I was doing some thinking this morning while on my hour long commute. Thinking about old times, and old friends. High school, when I was in high school, I went to a technical school, we had this project. A hand full of us were picked to physically wire the school for cat5. It wasn’t a huge building, 5 of us were picked. Once the cable was laid, we brought on 5 more students, and we built or upgraded 170 pc’s.

While things were being installed, I had access, to everything. This was an NT4 network, so I had an admin account. Once things were finished though, that got taken away. I didn’t really like that. So one afternoon I took a seat at one of the instructors machines, and with a nice tool from l0pht heavy industries, I dumped the SAM to a floppy. Once I had that, a few DAYS of brute force, and I had my admin rights back. And that wasn’t the first time! Some day ill tell you about the day I almost made the “secutity” on the systems running DOS/3.11 before they moved to NT look like a joke in front of a PA state representative. I had also learned how to pick simple locks because they started locking the desk drawers. A skill that came in handy in college too! And lets not forget the key I pilfered off an instructors desk in order to keep my access to the under desk kick panels when they started locking them.  When i graduated, i passed the key on to a Junior that i felt worthy.  😉

In college, there were enough people abusing shared systems that they installed these hard drive lock cards.  Essentially, they were a card installed in the system that actually stopped writes to the hdd and instead put anything written to the system into a cache.  If you turned a key on the back of the system, you’d get write access back.  Well, these things were windows boxes, with IE and no other software.  I _needed_ Netscape, right?  So i put my primitive lock picking skills to use, and started unlocking systems before class.

So, what am I gettign at?  Am i a trouble maker?  No, I just dont like it when shoddy security is put in place to try to prevent me from doing the things I’d like to do.  In my opinion, if the secuirty can be circumvented, then it’s not secure, and i’m not in the wrong.  It’s different of course if your intentions are malicious.  I’m not, I dont think i’ve even written a single line of malicious code, nor have i ever used my skills to do anything immoral.

Maybe it’s this same desire to have no barriers that eventually lead me to becoming a Jeep enthusiast?  They are the go anywhere do anything vehicle after all.