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.
Why porn of all things? It’s one of the few things that could get you in serious trouble at a school, why not a meme or silly drawing.
Why porn of all things?
It’s one of the few things that could get you in serious trouble at school
Question and answer in one. It’s hard to understand risk-seeking behavior as a risk-averse person, but that’s exactly why
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.
I remember the times when our school got our first computers: three C64 with C1541 and one printer. The math teacher who wanted to learn computer science to one day teach it vs. us three who were fluent in assembler, knew the key routines of the OS by heart, and even knew the hardware inside out.
I exchanged the C64’s OS ROMS for EEPROMs with four different OS images and hid the switches inside the extension slot. Yes, for this I opened the computers, de-soldered parts, soldered other parts in, etc. The teacher never noticed. Spare keys are fun. Modern school IT would probably faint if a student tried this.
Occasionally, I exchanged the EEPROMs for other variants, like one day where I had an image where the printer suddenly printed everything in reverse. OK, I did not turn around the letters (no space in the code for that, and the printer only had eight user-definable characters, so this would have been a major operation).
The teacher was confused, he just wanted to print a small basic program he had written, and it produced something like “olleH” tnirp 01 instead of 10 print “Hello” (not the actual program he had written). Switching the computer off and on did not help, either. So he asked for help, and I took his C64, turned it upside down, knocked on the bottom three times, and placed it back on the table. During this last motion, I knocked back the switch for the EEPROM selector to the standard ROM image. And then I made the teacher print his text again…
Experiences like this probably got where you are today. Probably doing embedded systems programming and stuff eh?
My card reads “Embedded Systems Architect” ;-)
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.
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.
