To the shining star students in any programming class, you pass on all the tricks you learned that got you where you are. This included, of course, the hacking tricks, at least those that you figured would be harmless enough to give to a responsible high school student.
My teacher proposed that I craft myself a good ring-tone, then make a cunning little program to pose as the C: prompt, a program that would just ring, and ring, and ring. The programming lab was a high school classroom with desks in the center and an assortment of recycled crapboxen lining the room, most of them powered-up sitting on the C: prompt. No one would notice anything out of the ordinary about one of them booted up, not until they tried to use it. A cunning program would have waited intermittently between sets of rings, and not ring long enough so that anyone could figure out where it was coming from.
I didn't ever code it, of course. I was a Good Girl, and I had too many programming projects to try and do as it was. But it was a funny thought, and every now and then, something reminds me of it.
