I had a friend who sent me a “Y2K fix” program back in '99. Said it would patch the error so I’d be safe. When I ran it, it swapped the letters Y and K on my keyboard.
Finds anything and everything that can be set to dark mode and sets it back to light mode, but not while you’re using it and not immediately.
That poor guy that thought he accomplished it by just having a virus that changed peoples files to pictures from Clannad but got arrested for copyright.
Like genue wishing this one.When I was in high school I made a .bat file that autoran when you put it in a device. All it would do is open the disc drive every 90 seconds however it did convince one teacher that she had a virus which caused giggles all around.
Simple, every now and again switch a key input with a neighboring key. Imagine slowly losing your confidence in your motor skills as you just can’t seem to type properly no matter how careful you are.
It would do it like once every 10-1000 minutes, you will never catch it and slowly lose your grip on reality.
Excuse me sir, they said “harmless”
That’s nasty
On somethingawful back in the day if you were on any one page on their forums for more then about 20 minutes, a audio clip would play that said something like “HEY EVERYBODY I’M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO”
i remember one from GNAA (racist edge lords) that did that… it also spawned endless moving windows that were impossible to close so you had to hard power off the computer… also it maxed out the volume….
it was just javascript thoughI knew a guy who had a shitty boss so he set every key press and program function click (ok, cancel, etc.) to play that sound.
albanian virus.
Much better than A Serbian Virus.
I believe that specific site was called “Last Measure”. It would also open up a bunch of shock sites…
Yep. I remember you could go to *.on.nimp.org and it’d lock up the browser with alert() loops, play something loud and obnoxious, and show shock images. In middle school we’d convince people to go to something like runescapehacks.on.nimp.org in school. I specifically remember one that said “Everyone come look, I’m looking at gay porn!” on repeat.
used to be fun at the office to take a screenshot of someone desktop, and make it the desktop background, then put all their icons into one folder.
- Screenshot of desktop
- Flip 180°
- Set as desktop background
- Right-click desktop -> Hide Desktop Icons
Edit: Markdown is dumb
Edit 2: Oh and hide the taskbar too
Classic prank. I’ve done this before.
I had one guy I’m the late 90s at my HS who made a program that copied itself onto every directory on the computer at startup. It was a .com file and if you tried to run it it would use the PC speakers to play a tone increasing in volume and pitch until it was unbearable. You had to do a hard boot to end it.
I also remember the Form virus that made the PC speakers make a sound each time you pressed a key. Can’t remember if it did anything else.
There was a guy in my dorm who really didn’t like his roommate. Really, really didn’t like him. This was in the early aughts.
So one day he goes on his roommate’s computer and puts a text file in his startup folder. The file says, “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus!”
For context, Snood was a free video game people downloaded in the early aughts. Basically the same as Bust-A-Move, which probably doesn’t clarify anything if you didn’t already know what Snood is.
Anyway: “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus! If you don’t score [extremely difficult but not completely unrealistic high score] points, all of your files will be deleted!”
He laughed to himself and promptly forgot about it.
Weeks later, the roommate is on his computer in the middle of the night.
“What are you doing up? Go to bed.”
“I can’t. It’s this stupid Snood virus.”
I remember a more modern iteration of a virus that forces you to play an extremely hard game:
It demands a score of 200 million points in one of the hardest installments of Touhou on the highest difficulty. And 200M is pretty high, basically you need to finish all 6 stages and score reasonably well.
I only know about Snood because of a LGR video about it, I don’t think that game ever reached Brazil
I wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker’s computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he’d figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.
Did you ever tell him?
I dumped a batch script into a dev’s startup folder that would draw the text effect from The Matrix all over the screen. I thought he’d immediately catch on but apparently he stood up and started yelling about his workstation being hacked.
Set it to run on boot, I hope.
I had a boss that wasn’t exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said “good job”, which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off… Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.
I offered to take a look and see if I couldn’t stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)
Good job.
Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you’re done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can’t close this one, only slightly minimize it.Also, autoplaying videos that pop up in the lower corner of your screen. It has a clear, easy to click “X” button to close, but every 100 px you scroll triggers a re-check of the video window to ensure it’s still open and playing. If it’s been closed or stopped, the pop up window respawns and/or the video restarts.
You should add one allowing this site that you’ve never been to before and don’t even know yet if it’s useful, to send you notifications.
How about wait until you’re at the end of the article. But before you can read the last paragraph or two a pop up to ask if I want to join their mailing list or some crap.
RedReader my beloved 😢