This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The following is a true story; the names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty/idiots.
Fall semester of my senior year of high school I took an AP(Advanced Placement) C++ Programming class. The fact it was Fall semester is irrelevant – except for that in the fall high school marching band season starts. For some reason my high school was insistent being idiotic and implemented the worst possible scheduling system ever. Instead of taking 4 classes one semester and 4 classes another semester, we took 4 classes one day and 4 classes another day for an entire year. How retarded can we get? Okay. Where was I? So it was senior year in a programming class.
Cast of characters in this programming class:
This was the third or fourth week of school. The school had implemented a fairly breakable security system in the classroom (and others) called Fortres. While we could do what we wanted with the computers, it was somewhat tedious doing all of the workarounds—in short, we needed the administrative password. That’s when Uncle Pong had a stroke of genius.
Pong made a program in Visual Basic run silently in the background (while having VB Studio open) and made a legit request to CP to enter the password on his computer. I think the Borland C++ we were using occaisionally needed it to be unlocked. Regardless, Uncle Pong now had the Fortres password and our key to unleashing hell on the school.
The password was ‘snipe’ (what a horrid password to choose!) and we had a few rounds of fun. Not as much fun as the time the previous Visual Basic class in the Spring when the teacher had the password on a post-it note on her desk when she was in Louisville. A few network drives were filled up that time.
We had another opportune time when CP was gone for two or three days, and ran a little too wild. Doobie wrote a packet sniffer for e-mail passwords (which were usually the same as their gradebook software) that dumped the account name and password into a growing text file. Pong and Doobie were simply up to no good. Day one of our reign of hell had gone off without a hitch and was quite fun. I didn’t really do anything that was worth mentioning when I had the chance, mostly out of ignorance. I’m lucky I didn’t, because Pong and Doobie later got busted.
Apparently one of the crew’s actions had been found out by the network administrator and they decided to employ some scare tacticts when CP returned from her trip. The day she came back Doobie was screwing around on the network and he failed to notice the WinVNC client installed on his machine. The techie’s took care of Doobie – right as Doobie’s copy of notepad said ‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you’ TWO police officers and an assistant principal came into the classroom escorting Pong and Doobie out.
I couldn’t believe it. They ran a sting operation on these two brilliant kids instead of just slapping them on the wrist. Why? I knew they were smarter than I am, and I knew I knew more about programming than CP. This was an outrage. I was pissed, so naturally, I blogged about it.
That night, the local NBC channel announced a contest called ‘Battle of the Bands’. It involved an online voting system – the band that received the most votes won something like *$5,000*. Our school was entered in the contest’s first round. If we won the first round we’d go to the finals, if we won the finals we’d get the money.
More on the the online voting system – remember, it was the year 2000 and let’s just say the security wasn’t very well done. Instead of blocking the voter’s computer’s IP address, the system placed a cookie on the voter’s computer and did a check similar to this: if the cookie existed, deny voting access…if the cookie does not exist, allow them to vote.
I wanted our band to win pretty badly, so I voted about 80 times on my own. The next day at school I discussed this with Uncle Pong and that afternoon the Cookie Monster was born.
Cookie Monster automated the voting process – it deleted the cookies set by NBC and automatically voted. Overnight our group got 10,000 votes. Then we started getting other band members to run it on their computers. Cookie Monster, like all great ‘malicious’ programs had props to our little crew in the title line – it read:
“Cookie Monster v666 by CP”
At the time, the band members who were be interested in voting for us in the ‘Battle of the Bands’ contest read my weblog. In my weblog I just had to brag about our tirades over NBC and more importantly over school and CP. I had screenshots of the program, and a photoshopped copy of the school’s newspaper with the headline ‘The Fortres password is snipe’. The band members who read my blog usually read my blog in another class taught by CP. It was then that CP saw my blog in class – read an insulting parody of the sting operation but worst of all she saw Cookie Monster. She saw her name on Cookie Monster, and read how it was supposed to rig the voting on the NBC contest. Naturally, she was pissed.
I was in Government class when she saw this, and it was halfway through Government class when I was called to the principal’s office. My dad, the network administrator, the principal, and CP were all there. To their credit, they had printouts of the blog entry and Cookie Monster, I couldn’t just go home and delete them. It wasn’t a pretty situation.
I had to explain the whole situation in front of Dad and the principal. The principal was so mad he immediately called NBC to inform them of this whole scandal. NBC responded something to the effect of ‘we knew this would happen, it’s cool. you can still win.’ We didn’t end up winning – another school instituted the same solution but on a much larger scale. Those f^&% punks! And THEY didn’t have to deal with Dad.
Dad was ‘disappointed’. If you’ve never heard “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” from a parent consider yourself lucky. It is a much worse feeling than any corporal punishment I received. He said I was to apologize to CP and to remove the material.
That night I removed the material, apologized to CP, and learned a lesson that no AP Programming class could teach anyone: don’t open your big mouth without considering the consequences.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.