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Ask Slashdot: What Happened To the Prank Apps That Used To Be Popular?
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Back when PCs were more boxy looking than today and people used floppy disks to store stuff, there were a bunch of prank apps around that one could put on a DOS or Windows computer to annoy the hell out of siblings, classmates, coworkers and others. (Here is a listing of some older prank apps and some more recent Android prank apps.) Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down. Some would make the mouse pointer move in strange ways or make it give you the middle finger. Some would cause you to hit the right keyboard key and still mistype a word. Some would play an audio file in the background every now and then that gave the impression of your computer making strange noises for unknown reasons, even turning the OS volume up before the sound, and then down again, making it impossible to make the sounds stop. There are many more computer users today than there were back then, yet there doesn't seem to be much new in the way of prank apps -- at least for Windows. Why is that? Did Windows 8 cause PC users to lose their humor?
because everything's an object, including literals. You can redefine anything. e.g. you can redefine 2 as 1. Did this on a coworkers computer when they forget to lock it. Hilarity ensued.
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So I went to linux. But I got win7 in a VB and kept it around awhile just in case...and hardly ever used it, except for laughs.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
There's no way to know if that prank app is only a prank app and doesn't have more code to do... interesting things.
Even back in the day some of those apps had viruses in them. There are limits to the amount of trust you have in some guy who wrote a cute little application that inverts your desktop or whatever.
It ran on at least CTSS, the Incompatible Timesharing System and Multics. Someone has one for Linux: it says "want cookie!" until you type 'cookie", then disappears.
davecb@spamcop.net
Installing those prank apps on someone else's computer is now a felony. Much like other pranks people used to play at school back then that would now get you thrown out if not prosecuted.
It's not around any more because modern UX developers do that anyway. No malware needed.
Security!
I'm not sure if this is still true, but I recall one of the only ways to invert a mouse axis for a game that couldn't be arsed to support it (eg Beyond Good and Evil) was with such prank applications.
You would probably get arrested for hacking today. You have to be careful with cops and prosecutors today. They are vicious and heartless.
Hop on my buddys computer and setup a simple music sharing service. Months later I still laugh at his enormous legal fees and damages. That one never gets old!
The broken screen app, the extra vision app, and who knows what else.
The slashdot editors are acting like idiots again.
"Hey, where did all my data go after the upgrade?"
"lol you got pranked bro!"
My favorite one is from about a quarter century ago, when hard drives were beginning to be a thing most folks could afford - it was a DOS app, and was called a "Hard Disk Cleaner" - no, nothing malicious, it just popped up a few messages and made a few sounds. Don't quite remember it all, but since sounds were VERY rudimentary, and most folks only had the on-board speaker, well, there was only so much it could do, but basically it said "Filling disk with water" - made an appropriate sound, then "Washing Disk" and made some sloshing noises, then finally said "spinning disk dry", and made a rising tone like a disk spinning up. The nit would tell you "Your disk is now sparkling clean on the inside". Stupid, but kind of clever. And some idiots would actually believe it was a real thing that needed to be done periodically.
People got tired of wasting time, and angering their customers/friends/allies!!
The location spoofer could be fun except I won't touch social media sites with my mobile phone. And I'm glad to see that the old "xroaches" program idea lives on in Android world.
Have gnu, will travel.
People grew up and stopped wasting each others' time on stupid pranks.
Q: What happened to the prank apps?
A: Malware detection software happened.
I still have a CD that has a library of all the prank apps that I used to use back in the 90s. Nowdays when I read the disk, modern virus scan software reveals that every single one of them was really a trojan horse that was meant to secretly deliver a spyware app, a backdoor, or a virus.
-Glires
Windows itself wasn't enough of a prank????
Are wobbly windows prankish enough?
Or the cube?
It's because those jerks moved on to viruses and malware once they figured out they could make money being a-holes.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
i remember silly shit making us laugh, vacuum cleaner mouse icon that appears to suck up the desktop etc... but remember these were the days a few MB on a cover floppy was actually quite cool, we even played demos! forget pirating stuff unless you had a sneaker net for it. cracktros were made even more mythical by the fact school kids would slowly trade copied floppies but have no idea the games game with copy protection anyway let alone the work and groups involved with making the copies possible and adding the cracktros.
these days we have so much access and we have learned to not be so dumb - there was overlap though. when cd writers were expensive cracked app collections were huge, and if you didn't have internet access often you didn't even have anti virus, let alone having it up to date. so i'd say initially, took less to please, then we were exposed to real risk. in fact if you managed to wipe my disk in the early to mid 90s it would have been far less problematic than now.
In the old days, commuters were simple, viruses and trojans were few and you knew who could access your computer. If you turned your computer on one day and all the text was upsidedown, you could turn off the computer, put in the backup DOS disk and turn it back on and be reasonably sure that if it was caused by malware, you would be safe. Now, anyone who can break into your computer over the internet could impersonate you and harm your family and friends, open up bank accounts in your name, blackmail you, etc. Scary.
Also, pranks used to do "impossible" things like play wave files through a speaker that was only intended to create beeps, etc. Computers are far more capable now.
While exploring the windows API's, I wrote a little program that would enumerate all the volume controls in the sound mixer, identify anything that looked like it might stop a sound from playing. It would un-mute and push every playback volume slider to 100%, play a .wav file provided from the command line, then restore the value of each control.
The office I worked in had a standard dell machine on every desk, with a built in speaker. Of course since we were packed together in a cube farm, most people had muted the volume.
For an April 1st one year, I prepared a script that would connect to each machine using PSExec from System Internals to push my small program across the network and play a clip from Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind at full blast.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I was the main producer of those prank applications. I put years of my life and soul into an awesome prank that was to go off at 00:00:00 1/1/2000. Somebody found out about it and the whole industry banded together to quash my master piece. After that failure, I didn't really have it in me anymore. I lost the joy of the prank and slowly stopped making them.
Besides, now you can actually make money hacking into people's computers. Seeing the look on their face through their webcam when they open up their bank accounts and discover nothing is priceless. Now that unauthorized computer access is a federal crime, you might as well get some benefit for the risk. It also didn't hurt that nearly everyone was an admin and everyone used the same account.
But don't worry. The entire computing industry runs around in circles. They'll become very popular again once better AR devices hit the market. Is there really a giant spider hanging in the middle of my doorway? Do I dare check? Which leg am I supposed to touch to make it go away? *Whimpers*
My two favorite app-free pranks:
1. Prankifying WiFi-stealing neighbors
2. Your colleague leaves his desktop unlocked?
a) Grab a screenshot
b) Make it the desktop background
c) Hide any desktop icons/windows
Lots of fun ensures, especially as an educative measure for colleagues/underlings ignoring relevant IT policies.
In the olden days if a co-worker left their computer unlocked:
typedef int float;
In one of their header files.
Back in the 80's there was a, shit, not sure what, but you could run a doc through it and it sounded like a black guy wrote it. Funny as hell, controversial even at the time. Stuff like "We support" turned into "We be, all, like, like this". Soon there were 2-3 other dialects you could run, all funny as hell.
.login be logout, etc). I ended up with a hardware RS-232 analyzer on my desk. What did I do? I fucking plugged it into Dennis' Vt100 connection to the VAX, Dennis was my biggest shenanigans trickster. Grabbed his password and don't remember what I did, but it was fun.
Now having anything like that available brings down the wrath of the SJWs. You'll get fired for even having the output of such a program. Never mind it was probably a Yacc/Lex thing.
Around the same time we had terminals in our cubes connected to a VAX. Go get a cuppa coffee and not lock your terminal? Russian Roulette. We looked for this kind of thing, only took a minute on an unlocked terminal to cause lots of fun (make the first line of
Now that would get me thrown in jail.
Pranks were a ton of fun, and an effective teaching tool on personal security. Nowdays they're more likely to get you fired, thrown in jail, and facing $100k in legal fees.
That's what happened to the tricksters.
So... there are less a-holes with a juvenile sense of humor writing annoying programs... are we really supposed to lament this as a loss? My guess is they all grew up and now write bitcoin mining worms.
Lol was this at Enron?
People used to use their computers for boring things. How many times did I have to remove the AppleTalk-aware Energizer Bunny extension from the machines in the computer lab?
Now people's PC's and phones have lots of personal data on them and you don't mess with that.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down
Since recent versions of Windows can do that, do they qualify as prank apps, too? It makes too much sense now.
Ezekiel 23:20
... this brings back.
- We used to do a screen shot of the Desktop; set that as the wallpaper; select all the icons and shift them to the center of the screen and capture that.
Rinse, repeat and the victim would freak out trying to locate their active icons.
- We'd drop to DOS, inactivate the primary partition and the victim would get an error that there was no bootable drive. When they were distracted, one of us would reactivate the partition like it was magic.
- We'd write a .bat file that would run on startup that would make sounds like birds tweeting at random times.
- Back in the standalone days (ca. 1982), we'd have a DOS window pop up telling the victim to go to the fax machine and call a certain number (time and temperature) to remove the "virus."
Some here may remember a sight called, "Stupid Windows Tricks."
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
It's because those jerks moved on to viruses and malware once they figured out they could make money being a-holes.
Wow. You're still sore about it?
In our lab an unlocked terminal was always a sign for a lesson in security, i.e. a harmless prank. The trick is to pick something that's just dickish enough that someone notices it, but not so dickish that it becomes an asshole move. Aliasing a command in their .bash_profile, for example.
or #define if(X) ( rand() % 2 )
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Likes to blame SJW's for shit he can't find. "Where are my car keys? Fucking SJW's again" God damn please let this moron get run over.
You used to do this stuff before Windows fully loaded.
This goes back in time, but you could play WAV files from the DOS prompt (or autoexec.bat) before Windows fully loaded.
Solution?
Crank the volume up on all speakers in a computer lab. Make sure a WAV file of Meg Ryan in the restaurant scene of Sleepless in Seattle is queued up...
Let her rip.
#define volatile
#define M_PI 3.2f
#define true ((rand()&15)!=15)
#define strcpy(a,b) (((a & 0xFF) == (b & 0xFF)) ? strcpy(a+1,b) : strcpy(a, b))
is comes bundled with your Microsoft software.
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The prank apps still exist on new platforms. Us old people had to get work done and lost interest to maintain these things on "our" platforms. The OS nowaday is a commodity the same as a Z80 and BIOS was to us is Windows and Mac to the new generation, it isn't interesting there, but go to Slack or Gab or whatever teenagers are using today and you'll see the same.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I had a coworker who would just send letters off resignation from your email if you left your computer unlocked. I like your thing better.
My friend always adds keyboard shortcuts to his girlfriend's phone.
When she typed:
Joe
It would replace Joe with:
Joe, giving him a blowjob.
He put random stuff in there for different words and misspellings daily, and rotate them so she never knew what she was typing.
Replace work with:
fuck the cat...
Things like that.
It even worked with voice to text on her old phone, till she smashed it:)
It was funny to watch!
That's advanced evil.
An old classic is to do a print screen and then move away all desktop icons and put the captured image as the desktop image.
It would be really confusing until they realize what happened. But with the start button it's not that easy.
A lot of the common prank programs were also listed as annoyances by anti-virus softwares.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We grew up and realized such things where dumb. Why didn't you?
things used to be much more open and innocent. it was possible to talk to any user via "talk" (a unix program) that had been installed by default on any work station. You could telnet into any other workstation (and even printers) and run jobs or have the computer talk like echo "You work too hard today"|festival --tts; fortune|festival --tts Things are less innocent today. I guess, technology has just grown up and things which were funny are no more funny. Part of the humor was also surprise like "I did not know that one can do that" and the target of the joke was known to appreciate it. Very few today would think the BOFH is funny (it contains a few pranks). It used to be different as there were times, when using a computer would already mean by definition that a user had basic sysadmin skills (like being able uuencode an attachment and submit without an attachment protocol) or even developer skills (as it required to write a program like a printer driver if it did not exist). There was a good chance that if somebody had access to mail or a workstation , the person was appreciative for a joke or prank. Today, that slice has become thinner as the technology is used by everybody.
What are today's equivalent to BackOriface, NetBus? Back in the good old days of a barely firewalled internet where one could install one of these on their buddies PC and prank the hell out of them remotely whenever they dialed up or the (un)lucky few that had the 1st always on cable modem connections with their PC plugged straight into the cablemodem
Auto-hide taskbar as well.
I used to do that back in 2000 at the University.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Things like posting tubgirl links to appear to be from idiots that leave their Facebook logins on public computers.
And they treated all prank apps as viruses, because if hey didn't people would complain that the antivirus was shoddy.
Nowadays, even if its locked, Microsoft installs an "update". Its much the same really.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I'll risk my job so that I can download some prank software to put on a colleague's PC? Assuming I can get an untrusted exe onto that machine in the first place!
There used to be a great Mac programmer's conference called MacHack. It was a weekend hackathon where people would churn out interesting code. Lots of them were pranks. One would cause the OK and Cancel buttons to run away from the pointer in dialog boxes. One turned all system text into Pig Latin. It was easy to pull these off in classic MacOS as it didn't have protected memory, so you could patch basically anything in the system with an application.
My personal favorite was the person who coded Breakout (in Forth!) to run on OpenFirmware, the original PPC Mac's firmware. So you turn the machine on and immediately after POST, breakout comes up.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
For true pranking, you couldn't go past Back Orifice. Your co-worker working on a seemingly important Word document? Kill Word. Does that person over there really need to be using IE right now? Nope? Zap.
But the funniest prank I ever had using Back Orifice was to pop up a system request. I targeted a sales guy who did have a sense of fun and made a system message pop up telling him to to call my co-worker (who did IT support). I sent the message, and within seconds my co-worker's phone rang and they tried to troubleshoot this message. I let it got on for a few minutes, then sent another popup "Problem is resolved. Hang up now". My co-worker was then saying "Oh, so the computer is telling you to hang up now? Well, we better do that then." He hung up, spun around to me and said "I have no idea what just happened, but I KNOW you're at the center of this!". Of course, I fessed up straight away. We cleaned Back Orifice off the computers I had put it on and that was the end of it.
That was a funny day in the office.
Ugh. I can recall working on a professional project in C/C++ where, in order to make it work across multiple compliers, someone had redefined things like 'null'. Hilarity did indeed ensue.
> come up every few seconds on it's own
Quality journalism.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Had a good one pulled on me. Came back to my desk to find the wallpaper showing a (subordinate who sat in the next office) coworker with my teenage daughter. All in good fun, though I learned to lock my screen before walking away.
Just another day in Paradise
Worked as a TA in a computer lab full of IBM PCs back in the DOS days. Every morning when class began everyone would dutifully grab one of the DOS boot discs from the teacher's desk and use that to boot their PC. One day I got there early and installed a program into AUTOEXEC.BAT that would play someone singing "I want some red roses for a blue lady" through the PC speaker onto all the boot disks. Nearly 20 PCs belting out that ridiculous song at just about the same time - fun times.
Then when TCP/IP was just starting to becomes a "thing" and people had their first versions of Windows for Workgroups there was lots of fun to be had with "net send" in its infancy. There were no "users" or "domains" so you had to target by IP address. But people were just starting to get the hang of email - so it became trivial to just send anyone in the company an email that would prompt a response. Once they did, the email headers contained their IP address and then the fun could begin.
"About to format C: Press OK to proceed" - and of course the only button was "OK" - which resulted in them leaving that message box up for the rest of the day in a corner, or rebooting their PC, etc
"You are needed at the front desk regarding your security badge" (which was about 10 floors down)
"Keyboard tactile threshold reached. Please type more gently to avoid permanent damage to your keyboard." (did this on a work-neighbor that I could actually watch - did it a few times in a row until they were ever-so-gingerly and carefully pressing each key and getting quite irritated in the process. Then "Keyboard malfunction" in a loop every 5 seconds until they contacted the help desk to get a new keyboard. When they unplugged the keyboard the messages stopped. When they plugged in the new one "Thank you - this keyboard fits much better"
Not funny anymore and... my antivirus ate most of them and I didn't even notice.
Prank apps are no longer popular for the same reason that ventriloquist dummies are no longer popular comedic props.
Many of the older windows and dos prank programs got flagged as a virus by virtue that they did things the user didn't want.
I remember a colleague that always launched programs from desktop icons (never from the start menu). So we did a simple prank of taking a screenshot, setting it as the wallpaper and then deleting all the icons. Result, lots of frustrated double clicking and wondering why applications wouldn't launch.
Forget about the old pranks.. What I want is the old Simpsons Screensaver, complete with flying toasters!
It's better to burn out than to fade away
People eventually recognised that the apps just weren't funny, sent anyone installing them to Coventry and then got on with their lives without annoyance - oh, and they learned how to lock their computer, pranks are much more of a motivation to do that than the threat of security issues...
I once wrote a clock app that would play the cuckcoo sounds and eject the CD Rom drive dray the appropriate number of times each hours.
The systems administrator told me if I ran that for real he'd rip my arms off.
Systems administrators were known to do that.
the fine line between prank app and malware.
anyway, i never knew these apps were once popular, always avoided them with a passion.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
When Microsoft made Windows it's self into a prank app, that took all the fun out of it... 8-P
"ru" is good language. Is best for hack computer or election.
"All ru comp are mine!"
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I think they rolled all the prank apps in one and called it Windows 10.
In the days of 15" CRT monitors, I would set the resolution to 1024 x 768, interlaced, and set a desktop pattern of white-black horizontal lines. The whole desktop flickered at 43,5 Hz.
By far the most effective computer pranks I ever pulled didn't even involve software:
Open a few windows, take a screenshot, make it the wallpaper.
Put a piece of a post-it on the bottom of an optical mouse.
Switch the 'C' and 'X' keys on the keyboard. (YMMV by the typing skill of the target)
I had a coworker who would just send letters off resignation from your email if you left your computer unlocked. I like your thing better.
As a manager, if someone sends a letter of resignation, I would accept it. Note that I say "if someone sends a letter of resignation", not "if a letter of resignation is sent from someone's computer".