I know its ​"naugh​ty" and my schools ​tech-go-to-​guy better not be here but...

Is there a way toa) stop them reading EVERYTHING i typeb) get a higher level/access account - for gods sakes people my                     website is not "deemed as dangerous"                and be able to play music whilst in IT lessons? come on, is it so             bad that i already know what the dudes gonna say? ("Now, in MS         access..." i know that program like the back of my hand. he spent         about 30 mins explaining Integers Booleans and Doubles once                 (even though we're not "good" enough yet [my (I need to watch my language)?] when you             can sum them up in what, 30 seconds?)c) details: school uses Ranger 5, and im pretty sure my account is limited (what else could it be? unless ranger makes every1 admin then restricts bits...)maybe just a patch to play music would be helpful. And dont tell me im arrogant for not listening : i only put one headphone in!! (well, in the days i could listen to music etc.)I listen for certain keywords: Homework, Programming, Next Week, Now youre going to..., FIRE!!!!, stuff thats important.

What on earth is up with your spacing?

It is usually quite easy to get around things at school. I have worked out how to change themes, and do all sorts of things. (You have to be inventive with shortcut keys).

It is usually better to just do nothing though. To be honest, do you really need to listen to music in IT?

Someone worked out (I don't know how as they didn't really know what they were doing) how to send messages around the school network with "net send", this was never sorted out, even though it would be pretty easy to do. After they moved to Windows XP, it naturally calmed down though.

I would expect that you would be able to find a way to listen to music, but, personally I wouldn't advise trying to exploit a school system, it will only get you in trouble.

(One of the funniest things that happened at my school was that someone evidently had made an account to test the network (this was a network admin account), having a username and password of "a" (this was presumably to help them login in and out fast. A pupil (in my year, I think) discovered it, and it led to trouble on the network. What surprised me is the low level things people did, i.e. creating folders on all the desktops with insults to people on. I thought someone would have made the area where all the public documents are kept editable by all so that people could change things, but this didn't happen).

To conclude, I suggest you weight up the "fun" of listening to music, with the real possibility of trouble and also the effort it could take to actually be able to do.

Angus Higgins

Bas wrote:

What on earth is up with your spacing?

He's suffering from "tab" syndrome.

Bas wrote:

What on earth is up with your spacing?

He put "áss" in his original message, it didn't get past C9's filter (how ironic) which then, as we all know, messes up people's posts.

I work as a Network Manager in a school, and the one thing that irritates me the most is students trying to circumvent security policies that are put in place.

Whether this is something trivial like creating "funny" folders or moving up the scale to  trying to get access to staff data or bypassing proxy settings. At the end of the day, you are only going to affect yourself and your friends, as tighter and tighter security policies are implemented.

It's my understanding that legally people like myself have to provide a secure environment for students, after all, they are (and I assume you are one of them, if not I apologise), minors, ie under 18.  The school has an implicit role to protect you.  If something should happen due to a student bypassing security, reading confidential data, entering a chatroom etc, serious questions are asked and people like myself can lose jobs and sometimes be prosecuted.  Do you really want this on your concience?

Also, at my last job in a university I was told that due to the way educational instutions are funded, ie from the governemt, any abuse that is discovered on PCs bought with that money could mean the end of, or a severe restriciting of, further fuinding.

Just my 2 cents

Andy...

Angus wrote:

Someone worked out (I don't know how as they didn't really know what they were doing) how to send messages around the school network with "net send", this was never sorted out, even though it would be pretty easy to do. After they moved to Windows XP, it naturally calmed down though.

Heh, back when we were using Windows 2000 at my school, a guy figured out how to do it in the command prompt.

The command prompt was later restricted, for that reason and for other reasons.

Although, I found a way around it by simply creating a batch file with the net send command in it and executing it.  Apparently, cmd could execute commands but not actually be opened.

Clever me.

mVPstar wrote:



Angus wrote:Someone worked out (I don't know how as they didn't really know what they were doing) how to send messages around the school network with "net send", this was never sorted out, even though it would be pretty easy to do. After they moved to Windows XP, it naturally calmed down though.

Heh, back when we were using Windows 2000 at my school, a guy figured out how to do it in the command prompt.

The command prompt was later restricted, for that reason and for other reasons.

Although, I found a way around it by simply creating a batch file with the net send command in it and executing it.  Apparently, cmd could execute commands but not actually be opened.

Clever me.

A better way is using VBA (usually unrestricted in MS Access) and making use of the APIs in Windows to send the SMB blocks yourself. No amount of group-policy can halt that.

When I was 11, I set up a website called "ARM" (from "Anti-RM", RM being the main equipment and services provider for my, and many other, schools), it wasn't much (heck, it was done in FrontPage) and I moved on to writing my own tutorials on "hacking" the Windows shell by 13 (back when networked Windows 95 was still being used), I decided to pull the site just before I turned 14.

I'm thinking of bringing it back, not because I'm evil or want to encourage illegal behaviour, but I'm finding modern attitudes to censorship and control overreaching. "Civil disobedience" is the word. Similar to Peacefire's manifesto, btw.

Oh sure, I totally understand school efforts to block MySpace, but blocking RateMyTeacher, YouTube, and in some cases Wikipedia? What kind of fascist substance are the policy makers smoking?

Modern Windows systems are pretty secure, there is no way a mere User can elevate themselves to a member of "Domain Admins" with just a solitary workstation, the worst they can do is obtain free access to information.

AndyC better be glad I'm not going to his university, I'd have rooted a few machines by now, circumvented all manner of filtering with encrypted RDP, and installed Firefox, regardless of Group Policy.

Leet Windowz skillz for great justice!

emet:

That's what mummy and daddy buy the computer for, if you want to get your l33t skillz up, do it at home.

w3bbo:

Blocking certain websites is done to a) protect the kiddies, and b) to prevent the dissemination of drivvel such as you find on wikipedia (hardly a sound source of information, we want our kids learning from that?)

And I work in a school, not a university (I assume you addressed the last comments to me), the guys in Unis are generally a lot stricter than me, so go for it, root a few machines, get rdp on... and lose your degree

I agree that we can;t be too dictatorial, and kids have to learn by their mistakes, but at the end of the day, if it comes down to a choice of turning a blind eye to Johnny Snotrag using MSN / MySpace etc or losing my job and not being able to pay the rent, bills, buy food etc... I think I'd rather have somewhere to sleep.

Andy...

Ironically, if he was as good as he claims to be, he should be able to find ways around it himself.... Perhaps he needs more IT lessson

RobbieCrusoe wrote:

And I work in a school, not a university (I assume you addressed the last comments to me)

No, AndyC is a fellow educational sysadmin here on Channel9, he takes pleasure in dissecting my points and proving me wrong. (He's doing us all a service, methinks, kudos Andy)

RobbieCrusoe wrote:

...the guys in Unis are generally a lot stricter than me, so go for it, root a few machines, get rdp on... and lose your degree

I didn't say they'd ever find out it was me Besides, I stopped feeling the need to modify things excessivly since I started using my lappy, it gives me more freedom (and a better CPU).

RobbieCrusoe wrote:

I agree that we can;t be too dictatorial, and kids have to learn by their mistakes, but at the end of the day, if it comes down to a choice of turning a blind eye to Johnny Snotrag using MSN / MySpace etc or losing my job and not being able to pay the rent, bills, buy food etc... I think I'd rather have somewhere to sleep.

Or do what more progressive places are doing and offer a relativly "unrestricted" service somewhere else, like kiosks in the cafeteria. Sure, block all the pr0n you want, but leave MySpace, Messenger, and other "social" websites available. It's not a classroom, it won't be a disruption. We've been doing that at my place with no issues (heck, the IT guys are even rolling out a free-for-all wifi service in their DMZ)

W3bbo wrote:


Or do what more progressive places are doing and offer a relativly "unrestricted" service somewhere else, like kiosks in the cafeteria. Sure, block all the pr0n you want, but leave MySpace, Messenger, and other "social" websites available. It's not a classroom, it won't be a disruption. We've been doing that at my place with no issues (heck, the IT guys are even rolling out a free-for-all wifi service in their DMZ)

I tell ya, you would love every school in NSW in Australia then. Ever since the Department of Education and Training decided to act as the state's dictator on which parts of the internet are child safe, and which parts aren't, all control on the internet in schools has been taken away and sites are blocked at the source, the state's proxy. Things like Messenger are therefore banned in every school, and sites parents and teachers deem inappropriate are banned at the state level (Including that RateMyTeacher mentioned earlier). Also, under the scheme, the DET provides email accounts (Using Exchange, thank god for that) to all users and cuts off all web mail accounts.

The filter is also so out of whack that it detects lots of legitimate sites as bad for various reasons. RDP, LogMeIn and various other remote access sites/protocols are also banned (Including online proxies), and there is really no getting around it, short of signing up for your own ISP subscription, which is not going to happen at all.

All this came about two years after I had a very efficient ISA Server setup going really well for our school. We could provide local filtering, logging, caching, access banning and all sorts of things that suited our needs, then the DET brought in this internet nonsense and killed it with their upstream servers, forcing us to rebuild the server as another terminal as it was effectively dead.

Other things it kills, Google image searching is a no-go for anyone under year 11 and there are various other PITA things with it.

So before you start complaining about how bad filtering might be, think of the millions of students in NSW who are screwed at the source for their education.

I was "naughty" enough to write a program that'll WinExec() minesweeper at lesson in my school days (those Win3.1 days).

Things were boring at that time... Pascal was something that you could learn in a summer, the tasks of Lab lessons are done within 15 minutes, and my teacher also agree finding other things to do myself is better. So he doesn't care what I do as long as I promise not to make any trouble to the PCs themselves, and not to teach my classmates how to do so.

W3bbo wrote:


AndyC better be glad I'm not going to his university, I'd have rooted a few machines by now, circumvented all manner of filtering with encrypted RDP, and installed Firefox, regardless of Group Policy.

Trust me, you wouldn't.

W3bbo wrote:


No, AndyC is a fellow educational sysadmin here on Channel9, he takes pleasure in dissecting my points and proving me wrong. (He's doing us all a service, methinks, kudos Andy)

He he. thanks.

Ahhh, Good times,

I made a service which I managed to get running as admin(you know, the usual simualte-a-network-attack trick with an admin logged in...) that would listen to a text file in my account and do anything I wanted to.

after the admin found out about that, I was recruted to pen-test the network and see what I could break, 2 minutes later all the school servers were down (ping is great).., though it was in the holidays.

At my high school, we got the full admin password for the novell servers.

It was very exciting at the time, we never did anything with it though. We just wanted to prove that we could haha.

We used two ways to get the password, the first method we tried was creating a copy of the novell login and logging everything typed in. (this was with win98)

When the computers got upgraded to Win2000 we sniffed for the unencrypted LDAP communication using an ARP man-in-the-middle attack.

It was kinda boring after we got the password.

Also we used a ssh tunnel to get on msn.

The funny thing is, i now have a small part-time job at a local school as a network admin.

I dont want to change much, all i want is a bit more useablilty. everythings locked down like a fort. i mean, my own website is not deemed dangerous people! (my spaces were out as i was trying to branch the whole topic with tabs ) All i really want to do it be able to change a theme, be allowed to go on a few websites once all my work is finished etc. and be able to KEEP any settings ive changed when i switch a computer on the network.

I dont mean to be arrogant etc, i just want to be able to do a bit more stuff... like Cyonix said, i just want to do it so that i can say i have done it. Theres a way around everything, but seriously, i dont mean to cause trouble, as, trust me, i am one of those "goodie two-shoes" kids. I just want a bit of flexibility and a way to change a few settings. You cant even right click on the desktop/in folders. WHAT?

Thing is, i suppose it is helping my skills, as in school i have to find ways around everything, which now gives me my usual route and the more techno-fied way. So, in essence, it could be a good thing. hmmm

RobbieCrusoe wrote:

Blocking certain websites is done to a) protect the kiddies, and b) to prevent the dissemination of drivvel such as you find on wikipedia (hardly a sound source of information, we want our kids learning from that?)

I fail to see how wikipedia is any more drivel than other sites they would visit for research.  In fact, it's more likely to be accurate since people apparently live to keep it up to date.