To avoid being brought up on various computer related criminal charges,I've been instructed by our contact at Hell Inc. to make the following statement: This article is false. The computer programs, At Ease and ResEdit, do not exist. The computer family, Macintosh, does not exist. The techniques explained do not work. In fact, the writer of this article does not exist, nor do you, the reader. This entire article is a crock of lies and balderdash.

Anyone who uses Macintosh computers in any sort of public lab has undoubtedly run into a protection program called At Ease. Now, I understand the desire for administrators to secure software, but At Ease is a nuisance. It severely limits what you can do with the computer. What's the use of having a powerful computer that is intentionally limited? It's like having a sports car with flat tires; sure, you can drive it, but your not going anywhere in a hurry. But, I digress. There are ways to...disable At Ease. When the program is first installed, the administrator and /or staff can include a password option to shut down At Ease and let the user access the Finder. It is, in some cases, possible to find out what the password is, however. The real secret is to use a program that allows one to view the resource fork of files (I'm not here to tell you what a resource fork is. That's for programmers. This is a hackers guide). My personal favorite is ResEdit. Now, you can do some serious damage with ResEdit if you're not careful, but in this case, all you'll be doing is reading files. Figure 1: The file you're looking for. Now in order to use ResEdit, the computer in question must allow you to open files that are not necessarily within the At Ease folders. This is different on each computer. If you can't do it...you're screwed (Hell Inc. is working on a way around that problem). The file that you want to open up and examine is simply called "Users." It's buried deeply in the System folder. From the File menu of ResEdit, open the "System Folder", then the "At Ease Items" folder, then the folder "At Ease Users." It's in the "At Ease Users" folder that there should be a file called "Users." (see Figure 1) Open that puppy up and have a look. You should get a message basically telling you that the file is locked and you can't make changes. That's ok, since all your going to do is read the information anyway. Once open, an icon with a bunch of 1's and 0's called "User" should be visible. Open that up. Now you should have some choices. There should be a bunch of user names listed. It's up to you to find the one that represents the one with a password. Probably named "Staff" or something like that. Anyway, when you open that up, and should see a bunch of numbers and digits (Figure 2). In the center column is information is hexidecimal form (again, no explanation). The right column represents the text of what is coded for in the center.About halfway down the center column, at offset (for all you computer geeks) 000022, a series of numbers and letters will appear.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 Hexidecimal F8 FB FA FD FC FF FE F1 F0 F3 F2 F5 F4 F7 F6 E9 E8 EB EA ED EC EF EE E1 E0 E3 A8 AB AA AD AC AF AE A1 A0 A9 D8 DB DA DD DC DF DE D1 D0 D3 D2 D5 D4 D7 D6 C9 C8 CB CA CD CC CF CE C1 C0 C3 Table 1:Hexidecimal conversions

Figure 2: The password located at offser 000022. The "03" represents how many characters long the password is.

This is the coded password. The first series of numbers tell you how many characters long the password is. The rest of the password can be decoded using the hexidecimal table I've included here (Table 1). In the example given, the password is "GDT." Use the key to make sure you understand how it works. That's it. Once you have the password, you can turn At Ease off. I'd advise not mucking about too much, or the administrators will know and put stricter limits on what you can do through At Ease. And remember, all of this is a lie. Really.

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