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Code in my life: A chronicle part 4

#code
#nostalgia
#chronicle

This post is a continuation of part 3

When people ask me what my introduction to hacking was, I usually point to the first CTF I participated in 2019 or watching LiveOverFlow videos on Youtube in 2017. In reality, it was actually the following.

At the start of 2015, when I was 10, about to turn 11, my dad got a new work laptop, and I was able to claim his old one: an old Fujitsu (can’t remember the model) laptop. But there was a problem.

With it, I was formally granted access to the internet, with a few caveats. My dad installed Bitdefender antivirus, with full “parental control” features. I was gated completely from accessing most sites. Furthermore, my parents enforced a strict one-hour time-limit on my computer usage.

I hated it.

I would try everything in my power to bypass it. One hour at a time. Within a month, I had a working solution.

I would reboot my computer into safe mode, and rename the .dll file responsible for the parental control features to .dll-old. It worked. Every time you tried to enable the parental control feature in the UI, it would be stuck on loading for about 1 or 2 minutes, before popping up a message box exclaiming: “parental control feature unavailable at this time”. It was perfect.

There was just one problem. My dad used to receive a report every week on what I was doing on the computer. With this change the report would still show parental control active, but no data was available for review.

This became a regular point of contention in the house. I was clearly using the computer, but the report showed nothing. Initially, I was able to play it off that the control software must have just been unreliable. I was confronted almost bi-weekly about why the report showed nothing.

Eventually, my sister also received her own computer, and I quietly made the same change and her reports also started showing nothing. My dad let it go.

With unrestricted access to the internet, I could start exploring the programming world even further, and finally start diving deeper.

This post will continue in a part 5