Hey, this Jack, host of the show.

When I was a teenager, I went to university and studied computer science.

At one point, they gave all the students logins to some central Linux computer.

It's where you were supposed to do your schoolwork, like you could use it for file storage or check email there and do programming.

Well, when they gave me my username and password, they said

my username is my last name and my password is just my first and last name. And I instantly

realized, this means if you know another student's full name, you know their username and password

and can log in as them and read their emails and look through their files and stuff. And I told that to the teacher, hey, this is a bad password policy. He's like, why? And I'm like, because I know everyone's password. He's like, yeah, well, everyone should be changing their password. I'm like, yeah, but they're not. None of them are changing their passwords. I tried helping a few students change their password, but I knew it was a lost cause.

You could pretty much pick any computer science student in the school, and there was a pretty

good chance that you could log in as them if you just knew their first and last name.

Well, while I was sitting in class one day, the school sysadmin came into the class, and he pointed at me, any motion for me to follow him to the hall. It's like, go into the hall. He starts telling me, someone has broken into our Linux computer and is going around deleting a bunch of student files and data and stuff, and some students lost a ton of work from this. I was like, well, it wasn't me. I don't know anything about that.

I've never done that. But this guy was giving me a crooked look. He's like, come on, fess up. I know it was you. I was like, no, it wasn't. Why are you blaming me? What makes me think I did this? He's like, come on, man, I've seen your command history. You're way more active on that computer than anyone else. And the commands you're doing show me that you know way more than any other student too.

So it had to be you.

There's literally no other suspects.

And I'm like, I promise you, I did not do anything bad on your system,

but you have really terrible default passwords. and the students are not changing them.

He was like,

whatever, dude, look, if it happens again,

you're getting suspended.

And I started to realize, if whoever did that again,

I might get kicked out of school for that.

And this made me super worried.

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