• I'm Hiding 🇦🇺@aussie.zoneEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    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!!

    • jjjalljs@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      I’m still irritated about when I was a youth I found a somewhat obvious security hole, and took advantage of it in a mildly funny way, the staff just punished me.

      You weren’t supposed to be able to change the desktop background, but for some reason MS Paint had a “set to background” option that worked. So I set the background to a screenshot of the desktop, and then hid all the icons and start menu. Later, the teacher thought the computer was broken because “nothing was working”.

      I think it could’ve been a good teaching moment. A talk about not messing shared resources up, and channel my interests somewhere productive. Nope. Just a lecture and week long library ban. Disappointed.

      • lovelily@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        10 days ago

        the mistake there is expecting the education system to focus on actually make an effort to teach kids guided by their individual qualities rather than reward/punish everyone that doesnt fit the cost-effective and efficient mold

        wouldnt want to treat schools as anything other than a business nor pay teachers appropriate wages, now would we?

  • holycrap@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    13 days ago

    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.

  • Tin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    12 days ago

    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.

  • HexesofVexes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    At first it all seems normal, every now and then a random sound effect is replaced by ominous hooting. Every hour, on the hour, a green owl flashes on the screen for a frame or two, it’s eyes boring into you before vanishing. Once every 50 or so times it pumps your volume up, selects speakers as output and let’s loose a screeching hoot. Random popups slowly ramping up “Restart your streak today”, “Where did you go?”, “Duo misses you”. At first just once or twice a day, but steadily increasing in intensity till it’s one every 23 seconds.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    11 days ago

    I shall write a virus that makes the computer play the “USB device detached” sound followed shortly by the “USB device attached” sound. Dee doo. Doo dee. Just that. three or four times a week.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      11 days ago

      Okay can I piss and moan about something tangentially related to this?

      I’ve noticed that most video players, browser embeds, Youtube, VLC, whatever, have a run-on. You click pause, and the video keeps going for probably half a second, so if you’re trying to capture a specific frame, fuck your sack.

      • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        In VLC you can hit E for Next Frame. I think its full stop on YouTube.

        I’m wondering if that’s something hardware decoder related (like it goes fuck it, I’ve decoded it, you’re watching it), because I can’t say I’ve noticed that on even the shittiest websites, at least on my PC.

    • BlueFootedPetey@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      11 days ago

      Delete is the one we use to remove the character in front of the cursor, amiright? I feel like enter and backspace is more havok for the common keyboard user, but iv no idea for programmers and such.

      • Taleya@aussie.zoneEnglish
        1·
        11 days ago

        yeah sorry had a 6am brainfart and meant backspace. But, on the other hand, they’d expect that one…