Comment by belval

I find it annoying that people immediately assume incompetence and not inadequate staffing or conflicting priorities. I worked at a school district for a few years and we were woefully understaffed for what we had to cover. In situations like that you do what you have to so teachers can teach, move on to the next emergency, and hope like hell some self-important little shit doesn't burn everything to the ground.

The students were extremely lucky.

The advice given to me in high school (I was working on tech projects after school for several teachers and groups) was to not even try or explore poking around the IT networks it no matter how good my intentions were. All it takes is one grumpy school administrator to feel undermined or to misunderstand your report and you could be expelled.

When you're in a position like a student, you're still working your way up and building credibility. No need to risk it all for an IT group that doesn't want your security advice and didn't ask for your help.

The poster/hacker actually addresses this -- he doesn't reveal himself until after graduation, keeps his fellow hackers secret still, and mentions that he was most likely the prime suspect in the district anyway. Seems like a fair tradeoff if he wanted to make this blog post, though school districts could be nasty and litigious, I guess.

He addresses this pretty well in the post imo. His co-conspiritors remained unnamed while he alone revealed himself because he wanted to publish this post and it's highly likely he would've been blamed anyway.

The newest policy is to charge minors as adults unless there's a compelling and beneficial reason not to. I think that was a DOJ change around 2009. Not sure how many states followed suit. But in general, its increasingly likely that minors are being charged as adults.

Also in my typing class circa 2004 the teacher was about to kick me out because he thought I was on a chat room during his class. I was actually viewing page source on an HTML document

I used CACLS with an Office hack in NT / 9X to copy homework. Never got caught for that.

They got me on propagating computer games through the network using shared drives the teachers were supposed to use for homework.

We had BNC network cables in those days and the entire building shared a single T1 line for several hundred computers.

The world has changed.

Same thing here. Teacher came into class with his multiple month investigation comparing all students work highlighting common errors. Found three different groups that were sharing work load. In school suspension for all of us, only like three kids left in class for the week.

Consent is paramount when doing that type of exploration. Without explicit permission, how would an IT administrator distinguish the difference between a curious student and a malicious attacker?

People on HN always act like what they were doing was almost noble. You weren't. If you had been picking locks or even rummaging around unlocked desk drawers you'd get the same treatment and deserve it.

If I broke into your home tonight to play a prank on you and then handed you a white paper about how to better secure it, how would you feel?

Nah, i actually used powershell before bash because i did a lot of android hacking stuff before learning to code. I worked with Powershell 3, powershell 4 and powershell 5. Powershell 3 was the most painfull thing to work with. No state accross session, the default were shit so i had to reconfigure more often than not. Slow, painfull, buggy... Around the same ime i learned how to bash pretty well in two days, use rsync, use ssh, use sed and awk... Powershell 3 was shit compared to this.

Then i used powershell4, i guess it was better but honestly i don't think i've used it very much. Powershell5 might be better than bash for 90% of the dev population though.

Well at least it's a racing horse and not a turtle.

Seminal.

PowerShell has been available on Linux via .NET Core since 2016 and version 6.0. Even my Windows box with PowerShell 5.1 likes to remind me of this fact every time I start it:

    Windows PowerShell
    Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
    
    Try the new cross-platform PowerShell https://aka.ms/pscore6

There have been REPLs like PowerShell for ages, it's nothing really new. The only nuance in this is that it is new in the Windows ecosystem to have something like that supported by Microsoft. Ironically, it hasn't managed to displace the command prompt or batch files, so instead of having to deal with one thing, you now have to deal with two things.

As for the passing of strings: it might seem like a pain, but as soon as you start working with non-program I/O it's not like you'll have much of a choice. Keep in mind that it is the lowest form of communication and you can build on top of that. Same with I/O in general: nothing prevents you from using shared memory or a device instead.

> Passing strings from program to program is a pain

The internet has been pretty successful and many popular protocols (http, smtp, etc) are exactly "passing strings from program to program"

Parsing strings in Powershell is super complicated compared to regular Unix tools

> Credit where credit is due, we all WISH nix had something like PowerShell.

Who is "we". I've worked exclusively on a windows stack so used powershell on the job. But at home, I use bash. I don't want something like powershell in nix and don't use powershell on nix even though it's been available on nix for many years now.

> Passing strings from program to program is a pain

You can argue it's the basis of computer science and also pretty efficient.

> passing around .NET objects instead is a great step forward, as can be seen by the several attempts at similar shells passing around JSON objects.

Passing around objects can be slow, inefficient, wasteful, etc though it can be convenient.

If you are on a windows stack then go with powershell. If not, then go with bash. Nobody should be on a windows stack but sadly, much of the business world has been captured by microsoft.