[superlarry]

to sum up my earlier post, the computers were run terribly at my former HS. a certain company held the only rights to security software that, although not too bad in itself, was set up incredibly stupidly (Foolproof software, for all those familiar).
so offhand one day i see i can get the password through some shifty file-sharing and such. being the head tech student at my school (prez of the computer club, oh baby), and the first person anybody turned to when there was a computer/technology problem, i did it to help out. i.e. the school newspaper needed the zip drive unlocked so they could get the pagemaker files to the publisher. the school's hired techs sure are never gonna help, so i did it. stuff like that, all the time when teachers' computers were messing up.
the school caught me (through my clumsy, oafish friend on the newspaper staff who got caught using the password), and threatened all this disciplinary crap. i never got nailed (i BSed my way through a lot, plus i knew there were absolutely NO rules for this type of thing at my school).
what kind of approach do you think should be taken to this kind of stuff? breaching security in order to better things.
keep in mind that i did try on many occasions to obtain legitimate access through many good, logical arguments.

p.s. hehe, also the school considered me a sort of genius for doing this ;c) it was obviously not their doing...

[Cipher13]

Same thing for me; though I'm still at the school.
Initially I had to resort to less than legitimate means (they used FoolProof also), but eventually I was given the passwords; I never did anything malicious, just fixed things.

So yeah - the admin at my school knows what he's doing, so thank God for that... all is good now.

If you need to break a rule in order to do something "good"... go for it. Just try not to get caught

[Taloston Man]

Well, breaking a/the rule(s) for the betterment of mankind is almost always the better thing to do, otherwise society would never progress.
Unfortunately you also have to remember that the people whose rules you are breaking will almost NEVER side with the revolutionary.
So even if you're helping them and other people out, they're still feeling screwed and will almost always act as such.

[nealconner]

Foolproof, heh. Just press Apple-J to disable it for a while. I knew the passwords anyway.

[nealconner]

Yeah, I fixed a lot of things. All the computers were in bad shape at my Middle School and all the staffs were stupid and lamers. Heh.

[darcybaston]

I say, gaining access is ok. Doing something with what you access isn't.
Isn't that part of the hacker's ethic? It's ok to know how to do something but to go in there and destroy data all the time isn't? I'm no hacker, I wouldn't know.

Darcy

[Kozmik]

A hacker is harmless; just gains access. A cracker is harmful, and steals or destroys data.

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by nealconner:
<STRONG>Foolproof, heh. Just press Apple-J to disable it for a while. I knew the passwords anyway.</STRONG>

Only if that options on... in any decently secured lab it won't be

[wANCO tHE sANE]

My school uses this thing on their iMacs that lets the admins up in the office see what's on your screen at any given moment. When I went to the HD everything was messed up and I double click on the Sys Folder, then my teacher asked me If I tried to mess with the system folder, I said no, I just got confused where to go. Does anyone know what this program is? I also saw it in action in another school. The teacher's computer can take control of a student's computer too. It was kind of funny. Methinks that program is based on extension so I could just freeze the iMac and restart w/extensions off anyway.

[alphamatrix]

I'm in 9th grade now and I've already installed a sound card for the music class and helped with all sorts of stuff. So the day before the last day of school I'm messing around in the computer lab on our WinNT machines and I just happen to find where the text documents for the typing program are and so I changed some then I went over to textfiles.org and and got instructions on how to build a atomic bomb and pasted it into one of the more advanced docs. one has used the prog yet so i cant have any fun Its sorta weird our small school shut down the computer lab because i changed the DP on some of the computers to these = WTO and this =Bill

[TheJoshu]

A friend of mine from my junior high school (a private school in Brooklyn) was (and likely still is) very interested in amateur hacking. So he would use our school's computer center to test his skills... and the computer teachers always reacted positively, but the higher authorities were never very happy with the situation. So it would be up to the teachers to nurture his habits without telling their superiors... I think it's important for schools to accept this activity, in the name of scholarship and not in criminal activity, of course.

[Amorya]

Our school has a lab of PCs. They run an equivalent to netboot (it copies the Windows folder off a server each startup then boots from there). File sharing is locked, and the mail server has a 1mb limit.

Anyhow, some admin forgot to lock the directory on the server that held the Windows folder for netboot. An enterprising 6th former discovered how to access this, and after that most of us had a dir in there to pass files. No-one noticed.

A few weeks later, the lab is panicking - someone has erased the whole folder's contents. Knowing that the computers will die on reboot and the staff are too clueless to fix it, I copy the contents of my station's windows folder to the server. Testing the reboot, it works perfectly. Problem is, my Windows folder from that session contained cookies with my username, so I get nailed.

The headmaster, who has no idea what I've done, tells me I am guilty of hacking, and that "I am not sure what you have done, but we know you did it, so don't bother saying you didn't." I get banned off the school network for 6 months.


Amorya

[Particle_Man]

I used to disable Foolproof on the local college network so friends and I could play Marathon, Spectre, and Maze Wars. There were at least a dozen IIci's (that'll give you an idea how long ago it was) all networked. The Foolproof setup was pretty tight but they had Word active (as most places do) and had Word set so it could save files anywhere. Word can edit any file. I'd open the Control Panel and Extension for Foolproof in Word, delete all text from the files and then save them over the original copies. Suddely they were nothing more than dociument files with nothing in them. Reboot the machine and you were in. I always carried a copy of Foolproof with me and reinstalled it when I left. With the prefs file untouched it would default back to the configuration the school had it set up with.

I and a friend cracked an ftp server for a web site to remove files that a mutual friend of ours was being sued over. The person being sued had forgotten the password so she couldn't remove the files herself and the admin refused to remove the files from the directory (although he renamed the index.html file) because of the legal action.

Hacking can be used for good. In fact I'd say that most actual hacking is done for the right reasons. Cracking on the other hand...
Too bad the media has latched onto the worng term.

[Avenir]

Originally posted by wANCO tHE sANE:
<STRONG>My school uses this thing on their iMacs that lets the admins up in the office see what's on your screen at any given moment. When I went to the HD everything was messed up and I double click on the Sys Folder, then my teacher asked me If I tried to mess with the system folder, I said no, I just got confused where to go. Does anyone know what this program is? I also saw it in action in another school. The teacher's computer can take control of a student's computer too. It was kind of funny. Methinks that program is based on extension so I could just freeze the iMac and restart w/extensions off anyway.</STRONG>

It's probably ANAT (Apple Network Assistant Tookit). We had that on all 100+ machines at my high school, good stuff, and easy to disable if you know how

[Cipher13]

Originally posted by Avenir:
<STRONG>

It's probably ANAT (Apple Network Assistant Tookit). We had that on all 100+ machines at my high school, good stuff, and easy to disable if you know how </STRONG>

Yeah, we use Network Assistant at school.
I used to use it at home, but now use Timbuktu which can do the same thing.