Quote: Original post by rip-off
Rearranging the keys in alphabetical order can be fun too - if the subject isn't a touch typist. If they are - maybe there is a way to remap the key settings to alphabetical order too?

You can change the keyboard layout to Dvorak through the Control Panel. Good for some major typing confusion.

Use power menu to:

Set a window to always be on top, same window as transparent. Doesn't work on all versions of windows now, you just click through the transparent screen.

I once wrote a program that simulated entering full-screen console mode and reformatting the hard drive. It was incredibly realistic with blinking cursor, the proper console font, and simulated hard drive activity.

Years later while going through backups I found that program again, but of course forgot what it did. I ran it and nearly had a heart attack while the damn thing started saying "Formatting 5%..."

Quote: Original post by mutex
I once wrote a program that simulated entering full-screen console mode and reformatting the hard drive. It was incredibly realistic with blinking cursor, the proper console font, and simulated hard drive activity.

Excellent prank. I remember people pulling that in my high school AP CompSci class to freak out the teacher and some of the students who didn't know any better.

Another one I remember was one kid wrote a simple app that would run in the background and just write a file until it was full, create a new one and write that file till it was full, etc etc etc etc... until the computer ran out of disk space! He loaded it on a ton of computers and when they found out it was him they kicked him out of the program :P It was a stupid prank anyways

One of the most evil pranks (well, I'd classify it as an attack actually) you can pull on a computer without needing to gain access is to spoof its MAC address. The requirements are that you can find out the target's MAC address and that your spoofing computer is physically connected to the same network switch that the target is, and that you can accept the complete loss of network access on your "attacking" PC.

The result is undefined behavior, but usually results in completely loss of internet connectivity for both PCs without anything else being obviously wrong.

I remember writing an application that would turn the three keyboard lights above the num pad on and off. The code was done in about two minutes, but composing a cool sequence kept me entertained for the rest the day. I ran it as a 'background' service on three or four machines in the office, only one keyboard got smashed to pieces by one of the many frustrated programmers.

It was a good day. [smile]

At school, we had lots of fun with a trojan horse called SubSeven, which was present on most of the schools computers. We had a paper map showing the IP addresses of all the computers, so we could connect to any of them.

This allowed for all sorts of childish pranks:
* use text-to-speech from an idle computer in the corner of the room. Half way through a lesson a computer starts insulting people suddenly.
* use remote screen viewing and keyboard/mouse injection to hijack the teacher's PC at humorous moments. Teacher is saying "So to center this text, we just type in <cen..." but instead "I peed my pants" appears in the word processor.
* Make people's screens go black, except for an interactive text-chat. When they start asking questions, you can switch their screen back to windows so no-one believes them that their PC just told them to 'follow the white rabbit'.


Of course, it didn't go down well when the school finally found out they're infrastructure was riddled with trojans...

Quote: Original post by Gaiiden
one kid wrote a simple app that would run in the background and just write a file until it was full... until the computer ran out of disk space!

A simmilar one: at a LAN party I used to go to, people used to run an app that would search for writable shared folders on the network and fill them with millions of empty files. This doesn't fill the HDD up, but windows does lock up when you try to view the directory.

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
]A simmilar one: at a LAN party I used to go to, people used to run an app that would search for writable shared folders on the network and fill them with millions of empty files. This doesn't fill the HDD up, but windows does lock up when you try to view the directory.

I heard a story in middle school about someone who was poking around other people's shared folders. This was when the school had next to no security - the students' laptops had their "My Documents" folders all shared unless we took unshared them ourselves, etc., and he discovered that one student had some pornography in his My Pictures folder. He then discovered that the IT teacher (who was also network admin IIRC) also had his My Documents folder shared. There was thereafter a bit of a fuss, as apparently some of the other student's pictures "migrated" to the teacher's hard drive...

[Edited by - Oberon_Command on September 6, 2009 8:32:05 AM]

It's ridiculously easy to write a program that will eject the CD drive at random intervals.

The function you need to eject the CD drive is called mcisendstring, if I recall correctly. The rest of the program requires only basic programming knowledge.

The best prank I pulled was while in college, living in the dorms. My next door neighbor had is brother move in with him. They both liked loud music and played MP3s from his computer through their stero system. My roomate and I couldn't stand it. So we took action.

I searched for a nice back-door program that could quietly install itself with zero indications as to what was going on. My roomate created a fake IM account and started chatting with our neighbor. He tricked the guy into thinking a file we were sending him was a picture of the "girl" he was chatting with(simply renamed the back-door client executable "my_picture.jpg.exe"). He says the picture wouldn't open. Stage set.

For the next few weeks, we started off with small things. Changing the volume of their music when it got too loud. As time went on, we got more creative. Randomly changing tracks. Uploading new songs and playing those, such as "It sucks to be you". Changing the desktop around, randomly ejecting the CD drive, etc. Other than some confused moments, though, nothing really changed.

That's when my roomate decided to get dirty. He started downloading male porn and dropping it throughout the guys harddrive. He didn't notice anything until we changed his screensaver to display the porn pics. Now that created quite the reaction. The guy got into an argument with his brother over it, thinking his brother must have done it. After that, the guy always locked his computer. So, we changed his password so the next time he tried to unlock it, he couldn't. Again, he blamed his brother.

They stopped hanging around each other as much after that, which stopped the loud music. I kinda felt bad, thinking that it might have been because of what we did, but it was worth the peace and quiet it brought.