One in four UK schoolkids admits hacking

Awesome !

"It does get me down at times, looking at the contrast of the way things used to work, and the rank stupidity and fear I see now."

Yeah, you're right, prosecuting people for breaking the law is, like, really lame.

And that's two "curiosity is not a crime"s and counting. Place your bets.

Gin!

Heh, as a l33t d00d from the lake district, i can attest that there's bugger all else to do in cumbria at the age of 13, other than snatch the old lady's gin and sit in a park/field/forest.

Though i doubt any kids these days even know the ' or '1'='1'-- trick. Not that it helps when hacking your mates facebook page, better off phishing for that sort of thing really.

*sigh*

Cracking is not hacking, silly.

Anyway. College - VT100 terminals, mainframe logon screen and everything logged

My only option was to write something that looked like the logon screen and walk away.

eejot tries logging on on my dumb screen

username and password written to file in my account

screen sends obviously wrong password to proper logon mechanism whilst logging out

Proper system says 'wrong password please try again'

eejot tries again and gets in

I got their username and password account

this was in 1985. nothing new here

In my day....

I would hack into my classmates accounts and nick their coursework, then delete their copy and leave pron in their user area.

Me and my mates also had several teachers login details which was a lot of fun. We also used to play doom and duke nukem 3d in IT classes, with (the same) 5 PCs rebooting at the same time when the teacher came back.....good days.

I ended up being banned from all IT (including the IT class) for the last year and a half of my GCSEs....

"Hacking is illegal and we need to ensure everyone understands that.”

Children smoking is illegal. Drunk tweenies is illegal. Girls popping out babies before or around their 16th implies something illegal took place. Driving too fast in a town is illegal.

Contrite crap like that is pointlessly stating the obvious. Those who know, know, and those who don't are probably having too much fun to care...

[back in my day, Econet was dead easy to hack, mobile phones were unheard of, and telephone charges for BBsing would incur incontinence in all but the well-paid... but, dammit, we understood the function of a computer inside out, none of this "black-box-it's-complicated" nonsense!]

Oh really?

Less than one in four school kids has enough brains to do even a trivial hack.

More like one in four answers yes to impress their mates.

this is *good*

Now 2 in 4 school kids know from experience to use decent passwords.

Hack fail.

As a Cumbrian student myself, I severly doubt this, of my school of 1,500 I can think of two people capable of doing anything close to 'hacking'.

Bravo Cumbria. Bravo.