C is for Camouflage

by Malandraj3m

Everyone is familiar with restrictions.

There will always be people or groups that like to control what you can and cannot do.  When the pursuit of knowledge itself is restricted, a hacker will always find a way.

In middle school and high school, my access to computers was limited.  At my house, we had one computer constantly occupied and controlled by my parents (mini-padlocks through the plug-in prongs on electronics remarkably led to a fascination with lockpicking.)  The school I went to had a whole network of computers to play with though!  I ended up spending as much time as possible learning what I could and experimenting.

Classes on typing and Microsoft Office programs were mastered fast, and left a lot of free time in class.  I quickly discovered DOS and batch programming: subjects both my parents and computer teacher were less than pleased I knew about.  They were fearful whenever a black box with white letters popped up even though I had done nothing but explore file systems and teach myself rudimentary programming (going though classical cryptography and making programs for each cipher).  I was spoken to, questioned, and told not to "mess around."  It was made clear that punishment would be meted out if I were caught using the dreaded DOS.

It bugged me that I couldn't make cool cipher programs anymore.  The teacher sat in the back with a view of all the computer screens and paid special attention to the students that were done with their class exercises.  We were allowed to work on schoolwork for other classes though.  So I came up with a simple solution: I would make DOS look like Notepad.  Even better, I would make it look like I was writing a paper while I was really learning more about computers.

Part One

1. Find CMD.EXE (it's in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32).
2. Create a shortcut and hide it somewhere on your profile.  We had usernames assigned to us and a folder we could use for schoolwork, so I put in there.
3. Right-click on it and go to the properties.
4. Assign a shortcut key to it.  Mine was Ctrl-Alt-C.
5. Change the icon to Notepad (also located in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32).
6. Click on the "Font" tab and change it to Lucida Console.
7. Click on "Layout" tab and change the window size to something more Notepad-ish.
8. Apply changes.
9. Rename to something less conspicuous.
10. Open it up and take note of the starting directory (this is used in the next part).

Part Two

1. Open Notepad up.
2. Type the following:

@ECHO OFF COLOR F0 PROMPT $S$H TITLE English Paper CLS ECHO

3. After ECHO, copy and paste a few paragraphs of a paper or whatever you want it to look like.
4. Go to "Save As", navigate to the directory you noted, and save it as C.BAT.  (Make sure to have "Save as Type" be 'All Files').

You should now be able to press Ctrl-Alt-C, type "C" and Enter, and have everything look like you're innocently working on a school paper.  All in less than a second.

It may be simple, but it satisfied everyone and opened up a whole world that was being kept from me.

Dar urn jeitinho amigos. (Give a way friends)