At my school, we quickly discovered that the admin password for all the networked printers was the name of the high school. All these HP laser jets had a function where you could upload custom translations for the status messages on the printer displays. So we downloaded the English string set (XML) and made some changes, “translating” for example, “Printer Ready” to read “Paper Jam”, “Replace Toner” and so on. As well as changing the admin password. The school actually RMA’d them back to HP thinking the paper jams were some sort of actual defect, as opposed to an altered status message, and eventually replaced them all with Brother printers. Oops lol

When I was in middle school in the mid ‘90s, the school library decided to go digital. They installed a bunch of computers with what they called “a boolean search system”. For the first time, you could search for a book by topic in the library and, after a bit of a wait bc computers were pretty slow back then, you’d get a list of results.

Well, us being kids, on the very first day, somebody decided to search for “book”, which of course matched every single book in the library and therefore created enough system load to lock up those poor mid-‘90s computers to the point that they required a hardware restart. IIRC this system was on some kind of a network too and I believe it would also lock up the network such that the other computers couldn’t use the system either. I didn’t know much about such things at the time.

Anyway, word got around immediately and so every single time a class came to the library, somebody would search “book” on a computer to see what would happen and lock up the whole system for hours. This went on for weeks with the punishment for searching “book” on the “boolean search system” becoming more and more severe, and then I moved to a new state so I unfortunately do not know how this story ended.

for several days in a row i’d get to class before the bell. the teacher would hang out in the halls.

i’d hop on his unlocked PC, open command prompt, run shutdown /r /t 600, minimize the prompt, and walk away.

he’d be mid attendance and his computer would reboot on him. a few days in he stepped into the room mid me typing the command. he was madder than i expected, but just “yelled” at me.

Create a folder with intriguing name on desktop, take screenshot, set screenshot as wallpaper, delete folder. (Didn’t everyone?)

We all had laptops in highschool, and apparently our IT admin couldn’t figure out how to disable the “Upgrade to windows 10 for free!” Popup everyone was getting. Anyone that upgraded to windows 10 got called down to IT had their laptop reimaged. When I heard about it, I figured that they must have been checking OS by our user agent or some other web-based method, as upgrading to windows 10 appeared to kill all of the group policy things. Assuming they had everyone’s mac address recorded, you could correlate laptop to user pretty easily.

From then on, every week I would USB boot a different OS. Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, Windows 10, Windows XP, etc. I would run each OS for a few days until I got called down to IT, had my laptop inspected, and sent back to class when everything checked out. Drove them nuts, I thought it was funny.

It started innocently enough, some friends writing simple C programs that would output an ever increasing text file containing the letter ‘a’. This rapidly devolved into a competition of who could output the largest files the fastest.

We had progressed to recursively launching spaghetti programs competing with streamlined data-dumpers until we started to hit storage limits on the central server.

10/10 great learning experience.

Somebody had put the Halo CE demo in some gym teacher’s shared folder and everybody in the school could access it and play LAN blood gulch

This was ~15 years ago. We got a laptop with school credentials on it, but couldn’t log in to the local admin account, only our own student network accounts so couldn’t do anything fun with it. No problem, install Linux on a flash drive, plug that in, run a script to crack the admin account (thanks rainbow tables) and get in. It was not a very strong password. A lot you can do now. Install games, browse the web unfiltered, and so on, but problem is our use of the laptop was limited to the after school activity we were part of (robotic club obviously) so still not really too much fun to be had unless we wanted to get caught pretty quickly. But there was one thing, we could grab the WiFi password. Turns out that it’s only hidden on the student accounts, on the admin account you just click on the WiFi network and it just gives it to you. We didn’t plan for it but we didn’t take advantage of it. We shared that password to a couple friends but in general kept it under wraps, this was before data plans were so wide spread so it was actually useful, and the school itself was a faraday cage for anything but the weakest cell signal. Best part, it worked in other schools too, so I’m pretty sure it got spread pretty far eventually. I graduated before they changed it, no clue what happen after though.

We also took the balls out of the mice. And put tape on the optical ones.

When I was in high school, I reset the admin password on one of the macs in the computer lab in single user mode and used it to find the school’s Wi-Fi password in the keychain. Shared it with a few friends and it eventually made its way to most of the student body. It was a total game changer for all of us because we all had smartphones (this was in 2014ish) but the building had virtually no cell service indoors whatsoever.

Our school had a local TV station. They broadcast school board meetings and a slideshow of random updates about the township. I figured out how they controlled the music in the background and changed the music to heavy metal.

I came into class the next day and my TV production teacher told me that the school received multiple calls complaining about the music.

Friends found a way to get our scheduling website to leak our schedules weeks early completely client-side. Because a lot of schools use that website, the information spread and all of a sudden we had people from Kentucky in our Discord server asking us how to do it. You’re welcome, random Kentuckians.

Highschool had filters to prevent students from visiting certain (most) sites, but for some reason a browser created using Visual Basic Studio’s browser template worked just fine. At least I think that’s what it was called. It’s been a minute.

I used to fuck around with desktop shortcuts for fun. For example, replacing the internet browser shortcut with a shortcut to a script that starts the browser, but also does other weird stuff, often only after a certain time.

So somebody would “start the browser” and every 30 seconds, the script would open another browser window, or word, or close a browser window, or shut down the computer, etc.

I thought it was just harmless fun that was easy to fix and figure out, but the school IT would look everywhere to fix the strange issues and believed that students had installed a “hacked version” of firefox…

My home room in middle school was one of the few classrooms that had windows pcs. They used deepfreeze to reset them daily, but I found some program that actually disabled it. I think I just installed firefox or chrome and then ran windows updates because they always had the annoying yellow shield system tray icon for windows updates needed.

Take all the balls out of the mice