
Ask HN: What is your favorite tech prank? - ternbot
In Windows: Alt+Ctrl+Right Arrow on someone else&#x27;s computer
In General: Email spoofing
======
thisisdallas
When I was in high school, I realized I could use the dos net send command to
send any computer a pop up message.

First message: "Initiating mandatory inappropriate content scan" Second
message: "Inappropriate content found...adding to log." Third message: "More
inappropriate content found...adding to log." Fifth message: "User ID and Name
added to log. Transferring to central administration offices."

The look on some people's face was priceless haha.

Soon they got wise to my ways and the gig was up.

I then found some Novell app that was installed on every computer that allowed
the exact same thing but made it even easier! I think there was a list of
names that I could select and then send a message. That didn't last long
though. It was soon too blocked.

Any teachers out there? Don't let your students get bored.

Edit: I also just remembered each student had a personal network drive that
they could access on any computer. Each student got something like 250mb or
something like that. When you logged in as normal, you could obviously only
access your drive and no one else's drive. I can't remember how but I figured
out how to access other people's drive. The great thing was, I had read/write
access :/ I could put anything in anyone's shared drive.

Come to think about that...I was a turd in high school.

~~~
wkimeria
In the old days, I thin NT 4, SQL 6.5, you could call out to the OS from SQL
triggers. I created a SQL trigger on a test/database/test table that did
netsend to a co-worker/friends machine with "You have performed an invalid
command. Idiot!". That table got inserts about 1-3 per minute, but sometimes
up to 10.

------
Stoo
Round-robin email spoofing. Set up an array of people to email, each person in
the array sends an email to the next person saying "Can you come over when
you've got a minute, please", last person in the array sends to the first.

Watch as everyone in the office gets up and goes over to each other's desks.

------
tehwebguy
Extremely targeted Facebook ads. It will cost you like $10.00 but you might
have credit from some hosting plan or email promo anyway

Also sent a fake "Exteme Marketing" Pizza Hut promo email to a colleague a few
years back. It looked mostly normal but had lines like "BEST FUCKING PIZZA
EVER"

~~~
krmmalik
But what content do you put in the advert?

~~~
tehwebguy
Here's what someone did, I haven't done this yet but it's so funny:

[http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
pranking-...](http://mysocialsherpa.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

~~~
NetStrikeForce
That is funny and scary at the same time.

How many people had used this to deliver targeted malware?

~~~
ghostinfluence
Zero. I was only targeting an audience of one ;)

------
jayrobin
Setting the desktop background to a screenshot of the desktop, then hiding all
the icons and the start bar.

~~~
mb_72
As a victim of this prank (in the late 90's) I can attest to a) how puzzled
you feel when nothing responded to mouse clicks and b) how funny it is when
someone finally reveals what was going. The sole other programmer I was
working with at the time had set me up, and managed to keep a straight face
for 30 minutes while he suggested various solutions (rebooting, a different
mouse etc).

------
firebones
Oh, man. Some of these are old school, some I participated in, some I heard
about.

1) Homegrown, pre-internet, pre-SMTP homegrown email system in the early days.
Engineer colleagues spoof an email from CEO, put nice guy on notice that CEO
was hopping mad about his product and would be by late that evening to check
on some issue, forcing the guy to stay there most of the night in terror.

2) Hunt and peck typer for a team lead/manager at the dawn of the PC era.
Reports pry the keycaps off his IBM keyboard, swap the M & N. He types memos.
"This computer is screwed up--these memos have all the m's and n's swapped! I
think the PC is going bad" Colleague, a touch typer, sits down and says "Let
me try." He types the memo flawlessly. "Works for me!" Eventually the touch
typist gets bored of having to "fix" the PC with his magic touch and mercy is
finally shown.

3) PR1MOS system. CS001 student walks out of computer lab, fails to log out.
Edit login script to call itself on next login. Log out. That was really mean
and probably pissed a lot of people off.

4) Sending bells to people's terminal sessions. Randomly. But only when they
weren't paying attention. Cube farm fun.

How many of these things from the past would likely be grounds for
termination/expulsion these days?

------
OrionSeven
A few favorites we've done:

1) Placing an an Annoy-a-Tron (small devices randomly emits a sound) right
above someone's computer under their desk. Employee goes nuts trying to figure
out how a virus got on their system and tech support tears the system down
trying to figure it out.

2) Hooking up a small air horn to an office chair, so that when someone sits
down (and depresses slightly the pneumatic seat height leg) the airhorn goes
off scaring the crap out of the seatee. This one happened to me, holy crap...

3) A classic, there's always a hunt-and-packer typist in the office. Switch a
few keys on their keyboard.

4) Or a modern take of the key-switch, cover their keyboard with hello kitty
stickers.

5) Place not one but three annoy-a-trons around a desk.

6) If someone has a combo wireless keyboard and mouse, but doesn't use one of
the two, get out the piece they're not using and randomly press buttons or
move the mouse about for some 'phantom wireless problems'.

7) If someone leaves their station unlocked, send a quick group mail offering
to buy coffee for the team (or beer, or pizza, etc).

------
zem
way back in the day, a friend found a keyboard that had an extra "reset" key
on it - it sent the ctrl-alt-delete sequence when pressed. he promptly bought
one, sanded off the "reset" label and carefully lettered "ANY" on to the key.
he then waited till the beginning of the college year and sneaked it into the
freshman computer lab, then found a machine in the back corner of the room and
sat back to wait.

sure enough, a kid comes in, sits down on the machine, goes through the login
sequence, then hits the "press any key to continue" prompt. he scans the
keyboard, finds the "any" key, and presses it. computer promptly reboots. kid
waits, login screen comes back up, he goes through the sequence, hits any ...

he finally went to find the lab attendant TA, at which point my friend quickly
swapped the keyboard back. so when the TA got there, everything just worked,
and when it came to hitting "any key" there was of course no "any" key to be
hit, and the TA explained what to do.

(epilogue: my friend's reputation had preceded him, the TA figured out he had
something to do with it, and came by later to ask "how did you make that guy
think there was an 'any' key?", and offer to buy the keyboard when let in on
the joke)

------
ice303
back in the days of MS-DOS, using ansi.sys, I made a small .bat (and then
converted to .com) file that would swap the Space bar ascii code for the 255
code (that provided an empy space). I renamed that small .com file also to
ALT+255.com (making it look like " .com") and made it invisible. In the end of
the autexec.bat file, I type the name of the executable file (" "). you could
not see that there was anything there. My friends would go insane becase
everytime they pressed space bar, the screen would indeed output a space, but
it would always give an invalid directory error. It was so fun to watch.

Another prank, was a very bad one I admit. With the help of a friend, we made
a fake Quake 1 loader. While it was outputting a lot of cool techno
jibberjabber to the screen, it was running on the background a deltree /y c:\
_._ > nul

This was a bad one, but hey. It was the time of Anarchy cookbook, and floppy
disk bombs, and all those crazy things :) Cheers

------
such_a_casual
There's a prank sound that makes it sound like someone is knocking if you're
wearing headphones. Casual mode is to just send them a link with a picture
that plays the sound. But if you wana be a baller, shot caller, one can write
a script to detect if someone's headphones are in and play the sound at random
intervals.

------
archimedespi
Adding `echo echo >> ~/.bashrc` to somebody's bashrc.

This will make the terminal scroll more and more as bash sessions are started.

However, people get used to this since it happens gradually, and eventually
will go nuts trying to figure out why there terminal takes forever to start
(it's scrolling pages upon pages).

------
perishabledave
Plug in a wireless mouse dongle to a non visible USB port. Move the mouse in
slight random movements when they are using it.

Change the keyboard mapping.

Back in the 90's was installing black orfice on a friends computer, though
they didn't appreciate that. ;)

------
poops
There was a dirty mouse program that would get installed anytime someone had
their computer unlocked. Every few minutes you'd hear someone get pissed off
and banging their mouse on the desk.

Another one we did was take a screenshot of a 404 page, and then randomly show
that instead of the site that they were working on, but only for their IP.

A quick and easy one was to just crank someone's speakers all the way up, for
the next time they play music.

------
Gustomaximus
A few years back some friends and I made an April fools video about a new
browser feature. Every now and again we'd get colleagues around the company
let us know someone had mentioned it, without realising it as a fake, as their
'favorite feature' in job interviews.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkNxbyp6thM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkNxbyp6thM)

------
DrScump
ASCII terminals often had a "status line" (25th line, typically) on which
escape sequences could be used to display content that would not scroll off.

So, you just edit your target's ,profile (or .cshrc or .kshrc) to echo the
appropriate escape sequence to greet that party with the message of your
choice upon login.

------
arkadiyt
alias ls='echo Segmentation Fault'

~~~
twunde
It's even better when you set up the alias to disappear or reappear every
other login

------
apryldelancey
My favorite is a fictional one from "The Office" television show in the US.
The one where Jim created a program that changed Dwight's name to diapers
every time Dwight tried to type his name on his computer! I've been waiting
for the chance to do a similar prank

~~~
wmoser
When I was in HS some of my classmates got in trouble for something similar.
In MS word there is a dictionary that can be edited for the auto-correct.
Example changes teh -> the, etc. You can put a name or common word as the
common misspelling and anything else as the auto-correct.

------
zygotic12
Got a tech friend who always carries a tool-kit? Place a large screw under
their chair when they step out and casually point it out on their return.
Watch as they dismantle chair.

------
lovelearning
Tell anybody who has a computer problem to just press ctrl+shift+f13.

~~~
wycx
My Wang 725 keyboard goes all the way to f16. Conveniently f14 is alt-f4.

------
hacknat
Install `sl` on everyone's machine. `sl -al` FTW.

Edit: cf [http://man.cx/sl(6)](http://man.cx/sl\(6\))

------
lnk2w
Back when chrome had the startup overlay option (1 ~ 2 years ago) I changed
the homepage of a friend's notebook to a male escort service website.

------
jhallenworld
Aim the light sensor at the light it's controlling. Extra points if the light
is outside a bedroom window :-)

------
flignats
Update a popular desktop icon's properties to shut down or restart the
computer when clicked.

------
ghrifter
open up command prompt (or shell if mac) on my less tech-savvy friends
computer. Then type in some commands

eg:

    
    
        dir
    
        netstat -b
    
        systeminfo
    

etc

They usually freak out thinking that I'm hacking them. I act like I am too.

------
CyrilBoh
ctrl + alt + down (or maybe up)

Turns the screen upside down and quite a number of people don't know how to do
it.

Another one is enabling scroll especially for someone who is working in Excel.

------
relaunched
Switch the keyboard to Dvorak.

------
tmaly
wired a camera flash unit up to my dorm room's white board marker. gave people
quite a jolt

------
ljk
a piece of paper under optical mouse

------
BorisMelnik
You can't go wrong with Alt+f4

------
muzani
Ctrl+Shift+W on a browser.

------
dmarlow
CTRL + alt + down

