Kids these days are on a whole new level.

@djlink
That's what they teach in the movies.

I remember using editing the directory sector of Commodore 64 floppies in the eighties with a floppy editor (think hex editor) to hide some naughty games I'd gotten my hands on from showing up in the directory listing. Obviously, to hide them from the parents 😁

@djlink

At school, we had Windows 3.11 set up with restrictions in the File Manager to prevent running any unauthorised programs. But you could run MS Word. MS Word supported OLE embedding. And there was a Packager program that you could run from the 'insert object' dialog, which would package an external program as an embedded tool.

I used that to embed the MS DOS Prompt Windows app in a Word document, which I could then open and use to launch the DOS prompt. This could then run arbitrary programs.

Some years later, some of the computers were running Windows NT. We installed Quake and copied it into an alternate data stream in a 4-byte text file. Back then, alternate data streams didn't show up in disk usage tools and you couldn't enumerate them (there was an API, but no standard tool shipped for looking inside them), you just had to know it was there. You could copy Quake out of the hidden space and then delete it after you'd played it. No one looking at the system would see it.

This is how children learn how computers work.

@djlink pretty sure this is how we got the admin password to our school network back in the 90s :)

@srtcd424 @djlink yeah, when I was at high school (2000-2004), we programmed a screen that was identical to the Novell Netware login screen that was used to authenticate on school computers. It loaded first, the user typed in their credentials, it gave them an error message "try again" and then it loaded the genuine login screen. That's how we got credentials of most users at the school. Not sure if I should be proud or ashamed of it, but it definitely boosted confidence in our IT skills. 🙂

@sesivany @srtcd424 @djlink When we tried to pull similar trick, we found there was already someone doing that. So we just printed the username/password results. Unfortunately, we left the list in the printer :-).

@djlink did that for BIOS password, in turbo pascal. not worth the guilty feeling for years...

@lkundrak @djlink At school, we just disassembled the PC and took out the BIOS battery. Boom, the password was gone 🙂

Then we started overclocking the CPU like crazy 😃

@jakub_neruda @djlink omg no but then it's sort of obvious you messed with the password, not a great long term plan