Microblog Memes

It was not a virus, but still great fun: coworker had a fat UNIX workstation, but no idea of the particulars except for the program he was using. I knew my ways around such machines, and I could log in from another machine via serial terminal.

What the coworker knew about the audio capabilities of his machine was the occasional "beep" it made. I found the "auplay" command, and a list of 8-bit audio samples.

So one day I was sitting at the PC next to him, logged in, and command ready to run, and waited for an error message to pop up. Then I pressed return, starting "auplay laughter.au".

That face.

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.

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"

albanian virus.

I believe that specific site was called "Last Measure". It would also open up a bunch of shock sites...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

I remember a harmless over that just randomly opened your CD tray while it ran. Called something like cup holder, or something like that.

Shit that was a long time ago...

RedReader my beloved 😢

I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.

I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school's server that I shouldn't have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students' laptops interrupting the class at max volume.

Best bit? I "taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity" and didn't get in (much) trouble!!

A virus that changes Windows' sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.

I was in college during the years leading up to y2k and supported myself at the time getting IT infrastructure ready. Some friends and I decided to write a "virus" that, on bootup, checks to see if the current date is in the first week of January 2000 and if it is and a backup of the fonts is not found (so it'll only run once) then it'll back up your fonts and alter the originals to replace the y character with the k. This affected everything system wide.

That created more chaos than anticipated.

I call bullshit. In the 90s you had to turn a phisical wheel to increase the volume of the computer.