ISS for "Hacking" and Strange Depression...

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Okayyyy how do I start here? Well I suppose I’ll start with the ISS thing. I am taking web design as an elective (which as it turns out is a horrible class. They are teaching how to open pictures in PS… Web design? I think not.) and I got incredibly bored after finishing the whole semester’s work within 2 weeks. Sooo I reverted to messing around in bash and other ‘stuff’.
Long story short, the security at my school sucks and I shut down every computer in the building. Now this is an actual crime as I found out later when the teacher (who is pretty much the only other person, along with that hall’s principal, that is literate with computers) called me out after checking the keylogger. Fast forward 2 days I am in the previously mentioned principals room and I am getting pounded with, "You are going to Juvy, no more MIT for you B!atch, and you are a horribly immature loser. In principle language. After venting she actually said, “You have skills.”, and just gave me 2 days of ISS (In School Suspension). I mean good lord, I am the luckiest damn person on the planet!! Has anything like this ever happened to you guys? Do you think I should have gotten punished more severely? :stuck_out_tongue:

Alright, second topic.
About a week after this happened and after serving my ISS I was starting to become rather depressed for no reason. I started not talking to my (only) friend, and refused to come down stairs, except for meals. I couldn’t code because I couldn’t find any inspiration and started just sitting in my room listening to music for hours at a time. My daily schedule was this: Get up at 5 (I have a ‘zero’ period. Orchestra.) and take a shower. Go downstairs, where nobody is up yet and won’t be till after I leave, and eat half a bowl of cereal which somehow fills me up completely. Then I get a ride with one of my classmates to school and, well, go to school. Come home, do homework first thing, and then do pretty much absolutely nothing until 12 oclock when I fall asleep. I don’t know why this is happening, and it makes me feel like I’m going off the deep end, ya know? I’m turning 15 tomorrow, so I’m guessing that my age does play a major role in it. Have you guys ever felt like this? What did you do to battle it?

Thanks for reading,
-cMp

#2

Yeah sorry, I deleted that waste of byte post :slight_smile:

To 2nd topic: If you feel that, you must find out the root of cause. Or try to do new creative thing.

#3

I dunno the cause of it, but I think it has to do with the whole high school we’re in the big leagues now impression the teachers force upon us. I was thinking of re-learning to skate. I need a new board…

#4

I’m surprised they let you off so easy, it doesn’t take particular skill to use a keylogger :clue:
I definitely messed with my middle school computers (got into root account, etc) but you need to be confident that you won’t be caught. I wouldn’t do something as large scale as that because it can seriously mess up the rest of your life.
Depression? Never had that, only problems with productivity. All I can say is, don’t blame it on being a teenager, that just institutes the placebo effect.

#5

Ah, no I didn’t use a keylogger, they had one on all of the computers in the tech lessons rooms. All I did was shut them down. I did program one of those babies once in Python :P.
Also, I’ll try and figure out what’s causing it. It is really annoying to have that nagging thing in the back of my head.

#6

Having nothing to do (and in general, any changes to a routine schedule) will make you depressed.

I’ve been through depression recently, you basically don’t want to do anything and have a very large desire to just sleep.

Just know that literally everyone goes through it, and you brain is really really good at making a not so good situation seem horribly terribly bad.

Anyway, nothing wrong with being curious in computer security etc. I went through that phase too (but i never got caught lol, my school’s IT teachers were stuuuupid) What you did really had no negative impact on anyone and you shouldn’t be ashamed (well, I wouldn’t be.) Even though your school probably wants you to.

Seriously, Highschool seems bad, but it is virtually nothing relative to the rest of your life.

#7

Something new, especially something physical, can do the world of good in these kind of situations believe me. So yeah, go take up skate(board?)ing. When I get like that, I just throw myself into music stuff. Have taken up learning two new instruments in that place and now I still thoroughly enjoy playing them.

On the hacking front, you get a bad reputation but really you’ve done your school a favor. Hacking is only really bad if you do it maliciously, otherwise you’re just showing them the holes in their own security. Unless you get really stupid people prosecute but don’t stop it happening again. Honestly hackers get paid a hell of a lot of money to try to hack into big companies, by the companies. Better someone working for you than someone not.

#8

Regarding hacking: it’s not as innocent as some people here suggested, and certainly wasn’t doing a favor to your school. I think the school handled it properly, and let you off the hook with a very mild penalty. You should really be grateful it fizzled out like that, with a different principal it could have actually ruined your education and prospect of an enjoyable job. Anyway, enough of this patronizing talk, that’s actually not what I wanted to stress.

Take advice from our beloved and fictional spiderman:
With great power comes great responsibility
If you find yourself in a position where you have way more privileges than you ought to have, don’t push the boundaries, don’t give it a whirl. It might seem innocent to turn off all PCs, but you might have turned off a few servers too. Would that be an incredible bad design by your school? Sure! But that doesn’t mean they are right in blaming you for any resulting damage. You shouldn’t assume you can oversee all side effects. Just like standing aside a busy road, giving everybody the finger. Sure, it’s an innocent offense, but one might distract somebody resulting in a lethal accident.

Another nice pro-verb that is related:
Never bite the hand that feeds you
When in doubt, just refrain from your cunning tricks. You might piss people off that you rely upon. This education, and more specifically, this principal, can change the rest of your life in a split second. If the principal had been in a generally displeased mood that day, you could have already been expelled, or they could have involved the police, because after all, it was malicious behavior, breaking at least a handful of laws. As an alternative, try to hack the computers at home, or even better, boot a few OSes in VirtualBox. You’ll learn just as much, without the consequences.

Last but not least. Isolation is a sure way to fuel your depression. I guess it’s only natural that when you feel bad, you lose the will to be socially active, but I can tell from first hand experience that isolation will only make it worse. Punch yourself in the proverbial nuts, force yourself to see (other) people, and you’ll likely be glad you did. Us pesky humans are social beings, and isolation brings out the worst in us,

#9

Riven, your posts are all medal-guzzlers aren’t they :wink:

#10

@lukasz1985 :clue:

#11

this one time I fork-bombed a teacher’s computer with a batch file as part of a how-to speech in that class. the teacher was panicking because of all the windows popping up.i just power-cycled it and it worked fine afterwards.

#12

We used to hack all the time.
Some golden rules are never get caught.
legally you fucked up: its very unlikely for the school to actually believe that a student did this - they mostly think all student are idiots, and they dont even know the systems that well.
so you had to do SOMETHING to suggest that you were actually responsible
Even if they find some relations between your account and the outage, always act dumb. You dont even know if or how this would be possible; Even if you were logged in it could have been someone else while you where in the bathroom, but in general dont hack stuff when you have to login and stuff.
keyloggers would be forbidden in my country (germany), and even then people would have to look at the logs.

Another important rule is: dont do damage: do it for the lulz.

so with unix you can for example send a open disc drive command. and thats fun (if you are young and in a boring class, I guess)
there is many things you can do I guess

turning off every pc will actually do damage, stop productivity and erase some data they are working on
its like turning off the power in the whole building
another thing we obviously did was this net send bullshit which hopefully doesnt work anymore today

but for many reasons you would hack pcs from other rooms, you never know what they are used for and it wont be fun anyway, since you cant see the reaction

#13

I have never hacked. I simply use the school’s security to annoy people through orher means.

I discovered that you could stop the user from closing IE if you put this:


while(true)
{
    alert("You shall not close Internet Explorer");
};

Into the javascript of a page.

And because the school blocked the use of task manager, there was no way to close it except by logging out.

Just saved it somewhere where anyone could access it and when they weren’t looking, opened up a few on their computer.

#14

That’s why these days browsers offer a checkbox in each dialog, disabling all future dialogs from that host and/or page. I blame you :point:

#15

Riven, thanks for that great post :). And Cero, I got caught because I was stupid enough not to overload the keylogger on that machine. Instead, I just, ya know, did it. Yes, for the lulz. I didn’t actually think it would shut off the school section but I suppose I actually put the name of a power supplier into the gui. Bad luck more than anything. Haha, and I’ve been doing that net send bullshit since 5th grade! It was hilarious at the time. And then there was that time when I shut down my friends computer when he was taking a test… That one was good :P.
I’m not glorifying what I did, it was THE MOST stupid thing I have done in my entire life. But I am saying if you little stuff like the stupid net send thing it’s entertaining in a boring class.
BTW, it’s funny as hell how insecure my middle school was. Simple Python script I wrote crawled through all the different nets through all the computers and in about 10 seconds I had every single name in the domain. I could have crashed the school, even infect everyone with a RAT for a DDOS. How funny would that be if I targeted the schools website from its own school? But no, I chose just to let it slide. Lesson here from me: If you have the opportunity just learn from it, don’t exploit it. I learned the hard way, but I suppose now guys around my age looking at this can stop before they get into real trouble.

#16

Except whatever version of IE my school has. :stuck_out_tongue:
I still do it to people every chance I get. ;D

Another thing me and my friends like to do is create and run a batch file that opens infinite file explorers or command prompts. Unfortunately this one is a bit more serious so we only use it on whatever computer we were using at the time, and log off once things really start to lag.

Our school’s security is actually quite solid, and would require some real hacking to get around. However, there is one small but significant flaw. Students are unable to download .exe’s from the internet, mainly to stop people playing games, but I guess it also helps security. Then one of my friends discovered that you could run .exe’s, if they were inside a .zip. So he got WINRAR (in a .zip) and started downloading some applications. He even got Eclipse working (he had to download the JDK as a .zip too).

It’s quite a serious security flaw, but we aren’t going to exploit it because 1) We’d get caught; and 2) It would be fixed (probably in an overly-aggressive way that results in even more restrictions) and then we wouldn’t be able to run .exe’s freely.

#17

That is indeed hacking.

I’m amazed they let you off so well. I never did any hacking or cracking when I was still in public school, I just wrote webpages and wrote little testing programs. It was a part of how I learned BASIC. My computer teacher let me do what I wanted, she even told me the class pretty much held no use towards me. I was more of a pet, and I never pulled off any pranks, except for one.

The only prank I’ve ever pulled off was simple, it was similar to what HeroesGrave was talking about earlier.
I made a basic webpage that played “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley in the background, and had the popup that wouldn’t allow you to close the browser. Since most people were familiar with the meme, they let me go. I never did anything “malicious”.

  • Jev.
#18

@depression:
Do sports
( or sex :wink: )
No really, you need to do something body related, so you’re moving your focus away from your thoughts towards physical self-awareness. Coding (alone) does not help. Force yourself to socializing may also not work, because you need some kind of openess to get something out of it.

#19

Go for a long bike ride! Feel the wind in your hair. Smell the fresh air! :slight_smile:

#20

It’s not uncommon to be feeling a tad depressed when you’re unexpectedly slapped on the wrist. It can turn your innocent little world upside down, making you wonder what it’s all for. Hold on, it’s just a phase (unless you isolate yourself :point:)