Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter.
We had a game design class that happened after school. Usually that period was reserved for making up classes you failed, but ROP courses that didn't align with the district's curriculum goals were taught as well.
Needless to say, pretty much every resource we needed was blocked. So the teacher would give out his content filter bypass credentials, because the school wouldn't entertain any exceptions to students not being allowed to have them even though they knew there were classes on campus that would have tremendous difficulty. A couple of times a student would leak the credentials to others on campus and it'd take all of 5 minutes to get to everyone on campus via social media.
They'd always treat everyone who knew the bypass accounts as "guilty unless proven otherwise". I ended up in detention a few times for even knowing it. Parents complained to the school a bunch, school just always blanket said "bypassing the content filter as a student is against policy for any reason. No exceptions."
Makes me think back to 1st grade in 1999 when I was first given internet access and being told not to use Google because "it wasn't safe". Couldn't have been that bad because it took another half decade for me to inadvertently end up on the "adult" part of the internet.
[1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...
Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops.
There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me.
Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents.
High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.
Microsoft security baffles me. You could run Windows Update in the browser (and also antiviruses using ActiveX). Who would think of making it possible to alter the OS… from the browser?
My school disabled right click in Windows Explorer, I'm still not sure why.
Of course, despite every PC being on a domain, there was still the local administrator account, which was easily obtained by leaving an unused computer running ophcrack overnight. Eventually I found out that the roaming network administrator account password was simply ford, as the admin left a local account on a computer that wasn't networked; this pretty much lasted me through high school. For bypassing the firewalls? That was simple; I got a free shell account, and later my own server, an early openvz vps.
Once I got my own server, I spent long amounts of time trying to increase the amount of RAM available to me (since it was fair-share CPU on a decent server, building and similar jobs ran far faster than my current digital ocean VPS). At this point, I found out about sshfs on my own computer, and spent ages trying to find a decently cheap Xen VPS so I could use kernel modules for sshfs and swap. Eventually, I gave up. One period of my last semester I was a TA, rarely with any work to do, so I spent most of my time on IRC and setting the wallpaper to be Cyanide & Happiness comics.
/me trouts Piper around a bit with a large slap
1: this used to be available at https://bitbucket.org/cryptw/fontloader but not anymore. This might be the source, not sure. https://github.com/stevenstrike/FontLoader
That sounds very big tech to me, exactly the model towards which Facebook et al. are moving.
"Even if I color in the lines, or intentionally dabble in creative thinking, some adult might yell at me... Hm. I don't need their permissions. They obviously don't see how great I am so they are a dumb nuisance."
He was a good friend because he kept silent about the fact that I was the one doing it ;)
Back then, everything really felt like magic.
Old netsend trick, pre windows xp SP2.
There were enough stories at this time online that I knew it was best to say nothing. Did nothing bad, just explored, learned quite a few things and well was surprised how really easy it was to do things.
Nowadays, I feel kids won't/don't get that chance to explore - which is sad. Internet is curated through apps and "enagement" user experience and cloud services/SAAS.
Maybe they can spot a lifetime link to a google sheets master password document. ;)
I was banned from the computer lab for the whole of my secondary school years. It didn't matter though, because when I was 12 (~1989) the headmaster dropped computing from the school curriculum as "computers are a passing fad". They just used the computers for typing up essays after that.
That reminds me of the Decca record label executives rejecting the Beatles in 1962 because “guitar groups are on the way out”.
Picking up a copy of The Wall Street Journal at any point in the previous ten years could have clearly indicated that... and any school at which there's a "headmaster"... I would expect the WSJ is not a foreign entity to them.
It looks like they realised they were out of their depth and found someone who could help. Were they wrong to trust you?
Edit: I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean:
A. The principal and the music teacher asked you to help out a few times because they knew you were skilled
B. You were always the first suspect when anything went wrong
I understood it as A. If so I really don't see how you'd lose respect for them over that.
The "admin" person calling you for the former? Pretty cool. The principal calling you to their office for the latter? It really does say weird things about authority figures to a kid who's paying attention, especially when mixed with the cluelessness about security.
It sounds like they were right to trust you? Doesn't sound like you ever did anything bad with admin credentials. And you even used it to fix stuff.
It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. Which in retrospect has been the most valuable outcome from being the local “that kid from Wargames”