I really enjoyed this post, it brings me back to when I was in high school learning java and I made an app that took over your whole screen with a grid of “x” buttons where only one of them actually closed the window. When someone left their computer unlocked I would pop in a a floppy disk and run the program then leave.
We had an IT guy at our school who would always ask us what we were up to which we would answer honestly. He never got mad at us for figuring out how to get Halo CE or Starcraft or other games running over the network, but he did tell us to knock it off when we got too bold.
My friend memorized his SC CD key so he could reinstall it quickly. Good times
We had a network file share so no floppy necessary. Very easy to hack everyone's computers.
I wrote a script that would read the title of all your open windows and close free games.com or whatever the popular game site was at the time. Shouldn't be playing games in class right? I felt bad when it closed some 3d modelling program because of the save file name he chose. Oops.
if you're just playing on LAN, both 1234-56789-0123 or 3333-33333-3333 work as a cd-key for original StarCraft. installing Brood War on top doesn't even need a cd-key
Back when i was a teenager i was so excited when me and my friends found (technical) loopholes in stuff. It was a game in itself. Getting away with cheating, getting away with "hacking", etcetera. We did some things that may have cost someone some revenue, like writing down cd keys and other stuff, but we meant no harm. No real big damage was done.
Nowadays i have two teenagers myself. Whenever some/we suspect they are "up to no good" i will try and remember my own teenage years. Then i tell them something like that i think that was awesome and i'm proud, but don't get caught again. :)
The shared computers at our school (college equivalent?) were locked down in theory, that is, you had to get the IT guy to grant you internet access, otherwise you could only use things like Word and the like.
We found a workaround; if you opened up notepad, went to the open file dialog, then I forgot the next step but it would open up the file explorer, which turned into Internet Explorer if you entered a URL in the address bar.
Of course, we also had copies of Linux that booted off of CDs, but they were a bit too obvious.
I think there was something like this that allowed you to bypass the password on Win95 - you click help, then something, then it opens the file explorer
> He never got mad at us for figuring out how to get Halo CE or Starcraft or other games running over the network
I had found out that Quake 2 could be run without admin privileges, so I installed it on a bunch of computers throughout my school. Lots of people got into it, but I ended up getting in huge trouble including suspension and parents being called because I "ruined the Internet." The IT person insisted that networked games take up all of the bandwidth and that i had "hacked the computers" to gain admin permissions to install.
As an aside, I seem to have a story for lots of comments in this thread!
We had an IT guy at our school who would always ask us what we were up to which we would answer honestly. He never got mad at us for figuring out how to get Halo CE or Starcraft or other games running over the network, but he did tell us to knock it off when we got too bold.