Internet Pranks in Schools

Ferante125 writes "An interesting article about online pranks by students and teachers' responses to them. There are some interesting stats that sounded a little hard to believe. My immature side finds it funny and my more mature side is interested in the legal aspects." For the most part it seems like this article thinks pranks are basically just name calling and flaming on websites.

Comments

I guess I dodged a bullet

[spyrochaete]

In grade 8 mid-last-decade a friend and I wrote a little BASIC program on our class's standalone Apple IIe something like this:

10 ? "Bwahahaha! I am the Michaelangelo virus!";
20 GOTO 10

This caused a bit of a stir in our class for half a day before we fessed up. I suppose I'm fortunate to have escaped without prosecution.

Re:I guess I dodged a bullet

[shivamib]

OH!!! So it was *you*, insensitive clod! Thanks for teaching me the fine arts of BASIC, though.

Re:I guess I dodged a bullet

[garcia]

I wrote one (on the same "platform") that caused the computer to beep and wait. I copied it to all 25+ computers in the typing lab and ran them so it would beep in succession and then repeat.

I thought it was pretty damn funny, even when I got 25 hours of detention for malicious use of the computer system :roll:

Re: I guess I dodged a bullet

[spyrochaete]

It's always the low-tech pranks that take people the longest to fix.

I unintentionally freaked out my poor mom when I got smarmy and edited the Win98 logoff screen in mspaint. I changted a W to a T so that it said "It is not safe to turn off your computer." She left it like that for 3 days until I let her in on the joke. Oopsie.

Re: I guess I dodged a bullet

[Anonymous Coward]

Just before graduation, I modified my teacher's autoexec so that, starting a few weeks later, would change his desktop's wallpaper to a picture of cindy crawford with his face.

Re:I guess I dodged a bullet

[Otto95]

In my day we pulled a prank where we changed the number of beads on the Math teachers abacus. Oh man, I'm old!

Re:I guess I dodged a bullet

[Aladrin]

Ah, highschool. That was a fun time. Being the only one who was computer literate, I remember editing the batch file for PFS Write to display messages on other students' screens as they booted.

Once that was figured out, the teacher was getting mad so I made it erase itself once they pressed a key, so when they tried to tattle... Nothing.

I had so much fun with that little prank.

Re: I guess I dodged a bullet

[Random Destruction]

we did a similar delayed autoexec thing w/ loadlin to cause the lab computers to boot clusterknoppix on the last day of school.

The school didn't seem terribly pleased about their new 'supercomputer' tho.

Re: I guess I dodged a bullet

[Anonymous Coward]

> It's always the low-tech pranks that take people the longest to fix.

That's very true for non-technically-savvy targets.

I had a (technology company) coworker who could not touch-type; I moved around his keycaps for things like +, =, and punctuation keys. End result: he called tech support, and he and the tech support guy couldn't figure out what had gone wrong. They were just about to re-image his machine before I wandered back by and told them what the problem was.

As a kid I wrote a fake prompt program for my family's Apple II+. It passed through most commands, but after a while would refuse and make slightly rude remarks. The rest of my family seemed to think that this was a plausible computer failure scenario.

Re:I guess I dodged a bullet

[greeze]

When I was in university, I worked in the campus computer lab. One night after hours, a friend of mine and I recorded 35 distinct and separate fart sounds. They were all very small toots: a squeak here, a poot there... they all sounded like the farts you try to sneak out when you're in a public space, but they come out a little louder than you'd hoped. We then set each of them as the hourly chime on all 35 of the Mac 8500's in the Mac lab. Since the clocks on all the Macs were off by anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, the farts didn't all sound at the same time.

It would start a few minutes before the hour: over there in the corner of the room you'd hear a little "squeee." The poor CS student working on his midterm would look around, embarrassed. A few seconds later, another student's machine would respond with, "brrrt." As the hour approached, the farts got closer to each other until the entire lab was abuzz with flatus. And as the hour receded into the past, the farts would peter out slowly.

It took several days before the staff finally caught on to what was happening.

internet Pranks vs Internet Pranks

[garcia]

Well thank god these aren't Internet Pranks and are instead internet Pranks. Lord knows what teachers would do if they really used the Internet to pull this shit off!

Lame

[Stanistani]

Obviously these students need to be indoctrinated in the latest Internet memes:
There were no rickrolls, and not even a single Longcat reference.

Re:Unlikely Statistic

[Anonymous Coward]

Dating.

Those aren't pranks...

[Thelasko]

Putting your high school up for sale is a prank.

Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank?

[Barsteward]

The best pranks i've seen were the joke program that screams "hey come here and look at this, I'm watching pron" and few minutes of running and the other was a progam put into the autoexec.bat and did the following on boot up.... it sounded a couple of beeps then displayed the following text very slowly... "Water detected in the computer Please wait.... Spin dry cycle starting" At which point the floppy disk drive was powered up slowly until it reached at top speed and held it there for a few seconds. then a few more bits of text followed saying that it was now dry and useable. the early noisy drives were best, i think this was around about DOS 2 or 3.

I'll play

[hoggoth]

Since we're all sharing...

When all we had was Dec printer terminals, I wrote a program that waited until I was long out of the computer room (about 30 minutes) and then sent a stream of form-feeds to all of the printers. Form feed shot a page of fan-fold paper out of the printer at high speed. The room filled up with curling paper and looked like someone dumped a box of detergent in all the washing machines at a laundrymat.

After we upgraded to new-fangled CRTs (keyboard and monitors to you young'ens) I wrote a program that randomly drew an asci-art horse galloping across the screen from one edge to the other in the middle of whatever the user was doing. They never did find out where it was coming from or how to stop it. I quietly disabled it when the word "expelled" started being thrown around.

Re:Does defacing websites count as a prank?

[element-o.p.]

When my youngest brother learned Visual Basic, he wrote a small program to display an alert window with the following message:

"Hard drive error detected...reformat C:\?"

The only response option it gave was "OK". Then he put the program in the autoexec.bat file on my dad's computer. It only took my dad about two or three seconds to figure out that it was only a prank, but for those two or three seconds, he was white as a ghost. It was priceless to watch.

Re:Yet another case made for homeschooling...

[VisceralLogic]

Homeschooling just segregates them even more and inhibits their socialization. The fact that you want to choose with whom they socialize is kind of disturbing. They aren't some sort of pet that you get to train. You should allow children to grow and develop with guidance, rather than follow some sort of path that you want to vicariously travel. In my opinion it's homeschooling that will hinder your potential child's socialization, rather than public schools.

I was going to point out that I was home-schooled through high school, and am perfectly well socialized... but then I remembered where I was posting this. :)

Re:And did you have to fix it?

[dzfoo]

>> The prime rule of pranking is don't do anything you wouldn't be able to fix or pay for yourself.

I thought the prime rule of pranking was to only execute them on days who's number of the month can only be divided by itself and one.

        -dZ.

Pranks from the chalk face for fun and profit

[vorlich]

I have said many times on slashdot that school is in fact a prison. The inmates generally despise the jailers and unless you wish to spiral off into an alcohol induced early retirement a sustained level of pranking is all that will keep you going.

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I always used to dress completely in black for the first day of term - suit, tie, shirt the lot - Gothed up to the max. I wore those pinz-nez glasses on a chord around my neck so that when I addressed a student, I had to peer over the top of them. Scared the living daylights out of the little darlings.

There were five IMacs in my tutorial room and each one had the clock set 3 minutes ahead of its neighbour. The macs pipped, pinged and giggled on the hour, on the half hour and on the quarter hour. Drove some students mad but drove my boss madder. Students of course cannot work Imacs and were unable to retaliate even when I sent them (for stats practical) to determine the total consumption of potatoes and KFC (popular foods in that part of Scotland!) amongst their fellow students.

I told them that the air conditioning system on the roof was a penthouse apartment, that another male lecturer, who dyed his hair and moustache(?) a charming shade of mahogany, had an unusual genetic condition and that was his natural colour.

When students asked me where I had acquired all my computing skills I told them I learned them in Bar-L (The Scottish High Security Prison). When they asked me for an idea for the cover of the college magazine I suggested a crop circle in the shape of the college logo set in a potato field. When they were stumped for a design for the same magazine, I had them lay it out like one of those airline mags, although, rather disturbingly, this was regarded as award winning work.

When my departmental head suggested the college have a top 100 books online poll, I had my students rig it so that Larry Niven's Ringworld was number one and Jane Eyre (her choice) was last! They also added 80 other hilarious titles. My head of department avoided contact with students at all costs and conducted most of her business via email. This was in the days before account verification so I regularly signed her up for every newsletter that had even the slightest connection with our faculty subjects. She was under the delusion that these internet sites had sought her out because she was so important a figure in the world of education...

My college circulated a monthly staff suggestions form (probably to comply with some iso 9001 crap). I regularly suggested painting our corridors light pink to calm down difficult students. When I missed my flu jab I jokingly suggested that they implement a college wide vaccination program. Not only did they take up the idea, they awarded me 100 pounds for making such a practical suggestion.

All of this pales into insignificance when I think that I could have sold the damn place on Ebay!

Outstanding use of Onomatopoeia

[Critical Facilities]

I applaud your penchant for mischief and your anecdotal prose. To hear such a juvenile prank story told with such eloquence borders on a work of art. In particular the "squee" had me laughing embarassingly loudly at my desk. Well done, sir.