illegal or not?

[Gimly161]

Hi all, this is my first comment .
I didn't know quite where to put this thread so i put it under networking.
So my school has an annoying slow school network, the PCs though are quite fast (an i5 with 4/6 GB of RAM, enough for home and school use) but that terrible school network kills them.
anyway going to my point, I grabbed a school pc and deleted the bios passwords through the so called 'passwd' jumper on the motherboard and gave my USB a higher boot priority than the school hard drives so i could boot Ubuntu. I didn't hack the network or deleted the hard drive or anything just changed the bios passwords and the boot priority. now my question is, is this illegal or not? and is it very bad what I did?.

 

[COLGeek]

I am sure you violated your school's IT policies. I would imagine that you could get detention or suspended for the infraction. You (or your parents) likely had to sign an agreement for how users are to conduct themselves with school IT assets.

 

[cdabc123]

im kinda curious of how you were able to do this without anyone seeing it. but no i don't believe its illegal, you could still get into trouble with the school though. and i don't believe its a very bad thing to do you showed the school a flaw in their current setup

 

[Gimly161]

+COLGeek well damn you are probably right but i can't do anything against it know right? and you can't care about anything if you don't know it right
+cdabc123 it was like in my first year of high school and teachers said , you can't hack the school computers! and I was like, challenge excepted! And now in my 3rd year of high school I finally fount a 'flaw' in their security. I can now take down the whole school system but i'm not going to do that because I'm not bad I'm just a boy who is looking for challenges! XD.
Anyway thanks for your reply guys!

 

[Gimly161]

im kinda curious of how you were able to do this without anyone seeing it. but no i don't believe its illegal, you could still get into trouble with the school though. and i don't believe its a very bad thing to do you showed the school a flaw in their current setup

well nobody saw it because nobody was in the corridor. my teacher wasn't at school so i was free.
sorry my English is not my native language so I don't know how to quite say it so that sentence might sound a bit strange XD

 

[McHenryB]

Technically, deleting the BIOS password and changing the BIOS setup is "unauthorised access to a computer" which is a criminal offence in most jurisdictions. The excuse that you were "showing the school a flaw in their setup" is a specious argument - you are not allowed to break the law to point out potential problems like this. For example, you could not claim that you were driving at 100mph in a 30mph zone to highlight the lack of speed cameras.

But I doubt the school will prosecute when they find out - they'll likely just expel you.