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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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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.
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.
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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.
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.
Jive filter, it still exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Those text filters lost their appeal when AOLers flooded the internet with their all caps rants and ravings filled with misspellings and colloquialisms, and the novelty wore off, as it was no longer populated mostly by intellectuals who learned and typed formal English.
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)
Anything beyond leaving a yellow sticky ridiculing them *is* an asshole move.
is comes bundled with your Microsoft software.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
You missed to post a video of the reaction of people seeing that!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
So like, this one time... at Computer Camp...
This space unintentionally left blank.
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.
Contraversial as in it was obviously a bit racist but people felt awkward about pointing out blatant racism in the 80s. Well yes, the 80s were kinda racist and most people around then did indeed pick up racism from the general culture, and tha tincludes both you and me.
The difference between us is that I'm not under the impression that I'm unassailably perfect and that if someone points out that some category of behaviour is actually harmful then I realise maybe I shouldn't do that. I don't simply blame that person for being an "SJW".
Now the world has changed around you and people WILL make a fuss if you're blatantly racist. If this pisses you off, the fault is yours for refusing to ever examine yourself, not the fault of some evil nebulous "SJW".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Considering all the race violence in america today, including the recent alt right murders. Do you think that you managed to make the 201Xs better than the 198Xs?
This is not trolling, i trily wonder about it, because at times I feel like in the last 50 years, the west stopped progressing and is just slacking around.222
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Nowadays, even if its locked, Microsoft installs an "update". Its much the same really.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Considering all the race violence in america today, including the recent alt right murders. Do you think that you managed to make the 201Xs better than the 198Xs? This is not trolling, i trily wonder about it, because at times I feel like in the last 50 years, the west stopped progressing and is just slacking around.
That's a good question. To define "better" you have to essentially assign a scalar to a multidimensional space, in other words, you have to find which things are better and which are worse and assign some sort of weighting to them and add the result.
so in some sense whether it's better depends on how you value the various things that have changed.
It's also important to discount perception: the 24hr news cycle has made it feel like we're in a massice crime wave the likes of whic hhas never been seen before but on average it looks like crime and voilence has actually been decreasing slowly but steadily.
Speaking of perception, people generally are used to their current situation and adapt if things change slowly. The 80s seemed fine (though I was a kid). The 90s seemed fine (I was a teenager). So did the 2000 and th 2010s. But the world has changed a fair bit from them.
An interesting thing to do is to find some old TV series you liked that has more or less vanished (no real cult following, go for something big and popular at the time) from say the mid 90s or 80s and watch some of it on youtube. The popular stuff of no particular merit tends to very much reflct the zeitgeist. It can be surprising. One show I remember loving in the 90s turned out to be unwatchable. It had things like a recurring funny side character: the joke was he is gay. That was it. The sole joke abut him. Repeated again and again.
But yes things are not uniformly getting better. The worsening of the gini coefficients and destruction of the middle class and similar things is stacking up problems. I think that's orthogonal to the reactions against bigorty etc. I'd like to take the latter, not the former if I could.
Naturally and reasonably people who are feeling the pinch of the middle class being destroyed are going to think things were better back then. Problems arise because humans are great at spotting patterns. So some people lump a whole lot of these things together and want to regress everything back because the things feel related (like cargo cults).
Fun fact: in the early middle ages there was a reaction against buttons. Turns out that the tight fitting, form revealing clothes enabled by the invention of buttons came aronud at the same time as the black death. Many people believed that buttons via the more revealing clothes were the problem and cause.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Amiga had some good ones like aRoach which caused cockroaches to scurry under your windows, dk which caused pixels on each window to fall like snow to the bottom of the screen, or closeme which made your windows flee whenever you approached the close button.