I've had a similar experience with spying software in University. The instructor was bragging about the spying tool during a lesson. Driven by disgust of being watched I quickly identified the remote host and port. Hacked together a shell script to flood the host with spoofed connections. While this was going on the command server was projecting it's video signal to a large screen at the front of the room. I watched with glee as the active clients preview thumbnails of the spy app slowly filled with fake clients. Very soon the machine locked up and became unresponsive. The instructor became noticably flustered I raised my hand and claimed responsibility. I was excited to explain how I did it and discuss but instructor was not interested at all.
This was my life in middle school- we had these crappy dual-core laptops that had monitoring software on them, and the computers would grind to a halt if a teacher wanted to see what you were doing. I think that running the modified VNC thing that was used took about 80% of the CPU's available power, and like 90% of the RAM?
Anywho, those experiences made me realize how much I value A) my privacy and B) just being left alone.
That's surprising - used to use VNC to do remote support for people running Pentium II and III machines in the sub-1ghz, single core range, and performance was fine. I suspect those machines were overburdened if you really experienced that much of a performance hit.
Just for reference, in middle school we had one Pentium 60 with a CD-ROM that was an absolutely mindblowing machine. I got to use it maybe once a month or so... Everyone else had to use the 386s while one kid would have his day on the fast machine.
It seemed so futuristic at the time, and now the story just makes me sound old.
Oh fun times. At my high school we ran Macs with an extremely tight allow-list of programs. For example, we were locked out of Safari and had to use IE5.5. I think even the text editor was locked out. Shameful.
Come to find out one day that 1) This was enforced only at the Finder (file manager) level, and 2) the AppleScript tool was on the allow-list(!)
A quick "tell application terminal to open" was all I needed to get into a fully-open environment. Not having a quarrel with the school, I didn't mess with anything. I just used it to do real work (like SSHing to my home server to fetch docs I forgot to bring in, or working on my AP Comp Sci stuff). But I also found out that the AirPort admin passwords were simply the SSID, so on the last day of my Senior year I changed a bunch of SSIDs to funny things. I also dropped a line to IT (via long AirPort SSIDs) letting them (and the students paying attention) know of the vuln :P
Bonus story: Years later at uni, I accidentally discovered that the shared "podium" account (used by guests to give presentations, but usable on any machine) was being used by someone to store their, uh, video collection. Much to the chagrin of the multiple presenters that accidentally ran across it during their presentations. Not to mention the rich browser autocomplete.
Wow, I did basically the same thing back in middle school! Noticed a checkbox on my computer teacher's monitor that said "Allow privileged applications to run unprivileged applications." Asked for AppleScript privileges so I could "learn some programming" and wrote a bunch of scripts that did nothing but start an application.
Of course, saving and running them didn't work at all. But clicking Run from the AppleScript editor meant that a "privileged application" was starting an unprivileged one :D
