The time I hacked my high school

http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-time-i-hacked-my-high-school.html

by fogus • 16 years ago

224 58 16 years ago

nathanmarz.com

dgant• 16 years ago

Similar to "Better to do and ask forgiveness, than to ask permission first"

teaspoon• 16 years ago

The punchier version is, "Better to ask forgiveness than ask permission."

salvadors2• 16 years ago

Punchier still: "Ask forgiveness, not permission".

noonespecial• 16 years ago

And they say you can't get a decent education in schools anymore. Everyone in the Chess Club now has an intimate understanding of how money moves through governments.

See you in Congress Nate.

mcknz• 16 years ago

More like Wall Street. Generate excessive leverage and let the government bail you out via taxpayers.

sprout• 16 years ago

Politics are politics. Any time more than 10 people form an organization, there are odd political heuristics used by the establishment that can be gamed.

xilun0• 16 years ago

I apparently missed the part were he took part of the money for himself and his friends after his "business" failed.

citricsquid2• 16 years ago

Excellent, although the "we didn't need so much money" might give the impression they were taking money that other clubs could have used, although that's government for you!

sp4rki4• 16 years ago

I'm under the impression that this hack didn't really mean other clubs got less money. On the contrary, it seems to me that thanks to his actions (which resulted on the restrictions for all clubs being softened) caused all of the clubs to make more money with increasing lunch sales.

citricsquid2• 16 years ago

ah okay, I read it as if there were limited places and they acquired more by pressuring the people into needing them to make more, if there's no limit then awesome, I retract my distaste!

megablast2• 16 years ago

The other clubs did lose out, since he was taking spots in the lunch queue he did not need, and stopping other clubs from using.

Nowhere does it say they council changed its restrictions due to the chess club.

The fact is, chess club does not need much money, nor fancy chess sets.

Nevertheless, good work, nobody was really hurt, survival of the smartest club and all that.

rflrob• 16 years ago

Even if they didn't need that much money, I would say offering prizes for merit-based performance was a nice side-effect. The amount that they needed was the amount required for N chess sets, while the amount that they were able to put to good use was significantly greater. And even if* they were essentially taking money from other clubs, who's to say that those other clubs would have used the money as effectively?

*My reading of the article agrees with the other commenters that this is not the case.

hnal943• 16 years ago

If only your student body showed fiscal constraint, this wouldn't have worked.

RyanMcGreal• 16 years ago

Once again, a perverse incentive accomplishes the opposite of its intended objective.

colbyolson• 16 years ago

While I approve of finding a way to get your foot in the door for lunch sales, the soon abusing of it really turned me off. Too much like politics really. Other clubs or the school itself could have used that money.

sp4rki4• 16 years ago

I wouldn't call this an abuse. It made it so all the clubs where making more money, so everyone was really profiting from this.

pyre• 16 years ago

Even though the rules about one sale per week were relaxed, it seems like each day could only have one club making a sale, and there was still a queue for those days. He was saying that since his group had a 'precedent' of 'needing money' they still got priority in that queue. There is no guarantee that other groups were or weren't missing out on money. There is just isn't enough information to make that statement.

dedward2• 16 years ago

Politics is reality... like it or not. We don't live in an idealized world where everything is fair.

And it involved the student government.. so of COURSE it's political...

djacobs• 16 years ago

Is "Politics is reality" really an excuse for such behavior, though?

BrandonM• 16 years ago

An excellent hack that left a bad taste in my mouth.

lylejohnson• 16 years ago

All those references to school lunch?

ryanelkins2• 16 years ago

I remember the time I "hacked" my school library's computers. I changed the homepage on the browsers to my Geocities blog (this was almost 15 years ago). Later that day I was pulled from class by a security guard. In the library was most of campus security and most of the administrative staff. They were sure that I had put my blog on their servers and destroyed their website. They even had some teacher from the computer lab who couldn't seem to figure it out. Once I showed them how to change the homepage back (there was a tense moment when their server took forever to respond) they stopped threatening to have me arrested and made me sit quietly at a table until the period was over.

mrcharles• 16 years ago

We'd just put a batch file attached to autoexec on our school computers which prompted with Cannot read C:\ Abort, Retry, Fail?, and then we made batch files for A, R, and F which just printed "Error" or something similar.

It was pretty awesome watching the "computer expert" claim the harddrives had died and needed to be replaced.

illumin83• 16 years ago

I did something similar - I had TSR programs written for DOS that "simulated" viruses. They simulated viruses like Cascade (where all of the characters on your screen would fall to the bottom and lie in a pile every few minutes) but didn't actually replicate.

I put this in the autoexec.bat file on every computer in the lab during my Pascal programming class. The next class was a word processing class.

Apparently the FBI was called to investigate when the computer teacher couldn't figure out that it wasn't a real virus. I wasn't really punished because I hadn't done any damage, but my parents got called.

As usual, someone with limited computer skills that can't get a better job somewhere else, ends up teaching computers for slightly more than minimum wage.

We used to have a lot of fun on the Novell network as well when the IT guy (think comic book guy from the Simpsons in real life) would walk away from his desk and leave it logged in. We would give ourselves admin and wreak havoc for a few hours until he noticed there was more than one superuser.

waynecolvin• 16 years ago

It's not the same as this story but I gamed Algebra II in in high school. It was last class of the day, the teacher was a track coach and most of us were in sports. Since time was short near the end of the year we all got permission to work at our own pace... As a C+ student in Algebra I quickly did the minimum on assignments in order to take more tests more often working far past in the book than we would have reached. I turned in crap of course but the total extra credit added up real good! ;) The teacher knew what I was pulling and even had to specify certain minimums, but went along with it nicely. (Other than never telling me just how high my grade finally was. Probably ~105%.)

Locke1689• 16 years ago

This never made sense to me. Back in freshman/sophomore year of high school I was pretty dumb and a little "grey hat" (just exploring, really). I would spend my spare time writing stack buffer overflows and of course had an Administrator account password to every computer in the network. Why would you do something so trivially traceable to you? I tended to do things more useful and under the radar like install CVS for my CS class.

ryanelkins2• 16 years ago

Why would you do something so trivially traceable to you?

Mostly because I didn't think it was a big deal. I mean, I changed the default homepage, I wasn't trying to format the drive or actually do anything that could be considered harmful. I didn't feel like I had to hide what I was doing.

It's not like when I took "keyboarding" (it's like typing! but on computers!) and had to type some long paragraph 20 times. Typing it once and then copy-pasting 19 times was more "wrong" in my book.

megablast2• 16 years ago

On the old BBC micros, I wrote a script that would loop through all possible passwords and try to log into the teachers password. Nothing was stored on computers in those days, so it wasn't such a big thing.

I got busted, had to go to the Principle, and despite explaining that it would have taken approximately 2 years to loop through all possibilities, he still threatened suspension.

salvadors2• 16 years ago

On the BBC's Econet system unless a machine was 'protected', any other machine on the network had access to its RAM - including the keyboard buffer. So it was fairly easy to get access to the teacher's password, especially if they always used the same machine and you could make sure in advance to unprotect it!

symkat2• 16 years ago

The students who bought the food at the lunch sales most likely did not care what their money was going to. This was not like paying taxes, it was getting restaurant food at a markup at your high school. I'm sure that those who actually thought about where the money for their food was going were few and far between.

The end-result of this hack was that the student government opened up selling outside food at lunch time more often for more clubs than previously allowed.

I see this as good for everyone involved, with the possible exception perhaps of the poor kids.

araneae• 16 years ago

Or the rich kids' arteries.

symkat2• 16 years ago

The high-school I went to served pizza and french fries regularly. The food was extremely unhealthy and to my knowledge that hasn't changed much. It's far easier to deep fry a few hundred pounds of tater tots than to make a few thousand sandwiches and sliced apples.

I doubt either option was fairly healthy for the students, but I wouldn't use a high-school cafeteria as the epitome of healthy living.

Also for some reason the rich kids at my school typically brought their own lunch and ate more natural food than the middle-class or the poor kids. Anecdotal at best, but that was my experience.

blizkreeg• 16 years ago

In the late 90s there was an email service in India that mailed you a check if you logged in a minimum number of times a month (heady dotcom dayz). I received a few $5 checks - in Rupees that was a decent amount of pocket money for a student!

While playing around once, I figured that if you entered the answer to the "Pet's name" security question as "pet's name" verbatim, it gave you the password in plain text! And this for _any_ account.

It was fun hacking into email accounts. I tried to persuade the girl I had a crush on at the time to join the service saying she could get money if she uses the service. She never did. Woman's intuition I guess.

eru• 16 years ago

Somewhat off-topic, I guess.

hfinney• 16 years ago

With great power comes great responsibility.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

Please tell us about the time you, nathanmarz, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage. :D

mattparcher• 16 years ago

Lucky. At my high school, the cafeteria made it real hard for anyone but the student government to sell food at lunch — our club had to collect dues from members who wanted pizza delivered. Then again, I knew a guy who would drive to the local taco shop before lunch and then sell real burritos to the other students to make a few bucks.

aneth• 16 years ago

This is one of those questionably ethical "hacks" that entrepreneurs commonly use to gain advantage. There was no great harm, but there was deceit and some harm. Socrates would not approve, but I think Paul Graham would.

When the victor tells the history, everyone cheers around the campfire, while the defeated cry foul and regroup their forces for revenge.

n-ion• 16 years ago

i know this will come off as dick-ish...

just saying this hack seems more like a ruse... which i guess is a hack... i was expecting more from such an inflammatory title...

The time I hacked my high school

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