The beauty of High School computer security...



  • I just wanted to get a thread started with stories of highschool secuirty in hopes that we can make a true compilation... I experienced one form and know a few people who experienced quite a few... And may I add they were all the worst form of security imaginable... in fact some were almost as good as labeling something "please don't click here".

     

    Here is my story: I had a programming class in high school, we weren't the l33t h4x0rz programmers, we were just some kids who had no choice but to take those classes because we were not zoned for that H.S....

    So we were doing C(with objects)++ programming. Now there was a problem, every one in a 10 minute period we would get a general protection exception from Windows NT and no reason why our crappy-ass programs crashed. Basically we could not do our school work and sometimes even had our grades threatened because we could not produce output for our projects. Despite our pleas for sanity the teachers refused to believe that they had a retarded system set up.

    This was until one kid got really bored and decided "what happens when I press ctrl+alt+delete during logon" and did, and lo-and-behold he noticed their security software running... Of course he killed it with the h4x0ry end-task, and thus his programms started compiling. And I say compiling because our programs compiled with no errors due to this wonderous security software and even executed, but infact they did NOT compile (i have no idea how) i had to compile at home.

     

    I wrote a test during class for this GPE by doing a simple program which looked like this:

     

    #include<stdio.h>

    int main(){ printf("hello world"); return 0; }


    that caused the GPE, and despite the proof the teacher thought I did something wrong...

     

    So a yr after I graduated I had to come back, and one student showed me the new official logon procedure: ctrl+alt+del, kill security, login... wooh guess theres no need to uninstall now!

     

    As to what security did other than f- us up? Nobody to this day knows! And no, this was not internet security since we had no internet connection :P



  • I don't understand - what was that so-called security software supposed to do? 



  •  No idea... Nobody knows. Infact I asked around, nobody knew, but nobody wanted to touch it. "Its an important and core part of our school security" was the best asnwer given. The best runner-up was "We have secuirty?" with "I don't know" as third place.

    Edit: When asked as to who installed it, the answer was "It was always there"



  • @dlikhten said:

    his programms started compiling. And I say compiling because our programs compiled with no errors due to this wonderous security software and even executed, but infact they did NOT compile (i have no idea how) i had to compile at home.
     

     

    Let's try that one more time, but this time without the self-contradiction.




  • I can only assume that "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del during login" really means "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del after logging in", since Windows NT hooks Ctrl+Alt+Del in order to do various things and won't bring up the task manager unless you're actually logged in.



  • @dlikhten said:

     No idea... Nobody knows. Infact I asked around, nobody knew, but nobody wanted to touch it. "Its an important and core part of our school security" was the best asnwer given. The best runner-up was "We have secuirty?" with "I don't know" as third place.

    Edit: When asked as to who installed it, the answer was "It was always there"

     

    Do you even read what you type before you click post?



  • I can only assume that "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del during login" really means "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del after logging in", since Windows NT hooks Ctrl+Alt+Del in order to do various things and won't bring up the task manager unless you're actually logged in.

    Ahh. Makes sense. But, if that is really so, then that so-called security is even worse than I thought. Because a user can only kill his own processes if he doesn't have Administrator privileges. So:

    1. Either that "security software" was launched through the Startup folder, or
    2. All users are having Administrator privileges

    One big WTF either way. 



  • @dlikhten said:

    that caused the GPE, and despite the proof the teacher thought I did something wrong...

    This kind of attitude sometimes extends to corporate IT staff. 

    I once worked for a company which, at the site where I worked, had always done software development on hpux.  During the time I worked for them, the idea was floated to port the software to NT, but the desktop NT boxen were all managed by an offsite corporate IT firm, including those used by the software engineers.  Their reply to allowing 'software compilers' to run on *their* desktops was a resounding no.

    When pressed, they agreed that software engineers could have a compiler, but each executable would be quarantined until it was OKd by IT staff.  

    What followed was true comedy, culminating in corporate IT taking back their beige desktops, and even pulling out our ethernet segment (yes, they took the wire), followed by the local unix IT people bringing shiny new black desktops to share the ether with the hpux boxen.  



  •  @arty said:

    ok... now imagine taking THAT model and moving it into a high-school

    Students were assumed (and often were) dumb, and so any error was assumed to be student's fault. Also students managed the computers (the brighter ones at least) but had no admin access. As to how to bring up Task Manager I honestly don't remember the exact procedure, but it involved running task manager before you are fully logged in.

    The person who set this up was... well nobody not even the department head knew who that person was.

     

    Also note that our programs COMPILED (c didn't have a problem). BUT there were compilation errors caz i took my program home and found a whole lot of em. And i mean syntax errors. This was using borland compilers and I have no idea what happened to let the programs compile.

     

    And please go ahead and complain about how my spelling sucks. Go ahead... Asshat... comeon I definately have at least 10 mstkes! Find em all for a cookie, and ill make sure you misspell your address on the envelope.



  • @dlikhten said:

    And please go ahead and complain about how my spelling sucks. Go ahead... Asshat... comeon I definately have at least 10 mstkes! Find em all for a cookie, and ill make sure you misspell your address on the envelope.
     

    You wish I was picking on your spelling... But just in general all of your posts above were incredibly unclear and full of obvious mistakes.

    Seriously, take an extra minute or two and just read what you write and you would be a lot better off.

     

    OTOH, if you want me to pick on your spelling, then fine. How can someone who can't even spell security (twice) pick on someone else's security implementation?



  • @Quietust said:

    I can only assume that "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del during login" really means "pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del after logging in", since Windows NT hooks Ctrl+Alt+Del in order to do various things and won't bring up the task manager unless you're actually logged in.

    Looks like it was Win9x, where Ctrl Alt Del invokes "Kill task" dialog, even before "login".

     



  • Sounds sorta similar to my experiances with HS computer security...

    When I was there, they had mostly Win9x machines with a security set up that included:

    1. Ctrl+Alt+Del somehow disabled.
    2. Software that ran in the background and (amoung other things) automatically closed any window with "properties" in the title.
    3. All local drives hidden from explorer/open/save.
    4. DOS prompt disabled.
    5. The "New" menu in explorer was removed (preventing the creation of shortcuts) and right-click had also been disabled.

    Since access to local drives was not actually stopped and the only thing actually protecting files on C: was the read only bit (not changeable due to 1 and 4) I decided to look at c:\autoexec.bat as a starting point.

    After opening it in notepad simply by typing the path into the open box, i noticed several lines that looked like this:

    IF EXIST somefile.bat THEN CALL somefile.bat

    Inevitably, some of these .bat files did not exist and there was nothing stopping me from creating them... So I did.

    The next step was to work out what I could do from MS-DOS before Windows started to "fix" the security. The first thing I did was to write my newly-created batch file so that it would shell to COMMAND.COM, effectively pausing the boot proccess so I could look around (the F-key boot shortcuts had also been disabled). Eventually I found a file called something like "winkill.exe" which looked like it could be the file responsible for closing "properties" windows. So I removed it's read-only protection, renamed it and exited my shell.

    After Windows booted and I logged in, it appeared that I had been correct, "properties" windows were no longer auto-closed. That opened up a bunch of possibilties, such as modifying shortuts to give me access to C: drive in explorer (as well as fixing a bunch of more legitimate actions).

    Next thing I did was to download MS Policy Editor, so I could remove the retarded explorer limitations all together.

    Unfortunately, a year or so later, everything was upgraded to the much more secure Windows 2000 (that didn't stop me from grabbing a copy of the local SAM file using a boot floppy) and then to XP (which had an "interesting" issue where if you logged in, logged out, unplugged the network cable, logged in and plugged the cable back in you would get much better local access than usual).

    Ah, those were the days... 



  • I think I can beat this.

    My school's I.T. department used a bunch of scripting to generate user accounts. This scripting was somehow linked to an Access database. They wanted to give staff the ability to reset students' passwords (for some reason, they wanted to keep track of passwords, so students weren't allowed to change their own), so they wrote up a little VB app that staff could run to reset a student password. It set the password and updated the database.

    Anyway, a mate of mine came up to me one day with a list of every student in the school's user name and password... when I asked him how he'd done it, he explained that they stored the database in the netlogon share of the PDC...

    *blink*



  • @TheRider said:

    1. Either that "security software" was launched through the Startup folder, or

    2. All users are having Administrator privileges

    3. Spyware



  • @mallard said:

    <good story>

    At my high school (Win95 days), we had a security suite called Fortress (or something like that) that handled all the security.  Mainly disabling right click and not allowing users to write to the local hard drive, though we could write to our UDS (all 5MB of it) and 

    The problem came when some luser resized the taskbar.  In those days, if you did that, your icons would overlap each other and you could only get at the one on top of a stack.  Most of the teachers, etc knew that they could re-arrange the icons by right clicking on the desktop and selecting "arrange icons" but with right-click disabled, we had to get tech support in to fix icons around the building after some serial taskbar resizer struck the school.



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @mallard said:

    <good story>

    At my high school (Win95 days), we had a security suite called Fortress (or something like that) that handled all the security.  Mainly disabling right click and not allowing users to write to the local hard drive, though we could write to our UDS (all 5MB of it) and 

    The problem came when some luser resized the taskbar.  In those days, if you did that, your icons would overlap each other and you could only get at the one on top of a stack.  Most of the teachers, etc knew that they could re-arrange the icons by right clicking on the desktop and selecting "arrange icons" but with right-click disabled, we had to get tech support in to fix icons around the building after some serial taskbar resizer struck the school.

     

    At my high school, we had an IT guy who was supposed to lock everybody but students taking programming classes out of the programming apps (because Turbo C++ let you drop down into DOS, at which point anything was possible).  Naturally, when we programming students came in for class one day, we discovered we couldn't use any of the programming stuff.  It took a couple days, but eventually the solution was discovered, which our teacher explained to us while rolling his eyes: the IT guy locked out only to programming students, instead of the other way around, and then was unable to figure out the problem for two days. 




  • "The command prompt has been disabled by the system administrator. Press any key to continue..."

    We needed a prompt because Explorer was crippled beyond use.

    Also, the desktop was completely empty, but every ten minutes a balloon would pop up "there are unused icons on the desktop...".



  • I have three WTFs from school.

    When I was mid-way through high school in about 1995 the school had no Internet connection, but there were computers in the library that had MS Works (that's a WTF right there) and a few classrooms had computers. One teacher even let us dial some local BBSs, which was cool.

     Anyway, we eventually got Internet in 1996. It was dog slow, but webcrawler and OnLine Guitar Archive were cool. At this time the teachers started saving student grades in MS Works spreadsheets (or Excel? I don't know) to a network drive. All the computers ran Windows for Workgroups and if you went to a DOS prompt you could access the network drive, copy the spreadsheet to the computer, and edit it, then save it back to the network drive. I did test this and it worked.

     A second WTF was from the following year. One of the science classrooms had a supply storage room converted to a computer room and at lunch myself and one of my friends would sometimes browse the net. One day one of the computers was left logged in as an admin user so I ran MS Paint and made an image that said "School sucks!" and made it the system wallpaper. The next day the science teacher said one of the computers was hacked and he wanted to know who did it. I didn't get caught.

     A better WTF comes from university. The computers there were new Windows 98 machines that were connected to a Unix network. During class one of the computer science professors said that every year the network would get hacked at least once by a third or fourth year student and as long as no damage was done and a comp sci teacher was notified the school thought it was a good learning experience and nobody would be punished, but that nobody in first year would ever be able to do it. Sure enough, nobody in my class knew very much about Unix and searching online for hacks didn't find anything that worked.

    Myself and a friend decided that Windows was clearly the weak link. Unix and Windows passwords were the same, so if we were able to compromise a Windows system to steal a password we could then use it to login to the Unix network. Windows 98 had no security to speak of so we could perform admin tasks. We wrote a Visual Basic program that looked identical to the Windows login screen and we set that as the Windows shell so after login Windows would load our program and the user would be presented with a dialog that said the password they typed was incorrect and they would type it again. We logged the password to a file on the c: drive and then loaded explorer.exe. We had plans to have the program automatically copy itself to the user's network startup folder so it could modify every computer that user logged into, but that proved unncessary. We simply loaded it onto a few computers and then broke a few settings and waited until one of the network admins came to fix it. After getting their password we were able to login to the Unix file server and using sudo we could do whatever we wanted. We made a text file with our names in it called 'hacked by first years' in the comp sci professor's network drive. I got some notoriety out of it from other geeks when the prof brought it up in class, but in case you were wondering, hacking the school's file server doesn't make you popular with girls. Not even with the two girls who were taking comp sci. Howeve, we did break into the network sooner into the school year than any other students ever had done.



  • My high school was so crappy that they didn't even offer any sort of computer/programming class beyond "how to use word/excel."  (I graduated in 1999.)  Does that count as a WTF? 



  • My high school (1993-1996) only had one programming class, and it was for PASCAL in DOS. The teacher really didn't know much. Since I had already been programming by the time I started that class, she labeled me as the "class expert". It was highly embarassing, especially since the Tandy 286 I used at home kept planting a boot virus on the floppy disks, which would then set off the virus scanner at school. The teacher would freak out, but I had to explain to her that the virus scanner intercepts it each time and cleans it off.



    None of the computers were networked except for the library, and those ran a DOS application used to search for books and microfiche.



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    the Tandy 286 I used at home kept planting a boot virus on the floppy disks
     

    Wait... What?!



  • The biggest wtf at my school was when I was in 11th grade takeing a AlgII/Tech class that just formed. The computers in the computer lab that we almost were always in were Win 98SE boxes that were slow as heck (At that time XP has been out for years already . Anyways near the end of the year for some reasion one of the kids in the class (he was already logged in the network via some Novell program) suddly he was not logged in as him self and had access to files at the three elemtary schools in our district, he didn't do anything he was just browsing around his computer or something like that it happend with no cause what so ever.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Wait... What?!

    LOL!! The only thing I can figure is it originated off of some individual floppies I bought from someone. The dang thing kept hopping between disks (I had A LOT due to the small hard drives). So, anytime I put a disk in, the virus would copy over. We didn't have anti-virus at the time, but the school did. So, the school computer kept having to clean the floppy.



  • My manager's son and I talked (he was intern) his security system involved QUICKLY hiding firefox's file tab so that nobody could access it and save files to the HDD (off limits) and my comptuer didnt have C: there (hidden) OH NO!!!!

    Teachers got so pissed they offered extra credit for cracking it in "creative ways"

    1) CMD could still see C: (i mean how can you disable that?)

    2) Clicking on File 2x would cause it to open.

    3) They also shared all student personal information on a network unsecure share drive...

    The list just went on. O and apparently all students were admins, just task manager was disabled BUT NOT IF YOU EXECUTE IT DIRECTLY BY USING THE WINDOWS EXECUTABLE FROM COMMAND LINE! so you can just kill the security software that way... And even presented with that the principal refused to believe that students could crack such a top-notch (20 dollar) security system and went on a manhunt for the l337 h4x0r purpetrator.

     

     

    O an asshat, you win a cookie, gime your address so I can send it to you! Just remember I might misspell it!



  • @shakin said:

    ...


    See that goes to show, you don't need to crack the password, just fool the damn people into giving it to you. Thats how the best hackings are done anyways. :)



  • @dlikhten said:

    O an asshat, you win a cookie
    Lysis? Is that you?



  • Got 3 from H.S. and one from college.

     

    In H.S. I was in a networking class.  The school had a pretty crappy 10M ethernet network that was shared by many classrooms.  Our class had 10 people and we were always using the Internet.  The speed for our entire room was often in the 768k range which was painfully slow, so finally the teacher got tired of hearing us complain and talked to the district IT manager who okayed running a fiber line directly from the ATM switch to our classroom, so long as we installed it.  I volunteered and nobody seemed to mind.  It was about a 1000 foot run with a pre-terminated patch cable.  I had a ladder and had to move through the hallway, removing tiles and securing the fiber to the wall with cable ties.  I was allowed to miss other classes to get it done and I took my sweet time, being very careful with the fiber to prevent damage.  When I was about 80% of the way done, some of the other networking students decided they wanted to skip classes too and they took and interest in "helping" me.

     

    At this point I had run into a problem.  The cable needed to go through a solid wall that extended up through the dropped ceiling.  A hole had been made but the other cables were stuffed so tight there was no way to get the fiber through, especially with the large connectors on it (remember, it was a pre-terminated patch cable).  I planned to ask for someone to enlarge the hole but one of the students helping me said "oh, let me try, I know I can get it!"  He duct taped the terminated end of the cable to a yardstick and started trying to ram it through the tiny opening.  After about 15 minutes he managed to get it through.  I kept telling him he was going to damage the fiber, but he didn't care.  I finished up myself after that but we could never get faster than 64k over the new fiber connection.  I pray this guy quit IT and went into another field.

     

    As part of our class work we got "hands on experience"  rewiring a building for the district.  This was actually kind of fun and educational but it amused me that they got free labor from their students and tried to pretend they were doing us a favor.  The building was ancient and had been an elementary school but was converted into a special school for problem students.  There was some fucked up stuff there.  We had to run cables above some padded rooms.  We tried to hide it underneath the top of the padding (about 9 feet up) because we were afraid some student who got locked in there would be able to jump and reach it if he could see it.  I sure as hell didn't want to be responsible for somebody hanging themselves.  We also broke all kinds of security measures.  We had an extension ladder on some inside steps so we could reach the ceiling.  I held the ladder because there was nothing to anchor it to and the smallest guy climbed to the top.  If he fell it was about a 20 foot drop the the concrete stairs below and it kept swaying as I tried to hold it steady.  Of course, all the other guys kept trying to distract me so I'd let the guy fall.

     

    We also decided to do some reconaissance of the district network infrastructure.  We found you could telnet into any of the switches or routers from a public IP address and have full admin privs without a password.  We were always lectured about security but here was this perfect opportunity.  We just ended up changing all of the message of the day banners to read "h4xed -- put a goddamn password on your routers".  I checked a few years later and the MotD was still there and you could still get admin privs, so apparently nobody ever noticed.

     

    In college we had brand new computer labs with shiny new XP machines.  The machines booted disk images from a NetWare server so no matter how destroyed they got, they would always be clean the next day.  This is good because everyone was logged in as Administrator.  Due to the disk image wipe, we had to store all data on floppies.  The morons in the IT department added the A: drive to the beginning of the PATH variable, though, so every time you did anything it tried to read from the floppy drive.  If you opened IE you would have to wait 5 seconds while the floppy drive made a grinding noise before the window would appear.  Same thing for many apps and any standard windows file dialogs.  It was extremely irritating so I always removed A: from the path first thing.  After about 5 months, the floppy drives started randomly failing and corrupting disks.  Nobody could figure out why.

     

    In my Java course students frequently lost homework.  The professor was very forgiving given the circumstances, but it meant many times projects were postponed time and again.  I never used floppies, though, just FTP'd to my home machine, so I was the only one who could ever turn in work on time.  TRWTF is that the professor chastised me in front of the class once for "messing around" because I had a window open to browse my FTP drive.  I guess she thought I was surfing the web or whatever.  I ended up having to explain that I used FTP for everything and that when she told us to open a file on our disks I had to browse to my server and download it first.  She was a little more understanding after that.  I didn't know much about revision control at the time so I just named my files like '[0001] - Class.java', '[0002] -- Class.java'.  In retrospect I feel pretty silly, but I am a little annoyed that revision control isn't taught first in programming courses.  Also, my naming scheme was very clear and consistent whereas the normal examples I've seen of this type of roll-your-own revision control use names like "class.java.good.Jan6-2002" and "class.java_v2_DOES_NOT_COMPILE".  Sigh...



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I always removed A: from the path first thing.  After about 5 months, the floppy drives started randomly failing and corrupting disks.  Nobody could figure out why.
    Obviously you shouldn't have removed A: from the path string ;)

    Anyway, thanks for your post. That was a good read.



  • At my highschool, we just rebooted the computer, brought it back up in "Safe Mode", uninstalled the "security" software, and rebooted.



  •  @shakin said:

    We wrote a Visual Basic program that looked identical to the Windows login screen

    Yep, I did that one too, when the school used Windows 2000, except that I had to write it as a macro in PowerPoint (so that it could be run full-screen). Nabbed a few of my fellow students passwords that way, but never an admin.

    Later on in A-Level (not sure what the US equivelent is), Computing class, we used to write fake "viruses" in VB and plant them on the shared network drive that we only our class used with their icons and metadata set up so they looked like word documents or other things that people were likely to click on. 

    The teacher let us do this as long as there was an easy method to quit the program. In one of them I added some code that disabled the "quit" button for a specific student who had a reputation as being a little "overconfident" in their computing skills. 

    A later and more devious "virus" was disguised as a word document and would open a real word document when run while it sat in the background using VB's "SendKeys" to type "inappropriate" words into whatever the user had open (I nicknamed this one "tourettes").



  • @AbbydonKrafts said:

    My high school (1993-1996) only had one programming class, and it was for PASCAL
    in DOS.

    Yeah, we also had Turbo Pascal. Except it was 2002.

    Sometimes I wonder if they still teach that.



  • @mallard said:

    Later on in A-Level (not sure what the US equivelent is), Computing class, we used to write fake "viruses" in VB and plant them on the shared network drive that we only our class used with their icons and metadata set up so they looked like word documents or other things that people were likely to click on.

    In H.S.  I had two friends who decided to have an "uptime war".  They were both running Win2k and were forbidden from doing anything to directly bring the other's computer down (like an app that closed windows or by yanking the power).  Friend A had a three day head start and by the time they hit about 100 days Friend B was getting pretty edgy.  He kept trying to dream up ways to take down Friend A without violating the rules.  He finally found a "prank" program online that basically threw up a "could not initialize" error dialog and then hid itself when the user closed the dialog.  It slept for about five minutse and would then fake a full-screen BSOD.  He sent it to Friend A and claimed it was needed for some schoolwork but that he couldn't get it to initialize.  He hammed it up, saying that "if anyone can figure out to get this to run, it's you, because you know so much about computers."  Obviously, Friend A couldn't get it to initialize and went back to browsing the web or whatever and five minutes later got the BSOD.  He freaked and rebooted the machine, wiping out his uptime.  The worst part is that the BSOD only lasted for about 15 seconds before it flashed "just kidding!" and a smiley face and returned the user to the desktop.  I was asked to act as impartial judge and I had to rule that it was fair because it only flashed the BSOD for a brief amount of time and that anyone in a serious uptime competition would spend hours trying to get the BSOD to go away before they rebooted.



  • I should add, Friend A ended up working at McDonald's and became a pedophile.  Haven't talked to him in about 5 years.  Friend B got an engineering degree and now has a steady job for a defense contractor.  If only he hadn't been so quick to reboot, things could have turned out differently...



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I should add, Friend A ended up working at McDonald's and became a pedophile.
    That is relevant now?



  • @Lingerance said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I should add, Friend A ended up working at McDonald's and became a pedophile.
    That is relevant now?
     

    It really is. Anyone who loses an uptime war is required by law to become a pedophile. The working at McDonalds just comes with the territory.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @Lingerance said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    I should add, Friend A ended up working at McDonald's and became a pedophile.
    That is relevant now?
     

    It really is. Anyone who loses an uptime war is required by law to become a pedophile. The working at McDonalds just comes with the territory.

    Precisely.  I guess you might say that by ruling against him I condemned him to a life of failure..  Hmm, that makes it all just a little less funny.. 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Precisely.  I guess you might say that by ruling against him I condemned him to a life of failure..  Hmm, that makes it all just a little less funny.. 
     

    I don't know, I would venture a guess that a pedophile might consider working at McDonalds a success. They have playscapes and happy meals you know....



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    I don't know, I would venture a guess that a pedophile might consider working at McDonalds a success. They have playscapes and happy meals you know....
    That really shouldn't have been funny, but it was. 



  • @belgariontheking said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    I don't know, I would venture a guess that a pedophile might consider working at McDonalds a success. They have playscapes and happy meals you know....
    That really shouldn't have been funny, but it was. 

     

    Whats worse is that it is probably true.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I should add, Friend A ended up working at McDonald's and became a pedophile.

     

     

    And that, folks, really is Worse Than Failure.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @belgariontheking said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    I don't know, I would venture a guess that a pedophile might consider working at McDonalds a success. They have playscapes and happy meals you know....
    That really shouldn't have been funny, but it was. 

     

    Whats worse is that it is probably true.

     

    I'm surprised you could win an "up" time war with a pedophile!



  • @Spectre said:

    @AbbydonKrafts said:
    My high school (1993-1996) only had one programming class, and it was for PASCAL in DOS.

    Yeah, we also had Turbo Pascal. Except it was 2002.

    Sometimes I wonder if they still teach that.

     

     

    Yeah, they still do it here in Brazil, but slowly changing to Java..



  • In my middle school's "technology" class (using Win3.1), they had some security software installed (Full Armor). They took some steps to ensure that you couldn't bypass it at boot time, locked down various features of Program Manager, and generally prevented you from running any unauthorized programs like command.com or File Manager. Except that this protection only applied to Program Manager - if you could run something through another program, it would work. Of course, all of those programs were disabled, so things were fine. Except they weren't. Windows Write could insert OLE objects, and programs could be OLE objects. Activating the OLE object runs the program. Tada, File Manager. From there, I found the security system's Uninstall program sitting in the Windows directory. It wasn't even password protected. I showed my instructor this. As a result, I didn't have to do any of the coursework, and was instead responsible for helping other students and fixing the computers (which resulted in amusing things like finding music CDs in the floppy drives). But mostly I just played through the Quest for Glory games I brought in.

    In high school, the machines in the library had recently been upgraded to Windows 95. A new, updated version of Full Armor was protecting these machines as well. So I opened up WordPad, and of course, the trick still worked. Sigh.



  • @Tatiano said:

    @Spectre said:

    @AbbydonKrafts said:
    My high school (1993-1996) only had one programming class, and it was for PASCAL in DOS.

    Yeah, we also had Turbo Pascal. Except it was 2002.

    Sometimes I wonder if they still teach that.

     

    Yeah, they still do it here in Brazil, but slowly changing to Java..

     

    We were doing our "Introduction to programming" course in a german university in Pascal. The professor's explanation for this was, that students might know that language, and also admitted that he had taught Pascal for the last 10 years (and also wrote a book, which was the basis for the course) and didn't want to learn a new language. At the end of the second semester we had a very quick introduction to Java (2 days). Unfortunately that guy was head of the department for "business information systems" (Wirtschaftsinformatik in German).



  • @dlikhten said:

    Also note that our programs COMPILED (c didn't have a problem). BUT there were compilation errors caz i took my program home and found a whole lot of em. And i mean syntax errors. This was using borland compilers and I have no idea what happened to let the programs compile.

    This reminds me of some very strange thing I'll experience with my network card from time to time. Whenever you access the network, say, by sending an HTTP GET request, it immediately returns. There is no error, no timeout, not "not connected" or something, it just does pure nothing, but it looks like the process could be successfully completed. IM client still says I'm connected, and I can send messages, except that they aren't actually sent but will appear in my local history as if they were. Every network access succeeds, but does nothing. I don't get it.



  • @Sarek said:

    At the end of the second semester we had a very quick introduction to Java (2 days).

    Seems reasonable to me.  Java is just Pascal with some "syntactic sugar".  Like, you have wrap all of your Pascal code in a "class" or something.  I guess the textbook publishers just wanted to find a way to sell new editions so they invented all these useless keywords. 



  • @derula said:

    This reminds me of some very strange thing I'll experience with my network card from time to time. Whenever you access the network, say, by sending an HTTP GET request, it immediately returns. There is no error, no timeout, not "not connected" or something, it just does pure nothing, but it looks like the process could be successfully completed. IM client still says I'm connected, and I can send messages, except that they aren't actually sent but will appear in my local history as if they were. Every network access succeeds, but does nothing. I don't get it.

    What OS is this happening on? 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Sarek said:

    At the end of the second semester we had a very quick introduction to Java (2 days).

    Seems reasonable to me.  Java is just Pascal with some "syntactic sugar".  Like, you have wrap all of your Pascal code in a "class" or something.  I guess the textbook publishers just wanted to find a way to sell new editions so they invented all these useless keywords. 

    Well, shouldn't Object Pascal (aka Delphi) be the successor of Pascal? I associate Java's syntax with C, but that may be because I didn't really pay that much attention to Pascal :-P

    We "learned" Java not from a textbook but really by a quick-n-dirty introduction because we were going to visit a partner university and our professor wanted us to "look good" in front of the other students (and their professors)

    We were also not forced into buying our profs book, instead he printed it out for each of us (200 pages, duplex, 30 students) 



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    What OS is this happening on?

    Windoze.



  • @Sarek said:

    Well, shouldn't Object Pascal (aka Delphi) be the successor of Pascal? I associate Java's syntax with C, but that may be because I didn't really pay that much attention to Pascal :-P

    Object Pascal lacks the powerful features that today's enterprise needs to gain synergy in a global marketplace.  Java replaced Pascal as the language of choice for today's programmer-on-the-move.  No language invented since Java adds anything to the trade of computer programming.  No only is Java capable of expressing anything these newer languages can, it also does so in more lines of code (more LoC == more billable hours!)  Programmers shouldn't waste time with these trendy, productive languages and instead should stick to the fundamentals of computer science: ALGOL, Pascal and Java.


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