It was Dad’s turn for a mystery.
Like every modern day investigator, Alex began most of his searches by going to a computer to try and find new things, and the computer he could most easily reach would be the one down in Dad’s office. He’d figured out how to turn the computer on, but didn’t know the password. Dad added the password after Alex accidentally rotated the desktop and dad had to spend several days looking at the screen sideways before figuring out how to fix it.
Alex had a rough idea of what the password was. He knew it involved keys on the keyboard, so he tried different combinations in hopes of happening on the right one.
What his Dad did not understand, however, was how Alex managed to access the contrast settings from the lock screen, changing visibility to black and white, as well as locking out the keyboard, making it impossible to change it back without restarting the machine.
This made his Dad think that the real hackers were actually a bunch of three year olds in Germany whose childcare service provided them with a computer lab. The adults thought it was adorable, watching them tap away at the keys ‘randomly’, while they are actually conversing on Usenet, figuring out zero day exploits, and creating hacking scripts in a proprietary language called drool++.
Dad finished restarting the machine, logged in, and updated the visibility settings to return color to his machine. As he did so, he noticed that the machine’s fan had started making an odd sound. Peering around the case at the air intake, dad discovered where all of his paperclips had gone. Dad sighed with a smile. Make that two mysteries for him to solve.
No comments:
Post a Comment