More How to be a Hero
in School Computer Lab...
This same basic technique also will work with your ISP. If
you offer to help for free, and if you convince them you are
responsible, you can get the right to have root (or administrative)
access to almost any computer system. For example, I was talking
with the owner of the ISP one day, who complained how overworked
he was. I told him I knew a high school sophomore who had been
busted for hacking but had reformed. This fellow, I promised,
would work for free in exchange for the root password on one
of his boxes. Next day they did the deal.
So try it. Find an overworked teacher. Or overworked owner
of an ISP. Offer to show him or her that you know enough to help
take care of those computers.
But how do you prove you know enough for the job?
If you start out by telling your computer lab teacher that
you know how to break into the school computers, some teachers
will get excited and suspend you from school. Just in case your
teacher is the kind who gets scared by all those hacker news
stories, don't start out by talking about breaking in! Instead,
start with showing them, with their permission, a few cheap tricks.
Cheap Internet Explorer
Tricks
A good place to start is with Internet Explorer.
What could be more harmless--yet effective at showing off
your talents -- than changing the animated logos on IE (IE) and
Netscape?
You could do it the easy way with Microangelo, available from
ftp://ftp.impactsoft.com/pub/impactsoft/ma21.zip. But since you
are a hacker, you may want to impress your teachers by doing
it the hacker way.
1) Bring up Paint.
2) Click "image," then "attributes."
3) Choose width = 40, height=480, units in pels.
4) Make a series of pictures, each 40x40 pels. One way to
do this is to open a new picture for each one and set attributes
to width = 40 and height = 40. Then cut and paste each one into
the 40x480 image.
5) Make the top 40x40 image be the one you want to have sit
there when IE is doing nothing. The next three are shown once
when a download starts, and the rest are played in a loop until
the download is done. You must have an even number of images
for this to work.
6)Now run the Registry editor. See Chapter 1 for instructions.
7) Click to highlight the subkey
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\IE\Toolbar"
8) On the task bar above, click "Edit," then "Find."
Type "Brandbitmap" in the find window.
9) Now double click on BrandBitmap to get a dialog window.
Type the path and file name of your custom animated graphic into
it.
So let's say you set up a flaming skull that rotates when
you run IE. Your teacher is impressed. Now she wants you to put
it back the way it was before. This is easy. Just open up BrandBitmap,
and delete the name of your animation file. Windows Explorer
will then automatically revert to the saved graphic in BackBitmap.
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