Black Hat Exploits of the Stupid-Easy 80s
Great writing. I never did anything so interesting, but I have a few fun stories from highschool. Our school district gave every student access to a mac laptop for coursework, but of course we used to play a lot of flash games. Eventually they got around to updating the network&#x27;s blocklist or whatever so addictinggames couldn&#x27;t be accessed anymore. I&#x27;m sure they thought they were very smart but this just raised the stakes.<p>Of course we couldn&#x27;t install games or our own software on the computers -- the `&#x2F;Applications` folder was locked down and nothing would execute outside of it. They weren&#x27;t totally stupid, they had some remote monitoring and privilege blocking software to prevent us from getting control of our own machines and doing silly things like playing games or even opening the Terminal. But eventually someone (not me, really, I wish I were this smart) figured out that inside of one of the pre-installed .app&#x27;s there was a directory to which users still had write permission. So everyone in the entire school started playing Marble Blast Gold and, for some reason, Pokemon Red through an emulator, all just by dropping the programs inside the special fold `&#x2F;Applications&#x2F;SomeThingICantRemember.app&#x2F;contents&#x2F;special-folder&#x2F;`. The games spread like wildfire because the school had also set up a system of shared network folders, one for each teacher, so that teachers could more easily share files with us. Turns out we could also use it to share files with each other. Lots of movies, as well. Eventually someone noticed and shut that all down.<p>Of course, highschool students want to play games instead of doing coursework, so one day someone (not me, really) realized that if you removed the battery from the laptop you could then unscrew the case and remove a stick of RAM, which would allow you to hold certain keys at boot to reset the PRAM or something like that. This would let you boot into safe mode, circumventing the remote monitoring and permissions software they had in place, and make your user account an administrator. Boom, games were back. I mostly used it to be able to work on software projects, of course, but I did end up playing a bit of Advance Wars.<p>I can&#x27;t remember now but there was some issue where this didn&#x27;t persist for very long -- maybe there were updates that the remote monitoring system would send that would reset your admin status? -- so you would have to go through the whole PRAM reset rigamarole, with a screwdriver, and that was a pain in the ass. I was out of school for a while my senior spring due to the flu and I figured out a way to totally disable the remote management software.<p>This was great, and I was having an awesome time working on software that would eventually get me my first programming job while I should have been focusing in class, when I got called down to the principal&#x27;s office, where I was accused of being a computer hacker. I of course denied it, but they said that it certainly was odd that my computer had stopped communicating with the remote management software entirely. I think because I was so close to graduating and actually hadn&#x27;t done anything wrong I got away with a week of detention and a firm promise to not do anything of the sort ever again.<p>Around that same time it had come out that certain administrators at the school were misusing the remote management software&#x27;s features to spy on highschool students in their own homes, which was pretty absurd and of course a huge and expensive debacle, so I think they were somewhat more sympathetic to me disabling it than they might have been otherwise.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...</a>