There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a …

Hehe, I know I managed to undo the damage I caused, but I'm sure my activity was logged and noticed by the sysadmins at the time. Ironically, after graduating I later became a sysadmin at another department at my university and told them about the particular thing I'd exploited. But, anyway this was on SunOS and specifically some Sun4c machines with a PROM password. I discovered a couple of new machines were put into the labs without a PROM password, so you could press STOP-A and get into the forth debugger, and read/write system memory. This seemed interesting, but I wasn't sure what I should be changing. Then one day, I was reading some documentation, and there was a system call [1] that returned a pointer to some information about the current process (or maybe it was for a specific pid), and one of those fields was marked as reserved. I discovered that the field seemed to contain some…

This is how the system chills our speech, making us nice and compliant little workers. Putting some funny animation codes into your .plan wasn't doing anything wrong.

Meh. Sysadmins are dicks. The system is secure or it's not. Poking at the locks is not a serious threat. I know a similar story of a sysadmin who did the same, but went into the lab and sat down next to the student. And then put his handgun on the table. Power tripping assholes. Source: I was a sysadmin.

In the Before Times, when I didn't have direct Linux experience yet, I was telnetted into my university's computer lab (as a non-root user) to do homework. I needed a newer version of GCC, and was resourceful enough to download, compile, and install it. A few days later I got called into the comp sci department to explain why I was hacking the shared server. I didn't know enough then to articulate how much I honestly didn't do anything malicious, but the sysadmin had evidence that I'd written files all over the place. I denied knowingly doing anything, but he had the proof. I was nearly on the edge of tears afterward out of fear of getting suspended for hacking. It was made clear that this was absolutely on the table. I told a much more experienced friend what happened and he investigated. He dragged the sysadmin to the dean's office and told everyone loudly that the sysadmin was a dipsh…