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?

Comments

I saw a cookie monster last year

[davecb]

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.

Re:Same as all the other pranks

[postbigbang]

After you've been hit with malware, a virus, maybe ransomware, pranks just aren't funny anymore. There are enough stunts pulled by firmware, coders, and people that misconfigure stuff to provide endless entertainment, if that's the sort of thing that gives you giggles.

Tangental apps

[Presence Eternal]

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.

Re:My favorite one

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember that one from the DOS days and another app from the same era that played a voice over the PC speaker saying "Help! I am trapped in your computer. Help, somebody!" It was amazing to hear audio like that out of something that usually only beeped or played monophonic square wave tunes. It wasn't until years later I learned how it was done. When the frequency of the tone was higher than human hearing, the tone would also be out of the range of the speaker, and the cone depth could be programmed by choosing ultrasonic frequencies, thus >1 bit DAC audio.

The pranks were just trojan horses

[Glires]

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.

Nope

[McFortner]

It's because those jerks moved on to viruses and malware once they figured out they could make money being a-holes.

The Internet happened

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We're too worried about malware

[Travis Mansbridge]

Regardless, given the vague wording of the CFAA, even these relatively harmless "pranks" could qualify as unauthorized use and therefore be considered a federal crime.

Re:A Close Encounter...

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like someone I know. I did this same thing but on Sun workstations in my Comp Sci lab in college. Chopped up an AU file and sent portions to different workstations then orchestrated all of the workstations to play the audio file but each portion from the respective workstation. An entire row of freshman straight nope'd their way out of that lab. I still laugh so damn hard after all these years

Re:A Close Encounter...

[complete loony]

Well I actually *did* do something similar more than 20 years ago with some dumb terminals connected to (i think) a sunos server. Well, technically they weren't logged in at the time.

So I'd written a script to use the finger protocol on each student server, collect the IP addresses of the tty's everyone was logged in from, which I'd draw in an ascii art map of each lab.

I'd worked out that one lab of terminals had a beep pitch you could change, while the other labs would only beep at whole octaves.

And I'd worked out that all the terminals were open to remote connections while there was nobody logged in.

One day the stars aligned, I pulled up a map of this lab and there was only one guy in there. So I picked a bunch of the terminals around him and beeped out the 5 note close encounters tune.

So he comes running down the corridor to our lab saying that was awesome, who did that. And everyone pointed straight at me. Because of course if anything weird happened it was probably my fault.