Discovering Things About Your Classmates and Technology

[McJob]

Two years ago when I joined college, I needed a way to get my assessment files (some stupid movie and an essay which I should have copied over USB) from my house to college quickly. I had to stupid idea to use a P2P network and got my friend to set one up from my house; it ended up killing the entire college network for 10 minutes because apparently the Administrator had put the most ridiculous netcode in that physically reboots the modem(s) if it detects certain types of network behaviour.

Four weeks ago, a virus spread through the college computer network. Some kind of Trojan. Everytime one computer's copy of Norton Antivirus would clean it, because other PCs were slower they would just resend the virus and so there was a giant, unstoppable loop. Apparently the Admin was too lazy/stupid to turn off the computers and clean them one-by-one, so I decided to not do his job.

Three weeks ago, I discovered something very interesting. On the computer I was using to work on Unreal 4 stuff, some idiot had downloaded uTorrent Portable and Jupiter Ascending. I didn't think much of it at the time so I chuckled and deleted the files (the HDDs on these computers are absolutely pitiful and full to the brim with student art projects).

The next week, uTorrent Portable and Jupiter Ascending were back, but this time they were also joined by The Devil Wears Prada and Mrs Doubtfire. I also found a suspicious .exe file (one of those that claims to have a song download). I uploaded it to one of those online file scanners, and the results came back positive for the exact same Trojan infection we had before. I deleted all the files and left a text note titles "DON'T BE A loving handicap.TXT".

Today, a friend messaged me from college. He was sitting at the computer next to the one I usually use, and apparently uTorrent Portable was back with the three movies and a different-but-similar suspicious .exe. He also said the virus probably hasn't been fixed.


What weird stuff do people do in your schools with technology?

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[Waru]

one singular computer lab has civ 4/5, europa univeralis, and tf2 all installed at my school.

[Lego lad]

in my video production class someone put a copy of minecraft in the share folder, was fun until the teacher caught on.

[SetGaming]

we have a shared folder

guess how many times we have to dig it out of some random file of some kids computer

(they're set up terribly)

[Pecon]

Most of the schools I've been at had solid enough security setups that stupid stuff like that was a pretty infrequent occurrence. At my first high school the IT department used Deep Freeze on all the computers so that no changes made to the computers would ever live past a reboot. However, they probably forgot to refreeze a computer after maintenance, and a virus started propagating across the school network that would be re-contracted from the source computer every time they rebooted. It was annoying, but the program had no malicious affects aside from copying itself everywhere.

Second high school I went to didn't use anything like Deep Freeze, so permanent changes could be easily made to the computers. However, they smartly had all the computers set up on a Windows domain network, which gave every single student a universal account logon that would generate a user on the machine for them to use. Non-administrative rights, of course. ...However, each machine obviously still had a local administrator account. I had a fun time hijacking those accounts for the sake of having admin access. No actual harm done, just basically making fun of how unsecure Windows XP was.

[XR-7]

When I was in high school I used a VPN to bypass the blockers so I could access the forums and YouTube. Pretty useless since almost nobody was ever online during school hours, but did it anyway. YouTube was also useful for passing time during uneventful study halls or when waiting for my mom to pick me up. After using it almost daily for months, the administrator did something that prevented VPNs from accessing the network. However, before the semester was over, the YouTube app was unblocked as well as the forums, but almost every other forum I stumbled across whether intentionally or not was still blocked for the reason, "forum".

[blockguy™]

i can't really figure out how to do anything on ours because everything is so limited. i can't even look at the hard drive. we only have 2 options in control panel. the it lady knows what she's doing, lol

[Shizza04]

i once named all of the files on a school computer "Infected".
every. SINGLE. FILE.

[Ravencroft·]

Someone made an extremely detailed snake on the cad software my program uses.

[Pecon]

i once named all of the files on a school computer "Infected".
every. SINGLE. FILE.

What did you do when there was more than one file in a directory?

[Otis Da HousKat]

I was a teaching assistant for a junior level course in computer science and engineering. The amount of students who could not understand how to save a file and navigate a simple directory structure was mind boggling.

[SetGaming]

What did you do when there was more than one file in a directory?

rekt

I was a teaching assistant for a junior level course in computer science and engineering. The amount of students who could not understand how to save a file and navigate a simple directory structure was mind boggling.

wait, they couldn't understand something simple like a directory tree like this:

home
    |
-------
|      |
pi    secretpaco

[Otis Da HousKat]

rekt

wait, they couldn't understand something simple like a directory tree like this:

home
    |
-------
|      |
pi    secretpaco

Ya, like one guy I told him to open, "My Documents," and he was clueless.

[SetGaming]

Ya, like one guy I told him to open, "My Documents," and he was clueless.

sad

[Alternat¡ve]

a computer assistant at my school blocked off about 5 computers for half a year because they apparently had viruses that couldn't be fixed

turns out he was using the internals for a bitcoin mining rig. he was expelled after they found out.