I don't know why I'm taking mental notes like "don't forget to change the system clock before doing crimes!" like I'll ever need it.
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
536 points (98.0% liked)
Greentext
5101 readers
1225 users here now
This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
- Anon is often crazy.
- Anon is often depressed.
- Anon frequently shares thoughts that are immature, offensive, or incomprehensible.
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.
In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.
A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:
while (true) {
fork();
}
Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. π€£
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. π
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.
What does that command do?
Creates a new process. So, it would create an infinite amount of processes filling RAM.
I'd scold the sysadmin instead for not cofiguring critical systems in a secure way. Ulimit exists for a reason.
Takes me back to the good ol' days of adding echo commands to autoexec.bat so the computers would display stupid shit on boot.
back in the 90s my highschool had a computer lab and we would go there for certain assignments. I think it was history class when we went to do βresearchβ which consisted of clicking links in an html doc from a shared drive and summarizing the articles on them. Someone changed some of the links to go to a porn site. The only thing that happened was the teacher said βwhoever did this is a sick personβ. I donβt know if they investigated but I was never caught.
2001 I figured out a way to get a NES emulator and games on all the computers in the lab. School was pissed but never figured me out. I played so much Kirby.
Someone figured out that you didn't have to install starcraft to play it, just copy/paste the files. Those were some good times.
We were able to put the emulators on our network drives, so the admins couldn't revert your change when the ghosted the machine.
My favorite accomplishment from that era was discovering that I could make the single core machines beep themselves to death and sneaking that into the shortcut icon for IE in the ghost image. Man was the IT admin mad about that π€£
I think it was the network drive for us as well. Shit was so long ago. I just remember everyone had it and was playing games and it was my fault.
NESticle?
Probably, I remember it being a different one but that could have been a SNES emulator. I canβt find one that rings bell that was around then. My memory is decent but it was 24 years ago.
If I had been running a school in 2018 you wouldn't have been able to get to the control panel anon.
I got suspended cos I figured out u could do the old boot a Linux USB and then do a renamed copy of cmd.exe to sethc.exe and get a system command prompt on the login screen when u activated stickykeys. U can do a lot with an admin account.
That reminds me of back when I was in high school. The IT guy was a big gamer and had installed RainbowSix on all the machines in the computer lab so we could play against each other during lunch time including himself.
One stuck up, self-righteous teacher heard about the game and tried to have the IT guy delete it from all the computers because they were "violent games that had no business being in school". He refused and the school's administration seemed to have his back on it. So during a computer class she instructed the entire class to delete the game folder from their computer and empty the recycle bin and then leave the file explorer open so she could walk around and see that it has been done.
While everyone else were deleting theirs I copied the game folder on my machine elsewhere, then deleted the original to show her that it wasn't there anymore. After she was gone I moved the folder back where it belonged and shared it on the network so everyone else could copy it back into their computer. The following lunch break it took less than 5 minutes to get the game back on everyone's computer and we kept playing like nothing happened. Get fucked, hag.
The surprising part here is that the school sided with the IT guy.
That, plus a school computer lab running without something like Faronics Deep Freeze (even my shitty Mississippi public school in the 90s had that or something similar), and the lack of permissions control that apparently allows student users to delete and restore program files at will is giving the story some real βthat happenedβ¦β energy.
All I knew from my perspective was that this teacher was angry at the existence of those games and the IT guy never removed them so she tried to circumvent him. To me that tells me that the school management either allowed it or simply didn't care.
The computers weren't really that locked down or secure from user tampering. Some idiots would even install malware all the time on them like Bonzi Buddy for shits and giggles. The IT guy didn't strike me as the hard working type and would only re-image a computer if it was no longer functioning.
You give woefully underfunded school IT departments too much credit, especially in the "desktops are new tech" days.
Honestly, sounds like your Mississippi school was ahead of the curve from a lockdown perspective.
It was one of the main city schools, so I suppose they could have been. That place was a shithole, otherwise, despite the best efforts of some really good teachers with the misfortune of being stuck working there.
I actually got all of Civilization 2 by finding it randomly installed on a single PC in one teacher's classroom.
Copy and pasted the entire directory to a zip disk that I uh... borrowed... brought said zip disk to another computer in the school computer lab that had both a zip drive and a cd burner, burned it onto a blank cd i had, cleared the zip disk, returned it, brought the cd home, copied over the game files, played civ 2 on my piece of shit eMachine that did not have a zip drive.
We just played Counter Strike 2D from a flash drive.
Those LAN parties with the entire class were insane and there was nothing they could do since it wasn't installed.
This wasnt a prank but i grew up with linux on all my computers and they didnt allow linux on school computers but the it admin allowed me to install the windows hypervisor(idk the name) on it(apparently even if you have standard edition windows you can still install the packages for pro edition stuff) so from then on i just booted up windows to boot up linux.
I don't get the "thin white line across" part. Could someone explain?
I guess anon wanted to mark the βtrappedβ computers
Certain types of computer monitors can get a hardware issue (read: broken) that results in a permanent thin white line across or down the screen.
Hmm, but if it was a hardware issue the thin white line should appear regardless of if the screenshot was edited.
IT is incompetent. You could easily disable ability to change desktop backgrounds for students
It's school IT, so it was probably a teacher who 'knows computers' and not anyone with IT training.
All of the school districts (rural area so each town large enough for its own schools has its own school district and the smaller ones will share a "unified" school district) near me go through the same MSP so it's better than the teacher who's good with computers but not as good as having an actual IT department
Or have student logins to track whodunnit.
When I was at school you could just boot Linux off a USB and had full access to the HDD.
Wow, amateur hour at the IT Dept.
Don't you have to be 18 to post on 4chan?
everyone was born January 1, 1970 or something when that question is asked for purposes of age verification
They said 2018 and the post was made in 2022
I think the person you responded to might not have fully realised their own age maybe? It's happened to me before.
I was at a festival waiting for a band to come on. Talking to people in the audience one of them asked me if I'd seen this band before. I said "yes, in X year". A girl there says " Wow, I was born in X year". For a second I wondered how she got the beer she was holding then quickly calculated that X year was 18 years previous to the current one and realised I was talking to a group of people roughly half my age. Nothing wrong with that but it just felt kind of weird that I hadn't really been cognisant of it before that moment.
I remember our stupid prank back in the day was to take a screenshot of your desktop, make it your background and delete all your icons.
Don't forget to flip the screenshot upside down, then flip the display on the monitor also upside down.
The computer will look normal, but the cursor will be move in the opposite direction.
I was a fan of leaving the orientation normal, but moving the start bar and setting it to auto-hide. A long time ago I put a simple bat file (like "shutdown -l -t 0" or similar) in a coworkers startup folder... I guess that was a step too far though and he thought I broke his computer. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
delete
You know you can just hide/show them in two clicks right?
We actually required active monitoring, because we knew how to change the .pwd files.
Net send *
He needs to set it to like 15 seconds so people think they are crazy for awhile. Needs to go back to normal faster. And then like 500 normal screens in the folder.
We had a "computer monitor" kid that could've been the base of the stereotype you have in your head right now.
He acted like a god, everyone knew a lot more than him, ended up never leaving and became head of IT there. Got busted creeping on school girls. Classic cliche.
We put midget porn on ours. They were on to us but no proof :D