[mustacheemperor]

This takes me back to my own first experiences 'hacking' and tinkering with the guts of a computer system, which put me on the path to a career in IT and engineering:

- Breaking the family computer with a trojan pirating Halo PC, which I then had to figure out how to fix before my dad got home

- Circumventing the NetNanny, etc parental controls my parents randomly decided to install on our personal computers several years after us kids had already been using the internet (edit: okay, there may have been a letter from Comcast re: the above sloppy piracy). Restoring my netbook to useful functionality without leaving a trace of modification introduced me to Linux Live CDs, and Linux!

Good to know tomorrow's hackers are still getting that education today!

[cpcallen]

Similarly: I remember spending quite a lot of time exploring [National Capital Feenet](https://www.ncf.ca/en/)'s Gopher pages in an attempt to find a link-to-a-link-to-a-page that would let me make arbitrary telnet connections, thereby bypassing their efforts to ensure that their free dialup service was only used to access their own services, rather than, say, to play Nethack on a public server at tamu.edu (whose exact domain name I can, alas, no longer recall).

[datadrivenangel]

Circumventing NetNanny definitely forced me to level up my computer skills. Classic.