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Admin
No. It rings true. The 90's and the widespread usage of microcomputers saw a level of technical stupidity that I haven't seen since. We are much better now despite the recurring WTF. You have to understand that these adults then barely knew what a computer is for. Like an orangutan washing clothes after seeing a human doing it, these folks were really trying to catch up while not showing their incompetence to kids. For the first time, the technical divide between generations was that marked, and that made a lot of adults in a position of authority uncomfortable.
I saw stuff like that not in HS but in College in the early 90s (when we were still making the transition from mechanical type writers to computers). I also saw it in the workplace when businesses started using personal computers with access to corporate e-mail and the like.
One such time the main security officer sent a mass e-mail to everyone regarding a virus spreading through e-mail (one of those "DO NOT OPEN" chain mail hoaxes) that when opened would make the CPU run on "overclock" (yeah, that's how they called it) until it would melt. Obviously this was impossible given that the message formats were plain texts and messaging clients we were DOS-based apps with no notion of auto-executable content.
To add insult to injury, it was a well-known hoax among those that should know (as a technology security officer should) with the obligatory "send this to as many people as possible, let's save our computers from overclocking meltdown!").
So I did what I thought was the correct thing to do: send him a private message indicating that it was a hoax well known for several years now, and that it was impossible to get a 286/386 computer to run in overclock mode (whatever the hell that was) till the CPU melted by just opening a plain text content on a DOS client.
What I got in response was a rabid reply indicating how he knew what he was talking about and how he alone was crusading for protecting corporate assets; that we has the chief technical security officer and that he would retain his own counsel in technical matters given his extensive experience in the subject.
In a bit of a douchebag move of my part, I simply forwarded his e-mail to several of my tech colleagues for shit and giggles and have veiled fun at his incompetence. That was my first foray into corporate incompetence, the likes I have not since since the 90's.
The story is believable. The 90's was a cauldron of WTF done by people not knowing what to make of computers, like lemurs watching fire at a distance.
Admin
Yeah, those were teh times :D
Admin
He didn't say, "Those who teach, can't." I really hope this math your tutoring doesn't include logic.
As to the original quote, the set of teachers I am familiar with really does include a lot of people who couldn't cut it doing anything else, so they went to teach a course they passed. Also, I know a lot of teachers who are very intelligent, have significant prowess in their field and others, and know how to go about teaching in such a way that students actually learn something.
Admin
In the early 90's my small rural Texas highschool invested in its first non-Apple computer lab. Everyone (teachers/students) were given a user account. The primary difference between the security groups was the teacher group had access to a few teacher-centric apps. Other than that, each user had full admin. Somehow, figuring this out made me a "hacker" and it was my fault the school had to spend $5k to bring in a consultant to properly configure the security groups. I was also barred from the National Honors Society because as a result. First student in anyones memory to receive such an honor. Of course, there was nothing in the rule books about computers period so I had that going for me, which was nice.
You didn't even have to hack anything to get into the teachers stuff since all of the teachers used their last name or one of their kids names as the password.
Admin
Somewhat related story...
When I was a senior in high school, half of my days, 2 days a week, were study halls in a room adjacent to the library. About half way through the school year the library got 3 brand spanking new 486 machines with Windows 3.11. As I was in the library most of the time, and the librarian knew I was "the computer guy" even then, I was usually tasked with helping out with the older library computer, a 286 with and older version of windows. Now with my previous experience, I knew that students would go crazy with Program Manager, deleting and moving icons, moving windows off the screen, etc. They would also go crazy with the color schemes, making everything all white or all black, or various shades of neon. I changed a few of the .ini files to be read-only so no changes from the default settings could be saved.
Fast forward a week later and I'm in the principal's office with the "computer programming" teacher. I put it in quotes as the most advanced thing taught was a budget calculator in Microsoft Works spreadsheet. The DOS version. Anyways, the "computer programming" teacher had wanted to check out these new fangled computers and when found out he couldn't move the icons around, he freaked. He asked the librarian who inadvertently ratted me out. I explained what I did, and why. I was told to fix it and that was I not allowed near the machines for the rest of the year. I explained what was going to happen and asked them if they were sure they understood what they were doing, and went and made the changes.
The next day the computers were unusable. Support contractors from the company who sold the computers to the school would make appearances pretty much every afternoon to work on the machines, only for them to be totally f'd again 30 minutes after they left.
One machine was worked on for 3 straight days by one gentleman. On the third day, I asked what was wrong with the machine. The problem was that someone had set a password on the screensaver, and set the screensaver to auto load on startup. For 3 days the gentleman kept rebooting the computer trying different keystrokes to stop the screensaver from loading. Why he didn't just wipe it, I have no idea. I asked him why he didn't just boot off of a DOS disk and edit the screensaver.ini file, or what ever it was, that stored the password in plaintext and write it down or change it to something else? I was thinking he'd go "I already tried that!". Instead he said "Oh?". Two minutes later he was finished and out of there with the machine running with it's dayglo orange desktop.
A couple of weeks or so after that the librarian pulled me aside and quietly asked me to do what ever I did to the computers when they first arrived. Turns out the support contractors were charging $100 per hour, including travel time of 2 hours each way for each call. That's $2500 minimum, per week. It was eating through the libraries budget, years at a time. Ten minutes later I had slashed the school support spending.
Admin
So... He was given a floppy disk to upload a website, then suspended because using the floppy disk and making the website was against the rules?
Seriously, who comes up with this bullshit?
CAPTCHA: sino (I am not Chinese.)
Admin
While there, I took a couple of undergraduate classes for background in areas I hadn't studied previously. I was sitting in one such class one day looking around when I realized that I had taken the prerequisite before anyone else in the class was born.
Admin
Normally, I would agree with you, but consider this true story: I got a call from a previous employer one day, and after some pleasantries, and dancing around the issue, she finally asked "did you, um, do anything to the BIOS of your computer"? I was fairly confident in my answer. "No". In the following silence, I injected "why do you ask?". She breathed a sigh of relief, then said "well, I didn't think so, but we had a visiting colleague from Germany try to use your old computer, and no matter what letter she typed, a different letter would appear. It was in every program, even in the boot menu, so it has to be something in the BIOS". That's when I remembered, that in a fit of unbridled boredom, I had popped the caps off of the letter keys on each key of my keyboard and then alphabetized them. As a touch-typist, I didn't care, and never thought about it again. Until then.
Admin
Back in high school, our public school's computers were using Novell Netware. Of course, there were some flaws with that, and once we got access to the command prompt (It was 2004 and we were still using Windows 2000) and control panel we basically owned the system.
I was really bored in my 10th-grade Webmastering class so a couple of friends and I decided to play around with "net send" in command prompt (for some reason we still thought it was hilarious shiznit). For the computer ID, I decided to put "1" followed by a short messaged filled with expletives that my friends and I thought was hilarious.
Computer "1" turned out to be the workstation for the school's band director.
Within 30 minutes the sysadmin came to our classroom and I was in deep trouble. I was punished with suspension from the class until the final exam, where I was supposed to complete it handwritten (our task was to complete this web site).
Needless to say, I still made it out with a 97 in the class.
Admin
They also insisted that a little miniature coilgun that I had built out of transformer winding and disposable cameras (totally harmless, it could only shoot a few meters) was a weapon, and basically tried to make my life there as annoying as possible for it.
Their loss, though. I left after one year due to all of this nonsense. I had gotten heavily involved with a senior project group that was building a picosatellite (I basically did all of the electronics and programming). Prior picosat projects had failed, but we managed to get a prototype mostly working and it won a competition, which means the project got funding to build and launch the sat. However, the senior team graduated, and I was the only one who would've been left to potentially carry the project forward to a new team, had I stayed. As far as I know, the project never recovered the next year, and the satellite was never built or launched.
Admin
... and that's why most exploits are usually reported by way of "anonymous reports". Especially when it's related to your school.
Admin
You think that's bad? Whilst doing tech support last year, my line manager sent one of those emails to all our clients. When it was pointed out to him that he'd just sent on a hoax, he first denied it, but then, confronted with incontrovertible evidence, tried to get one of us to hack up a virus to match, so he could be right.
Admin
Admin
I found an obvious hole in my bank's web site. I knew that to probe or inform the admins would bring a world of hurt, so I just shut up. Best thing I ever did. now, if you'll excuse me, they have finished detailing my Lamborghini.
Admin
Every time you think "that's impossible, people can't possibly be THAT incompetent," think again.
I was nearly expelled from college for editing my .cshrc file and changing my prompt. I and a few of my friends who had done the same thing had to sit down with the "IT Director" and show her exactly how we had "hacked" their systems: by running 'vi .cshrc'
Captcha: persto - persto change-o!
Admin
I found an obvious hole in my bank's web site. I knew that to probe or inform the admins would bring a world of hurt, so I just shut up. Best thing I ever did. now, if you'll excuse me, they have finished detailing my Lamborghini.
Admin
I attended a rural high school on the North Shore in the late 80s to early 90s (my high school was 7-12). Our "programming" class consisted of playing games in 16 blazing colors for the period. At least once a week in the winter, class was canceled due to good waves at Waimea and the teacher was an avid surfer. I put a password on the teacher's computer so that other students couldn't change their grades.
Admin
This was my WTF, and the editing certainly leaves things to be desired. The general plot works out though:
I was a sophomore at a high school in 1999 when I was asked to make the school website. The assets I were given were indeed hard copies and not digital.
I did manage to "hack" into a rival school's website by right clicking. That bit is accurate and has not be altered.
The school district handbook included rules such as "no weapons or other weapons," "no downloading of data," and "no personal media" (despite most classes requiring floppies from home). The rulebook also included "No accessing unauthorized sites." It is assumed they meant "no going to porn" or whatever, but the principal interpreted it as "No accessing sites you are not authorized to view." This was a double-punch, as I was not authorized to view the admit page of a rival's website, AND that admin page wasn't on the list of authorized pages.
I got the principal to "hack" the website the exact same way I did, simply by selecting a readily-available option from the right-click menu. After I pointed out that he was suspending me for TWO CLICKS of a mouse under normal operations, my punishment was reduced. "Zero tolerance," you see, means "always punishment," especially in Texas.
Obviously I know there's no such thing as a "PS/2" computer, that was...added.
PS: As a mini-wtf related to this one, the district-wide password policy was: Username: First initial, last initial, last 4 digits of the student ID number (found on the student ID, the student's schedule, every grade printout, every schedule printout, and every class listing) Password: The last four digits of the student ID, with numbers converted to letters, starting at 0->A, 1->B, etc. Student AB4365 had a password of "DCFE". Four characters, 10,000 possible combinations for 8,000 students, and easily determined using their login. Awesome.
Admin
ATTENTION EVERYONE
There is a new comment format that we will be enforcing from now on. It should look like this:
Admin
I'm officially a remy porter fan.
Admin
My high school had a strict no talking policy in study hall.
Captcha: erat - another name for a computer mouse
Admin
Saucy!
Admin
So basically TheDailyWTF is becoming Family Guy For Nerds?
Admin
Back in 2000, I was evaluating a commercial component which used a very primitive form of AJAX to enable cascading drop-down lists in Internet Explorer. The product website specifically stated that this was for "Internet and Intranet Development".
I'm no hacker, but within 20 minutes I'd discovered a gaping security hole in the product - not only could remote users query any data from the database, they could insert, update or delete as well!
Feeling like a responsible adult, I emailed the support address with the details of what I'd found. To highlight how serious the problem was, I included information on how to delete all records from the table used in their main example. A few hours later, I got a response which basically read, "Yeah, we know about it, but we can't be bothered to fix it, the component's only supposed to be used on an Intranet". Since we hadn't paid for the component, and I didn't feel like wasting my time, I let it go.
Three months later, my boss got an email from the MD of this company. Apparently, someone else had found the vulnerability and used it to hack the main demo on their website. This email accused me of decompiling their code (which I hadn't done), breaching their license agreement (which I hadn't seen), and hacking their website (which I also hadn't done). They claimed this hack had caused them major embarrassment with their existing customers, who clearly hadn't been informed of the security vulnerability, and threatened to sue my company for any financial loss suffered.
Thankfully, my boss was quite understanding, and once I'd told him what had happened, he sent a reply diplomatically telling them where to go. We haven't heard from them since.
Admin
Eh? The IBM PS/2 certainly did exist, it was just a lot older than the rest of the 1990's era PCs. However, I thought that was just to illustrate how backwards and archaic the technology was in your school, so I didn't really question it.
Captcha - abbas (I liked that band!)
Admin
Huh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
Admin
All of these nerdy stories are making me feel vicariously superior to the rest of mankind.
Admin
Hey, I remember doing that at Costco back when they were still selling Windows 3.1 machines! I discovered that if you hit CTRL-C at just the right moment in the bootup, you can break out of the autoexec.bat script before it launched Windows. Then you "CD \WINDOWS" and somewhere in one of the .ini files was the password for the screen saver. It wasn't plaintext, but it would look like this:
[Screen Saver] Password=fAf53aUpo
You just delete the entire line, and presto: no more password.
Alas, one day I was caught: a Costco employee came up to me and asked "Can I help you find anything?" while casually pressing the Reset button on the PC before I finished saving the INI file.
Admin
Might as well add some glory days type of stories to the forum. It was 2002 and I was a senior in highschool (yes I'm young - wanna fight about it).
Anyway, I had a compsci 101 type of course which basically covered 2 or 3 weeks of a 101 in undergrad. Straight C++ no classes , just very procedural programming. A cin,cout blackjack game was our final project.
The computers were running 98 (no funding to get XP) and they were "locked down". The admin tried to be creative by removing My Computer , auto-launch on the CD drive , hide access to windows explorer , etc etc.
I created a shortcut on the desktop to D:\ and popped in a CD and was playing SNES Roms. Teacher walked by and I couldn't hit Windows+D fast enough. That went over very bad and I was called into the principals office for "hacking".
Then later, I was called in because someone didn't log out of their machine and I left a .txt file on their desktop reminding them they should log off so they wouldn't lose work. Back to the principals office I went once again for "hacking".
The first time I was sent to the office the principal goes, "Well I've never seen you before so you must not be a trouble maker..." The second time went like "[not this crap again]"
I never did get suspended - only because there were a few people that knew me. I ended up teaching a night class with a teacher from the Vocational Tech School on how to use computers.
Admin
TRWTF is that principal's son maintaining website in other school!
Admin
Admin
Just because everyone is saying that this is real as 10 years ago people were so stupid: They still ARE so stupid. And it will not change.
Admin
Admin
I have exhausted your meme, pray I don't exhaust it any further.
Admin
Admin
Judging by your grammar it probably had nothing to do with the computer incident...
capthcha: vindico - spanish for a douche that looks like vin diesel.
Admin
Zero Cool? Crashed fifteen hundred and seven computers in one day? Biggest crash in history, front page New York Times August 10th, 1988. I thought you was black man.
YO THIS IS ZERO COOL!
Admin
Ooh, a labor dispute. Two-parter!
Admin
...
Not sure so serious...
...
Admin
Ah, this one takes me back. In my high school most of the computers ran Win98, but the CAD lab got Windows 2000 and later Windows XP computers while I was there. Naturally, there were WTFs everywhere.
Unenforced and ridiculous disk quotas - according to the student handbook, no one may ever use more than 2MB of server storage space. Maybe that was a leftover from a bygone era, but even the most incompetent and useless CAD lab user could generate more than 2MB of data in a week. One of my friends had more than 1GB of data in his folder.
The "games" folder on the Start menu had been removed to keep us from wasting our time with Solitaire, but the executable files were still on the drives.
The file server always went down at least once a day. Whether this was for planned maintenance or actual problems, they never told us.
And of course, the paranoid and incompetent administration. This happened about a year after I graduated and was relayed to me second-hand, but apparently someone got into the Linux-based mail server and changed the root password. The administration spent many thousands of dollars to hire an "expert" to come in and root through the server and network to find out whodunnit.
The "expert" rummaged around and singled out one of my friends because of suspicious content in his net share directory. The name of the suspicious file was firefox.exe. Now of course the computer usage policy forbade executable files in the home directory and obviously this "foxfire" was some sort of hacking tool! My friend tried to convince them that it was just a Web browser, but with a name like that it must have been some sort of a game, which was definitely against the rules.
They couldn't prove my friend did it, but they "knew" he did because he knew stuff about computers. Result? Suspension from the network for one year. They never did find out who really hacked the server, but they had someone to blame, so mission accomplished.
Now instead of recovering the mail server from a backup or wiping the drives and reinstalling it, they declared it dead and bought a new one.
Admin
CSB time:
One day in high school while walking out of the computer lab I thought it'd be funny to unplug the ethernet cable and reboot the computer I had been using. The computers network booted normally, but did have a copy of Windows 95 installed locally. I found out later that the school's Computer Science teacher (who was roughly 5 lessons behind the students) accused two of my friends of hacking the school network and both were called into the principals office. There they discovered that the "hacking" was my stunt (if you want to call unplugging an ethernet cable that). Nothing ever happened to them, and apparently he didn't think to accuse me also.
So let this be a lesson: unhooking ethernet cables is 3rd level Hacking Ninjitsu.
Admin
"Study hall" in US high school is a class period during the day where you do not attend an actual class; rather, you sit in a large hall and have the free period (usually about an hour) to study, do homework, or do what 95% of people I went to high school with did, which is sleep. Most places don't grade you for study hall; you're just warehoused for a period out of the day.
Thus, study hall can be extremely boring. I would have taken any legit excuse to get out of study hall when I was in HS.
Admin
Well that's what the $300/hour guy from Ernst and Young told us, anyway.
Admin
It's no different at my school. I'm a Junior/ 11th grader here in America. All internet activity is logged, and IT randomly takes control of screens to perform checks. I maintain the school paper's website, and I have virtually no code level access. Right click was disabled for awhile, and if you create an admin account via the command prompt, they will know. We literally live in a technological police state. We can't even get to some university websites because they have internet radio stations. Seriously. I'm amazed I can access this site.
captcha: conventio - I guess this school fear of technology is conventio round here.
Admin
When I was in high school the computer teacher told the principal that I had broken into MS-DOS, a very powerful area of the computer from which I could cause lots of damage. (I hit start>run>cmd).
I had to write a 2 page apology (single spaced).
Admin
Is an SSL pipe plenum rated or do I have to run it through a special conduit?
Admin
At my school, people aren't so suss about students using computers. But if they catch a student doing the wrong thing (e.g. playing games) they'll generally get kicked off.
I've never been accused of hacking (despite being seen by numerous librarians with QBASIC or a Putty terminal open). That's probably because I've ended up fixing a heap of their computer issues and became a favourite.
Admin
Admin
Back in... Oh, screw it.
A little while ago, in 1996, I'd quit high school to go to a local community college. It was a pretty cool place, actually - very few WTFs.
Since I only took a few classes, but the buses were infrequent, I had a ton of free time, which I used creating and hanging up doppelgangers of official notices, but with bizarre text. One of them was a list of the top ten differences between the comm. college and a local ivy league powerhouse; it had stuff like "Them: Cell phone. Us: Pay phone." The president of the school walked by and read the one I'd hung in the lounge I frequented, chuckled, and went on his way.
Anyway, they had a few Pentium whatevers in the lab, with Win95 and Netscape Navigator on them. They were locked down reasonably well; no executing anything but Netscape, photoshop, word, or whatever; no adding or moving icons, no command prompt, no access to any folders but a few.
Being bored, I noted that Netscape allowed you to select an arbitrary application for any given non-http protocol. 'command' didn't work... but 'qbasic' did. So, I set qbasic to be the default telnet application, 'telnetted' somewhere, and wrote "shell" in qbasic. Voila.
That, and a big-ascii-text-maker later, and the startup batch file scrolled by whole-screen-wide text saying, "You should have better security." It disappeared a while later, but nobody ever realized it was me.
At one point in another lab, I was using the same technique to copy a bunch of... things... onto a series of 3.5" floppies. Turned out that their security dude was sitting in the row in front of me. Busily copying, I asked him what prevented people from pirating applications straight off the hard drives. He waxed eloquent (disk 3) on the various methods (disk 4) that prevented access (disk 5) to the file system (disk 6) and how he was sure (disk 7) that nobody could get (disk 8) around them.
That was pretty cool.
Admin
Reminds me of in high school. Another "class mate" copied hardcore pron onto my student drive when I left my computer unattended (remember: always lock your pc). When it was discovered (an annonymous tip I am sure); the powers that be simply told me "you know what you have done". For a nerdy kid like me it was difficult to have not computer access for a month...and not know why it happened. I only found out when they gloated.