I've always liked computers, and been interested in their every aspect. I used to enjoy simply going through all the options on an old Mac we had in my room, looking at all the different screen savers. Because I got familiar with computers at such a young age, I was able to have some fun and do things that most kids my age didn't know how to do on computers- games, music, drawing. I could spend hours on the computer and never get bored (still can). The downside of this was that I spent hours on the computer and never got bored, and I was supposed to be doing other things like cleaning my room or mowing the lawn. Tough times for the Killian parents, I know.

In 6th grade, my dad decided he'd had enough, and installed Kidswatch - a program to limit/report what your child is doing on the computer/how much time they spend doing it. It gave reports down to the minute of how much I had certain programs open, and what websites I was going to. For instance, if I was playing a game for over my time limit, a box would pop up that says "You have 5 minutes left" and then after 5 minutes it would close the program unless I provided a password that could grant me more time. Now this was unacceptable. Especially since 6th grade me just had to beat all 100 levels in "N" . I needed that password.

However, guessing the password did not seem that plausible. I tried a couple times, but it wasn't working. So, rather than try to beat the software, I went a different route. My dad had installed Kidswatch on his - the administrator - account (it was through that account that you could edit the settings of Kidswatch). I spent some time googling and eventually found a method where you could seemingly obtain lost Windows user passwords.

The first step was to burn a recovery disk image onto a cd, so that I could change the BIOS settings and boot from that cd rather than booting Windows. I downloaded a file online and burnt it to a blank cd. The next time I booted my computer, I booted from that disc image. On boot, I was presented with two lines: both of which were gibberish hashes like the following: CC5E9ACBAD1B25C9AAD3B435B51404EE:996E6760CDDD8815A2C24A110CF040FB. One of those was a hashed version of my password, and one was a hashed version of my dad's.

I wrote both hashes down, and then put them into a website like this which reverses the hashes and figures out the password. All that was left for me to do was try out the password it gave me. It worked. Of course, I didn't tell him (in fact he is finding out about how I did this only through reading this post). To this day he still had doubt as to whether or not I could change it. Inititally, I would log into his account and change some of the program functions so that it allowed me to play more, and then log in to my account and play for however long I wanted. When I was done, I would log back in and change them back. But then I found the password that allowed me to extend applications for more time within the Kidswatch settings. I then could just use extend my time whenever I needed to.

Moral of the story? Where there's a will, there's a way. Especially if that will involves more time on the internet for Jeff.