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

We're too worried about malware

[ZorinLynx]

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.

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.