Psychobilly
🧀Muenster
Computer Science. I got my first Computer late in 1999, and got obsessed pretty quick with messing with it. I didn't have any manuals or anything like that, as it was bought second hand, so I sat at the Computer every night, opening every program, and messing with stuff to figure out what did what. After a few months, I'd gotten it figured out enough. Then I'd start hearing about this thing called "Unix" and became interested in that. Got some work a likes (Linux) and then FreeBSD, which was the real deal. I started toying with things that weren't exactly legal, but learned how to defeat security set ups, and eventually realized it was something people did for a career. By the time I tested out of high school, the Systems Admin for the school district was given strict orders when he would show up to my school, like "Don't speak to him, don't answer ANY questions he asks, and don't leave passwords anywhere near him" and then when he had to go in the lab where I was, I was told I had to leave the room while he was in there because they were scared. I mean I had some fun in there and did pranks, but they were like, literally telling this guy not to even speak to me. They said I'd trick him into giving info that I shouldn't have.
After testing out, I took like a year or so off, and got some dead end jobs so I was making some money, and then I got into College with a scholarship. I hated school, but college way different; No more math or English courses, and I was able to test out of most of the intro classes. I got the professors to sign off on allowing me to enter the second year classes my first or second semester, so I decided to take the advanced courses, and then, after befriending two of the main people in the CS department, I was able to get more of the advanced stuff they didn't normally offer to be on the roster. The guys who taught these classes, didn't care if I was sitting in the back of the room playing DooM or watching movies on my Laptop, as long as I was quiet and not breaking into their servers, they didn't care.
LOL at one point, the head of the Networking department walked up to my desk in class one day, and told everyone in the class to be quiet. He grabbed the books for that class that were sitting on my desk, and slowly opened them. He said "You guys hear that?!?!?! It's the sound of a book being opened for the very first time!".
Not to be outdone, I grabbed a yellow marker at one point, and high lighted all the mistakes in the book and handed it back to him with proof the book was wrong, so, that day, my teacher said we were going to go over al the mistakes and wrong info that I found in their books. I took questions and basically did a little demonstration in class showing them that just because a book says it, doesn't make it true. I was also allowed to do little side projects where the head of Networking took my side when I broke into their Faculty Network, and grabbed a picture of my teacher from his private drive, and showed it in my class demonstration. Once in a while, the Systems Admin for the college would forget to write down a password for a Server that we were going to play with in class, and so I broke into it and changed the password and left to go smoke outside while the teacher was trying to reach the admin to get the password. It was a good time.
I hope there's enough there for at least SOME smart assery... LOL. It didn't really help me in life at all. It turned me into an arrogant prick who despised people. I used to refer to "users" of Servers as "The great unwashed" and whatever other insulting terms I could come up with. At the time I thought "This is so easy to understand, how do these fucking idiots keep screwing up these things?". The idea of them not spending years of their lives learning it never even came into mind until I was older. I was a bastard bro. I don't do IT at all now. I humiliated people too much. I made a floppy disk at one point that would delete everything on the computer after copying all the passwords stored in the RAM to the floppy. It was simple and worked out pretty well; It would copy all passwords, then delete everything.
Sometimes in college I got bored and added porn videos to the startup folder, but only for the student accounts; When the admin would log in to check it out, there would be no evidence of it, because he used a different account.
That college ended up using one of my term papers, where I talked about how to select proper passwords, and enforce them, as their own password policy. I'm not sure if they still use it, but I wrote the password policy for my school as a project in class. Sure it was great, and I was good at it, but again.... I'd rather not be a prick.
It may not be a bad thing bro. If I stayed on the path I was on in college, I'd probably be dead right now. Either from a hard drug overdose, or getting shot by a user. I once told someone at the Hospital my Mom worked at, who had called me for tech help (they had their own IT department...) that to fix her problem, she needed to find the box that her computer came in, and find the books it came with. She asked me "What do I tell them when I call this number???" and I sadly replied with "Tell them you paid all this money on a machine you're too stupid to own and please take it away from me".... Yeah bro, if college wasn't his go to, and he's a bit in limbo right now, it may actually be for the better. I know it is in my case.
I'd rather grow weed than full of rage, over not hitting the mute button on a tech support call fast enough, where I dismantle a user's self esteem and describe their family tree and it's obvious re-entry points. LOL.
