
The Website That Got Me Expelled - Rudism
http://www.codeword.xyz/2015/09/05/the-website-that-got-me-expelled/
======
acjohnson55
As someone who is both a former student with authority issues and a former
high school teacher, this story leaves me with a whole bunch of feelings. You
would think that teachers have the maturity to be more or less immune to the
impressions of teenagers, but it's actually quite a challenge to maintain face
[1] as the instructional leader of dozens of humans. In my experience in Teach
For America, it was a fashionable meme that it's the adults that make
education hard, not the children. But I think that's not quite honest. While
adults are ultimately responsible for everything that's wrong with education,
on a day to day basis, you're put in very delicate and stressful situations
with children, who are impulsive, emotional, and myopic. It's really, really
hard to deal with adolescents at scale.

Yet, in this case, like so many others, it's very clear that at some point,
some of the adults decided that it was appropriate to wage total war on the
child who offended them. They allowed their hurt feelings to suspend their
sense of empathy and proportionality. Even worse, as the role models for the
school, they set a standard of absolutism and intolerance. I can identify with
them, while also seeing how badly they failed to take the high road.

It's interesting how this same dynamic has played out in criminal justice as
well. We struggle with the ability to treat the incarcerated in a humane
manner, to hold police accountable for their excesses, to provide security
without domestic militarization, and to fully rehabilitate and reintegrate ex-
cons into society.

I guess it's probably an inherent tension in human society, when there is a
boundary of authority. I just hope we can learn and progress.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_%28sociological_concept%29)

~~~
code_sterling
It's interesting, I graduated from that school in '92, and I was surprised
when I read it. The faculty I knew, most would have encouraged such a project.
My drafting teacher let me do a 3point of a x-wing for my final project. The
school let me take 3 years of art in one year. I got caught smoking in the
stairwell, and was just told to go outside. I did nudes, a controversial art
projects that my college would have raised an eye to. This wasn't a bad
school, or at least it wasn't the 5 years before this story occurs. So while
I'm sure this happened, my own experience makes me believe that were not
getting the whole picture.

~~~
Rudism
I was really surprised by how it all went down as well. Up to that point, I
had felt that the school, teachers, and administration were all very
progressive and tolerant, which was a huge factor in my decision to go forward
with the whole project and keep it going as long as I did.

As far as not getting the whole picture, I shared everything I could to the
best of my recollection. I also had one of the friends who was involved go
over it and it was his opinion that I have left nothing salient out as well.
It did all happen close to 20 years ago, however, so it's entirely possible
that we've forgotten something significant.

~~~
mirimir
It's amazing to read that first-person account. I recall reading about it at
the time. Or maybe it was the other case that you refer to. Thanks! I'm
curious about your perspective on a few things, though.

What free-speech rights did Canadian students have then?

Do they have more rights now, or less?

Teachers are "public figures", right? Or is Canadian libel law more like
English than American?

~~~
Hyperborian
I'm pretty sure that a high school teacher would _not_ be considered a "public
figure" in the US.

------
Animats
The most famous incident like this is "neverseconds".[1] This is the blog of a
primary school girl in Scotland who, each day, took a picture of her school
lunch and reviewed it. The school authorities threatened her and insisted she
stop. That backfired on them, badly. Coverage on TechDirt. Coverage on the
BBC. Worldwide press coverage. 10 million page views of blog. Complaints in
Parliament. School authorities disciplined by national education minister.
Public apology by town council. Girl wins several awards for fighting
censorship.

Her blog is still active, three years later. She encourages other kids to send
in pictures of their school lunches, and it's a great site for seeing what
kids have for lunch around the world.

[1]
[http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html](http://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/06/goodbye.html)

~~~
comrh
That's crazy. She's just documenting her reality. I'm glad she "won" in the
end.

------
ejk314
Ah, the good old days. I remember in middle school when I'd set up my first
webpage. I got my first and only in-school-suspension for going to that site
during class. Just going to the website. I just wanted to see if it was up,
since I had never accessed it from anywhere but home. My teacher's explanation
was "It could have been anything! You can't go to websites I don't approve
of!"

Now, this would normally have been something trivial I would have just
shrugged off. But my computer partner also got in trouble for "not stopping
me". What was he going to do, knock me out of my chair before I pressed enter?
This kid was the stereotypical teacher's pet who always did his homework and
was quiet in class, so I felt particularly bad for getting him in trouble. I
even offered to serve two days of ISS instead of him getting in trouble - of
course that request was denied.

To this day, I still cannot understand that woman's reasoning. How is "you
could have done something bad," grounds for punishment? What kind of person
feels the need to punish a child who's showing enthusiasm for a subject
they're teaching?

~~~
wyager
>How is "you could have done something bad," grounds for punishment?

Unfortunately, this kind of thing pops up in the real world a lot as well too.
"You're riding a bicycle after drinking a few beers? You could have crashed
into someone! DUI felony charge for you!"

~~~
enraged_camel
Driving under the influence is categorically different. You are a real danger
to others and can maim or kill them. How is that even remotely comparable to
navigating to a personal website in class?

~~~
lmartel
No matter how drunk you are, it's hard to maim someone else with a bicycle.
You might knock someone over, but you're really only a danger to yourself.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
As a pedestrian I disagree. I've actually seen cyclists knock someone down (it
was a pure accident, no drinking involved as far as I know) and they were
pretty badly injured (ambulance, etc). Last thing we need is cyclists drunk,
they're dangerous enough when sober.

~~~
shopkins
I only have anecdotal evidence, but offer the heuristic that most "drunk
enough to be dangerous" bicyclists can't ride fast enough to maim anyone --
and if they're riding down a hill, _they 're_ much more likely to be maimed.

There's an inherent barrier to entry that makes drunk biking difficult enough
to limit those who can actually do it. Like how often do you see someone drunk
on a road bike with clips? How many drunk people bike on busy roads where
_they 're_ more likely to get killed than the guy in an air conditioned hunk
of metal on wheels?

A reasonable person's analysis might conclude that it's better to say, "hey,
let's bike to the bar" that's 4 miles away rather than "let's drive," because
statistically you're as/more likely to fall down and injure yourself as if
you'd walked, and will harm society much less than if you'd decided to pilot a
machine that requires a fraction of the bodily coordination to get from A to
B.

------
gwilkes
Loved reading this, I have a very similar story. Same year, 1997, I made a
Geocities site and had teacher report cards just like in this story. I put the
site up on the library computers home page and then it spread around the
school immediately, kids were talking about in the hallways, teachers
mentioned in class that they would find who did did it.

I also critiqued the school itself, some of the hypocrisies I saw and notably
since it was a Catholic school they had a school rule against pornography even
when you were at home. So of course I put up a very soft core nude photo as a
sort of fuck you.

However, unlike this story I actually was expelled, but it's not very
difficult to get expelled from a Catholic school, it was a regular occurrence
at our school. Knowing this I kept it very anonymous and didn't tell anyone.

I got an email from the school saying they would sue me for libel unless I
came and turned myself in. That made me pretty nervous and pretty soon after
that a student who I knew emailed me saying he loved the site and wanted to
help. I then told him who I was and it turns out it was actually a teacher
impersonating a student.

My brother and I were both expelled, my brother didn't do anything but
contribute a few of the teacher reviews, so it sucked pretty bad for him. For
me too of course but I was kicked out halfway through my senior year so I was
mostly done with high school anyway. Plus I had already applied to colleges so
it the expulsion didn't show up on any transcript the colleges received.

My brother wasn't so lucky since he was only a sophomore when this happened,
when it came time to apply for college he got accepted to none of the colleges
he applied for. He appealed hard and finally got into one.

~~~
azraomega
Did you ever find out how they targeted you at the first place?

~~~
gwilkes
Oh, I had an anonymous email account listed on the website so people could
leave feedback or submit additional teacher reviews. So, they didn't know who
I was but they could contact me.

I fucked up by outing myself to the teacher impersonating a student, but with
a legal threat I guess it could have turned out even worse if I didn't out
myself.

Huge drama at the time, my parents were pretty religious so they actually took
the values of the school seriously and were so upset that they told me they
wouldn't let me go to college.

That was a pretty easy fight to win though as there is no way they could have
stopped me.

~~~
azraomega
It's interesting. I don't suppose there is a way to protect your anonymity at
the time. They would have got you either way. Using an email list might be a
better solution... haha, use a free email for every weekly update. Never
reply.

~~~
mirimir
In the late 90s, there was no Tor, or VPN services. There were still
pseudonymous remailers (penet.fi having gone down in 1996). I remember using
Potato Idaho to craft Mixmaster remailer messages with reply blocks. That's
how I posted to filtered cypherpunks :) But it was tedious.

------
Ambroos
I was almost suspended at school eight years ago for using `net send` from
.bat files and because I had Everest portable on my network drive (a tool that
lists system specs, I was curious what hardware the PC's had).

The guy that managed the network at the time was almost personally offended
and accused me of 'hacking' the network with dangerous tools. He got the
school board involved, my parents had to go talk to the headmaster. My parents
and I had to sign a contract which said that any other 'unauthorised' use of
the school network would get me suspended for 3 days.

If you have one bitter person working somewhere and nobody knows enough about
something to stop them, you can get these power-mad types. Probably happens a
lot at schools with just one network administrator.

~~~
vkjv
I must have gone to a great high school. I _actually_ hacked our systems a few
times.

We used a piece of software to lock down the PCs, IIRC, called Fool Proof. I'm
not sure if it was supposed to be ironic, because it didn't take long to
figure out that it kept the clear text admin password in swap. The machines
didn't have BIOS passwords, so it was pretty easy to boot into a hex editor
and dig it out.

When my teacher found out I did this, he praised my ingenuity and even got me
involved in vetting alternative options, despite the fact that I had been
handing the password around to friends like candy.

~~~
ryukafalz
Did you have a clue as to where in swap the data was stored? Looking through a
swap partition in a hex editor sounds mind-numbing.

~~~
mckiddy
Plaintext actually stands out pretty easily in a hex editor, just because
everything else is basically gibberish.

~~~
firebones
And never underestimate the amount of time that a teenager, with all the time
in the world, would dedicate to this.

------
TheLoneWolfling
Some sites require JS because they do weird things like rendering stuff
clientside.

This site "requires" JS because... The opacity of the article is set to 0?
Everything's there, everything's rendered, but they have a CSS rule (".use-
motion .post { opacity: 0; }"). Only thing I can think of is that they do a JS
fade-in or something and missed the unintended consequences.

(Speaking of which... Doesn't Google penalize sites that have an excessive
number of hidden keywords? I wonder if the entire article being hidden
qualifies...)

~~~
shadowmint
oh come on.

It's 2015, not 1999. If you don't have javascript enabled, do you honestly
expect to be able to read half of the internet?

~~~
cm2187
For privacy and security I do the same. Requiring javascript to just view a
blog article is insane.

------
edw519
Reminds my of the first program I ever wrote, in 10th grade, painstakingly
assembled one IBM card at a time, output onto green bar paper.

I changed the school motto from "Gateway High School, Hats Off to Thee" to
"Gateway High School, Pants Down to Thee" surrounded by an ascii generated
toilet.

The principal took away half my card deck (which would have taken weeks to
reproduce), promising to return them only when my father signed my output.

My father reproduced my output by hand with his signature and a label:
"Functional Specifications".

The principal returned my cards and never said another word.

~~~
bru_
Dude you must have gone to an elite high school

------
ggreer
I wish the post had gone into more detail about how the author was caught. Did
another student rat him out? Was there some forensic evidence he didn't
consider? I did _much_ worse at my high school, but I was never caught. Chalk
it up to trustworthy friends, knowledge of computer forensics, and a little
luck. Even if I had been caught, I doubt there would have been any real
consequences. A suspension? It's going on my Permanent Record? Pfft, who
cares?

If there's one piece of advice I can impart to students, it's this: Don't
worry about getting into trouble. Unless you're committing an actual crime,
the consequences are entirely forgettable. Even in the author's case, a clear
and disproportionate overreaction, he's _glad_ to have had the experience. So
don't be cowed. Have fun.

~~~
Rudism
I never really found out how they caught me. I suspect the guy in the states
who started hosting the site after the initial shut-down told them my name
when they contacted him, but who knows.

------
donatj
Haha, this brings back memories. Starting in Jr. High some friends and I ran a
website which started out as just some crudely drawn absurd comics, but later
added a section called "Anarchist Times" where we would vent mostly about
school in a news-article-esq manner, but also often politics which looking
back we knew nothing about. We would let anyone who wanted to write and At its
height we had something like 14 kids regularly providing content. A
reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and
acted like a prince. To my knowledge no one ever got in trouble, we did
however get blocked by the schools IT department whom I went to and protested
until it was resolved.

There was also some hijynx when we tried to enter the website for class
president and were told a website wasn't eligible, so we ran a write in
campaign and plastered the school in posters, which the school promptly took
down.

This was how I learned PHP and MySQL, which has made me my living the last 10
years!

After high school it fell largely into disuse, but I have paid for the domain
every year since then. I've ported it from host to host, and it still lives on
my Nginx digital ocean server. Even done a few small upgrades like making the
audio of our band "The Medium" playable through the site (html5). Lol, it's at
the poorly chosen [http://oasisband.net](http://oasisband.net) if anyone was
curious.

A few people have asked me to change their names which I have obliged. People
say some stupid things in highschool, I know I did.

~~~
eastWestMath
>A reoccurring theme was to mock the principals son, who was in our grade and
acted like a prince.

Err, cyber bullying?

~~~
bru_
It's not just regular bullying... _cue ignorant middle aged schoolteacher gasp
chorus_ IT'S CYBER BULLYING!!! _cyborg bursts through the wall and grabs nerd
by the collar_

~~~
dang
Please don't do this here.

------
spacemanmatt
Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants. I'm lucky I was not more
harmed by the sadist VP that ran my middle school.

~~~
masklinn
> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants.

If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary
education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no
issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the
parts).

Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of
power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little
relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy
it is to be granted power by the environment.

~~~
spacemanmatt
If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.

~~~
cma
When you add artificial specificity, people assume you did so for a reason.
Like if you say "women are [X descriptive property]" people will assume,
rightfully, an implied "women, as opposed to men, are ..."

And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an
implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally
contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.

~~~
spacemanmatt
picky, picky

------
rjknight
I must be about the same age as the author. This certainly brings back
memories!

Oh for the days when we could just uncomplicatedly assume that anyone who knew
anything about technology was also an instinctive anti-authoritarian, too.

------
beerbajay
I had a really similar experience when I was in high school, though I didn't
get expelled. I made a website with photos of students (and their first names)
giving the finger to the camera. People of course set this as the home page on
library computers.

Unhappily, this was right after Columbine, so the administration was super
paranoid and I was a little X-Files-obsessed black-trenchcoat-wearing
weirdo... so I got a week's suspension.

------
logicallee
What the hell is this guy doing as a coder - he should be running a media
empire by now!

Everything he reported doing in high school is fantastic grassroots marketing
and PR, and the content he created was great even back then. The teacher
review is one of the best ideas, ever. He got everything down - content,
distribution - even on slips of paper - the works.

This is exactly what you read in a media billionaire's bio: expelled from a
prestigious high school for running an underground school newspaper, which
printed students' uncensored teacher reviews. Oh yes.

More recently - even our HN title is clickbait! Yet his write-up is fantastic,
100% true and a great read! This guy knows how to press people's buttons.

And remember, he got free hosting because some guy thought his writing was so
hilarious.

OP, get into media, stat.

Oh, and OP? You _are_ hilarious. No rose-tinted glasses about it.

~~~
wolfgke
The author clearly writes:

"I was a pretty stereotypical “nerd” in high school. A debilitatingly shy and
socially awkward computer club member who spent the vast majority of his time
on the internet and listened exclusively to music by “Weird Al” Yankovic.".

~~~
logicallee
could you elaborate on what you meant by that?

~~~
wolfgke
I can imagine several scenarios:

* Being very introverted he hates doing the "people stuff" that is necessary to run a media empire

* While he is good at PR, he loves computer programming more

* He did PR in a way that worked quite well at a high school, but doing it professionally requires different/additional skills (say, people skills)

* While he has all the necessary competencies to run a media empire in principle, our society has some strong expectations how such people have to be (say, more extroverted, less nerdy).

* He has a very anarchistic way to run PR, which succeeded in its own way at the high school (see article), but does not work in a professional environment, where a different style is excepted, where he's not good at.

~~~
logicallee
well, I disagree. you have some good points, but my impression still leans
toward my former post. zuck isn't the most social person either :)

anyway, until OP tries it we'll never know :) thanks for elaborating on your
reasoning for me though.

------
atiti
I also had a similar story. It was also early 2000s and our high school had a
calendar system for each student so they could look up in which room they
would have what class. So a friend of mine and I have setup a proxy server
which would modify rooms randomly, or randomly cancel classes. In order to
"test out" our code, we ARP+DNS spoofed the the whole school network, so
anyone visiting the site internally would end up on our site. Most students
thought it was super fun that their classes were "cancelled" but obviously
teachers didn't approve :-)

It was also a couple of months away from our graduation, and we did get into
pretty big trouble, where we got suspended, and had to write a letter of
apology to the principal so they would allow us to graduate.

------
peterwwillis
I got expelled from several schools for the crime of knowing more about
computers than the teachers, having an interest in computer security, and
having a website. I was also used as a scapegoat by a network admin who
couldn't fix his networking issues. After the first school, every other school
assumed i was some kind of dangerous delinquent. It's part of what prompted me
to drop out.

------
coldcode
I remember when I was on the school newspaper my junior year (long time ago,
before the internet) we all decided to put a fake ad on the back cover of the
newspaper just for fun. It was a picture of a girl in a bikini with a headline
about her boyfriend loves her because she knows Calculus (or something I
forget exactly). Students of course thought it was hilarious, the school did
not, and actually fired the journalism teacher (who was female). The next year
we were basically locked down and could do nothing without prescreening.
Thankfully my family moved a few weeks into the year and I didn't have to deal
with it much.

------
loup-vaillant
Be sure to read the comment below about how another student got into similar
trouble for messing up with the school's unsecured network, but was able to
blackmail his way out. (The school had committed insurance fraud.)

Funny how people change their attitude the second they realise they do not
have the upper hand after all.

------
greggman
my self and 4 of my friends got banned from using the computers at our school
for ~5 weeks. We were the geeks in the computer class.

Showing my age, but the class had 12 Apple IIs and a networked Corvus hard
drive connecting them all for storage. The system had accounts. Each student
got some space on the shared hard drive to save their work and could not
access each other's storage areas. The teacher of course could access
everything and used it to read students' programs for grading.

One time the teacher had logged in and then stepped away to deal with
something or a student. One of my friends took that opportunity to do a binary
save of a large chunk of memory on that machine, the part where OS/state extra
was. Turned out if you loaded that save back into memory you'd become the
teacher. He gave us all copies of the file.

We never used it for any kind of mischief but a few days later the teacher
noticed one of us doing something we shouldn't have been able to do. The
teacher wrote our parents letters and said we were banned from using the
computers till the end of the quarter.

IIRC only one set of parents were actually upset. I think the rest were
actually kind of proud. It didn't affect our grades. We also liked the
teacher. I just thought it was his way of appropriately punishing us to make
it clear even though you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

------
sarreph
Like many commenters, this post brings back memories of similar experiences...

My experience with being silly on school computers was mainly in middle school
(age 14) where friends and I would find more inventive ways to wreak havoc on
the network. One of the favourite tricks was to hack open the command line
(using accessibility options in XP) and remote shutdown other student's
machines towards the end of a lesson before they'd saved their work... rather
cruel to think back to it now. Another more daring guy sent a string of
offensive messages to the principal on a LAN-chat type application that caused
pop-ups on the receiver's screen. Come to think of it, there were so many 3rd-
party administrative 'tools' that could be run trivially without root access
on XP, such as drive-encryptors (rendering machines essentially useless) that
it was easy to perform a whole manner of tricks.

Personally, I was only called into the deputy's office once, regarding a
server-wide DOOM game installation. They confiscated my memory stick due to it
holding the DOOM installation files. However, I somehow managed to get it back
the next day without them checking it; thankfully they didn't, because there
were so many 3rd-party executables and 'network guides' on there it would've
been far worse. I can relate to the stress the author felt in that sense,
because going home that night knowing they had my memory stick was one of the
most gut-wrenching feelings of my teenage years.

Thankfully, all that was required of me was a meeting with a sysadmin trying
to explain why I had filled an obscure part of the server's shared area with
DOOM and COD sprites...

------
gayprogrammer
My highschool brought me in to a meeting with the principal and police officer
when I wrote the name of my boyfriend on my ticket to senior prom. They
"convinced" me that I could not go to prom with a guy. End of story.

~~~
bru_
I love how the police officer was deemed necessary

------
nadams
> Our plan was to surreptitiously allow our fellow students to grade and leave
> anonymous comments about their teachers, which we would collect and publish.

So... ratemyprofessors.com ?

------
jbapple
IANAL, but near as I can tell, it's still up in the air if (in the US)
students have a constitutional right to be free of official retribution for
off-campus speech.

There is some evidence that if the speech is truly off-campus and if it
doesn't cause a substantial disruption to school functions (see Tinker v. Des
Moines), students are protected. Even the famous Supreme Court "BONG HiTS 4
JESUS" case was partially decided based on the speech being at a school-
related event.

On the other hand, "disruption" is defined rather loosely sometimes, perhaps
even lowering the bar to content that is viral, as long as it is also
insulting. See, for instance, SJW v. Lee's Summit.

------
learnstats2
The initial reaction of the head of English was what surprised me the most in
this article.

Shouldn't the English department be happy that their students have understood
satire and 1984, without taking a personal grudge? Glad it worked out well.

~~~
Rudism
I was surprised, too. I thought my reference to animal farm (some animals are
more equal than others) was particularly clever.

It's possible that the head English teacher was the one who wrote the original
Winston's Way, however, and may have taken it more personally as a result. I'm
not sure though.

------
geon
I have read several stories like this from the US. It baffles me how many
Americans seems to think their country is the bastion of freedom of speech.
Having it in your constitution apparently doesn't mean shit.

~~~
harmegido
You don't get these freedoms as a student. Or at least, the school is free to
discipline you (or kick you out) however they see fit for basically whatever
reason. You'll notice that there was no mention of police in the article. Our
freedoms exist only in respect to the law.

I actually do think that the American civil liberties are quite strong. I can
go protest in front of a government building with an ISIS flag with no (legal)
repercussions if I want to.

~~~
sound_of_basker
The USA identifies ISIS/ISIL as a terrorist group [0]. There is a good chance
that you will at-least be detained for questioning if you carry out said
activity.

[0] - [https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
office/2015/07/06/remar...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-
office/2015/07/06/remarks-president-progress-fight-against-isil)

------
elwell
In high school, I made a WScript that prompted user "Network timed out on line
#6. Please re-enter password:" and would surreptitiously record it. I put this
on a floppy, popped it in when someone in the library went to the printer,
waited, came back and said, "sorry forgot my floppy; can i get it, excuse me".
Didn't use it maliciously; usually would just modify the folder settings on
their home drive on the network to have repeating images of Pokemon as a
background image. I suppose this all sounds quite devious in writing.

------
hellofunk
That sucks that your creative high-school gag was met with such hostility by
the administration. I'm three years older than you and did something similar
in high-school. A friend and I made a MS Word clone from scratch of the
formatted template the school used for report cards. Then we filled it up with
teachers' comments and grades for us, but in total sarcasm. It was hilarious.
The teachers found out about it, and... they had a good laugh also. No harm
done. I guess it just depends on your environment.

------
nickysielicki
In highschool I made a website (in like 50 lines of web.py, easily the best
framework for small sites) with the twitter API that allowed students to post
anonymously to an account I ran. It was before YikYak came out, and I'm not
mature enough yet to not admit that it was a LOT of fun. ~400 followers (from
a school of ~1100).

There was admittedly a lot of cyberbullying, but I got the feeling it was
mostly friends making fun of friends and nothing was too nasty. It was more
along the lines of teasing each other with embarrassing inside jokes than
anything, and I made a strict rule that anyone would be banned if they used
anyone's real name so none of this would ever come back and prevent someone
from getting into school or getting a job.

It was like 4 months before graduation and my favorite teacher asked me to
take it down, so obviously I did. Friends were upset with me, but ultimately
we had our fun and I was happy to put it behind.

To relate this to the HN crowd, I have to say that I think YikYak sucks for an
anonymous platform. YikYak is so dumb because it's college kids posting either
unoriginal jokes or things about buildings on their campus.

The YikYak killer is the YikYak that is only somewhat anonymous. The YikYak
where you interact with your friends anonymously, not anonymously with
strangers nearby you and your city of 40k people.

------
gravypod
I was taken to the principles office after they found out I had access to the
camera systems of the schools.

I used it all the time to look for friends and check the lines for some
bathrooms.

------
suspthrowaway
Ah, school. I was suspended three times for various failure to comply with
authority, got straight As anyway. College, high-paying tech job, no problems
:).

------
dblock
Awesome story!

In college we ran a website called "The No More Bzzz Bzzz Hun Hun" about the
professors at the University of Geneva, in Switzerland. It was hosted in
Sweden with X-Force (mrsaint.net), a pirate group. Similar idea, but you could
vote for the most boring teachers (bzzz bzzz is the noise that a fly makes in
a boring classroom and hun hun is something to do with "fly f---ing", a term
in French that means saying things that are boring and useless). You can see
its remnants in
[http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz](http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz).
They never found us, but I was definitely scared about getting expelled from
college at some point. Unfortunately I no longer have the poll data :(

[http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html](http://dblock.github.io/nomorebzzbzz/faqs.html)
is priceless.

------
michaelmior
My messing around in high school was comparably minor. Our network ran Novell
NetWare and I managed to discover that there was an unsecured Website that had
a number of interest. Most of them were read-only with pretty boring info.
However, there was also a messaging function that allowed you to send messages
to any machine on the network that would appear as a popup. A couple friends
and I messed around a little and I promptly forgot about it.

Turns out someone else had found out about this and decided to make use of the
much more dangerous broadcast functionality. I can't remember the message that
was sent, but I believe it involved some profanities against our principal. Of
course they didn't think such a message could be tracked but it was. I think
this person was only suspended for a few days, but the admin learned his
lesson and secured things after that.

------
superkuh
Your website now doesn't render text unless javascript is enabled. This is bad
design. Stop it.

------
hellbanner
Really interesting how lack of anonymous hosting prevented the student's
public critique of their teachers.

Related: [http://voidnull.sdf.org/](http://voidnull.sdf.org/) (unafilliated)

~~~
ambicapter
I would hardly call it 'critique', it was just straight up gossip.

------
calgoo
This reminds me of when i installed key-loggers on all the library computers
at school :) Got a lot of interesting info during those weeks. Then my idiot-
friend logs into a teachers email account using credentials we found and sends
a recommendation to some university for himself... He got expelled, i
explained exactly how the key loggers worked etc, and was tasked with 40hours
of computer support as a "penance". I just skipped all my classes and
completed the "penance" it in less then a week lol. Sometimes i miss those
days :)

~~~
calgoo
Forgot to mention that i was the unofficial network and system admin for the
school since i was about 14. I had access to everything except an old 286 with
green/black screen that they used for grades. I still wonder if they kept it
on that system because of me. I know they upgraded it 1.5 years after i
graduated.

------
msie
Ah, young people. You can't equate students rating teachers to teachers
grading students. Unless teachers are allowed to say things about students
like: "She was a total bitch".

~~~
goodcanadian
I am sure they do say such things in the teacher's lounge. The difference, of
course, is that they are not doing it in public.

~~~
msie
Exactly!

------
kaonashi
Could've been me if my HS administrators had a lick of savvy.

------
Scea91
I have to say that it was perfetly written. I was hooked.

------
edem
I really liked your article and it made me remember that no matter what
someone (an authority figure in your case) says, there is always a way.

------
smrtinsert
This is another good example of the complete and pervasive misunderstanding of
what free speech is. Unfortunately law, ethics and morality cannot be reduced
to a bumper sticker.

Churchill high school kids come from one of the richest school districts in
the country practically defining the term 'privileged'. He undoubtedly could
have found a more productive and healthier hobby.

------
autotune
This reminds me of the time I attempted to use an article from The Onion as
part of current events assignment back in high school. Of course it just
resulted in a fail and was nowhere near taken out of proportion as OPs stunt
but taught me that certain people just can't appreciate humor.

------
andy_ppp
You have to say these sort of anonymous reviews should be formalised and
teachers questioned if their class think they are bad at their jobs. Or
hungover in class.

Of course, I also think teachers should be the highest paid people in society
(when I'm king), so take what I say with a pinch of salt.

~~~
iolothebard
Highest paid is fine, but accountability is equally important.

------
codewithcheese
Wow schools stray so far from actual education. To punish kids with the threat
of lack of education for airing their opinion on their own education
experience is so strange to me. It seems more like some sort of totalitarian
experiment than education.

------
neonbat
I find it immensely entertaining that Rudis created his own federal reserve
inside his school and immediately abused the monetary system to "buy all kinds
of sweet stuff." You should have gone into politics @Rudism. You would fit
right in.

------
wsha
Free speech is important but for some reason this story does not make me feel
much sympathy for the author. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it seemed like
the newsletter was posting borderline defamatory comments anonymously.

~~~
msie
Yes. It's sad how so many here romanticize being a dick in high school. No,
not all teachers are saints but I have some sympathy for them too. If this guy
created a revenge porn site or a gossip site where other students were being
harassed, he wouldn't have had quite as nice a reception here.

------
chuckgreenman
It's funny to think that there is a website devoted to the report card feature
of your newsletter. Rate My Professor, while kind of despised, its existence
is tolerated.

~~~
learnstats2
When Rate My Teachers first came out, teachers were annoyed by bad reviews and
sometimes frightened of the consequences.

Now - it's tolerated, in my opinion, because students on there are a lot nicer
than you might expect them to be.

I'd be curious to know what, if anything, has changed over that time.

~~~
comrh
I had a college professor specifically mention he would love if everyone went
on and gave him honest reviews because he was able to get them immediately
after the class ended (the feedback cards via the university were 2-3 months
behind the semester).

~~~
mikekchar
In my high school classes, I used to always give a handout (I have killed so
many trees... :-P) I often included a short survey that the students could
fill out in a minute or two at the end of class. It was a checkbox affair to
keep things as anonymous as possible (although some students occasionally
wrote comments which I appreciated). I found it unbelievably useful in
improving the classes.

Of course, it's hard to get information on how the students are personally
relating to you. I also would have welcomed a way to get feedback without
invoking a confrontation. Elsewhere in this thread I describe how it is
inevitable that some students will come to hate you (either by mistakes on
your part, or because of problems that the student is having personally). You
have to accept that it is part of the job, but I would have welcomed some way
to see if there are any common threads that I could work on.

Of course, just like any profession, some teachers can't deal with criticism.
Just look at programmers. Tell Joe Blow that his design could use improvement
and instantly they turn off. Some will take it as a cue that they need to
submarine you politically so that you aren't a threat to their job. :-P

------
elwell
I almost got suspended in high school for making a "virus" (just an .html page
with some js to open itself recursively in a new window).

------
roflchoppa
one of the only times i got in trouble at school was talking openly about
potassium nitrate in my math class, and how to make explosives out of it. I
completely understand why i was sent to the VP's office. Oh and that other
time i was burning leaves with a mag. glass.

------
xena
I nearly got expelled for learning how to use their copy of Macromedia Flash 8
for making games.

------
fspacef
Kudos to that Dad for not over reacting during all of the drama and supporting
his kid

------
mud_dauber
I can see the same exact story playing out on Glassdoor. It's going to happen.

------
codingdave
I'm sure the underlying story is true, and the author's core point of freedoms
of speech and the poor handling of the situation are true... but this sounds
like it was written at the time of the incidents, by the same teenager, and
not by an adult reflecting back on it.

------
bru_
I can relate to this story. One of my funniest memories was when my 7th grade
teacher reprimanded me for "putting a password" on my website. She was
referring to the username and password fields in the sidebar. I told her
everything on the site was visible without a user account, but I guess she
didn't believe me, because she made one that night. Of course she didn't find
anything. The best part was she filled out her whole profile, including a
picture of herself, her interests "knitting, helping children", etc, just so
she could have a chance at discovering an imaginary section of the site where
everyone at my school was lambasting her.

------
Kenji
_In junior high I invented my own currency–I printed an initial run of
“Daddio-Dollars” on my computer which I handed out to kids at school, then
sold candy and some of my brothers toys to them. Once I had fostered enough
confidence in the purchasing power of my homemade money, I printed up a ton of
it and used it to buy all kinds of sweet stuff from the other kids._

Wow, the man invented central banking independently.

------
imaginenore
It's sad that the same organization is the judge, the jury, and the
executioner. Even for the appeal process.

A shitty system.

------
bru_
I am jelly of some of my friends who got really good at programming in high
school. One dude managed to replace the keyboard drivers for every keyboard on
the entire network with garbage, so that if they plugged in another keyboard,
it still wouldn't work. He also gave his English teacher a "wacky mouse",
where she would be presenting something and at some random time her cursor
switched and behaved as if attached on the end of a spring. She would often
inspect the underside of the mouse in response to this problem.

------
iopuy
I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over
the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article.

I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written.
1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities
has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being
shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were
still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the
American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It
is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my
doubts.

~~~
dools
Also... What 16 year olds weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons in 1997? I
mean, yeah when it came out and I was 9 in like 1989 maybe it was edgy... But
1997 it was prime time. South Park was a little edgy in 1997, but not The
Simpsons.

~~~
brianwawok
I had friends who could not watch the Simpsons because they said "Damn"

~~~
_ak
Did this friend happen to be called Leopold Stotch?

~~~
brianwawok
hah this was pre-SouthPark

