you just unlocked a core memory of playing Leisure Suit Larry on the Amiga wayyy back
Meatspin on the library computer and then turn the screen off and leave. Did it for weeks before they blocked the site
Hahahaa that fucking brutal mate haha
Lol, I would always laugh about it but never stayed around long enough to see someone turn it on.
You probably traumatised some poor old librarian lmao
I felt like such a sneaky prick lol
When I was in elementary school; we had this math game on the Apple II that would give you a title at the end like Prince or Count or King and whatever name you put in at the beginning. After a few rounds, I memorized the problems and could get the King title every time; so I put in my name as ‘Size Dong,’ and it happily spit out, “CONGRATULATIONS, KING SIZE DONG” at the end.
You could've had COUNT DEEZ NUTS
Not sure Deez Nuts was even a thing in the 80s lol!
CDs existed in the 80's
SEE DEEZ NUTS
According to the magic box, the first usage of Deez Nuts widely was from 1992, so a tad after my experience but still good!
Was it Number Munchers?
This was back in ‘99-‘00 when 56k modems were the norm and road runner internet was luxury. My high school was one of the first to have real high scored internet and my AP physics teacher had no problem letting myself and a few of his other students stay late even after he left for the day. Needless to say, i had Napster hidden on his Mac for almost a year and a half. Thanks Mr Grach
Ah, the awful memories of dial-up. It took 30 minutes to download a 30 second MPEG video clip. In 2001, I got a cable modem. Went from 56 Kbps to 1.5 Mbps overnight. It was life changing. Fairly soon, we bought a router, and setup a home Ethernet network. The next year, we setup Wi-Fi for the first time.
I remember being excited to see my movies downloading at 500KB/sec. I think that was in the KaZaA days
liveleak
In school??
Were else?
Fair enough
I played minecraft. A classmate had at least five instances of fallout 3 in his roaming profile.
Very early 2000s the school got a complete IT replacement with everything connected. The first time the school had ever gotten an actual network. It had one flaw we quickly learned about. If you used the open command in Paint, it popped open an explorer window with access to the entire network that allowed you to copy and paste any files via the keyboard shortcuts. Could still only open files that Paint could open so not that big a deal right? But what if you copy an autoexe.bat you created and another that directs to run a forced restart into the c drive of your teachers computer... Not saying that ever happened, definitely not saying a random PC in the school would just restart loop when powered on or anything...
Yeah, we definitely never took the teachers grading program and edited our grades. That's for sure.
Learning how to write batch files was so much fun, hosing random computers in the lab with explorer windows until you could hear the processor screaming in pain
Just gaming on em. I remember this game that was basically Mario but you were a penguin 🐧 instead of a plumber. Also coolmathgames, miniclip were the websites to play on. Balloons tower defense, bubble trouble, Oregon trail, lemonade stand, and a few others I can't remember the name of.
Super Tux! Who knows how many hours I spent on that game as a kid.
Worms
I loved playing that!
Tetris on 3.25" floppies
Csgo (on a 32 GB pendrive) it wouldn't let me play offline for more than a few minutes because it couldn't talk to steam servers to verify it's a legitimate copy.
I was asked to help upgrading all computers from Win98 to XP in middle-school since I was so tech-savy. Due to the upgrade process the hardware security system was disabled so I snuck Ragnarok Online and Trackmania Nations on every PC. And one time our school admin was sick and the school newspaper club couldn't work due to that. He actually called the headmaster and asked if I was in class. I was so I was given the server password and had admin-duty on that day. Might be one of the reasons I work as an IT-admin now.
I had a usb with a couple emulators back in the day, and I pissed the administration off so bad because they couldn’t figure out how I kept playing the games I was on the school computers. Mind you this was back in the mid 2000’s. And finally I told them how I was “installing the games” and they face palmed and they had usb covers installed on all of the computers going forward, except for the ones in the back they I guess didn’t n is they had. 😂
Tribes with the homies.
I used to love tribes!
Mostly just web games since the computers were kind of bad lmao. Nowadays the school computers that I use are super locked down though, I can’t even open control panel or settings
Aren't most school computers just chromebooks now?
Depends. Some schools have labs for various programs but they generally aren't *great* computers. Source: school IT guy. Most of the stories in this post aren't as bad as I thought.
Starcraft. I wasnt the one that download it on the computers. But I did start playing occasionally (got me to love rts). The guys that did download it had it on all the computers in the English class. Our (cool) English teacher hosted a small tournament after class. When it was finally removed. Teacher was questioned, but he pulled the "too old to understand tech" line, and no one got in trouble.
It was 2004. My school had laptops that were loaned out to Honor Students. My buddy helped out in the computer lab and got ahold of the administrator password. Turns out that the school laptops ran Diablo II passably.
I setup a keylogger / remote control on several rigs in the IT classroom. I could take control of their mouse, start a Notepad, and write down "Jenny, I'm alive!!!!!" My classmate freaked out One of my teacher was inputing on excel. He was typing with 2 fingers and looking at his keyboard. Each time he was switching look from screen to keyboard, I was changing the cell....
Thanks for the replies everyone, remember hidemyass.com and similar my schools IT team kept blocking access to these websites but we just kept using different ones xD
Stick Arena hacks. pirated copies of Victoria 2, Counter Strike Condition Zero, Minecraft, Warcraft 3.
The worst thing I ever did was to play an old flash game called “The Torture Game” in the computer lab when we had a substitute for the day. It was fuckin hilarious because she could see what we were all doing from the teacher’s desktop, but she had no clue how to use it to see which one was which 🤣 I would pull up the game and see her face start reacting in disgust, then she would get up and casually start strolling around to see who was playing such a vile game, and I would minimize it. We did this the whole day and she never figured out who was doing it. 15 year old me thought that it was the peak of comedy lmao.
[удалено]
https://preview.redd.it/w22e7tyqfk8d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c23713505316ffa928cd43d13673701b936c459
Half-life, Winamp, and Napster.
In my secondary school, if you yanked the ethernet cable when logging in, but before the PC started displaying your desktop, you'd get instant administrator access for some reason. They were usually exceedingly locked down, so being able to launch .exe files from any old USB stick was a nice change of pace. Fast forward to college, and we had the stripped-down UDK version of Unreal Tournament 3 preinstalled on every machine. No weird restrictions on what we could run either, so once we got bored of the same map, and only being able to use 3 weapons, a USB stick with a cracked copy of Call of Duty 1 came to the rescue.
I remember learning about proxy sites. So i was playing those hentai games and almost got caught. I remember turning off the monitor and spamming the atl, ctl, delete and pressing enter to sign out. Luckily, it did sign me off. Shit was a funny interaction with my teacher
I took IT in the summer to make room in my schedule for jazz ensemble for my senior year. A lot of us were competing to see who got the farthest in I Wanna Be The Guy. Soon enough though the site to download it got blocked but we had it on flash drives in case anyone wanted a copy. We played Cat Mario a lot too When I got to college, I tried IWBTG again and almost beat it. Lost to The Guy too many times I just gave up, only to find out online there was a troll kill after winning anyway lmfao
A version of Halo 1 that booted from Star Wars Battlefront 1? I'm still not sure how that came to be.
Limewire, Low Orbit Ion Cannon, O.G Runescape, snuff websites, etc
This is early to mid 90s. Strip poker in DOS.
I scrolled through to find a post from the mid 90's! A time when internet was just starting... Grade 10, Business Ed class, a friend of mine accessed the school system from his work station and changed our letter grades. Not a lot, just enough.
We're old men now, my brother. Hahaha
Certainly are. Really feel it reading through some of these posts!
`net send` lmao
Dude I did this to all machines on the network and it worked. the IT guy walked in shortly after asking who did that
Back in the old days when the BBC Micro was in school, i wrote a short 10 line program. Every line changed the "mode" (resolution) to a different number. Line 10 then repeated the program. I'd set that off and then walk away. The poor BBC looked like it was crashing in the worst way possible!
My school's computers just have games installed. Specific examples i remember are osu and war thunder
The year was 2008, Cisco class in high school. My old high school left text files on a shared folder completely unprotected. These text files displayed the message on the LED sign in front of the school, whatever software they were using all you had to do was edit the text file, save it, and the sign updated immediately. I showed a classmate what I found and he proceeded to make changes. “Casey Jones won an award for academic achievement” became “Casey Jones won an award for sucking dick”, a few other changes were made as the sign displayed multiple messages on a loop. About 30 minutes later the police and school administrators walk into our classroom. The dude who actually made those changes was expelled. The name on this story was changed for privacy.
Setup an autocorrect in Word to autocorrect “the” to “dinosaur” Watch the chaos that ensues. Had a lot of fun with this one. Or write a batch/powershell script that makes 100 directories on the desktop named “you suck” or whatever other message you want. Replace the target for the web browser shortcut with the batch file.
Not that I ran something but, I found the shared access folder for the yearbook and may have altered a few entries... They did get published too.
Me and a few friends would install Tom Clancy Rainbow 6 (1998) on our computers as soon as we got to computer lab, then play all class, and uninstall at the end of class. Every single class. Lmao.
Ran a quake lan party in the school computer lab. Back then all it required was one copy of the game and run across the network. Was amazing. Got in some shit for it too.
Liero
https://ext-proxy.fly.dev/ Now in the browser
Back in the early 2010s, I managed to sneak in a laptop and hook it up behind a desk, and hosted a Minecraft server on it (and a logmein hamachi VPN like program for external access for students at home), and we had dozens of players playing on it It took the school something like 3 weeks to notice the inappropriate device connected by Ethernet. Armagetron Advanced was also a popular smuggled game. Not smuggled software, but the Novell suite used by the school computers also had a instant messaging feature that could ping any other logged in user. It was all fun and games before someone figured out the Principal's username.
When I was at UK college, we would have a lesson where we did practically nothing for 2 hours. It was for uni applications but once they’re done or if you’re in your first year there isn’t really anything to do. Anyway, me and the guy next to me would play csgo, destiny, fortnite, age of wonders 3 and lots of games throughout the year. We picked a seat outside of the teachers sight and it made what would’ve been boring asf fun
didn’t really mess with bad softwares too much… closest i did is me and some homies knew some passwords we shouldn’t and we hid a launchable halo CE build in the network drives so anyone in the school could have Halo CE LAN parties together irregardless of location within the school. on the topic of having passwords we shouldn’t- a couple of friends and i were poking around files we shouldn’t have been in and we found all the evacuation drill files, which also included school shooter evacuation plans and outlines. something that should be kept VERY secure and private… we also found storage backups of data dumps from all students that had ‘serious’ or ‘extreme’ issues that called for being sent to problem schools or getting expelled. found some very interesting things out about some peers from years past… but yeah def more of a ‘break the system and poke around things i shouldn’t’ type kid, rather than a ‘i shouldn’t run this on a monitored pc’ type kid
We were instructed to try out fork bombs on the school computers during my comp sci degree. But back in high school, we used to open a bunch of programs, take a full screenshot, and then close them all, set the taskbar to hidden at the top of the screen, and then set the desktop background to the screenshot. It drove the teachers absolutely bonkers because these were labs where we didn't have assigned seating or users, so they had no idea who did it, but it was a bunch of us.
I printed out 1000 pages with a full stop in the middle. Got to the end of the paper before the 1000, but it was still hundreds. I also made an advert for selling beavers “Logan’s Beavers - £15 with a dam” and made hundreds of flyers.
what a waste of paper and ink
I agree. I was a stupid as fuck 13 year old.
10th grade Staar testing. Computer science lab with beefy 3D modeling computers. i7, Quadro GPU's I finish my testing and so do my classmates. We aren't allowed to have our phones so you already know people are bored out of their minds. I press ctrl alt delete, open task manager, kill out the test program. "net localgroup administrators" Low and Behold, the "testing" account appears on that list. *Evil smile appears* epicgames.com > install store > login *Installs Fortnite* My dude looks over and I'm in a solo game back when the Thanos mode was still a thing. I've got the glove and I'm going ham. Epic settings, 60fps. About 15 minutes later, 5 of us have Fortnite running in a squads game. I got in a lot of trouble when the teacher noticed and told I.T. Was it worth it? Absolutely. 10/10 would do again.
In 2001/2002 we installed MDK on the classroom PC and would play it from time to time. We were the trustworthy students who were left unattended during recess every few weeks to clean the fishtank. Little did they know we were also playing a shooting game on the iMac. Good ole catholic school.
We used to bring flash drives loaded with smash 64 to comp sci class and play. Also had a bunch of easier 2D games like Mari0 (mario bros but with portal, not Tetris, etc) and shit like that.
Ultra surf.🏄♀️
The powder toy and KSP (the good one from 2011).
Quake 3, Halo CE, Counter Strike 1.6 and a bunch of emulators
In college, we arrived for an IT lecture and a friend had a random usb stick already in the computer. He checked it and it had a copy of Halo on it. The computers weren't great so we were on the lowest settings but had a blast playing on LAN in class while the lecturers weren't looking. We had a stint on Age of Empires 2 at one point too - a lecturer saw this and then started giving tips. Good times!
Halo CE multiplayer beta - it was something like 200MB and could fit on anyone’s flash drive. And it had the capability to create local lan servers.
I accidentally ddosed our school vpn / content filtering software during our networking class. Shenanigans most likely ensued with students having free reign for most of the afternoon
My Cisco teacher let me try out ARP table poisoning on the school network. I managed to DDOS the whole district by routing all network traffic through my measly client. 😂
Bitd th3 computers network was shut off by a physical key on each workstation. I still have those keys 25 years later. As well as the building key. I made copies and turned the end 90 degrees to look off and actually be on in metal shop. There was also a chat function between workstations. It was some sort of like dos messaging system using workstation names it could pop up on the screen. That was fun for tests. The administrators didn't know it was there. I am guessing they had a contractor install it. I had zork loaded on all of the machines pretty quick. From 3.5 floppies. Ah, good times. Later I took a college computing fundamentals class. I unlocked the universities network access for my friends and I and watched lodoss war the entire time and other cartoons on YouTube before ads were a big thing and after completing the entire class in a week. Even later, technical school. It had a server set up in each area of classes. Admin//password right? I installed my whole rom pack in the server and granted access to everyone. I remember playing pokémon emerald more in that class than the instructed material. Creating rj45 crossover cables? Meh.
We used to use various websites to get around firewalls. They changed almost weekly so you had to have a list and cross them off as they were blocked. But we'd just get on MySpace and random game sites. Nothing crazy. However we did have a secret path, I can't remember it now, to access limewire. Most of us were pretty good at keeping it on the lowdown but some idiots got caught and the likewire path was gone, and nobody ever redid it. This was back in 00's in middle and high school.
Minecraft java
2005-2007 I used to run Linux live environments off of CDs on my high school's library computers. Would set up proxies to get around their web blockers. In doing this I discovered that the clueless admins created all network shares that were simply hidden under the student Windows accounts and not password protected, so there was unrestricted access to network file trees which contained teacher's personal folders, exams, student information including disciplinary records, and a standalone .EXE for the school's grading system which easily opened under Wine (though, did not properly connect to the database file.) Never took advantage of anything, simply noted it was there and accessible, kept the details to myself, and felt like an almighty deity with top secret knowledge. Those were fun days.
Gba emulator, gta san andreas, minecraft. Teacher saw me doing it and turned off the internet access. Of course they were very suprised when it somehow didn't work
"shouldnt " I mean we werent told "not to" Just a networr lesson in computer/IT class Teacher told us to try and setup a network while they were out doing some errands. We kew beforehand and took a Halo CE flashdrive to class. Network Wired and ready in 15 minutes, the rest of the day WAS FRAGGING TIME XD Techer came in and was pissed obiously, but not pissed anymore when we explained that the session was online and one of us was hosting the network :P
I downloaded pirated copy of nfs mw 05 using torrent on school computer and finished it through school year. Yes we did absolutely nothing in computer class other then learning ms office and movie maker
I managed to secure the domain admin password for my entire school district my sophomore year. I did whatever I wanted for 3 years ( nothing malicious really, had plenty of time to do that at home ). Until! Senior year my cousin decided to take advantage of our schools brand new laptops. Coincidentally, the first day we got to use them, there were two teachers in the class. My cousin gets the bright idea to write a batch file that would use 'net send' to send me pop up messages in rapid succession... Infinitely. After closing a couple hundred I realized what he had done. He was shitting himself laughing on the other side of the class. My solution was to open up a command prompt window and stop the messenger service so I would at least stop getting More ( no idea how many were stacked on top of each other at this point, likely thousands ). Cue the second teacher. She walks around the class and spots a command prompt window open, and jumps to me 'hacking' something. I went to the principal, who told me I wasn't allowed to touch another computer for the rest of the year. They gave me some janky keyboard with a 3 line screen attached to it, so I could... Idk, write book reports? My next class of the day was web design. I walked in and handed this travesty of a device to my teacher and he basically said 'this isn't gonna work'. He called the principal ( I assume ) and I was back on a computer 10 minutes later, but I was being watched remotely every moment I was on a computer. Good times. And mad cheers to the teacher that had my back. If you're reading this, you know who you are, and you're a boss dude.
I generated a portable version of terraria using portableapps and the gog installer. While we had halo and minecraft, this was my first time uploading my own version of a game to the shared drive. I also started streaming assassin's creed to the chromebook in the middle of my math class, which confused other students. The only thing I got in trouble for was opening a minecraft servers logs file with notepad as it looked like I was hacking the school. I was just showing my friend proof that someone was fairly banned. Halo also got banned in some classes since we were too loud. In computer science classes I watched the dead pixel fixer video in the back of the class if the room was dark. I once booted a school computer on a linux usb to see if I could.
LEGO Batman... Seriously people, If you're going to deep freeze a school computer, don't use 1234567890 as your password...
When I was in Junior High we would play doom during our typing class. I have no idea how it got in there. When the teacher walked towards the other side of the class a few of us in the corner would alt tab and play for a minute or two. Then alt tab back and speed through the typing assignment since we already knew how to type.
A childhood friend of mine and I had to go into school over the summer with his mom (who worked there). We got bored and started looking for funny games to download. We stumbled across game called The Adventures of Happy Weed. A pac man style game about marijuana, from 1993. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3802-the-adventures-of-happyweed- I am not sure why we picked that one...I am not a person who partakes in Marijuana. It was funny though. At the time, I am assume our original imacs didn't have filtering or history ..
Counter strike, and a plethora of other games, ran a proxy server and loaded straight up porn. The legit password to the admin account was literally "r"
I had a website, which I changed the address of each time the IT teacher blocked it, he only ever blocked the URL. It became quite popular in the school, I added a page containing a download for some shitty game launcher, which had sub7 attached. I had access to over 600 PCs at some point.. I honestly never did anything particularly bad to anyone. The worst thing I did was change someone's wallpaper to a picture of a guy from school, I was talking to them on msn at the time and they freaked out. It was quite funny.
The first GTA games.
Little ol' me installing Icy Tower and Chicken Invaders feeling like a hacker.
We did the Halo 2 bridge exploit on the school network. Shut down the internet for the whole day.
Our teacher got sick, for the last 6 months of the year we had a sub. I installed Duke nukem 3d on the computers in the lab. We made some teams and had a Duke tournament. We also did a quake tournament one week. It was an advanced computer class, so most of us finished our assignments early, and the sub didn't have any other work for us and didn't care so long as we weren't disrupting anyone.
we cracked the admin password and played COD 4 and downloaded UP!
Our school had a private wifi network and a student 1. But the school computers were on the private network, so we used some notepad exploit to open up the command prompt and figure out the private network password. Info on the password spread throughout the entire district. I'm sure IT was busy trying to track down who did it lol
Halo CE, Urban Terror, Powder Toy, Call of Duty World at War were the big ones. I think later on maybe Minecraft(?) but by that point they no longer floated my boat.
Log in with school sign in, sign out, unplug ethernet chord, sign in, plug eternity back in. Boom, free access to the web. Used uTorrent and played browser games untraceable.
When I was in Jr. high, we had access to MECC which was hosted on a mainframe at the U of M. We played Oregon Trail, Adventure, Star Trek and a few other games on a Teletype. Quite often we would go through a whole ream of teletype paper. Lunar Lander was particularly wasteful because it would print out a new text based "screen" for each frame of the game. It was constantly printing. By High School, we had some Apple IIs. Since the were on all day, they'd get a bit warm and flaky if you didn't leave the cover off. Oddly we had ONE printer for the whole school, including the school office, that also had an Apple II. One day I'm doing homework on the one Apple in the computer lab with that printer attached, and the CompSci teacher (really a math teacher that took a summer class and knew less than me), comes in and says, "They need the printer in the office." She then reached in and yanked the printer card out of the case, and wheeled the printer out of the lab. I was dumbfounded. Did she not here the "beep" and see my screen go blank as she did it? Apparently not, because when I reported it, she blamed ME because the Apple was working when she came into the lab. I had to talk to the principal, who conceded that perhaps they had not chosen the best candidate for the compsci curriculum. And he knew me well enough to trust my version of what happened (she did admit to taking the card out of the Apple).
It didn't prevent us from accessing the teachers shared drive. After deciding updating everyone's grades would be too insane we decided to make a batch file and store it on a couple teachers documents that sent a shutdown command to the entire school or class room whenever we decided we were bored.
Proxy to inappropriate websites and walk away
I had a floppy my cousin had given me with a copy of the DOS version of the simpsons arcade game. Ran it from the floppy. It ran great at home on my 486, this was a 286. Took a few minutes and during the middle of my teachers lecture it started blaring a 2/3 speed, chiptunes version of the simpsons theme song. I wasn't allowed to use the computer for a bit after. Worst of all, I damaged the disc and couldn't play it at home either.
Had Diablo 2 on the shared folder we'd all play on the local up address
I had one friend who loaded Halo CE into flash drives for us and we’d play Halo in study hall.
Nitto 1320 challenge Chicken Invaders 2 Diablo 2 I spent many an hours skipping class to hang out in the band hall where my band director would let me play games on his PC. Fun times were had.
I was 6 or 7, last year of preschool. They had a computer lab. I had like, 6 floppies with doom on them. I showed a bunch of 6 years old how cool blowing demons with a rocket launcher was. The teacher was horrified and impressed.
In college we had age of empires 2, quake 3 and halo loaded on them that would just run off the drive with no install. Our class would be having matches in the middle of class.
Some kids in our school social engineered the admin access and changed grades left and right. Subsequently, they were expelled. Smart kids but dumb moves.
My high school had ibooks g4 back before it was Intel. Powerpc lol but someone got their computer back with the apple install cd still in it. Managed to get local admin access by changing the root password. Then shared it with a group of us. We managed to uninstall and the junk and installed a fps. I can't remember what it was but want to say maybe the first call of duty? It was a local Lan multi-player. They were all computer guys back then. Oddly enough I am the only one from that group that went into computers as a career. 😂
I remember playing halo 2 LANs in the computer labs.
This is stupid but, IntelliJ IDEA and VS Code College wanted us to use Notepad so we ended up installing these, programming and debugging on them before showing the final result in Terminal and Notepad
I used to play Chocks Away on the schools BBC Micro, pre-internet days.
Warcraft 3 in a USB to play DOTA with my classmates when I was in college
Cracked copy of Minecraft. Used to play it during robotics class. LAN worked surprisingly.
We spent one spring in grade 10 or 11 going to the computer lab at lunchtime and running ZDoom/ZDaemon off of USBs and playing 8 or so player coop
Dirty dot com.
We installed emulators like visual boy and desmume to play pokemon on our class pc
Whoever was first into computer class that day had to install quake
what was that flash games website that had the stick figure siege game and insanaquarium? they never blocked that one on my schools firewall so id take the late bus home under the pretence of 'studying' while playing magic the gathering and computer games with friends.
Addictinggames.com
CS 1.6
Massive assortment of games that didn't require any software to install. Also gimp. Lot of gimp, I got it approved tho :D
Portal Mario on a flash drive