I remember our stupid prank back in the day was to take a screenshot of your desktop, make it your background and delete all your icons.
Don’t forget to flip the screenshot upside down, then flip the display on the monitor also upside down.
The computer will look normal, but the cursor will be move in the opposite direction.
I was a fan of leaving the orientation normal, but moving the start bar and setting it to auto-hide. A long time ago I put a simple bat file (like “shutdown -l -t 0” or similar) in a coworkers startup folder… I guess that was a step too far though and he thought I broke his computer. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
That reminds me of back when I was in high school. The IT guy was a big gamer and had installed RainbowSix on all the machines in the computer lab so we could play against each other during lunch time including himself.
One stuck up, self-righteous teacher heard about the game and tried to have the IT guy delete it from all the computers because they were “violent games that had no business being in school”. He refused and the school’s administration seemed to have his back on it. So during a computer class she instructed the entire class to delete the game folder from their computer and empty the recycle bin and then leave the file explorer open so she could walk around and see that it has been done.
While everyone else were deleting theirs I copied the game folder on my machine elsewhere, then deleted the original to show her that it wasn’t there anymore. After she was gone I moved the folder back where it belonged and shared it on the network so everyone else could copy it back into their computer. The following lunch break it took less than 5 minutes to get the game back on everyone’s computer and we kept playing like nothing happened. Get fucked, hag.
The surprising part here is that the school sided with the IT guy.
That, plus a school computer lab running without something like Faronics Deep Freeze (even my shitty Mississippi public school in the 90s had that or something similar), and the lack of permissions control that apparently allows student users to delete and restore program files at will is giving the story some real “that happened…” energy.
You give woefully underfunded school IT departments too much credit, especially in the “desktops are new tech” days.
Honestly, sounds like your Mississippi school was ahead of the curve from a lockdown perspective.
All I knew from my perspective was that this teacher was angry at the existence of those games and the IT guy never removed them so she tried to circumvent him. To me that tells me that the school management either allowed it or simply didn’t care.
The computers weren’t really that locked down or secure from user tampering. Some idiots would even install malware all the time on them like Bonzi Buddy for shits and giggles. The IT guy didn’t strike me as the hard working type and would only re-image a computer if it was no longer functioning.
IT is incompetent. You could easily disable ability to change desktop backgrounds for students
It’s school IT, so it was probably a teacher who ‘knows computers’ and not anyone with IT training.
In university we were taught C programming. We started with simple things like loops and stuff. After a while the topic processes, threads & stuff came up and of course we were instructed to use that.
In the computer lab there where only thin clients so everything actually ran on the server.
A good friend of mine - not know what was about to happen - entered:
while (true) { fork(); }Astoundingly it took a whole minute until the server froze. 🤣
That was the same server most of the school stuff ran on. So nearly everything went down. 😂
He got scolded by the sysadmin the next day but nothing serious happened.I’d scold the sysadmin instead for not cofiguring critical systems in a secure way. Ulimit exists for a reason.
hid the folder deep within the drive.
My brother in Christ you can right-click the desktop, personalisation, check the folder linked to the slideshow. You didn’t hide shit.
I unplugged the monitors from the wall and wrapped a single hair-width strand of copper wire around the positive and negative terminals, and put the plug pins just barely back in the socket so it looked loose.
When the person investigating the faulty monitor pushed the plug in, the copper would evaporate in a bright flash.
Later that night I would dumpster-dive behind the computer lab at the school for the thrown-out, ‘faulty’ monitor. That’s how I got my first 17" CRT monitor for gaming on Counterstrike.
Holy shit that’s some serious preplanning and manipulation. It’s impressive and kind of fucked up all at once. Everyone else was here was just fucking around.
