• Niki (unregistered)

    The computer room in the library at my high school had a very strict "no games" policy. I was once researching this new video game development platform (I can't remember the name, but it was based on DirectX 7 or 8). I got kicked out of the library.

    I grew up to become a video game programmer.

  • JV (unregistered)

    Reminds me of when I worked at this one place... they decided to install a site blocker and limit web browsing usage to 1 hour a day.

    Not fun when you are a software engineer and need to use Google to look up code references, download libraries and such. The first week, our CIO came to my team all pissed off because we had maxed out our internet usage time. He was a fucking moron and did not even know how to use email (like most CIOs).

    Well, our co-lo was on a separate network, which only my team had access to. The following week, I installed a nice, small little proxy service and hooked everyone up. From then on, our internet usage time went to zero. We happily found what we needed and the CIO was happy. When the owners sold the company and everyone got laid off, I told the CIO and network engineer what we had done. The look on their faces was so worth the wait.

    I love corporate stupidity. It makes this job so worth it.

  • (cs)

    When I played games on my Solaris workstation I just renamed them to a.out

  • (cs)

    Where I went to highschool they used windows 98 machines with Novell on them. Freshman year you could just cancel out of the network login to get admin access to the machines. You could then install anything you wanted, untraceable. We chose to install keyloggers.

    I think they found us out because next year security was clamped down bigtime.

  • aristos_achaion (unregistered)

    Reminds me of this:

    http://www.bash.org/?178890

  • underwhere (unregistered)

    When I was in high school, I found out you could right-click in your personal directory and "Create Shortcut To..." C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe. Later, I ran Cain and found out there was an "Administrator" account with a five-character alphanumeric password. Still later, I just installed Arch Linux over the Windows partition.

    There was a proxy, too, but it wasn't worth the effort to get around it.

  • Ramses So let it be written so let it be done (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. Geeze. I guess my immature, unintelligent mind was in the wrong state after reading things like "Mamillian Reproductive System", "Sextuplates", and "Dorothy Titt". I thank all you more educated folks for setting me straight so I don't make an arse out of myself again. I do speak english goodly sometimes ;-)

  • underwhere (unregistered) in reply to underwhere

    Oh yeah, and I found out the network was vulnerable to ARP spoofing. I also found a CSS injection hack for Blackboard. I learned many useful things in those days :).

  • (cs) in reply to V
    V:
    Reminds me of this.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHb5QVD7fo

    I'm sorry, this site has been blocked by WebSense. Please use an alternative proxy.

  • (cs)

    I'd love to see the unedited version of this. ;)

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Leo:
    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!

    Not as funny as you might think - We used to have to punch FORTRAN programs by hand with Hollerith card punch(involved pressing 3 or 4 number keys(which represented a single character) simultaneously very hard because you were manually making holes in the card), then give them to a teacher who would take them to a university that had an ICL1900 mainframe & batch process them. The following week or so, you'd get the cards & the result back. If you'd made any errors,you had to repeat the process. If you showed aptitude, then you might be allowed to type programs on paper tape using a teletype. Then you could program in BASIC,Algol 60 & FORTRAN from the teletype(no screen - paper output like the old teleprinter on Grandstand) This was circa 1976

  • Patrick (unregistered) in reply to Mats
    Mats:
    Had a corporative assignment with our UK "sister" school... In Sussex. Guess which 3 letters stopped us from accessing their site when the new content filtering system came into play.
    That would be "uss". Can't have students accessing information on the american navy, now, can we?
  • Ramses So let it be written so let it be done (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    "He jumped back a foot-- all the space the repurposed AV-closet-cum-IT-office afforded"

    Does anyone else see anything wrong with this sentence from teh WTF? Maybe its just my immaturity showing but shouldn't it be "come"?

    It's not your maturity at fault, it's your intelligence. Othwerwise you'd be able to recognise basic Latin.
    I was beaten to it, by pretty much everyone in the thread. So clearly it is just you who can't recognise Latin!

    Didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. Geeze. I guess my immature, unintelligent mind was in the wrong state after reading things like "Mamillian Reproductive System", "Sextuplates", and "Dorothy Titt". I thank all you more educated folks for setting me straight so I don't make an arse out of myself again. I do speak english goodly sometimes ;-) (Obvious lack of intelligence as I can't even respond correctly, one those mornings ehh, I guess I should focus on my work before I wipe out a database or somefin')

  • PotataChipz (unregistered)

    Reminds me of when my high school blocked java.sun.com. Suddenly both AP Computer Science classes could not access the Java documentation. When we complained to the administration, instead of justifying themselves or unblocking the site, they decided to mirror (some of) the docs (with broken style sheets) on their own webspace. It was a mess, and we spent the rest of the year circumventing the "security" by typing in java.sun.com's IP.

    I still don't understand what kind of security that was supposed to be, and I really want to know how much money they spent on a site-blocker that only paid attention to domain names.

  • Myself (unregistered)

    In high school the network admin had the STUPID habit of resetting your password at your computer instead of hers. TSR key logger FTW.

  • Patrick (unregistered)

    bessy --> http://www.horsegroomingsupplies.com/pictures/files/1/6/3/2/Bessy009.jpg

  • DysgraphicProgrammer (unregistered)

    My high school had something that prevented the start menu from working, so we could only use programs on the desktop. The smart kids knew that you could use winkey+r to pull up the run dialog. From there you could run any executable you knew the name of. Including Regedit,which could be used to disable the security.

  • (cs) in reply to Leo
    Leo:
    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    You had computers in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day we had to use pen and paper, and sometimes a handheld 8-digit calculator which only ran applications called "addition", "subtraction", "multiplication" and "division".

  • Nick (unregistered)

    Ahh Bess.. I remember her from when I was in high school nearly a decade ago. I became rather popular when I set up a CGI Proxy that managed to get around the school.. even to a couple grateful teachers, like our own Violet K.

  • ctw (unregistered)

    Fortress? Is that the program I remember disabling with Ctrl-Alt-Del?

  • Mike Caron (unregistered) in reply to Joseph M.
    Joseph M.:
    This WTF is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and living persons is purely coincidental.

    This story is 100% true. In high-school, we had Bess installed. The main difference for us, though, was that all the internet went through the School Board's servers. So, trying to get a site unblocked was all kinds of fun, since you had to go through the board's IT department.

    I can only assume that our IT Dept. puts some of the other IT Depts featured on this site to shame...

  • Outtascope (unregistered) in reply to Ramses So let it be written so let it be done
    Ramses So let it be written so let it be done:
    Didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition. Geeze. I guess my immature, unintelligent mind was in the wrong state after reading things like "Mamillian Reproductive System", "Sextuplates", and "Dorothy Titt". I thank all you more educated folks for setting me straight so I don't make an arse out of myself again. I do speak english goodly sometimes ;-)

    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

  • (cs)

    Here at my school we have a program called TrustNoExe. It disallows direct access to most of the filesystem ( you cant type C:\ into explorer, but you can go my computer->C: ) and disallows running executables if they're not either:

    • on the local machine under C:\Windows or C:\Program Files\
    • On the resources share
    • On our personal directory on the network Only problem is, when an application //is// launched, it causes it to be run as an /administrator/ (see: we can launch Explorer over again, as an administrator as long as we kill off our shell first, start it from w:\ and then kill of VNC and tell TrustNoExe to GTFO)
  • (cs) in reply to Richy C.
    Richy C.:
    Dick Smith lived in Scunthorpe and supported the Arsenal football club. He had sextuplates at home with his girlfriend Dorothy Titt - they were conceived after they had been to Condom-en-Armagnac in France.

    Ah - keyword filtering.... :)

    Did they walk down Cockburn Street in Edinburgh? :P

    My Secondary School (High School) had something like this, and we used Altavista Babel Fish most of the time to get round it. Worked a charm, but seems my works internet is a bit harder to circumvent...unless you're on a PC they've forgotten to put on the Proxy :P

  • forgottenlord (unregistered)

    I'm pretty sure we had a block engine called "Bess" when I was in school. It had a logo of a dog and every time we tripped it, we'd scream "Stupid Dog". By Grade 12, 3 years after it had been implemented, word leaked that our school board was looking to ditch it for High Schools and have different classes of filtering for different levels of education (eg: Junior Highs would be allowed to access more sites than Elementary Schools, etc).

    It also came with this nifty little feature called "Teacher Override". Each teacher was given one for the explicit purpose of "if you need it".

  • AtEase (unregistered) in reply to fluffy777

    How about just restarting while holding down shift?

    That disables all extensions, including AtEase.

    Then you just go to the Control Panel and turn it off or throw it in the trash.

  • heretic (unregistered) in reply to Cbuttius
    Cbuttius:
    When I played games on my Solaris workstation I just renamed them to a.out

    Default C compiler output FTW! :-D

  • Richy C. (unregistered) in reply to charliebob

    Nah, but they took the London Underground and had to get off at Cockfosters (yes, it still makes me giggle when I hear the announcements).

  • zmb (unregistered)

    Those content filters always block stuff that shouldn't and what they do block is usually always harmless.

  • Techpaul (unregistered) in reply to Joseph M.
    Joseph M:
    This WTF is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between the characters and living persons is purely coincidental.

    Actually this is a tame example.

    I have seen some good and some damn right stupid methods and rules. Latest batch from a school district central filtering system. This appears to have been staffed by a woman promoted to level of incompetence and several teenagers who have BLOCKED at times:-

    • sections of bbc.co.uk for children
    • eductaional sites for "how to recognise a pedophile"
    • curriculum based sites
    • ANY https site
    • ANY site that requires a login (even if a govt or exam board site)

    Let alone the blocks on the site and installation of Scratch from scratch.mit.edu a well developed eductaional software package for getting 11 to 15 year olds to get into programming and understanding sequencing, with dancing images.

    The only good thing done is a daily sweep for proxy sites, so they quickly get stopped.

    CAPTCHA verto - vegetarian cheerios

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I run a web site for a non-profit social activist sort of organization. My daughter thought it was great fun when her school's filtering system blocked my web site as unsuitable for teenagers. I also have a blog site and she said she keeps checking that, but to her great disappointment, it isn't blocked yet.

  • Machtyn (unregistered)

    Not to be too spell checker, but the whole dihydrogen-monoxide joke was kind of blown when a certain 'r' went missing.

  • (cs)

    Reading all these comments... has anyone done a Fortress-like app that actually mostly works? And is reasonably difficult to get around?

    It'd probably be hard, but someone has to have done a better job than the stuff that people are talking about in this thread...

  • Jay (unregistered)

    At a former employer they didn't want employees accessing auction and shopping sites and that sort of thing. They had a number of them explicitly blocked by domain name. As many sites have a variety of leading characters on the domain name -- www.somesite.com, section1.somesite.com, etc -- they did the compares as a kind of "ends with" test.

    A friend of mine was trying to make travel plans for an officially-approved business trip. He wanted to check on his reservation at -- I forget the exact name now, but it was something like "radissononthebay.com". Except that URL ended with "ebay.com", so it was blocked.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to method1
    method1:
    Leo:
    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!
    Not as funny as you might think
    No, actually, it was exactly as funny as I thought it was.
  • golddog (unregistered) in reply to Patrick
    Patrick:
    Anonymous:
    Leo:
    Kainsin:
    Reminds me of when I was in high school, they used this security program called "Fortress" or something to restrict which applications students could launch. Little did they realize that by using the Open command in IE we could browse to any application and start it up.

    Secretly installed some games that way so we could have some fun during breaks.

    You had IE in high school? Whippersnapper. In my day, we had to use the Pascal IDE (for generous values of "IDE") to spawn a shell in order to run any application.

    Oh yeah? Well we had to smuggle in punch-cards if we wanted to mess around with the machines in our CS lab!
    Cardboard punch cards?

    Luxury!

  • Ralph (unregistered) in reply to PotataChipz
    PotataChipz:
    ... we spent the rest of the year circumventing the "security" by typing in java.sun.com's IP.
    You can do that??? You must be a hacker. Maybe even a terrorist.
  • Michael (unregistered)

    We had bess at our high school. I discovered the simplest of ways around it, though. Turns out in our implementation at least, they had "Warnings" and "Blocks." Warnings were the heuristically filtered sites, blocks were any site that was on the blacklist. The blacklist was of course one of those nice big ones sent around by over-zealous security companies, so it was a pain.

    Anyway, whenever you went to a warning or blocked site, you would be redirected to a page that displayed the message. If it was only a warning, you could click through and see the site, but a message was sent to the admin. (We all used shared computers, so it was completely anonymous) I noticed that there was one key difference between the urls: tucked away in a massive set of URL parameters was a "msg=block" or "msg=warningblock"

    I think you can pretty much tell the rest of the story from there. I told my friends, they told their friends, pretty soon the entire system was a joke.

    The admins told us to please stop. We didn't. The admins threatened to cut off all internet. The teachers flipped out on them as it was heavily integrated into our courses. Eventually, they scrapped the system altogether and sent an angry email claiming that it was our fault that so much money was wasted, and we should be ashamed. Yeah. Right.

  • Paul Ron (unregistered)

    Censorship is TRWTF. There are an infinite number of ways to express the concept "one". (1, won, 3-2...) Anyone who tries to block the communication of information between two willing minds is doomed to fail.

    Instead of pretending that we can shelter the kiddies from the Big Bad World, why don't we teach them how to deal with it? They're going to need that knowledge sooner or later anyhow. Do it for the children! Won't anyone pleeeeeeeeeaseeee Think Of The Children?

  • old guy (unregistered) in reply to Leo

    You had the Pascal IDE? Whippersnapper. We had to use the IBM Selectric typewriters in the typing classroom to, uh, I don't remember. But computers existed (somewhere) back then too, never you fear!

  • Sailor (unregistered)

    Real men program in COBOL. They type the entire 3-page ENVIRONMENT DIVISION by hand every time instead of copying it in from another file, even though it never changes.

    Did I say "type"? You should have it so easy. The punch card machine has a worn ribbon again, so you won't be able to read the printed characters at the top, just the actual Hollerith punch codes.

    If you can't desk-check your code and get a clean compile first time under these conditions, I'm afraid you're not going to make the big-time in Data Processing son, because you'll never make deadline while waiting three days to get your 2000 page core dump back from the operators.

    Captcha: eros - don't you love it when I talk sexy like that there old timer stuff?

  • Marvin the Martian (unregistered) in reply to tg
    tg:
    This reminds me that the Sony PS3 text chat obviously thinks the word 'nicht' (not in German) is evil. I cannot think of any reason that would justify this. Perhaps someone can enlighten me :)
    Only thing I can come up with is that "nicht" can be read as a Dutch insult, equivalent to English "faggot" (no, not "a piece of wood for burning").
  • CodeWright (unregistered) in reply to Ralph
    Ralph:
    PotataChipz:
    ... we spent the rest of the year circumventing the "security" by typing in java.sun.com's IP.
    You can do that??? You must be a hacker. Maybe even a terrorist.

    Heck, if he really wanted to be smart, he could just have visited http://1208319031/

    <grin>
  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to Machtyn
    Machtyn:
    Not to be too spell checker, but the whole dihydrogen-monoxide joke was kind of blown when a certain 'r' went missing.
    I've been calling this stuff 'hydrogen hydroxide' because when I break it down I usually get hydrogen peroxide and hydrogen gas first -- am I missing something?

    -Harrow.

  • Drone (unregistered)

    I remember those High School days. I think we had Fortress too.

    Our machines were mostly locked down, but we could still run MS Word. We discovered that you could embed an object in a Word doc which would launch any executable, allowing full machine takeover. Some of us kept floppies with custom "icon docs" linking to all of the popular games.

    The highlight was when our Science instructor couldn't install some needed software, and we used our workaround to install it for him. IT wasn't very happy :)

    The other highlight was when we put subversive messages on the screensavers, and then set up various batch files to put the messages back if anyone ever tried to remove them >:-) I went back a couple of years later, and they were still there...

  • forgottenlord (unregistered) in reply to Paul Ron
    Paul Ron:
    Censorship is TRWTF. There are an infinite number of ways to express the concept "one". (1, won, 3-2...) Anyone who tries to block the communication of information between two willing minds is doomed to fail.

    Instead of pretending that we can shelter the kiddies from the Big Bad World, why don't we teach them how to deal with it? They're going to need that knowledge sooner or later anyhow. Do it for the children! Won't anyone pleeeeeeeeeaseeee Think Of The Children?

    The problem isn't (or, at least for most schoolboards, shouldn't be) the 2 kids in the entire school that decided that the rules don't apply to them. The problem is the big fat lawsuit.

  • Yale (unregistered) in reply to fluffy777

    The Macs at my elementary school had At Ease installed on them when the old computer teacher (a cool guy who actually encouraged learning) quit and a 70 year old biddy ("Hypercard? I don't see any use for students to be able to write programs.") took over. Of course, there was a program that would quit At Ease and drop you back to the Finder, if you could somehow launch it. Luckily, one of the programs installed on the computers was a game called "The Manhole", which was sort of a kids' predecessor to Myst. Since Manhole was written in Hypercard, it was possible to call up a message box from within the program and issue a command to launch an arbitrary application.

    Eventually the password to quit At Ease became common knowledge among the students. The computer teacher still never bothered to change it.

  • rs (unregistered) in reply to tg

    "Nicht" in Dutch would be used to indicate a homosexual male person. It's not considered a polite form of address though. Maybe that is why :)

  • rs (unregistered) in reply to tg

    "Nicht" in Dutch would be used to indicate a homosexual male person. It's not considered a polite form of address though. Maybe that is why :)

  • (cs) in reply to TheUser
    TheUser:
    I'd love to see the unedited version of this. ;)

    http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/t/10408.aspx

    (This isn't spam, Mr. Akismet. Can't you see I'm linking back to this site?)

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