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Kids turned low-traffic NPR Spotify comments into a secret group chat

484 points · 257 comments · simonpure

cyanf · 1790638638 · focus · HN ↗
On the topic of bypassing school restrictions.
Every day, for his last 2 years of high school my sibling remoted into the KasmVNC server he has at home.
This was during a time when sysadmins were keen against any new circumventions. New methods usually gets blocked within the week. To keep it hidden, he had it behind a <something_academic_sounding>.org domain.
What did he do with absolute freedom? Mostly browse HN and Twitter.
If anyone at Kasm happens upon this, thanks for improving lives :)
1. phantom784 · 1790641872 · focus · HN ↗
  I did this in high school. I hosted an SSH server at home on port 443 so it'd get through the school's filtering, then tunneled in and connected with VNC.
  Only time I got yelled at was when the teacher saw the SSH window open and yelled at me for being in the command line. So I changed the colors to black text on a white background and they never said anything again.
  1. theturtletalks · 1790644077 · focus · HN ↗
    I used to put Ubuntu on a flash drive and boot the computer to that. Not sure if it helped bypass website restrictions.
    plasticchris · 1790648279 · focus · HN ↗
    I put knoppix on a cd and since the filtering was implemented via a proxy server that was entirely voluntary to use… also bypassed the filtering.
    Once I burned a bunch of Linux boot cds with unreal tournament on them and took over a computer lab to have a lan party. That was fun until the lab monitor got spooked that his monitoring system showed all the computers as turned off when clearly the lab was full…
    theturtletalks · 1790651630 · focus · HN ↗
    In our high school, you could install the Halo: Combat Evolved demo so we would play LAN across the whole school. They eventually caught on and started deleting Halo from all the computers, so we would just have the installation file on a flash drive, install it, and then uninstall it when done.
    badc0ffee · 1790670047 · focus · HN ↗
    All I had was Doom II over IPX.
    theturtletalks · 1790688662 · focus · HN ↗
    IPX was before my day, but interesting to learn IPX was the main protocol before TCP/IP got popular
    andai · 1790683382 · focus · HN ↗
    Ahh, core memory unlocked. I did all kinds of stuff on the school computers out of boredom.
    The most notable is probably cracking the admin password because I wanted to change the volume or something. (Seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time!)
    The computers had all kinds of weird restrictions, including the panning being forcibly set way to the left to compensate for the school's crappy headphones -- a crime against humanity, you would surely agree, if you experienced it.
    It took 30 seconds to crack, it was a short dictionary word and I remember being very disappointed with the sysadmin. But obviously I couldn't tell anyone about it...
    Let me see what else... our school accounts had 200MB network storage, but this was too small for all the Portable Apps[0] I wanted to use. So I created some kind of "startup program" that downloaded and extracted them from my web server. I think it also changed the background and the Windows Theme...
    <a href="https://portableapps.com/apps" rel="nofollow">https://portableapps.com/apps - still online, I see!
    I think these days kids just have their own laptops though. That's no fun at all :)
    That reminds me of how in zoos they put the food inside hard to open boxes so the animals don't go insane from boredom.
  2. djmips · 1790659490 · focus · HN ↗
    terminal were the OG dark mode. Nice hack to get around that!

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