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tricky | 3 years ago

Hilarious! After a few of those, I taught my son how to open the javascript console and "hack" his favorite cookie clicker. He was so excited to show his friends but the school-provided chromebooks are really locked down.

I was disappointed, thinking that would be the end of it, but his whole class has been trying to find ways around the blocks and filters ever since. They've found some clever workarounds and a lot of things that sort of look like hacks but are not. It's adorable.

discuss

fredley|3 years ago

Poorly implemented device lockdowns by my school were the start of my interest in understanding and manipulating systems, long may they last!

coldpie|3 years ago

Yuuup. My favorite instance in I think 9th grade was opening the computer case while the teacher was out so I could pop out the CMOS battery to disable the BIOS password, boot a live disk without the disk protection software (Deep Freeze), edit the Win95 boot logo screen[1] to put a little smiley face in the corner, and then put it all back together (sans BIOS password, since I never knew what it was originally!). No one ever mentioned it, but I'd see my little smiley every time that PC booted. Later, I spent 13 years working in reverse-engeering-related software :)

[1] https://www.dslreports.com/faq/3880

RugnirViking|3 years ago

its excellent! my school only let us modify files in our user network folder, and locked down anything on the C: drive. Turns out, if you could open cmd (you weren't allowed directly, but you could ask a vba script from excel to open one) you could just rename the C: drive to the K: drive or whatever, and that wasn't blocked lol. I'd use it to hide games like https://wz2100.net/ on particular computers, and show my mates which ones were on which computers, and make little excel files that had macros to open them

lozenge|3 years ago

The default admin password for a popular educational software that locked down Windows was "changeme". My school did not change the password.

mkehrt|3 years ago

Back in my day you could just rename programs (read: Quake 2) to winword.exe and they would run no problem.