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Admin
The usual version of this around the department I used to work in is that we would send an email to the whole department inviting them to lunch on the person whose computer was left unlocked. Nobody was immune, and everybody got the joke.
In fact, one time, one of the supervisors left his machine unlocked, and he even honoured the "lunch on him" email.
I'm no longer in that department (same company, though), and the department I am in now has a different personality to it, and this wouldn't fly. I kind of miss it, though.
Admin
I pulled the desktop-as-wallpaper stunt once on one of my coworkers who locked her computer but kept her password under her keyboard.
Not that funny, until I mention we were both in the Information Security department.
On an earlier occasion when doing tech support, I pranked a co-worker who knew nothing about computers (remember - doing tech support!) by adding a script to his startup folder to change his mouse settings to the lowest possible speed and his keyboard to Dvorak.
I also added a registry entry to run a different script to re-copy the main script back to his startup folder if he ever got wise; that led to seemingly random re-occurrences of the problem once he found and deleted the script in the startup folder.
I eventually had to come clean when he decided to send his PC in for reimaging.
Admin
god, if i ever worked with a prick like you the daily f***-with ration would be doubled.
DOUBLED.
Admin
pobody's perfect?
Who's pobody? :P
(Now, I have to check if I'm mature enough. I guess you already know the answer)
Admin
Back in college my roommates and I all ran Linux. One of my roommates left an ssh terminal open to his machine logged in as root on my computer. We put so many backdoors on his system. We activated the nobody account for login and gave it complete access through sudo. We setup anonymous FTP with complete access to the file system. We put a PHP file in his web directory that ran commands sent to it as root and dumped back the input. My personal favorite: I wrote a Gaim plugin that allowed me to run any command in double brackets sent to him, and randomly issued fake IMs to and from him. Our crowning glory was finding his porn directory and replacing all the images with gay porn.
Admin
Same here.
McAffee is a WTF AV by itself, I wonder why they use that crap here.
Admin
When I was in HS, I wrote a DOS program that displayed "I love camels" in a vertical-scrolling sine wave of colors. Then I told it to override the handling of ctrl-c/break to mock the user instead of quitting. Then I put it in autoexec.bat. Then I modified config.sys to remove the option of hitting F5/F8 or whatever to skip autoexec processing (I don't remember what those options were).
I did this on the last day of school, and I was called in on the weekend to come remove it or risk my grade.
It never occurred to anyone to use a boot disk.
I did get an A.
Admin
Where I used to work, unlocked computer meant getting your autocorrect settings updated... oh that made for some good times!
captcha: kungfu
Admin
Give this guy a break. He didn't really post this; he was in the bathroom and someone else did.
Admin
This reminds me of the time I got to work, sat down, booted up my machine and did the work I being paid for. It was SO funny! ...at the end of the day, I shutdown the computer and went home. All the way home, I was ROFL - ha ha
Admin
I had fun with a few dos based TSR's that would "drip" the letters down your screen. I have also down the keyboard swap trick so I could see what they were typing while I typed something different on their screen.
P.S. The onomatopoeia captcha seems broken, I've tried lots of them, pop, bang, boom, meow, bark, etc and not a single one works.
Admin
bows in awe
Admin
Now that's funny. Bash FTW
Admin
It was funny then, but now it's your tax $$ at work to replace them! Woo-hoo!
Admin
One unusual thing you can do is alter the mouse properties - I think IntelliPoint allows you to calibrate the mouse for up/down movement - you align the mouse and drag it straight "up". But if you change that to directly sideways, it's rather hard to use the computer.
Less obvious is if you just do it a bit off vertical; the mouse just won't go straight any more. (try 20-30 degrees clockwise for a right-handed individual; you just can't hold most mice like that.)
Admin
Now THAT was cruel and unnecessary.
Admin
And we get our work done too. What's the harm in having a little fun at the office from time to time? It makes the stressful times enjoyable and when you leave at night you're not grumbling out the door. Geez, there are so many downers around.
Admin
I recall my dad talking about his boss leaving his terminal logged in as root always. The screen would blank after a few minutes, and the boss's normal way to "un-blank" the screen was to hit enter a few times. What stopped that was a line left typed at the prompt one day. I think it was something like:
for i in 5 4 3 2 1; do sleep 1; echo -n $i...; done; echo; echo rm -rf /; sleep 20
Didn't actually do any harm, but if you aren't expecting it, it can be difficult to parse that line correctly in 5 seconds...
Admin
Agreed!
Nothing wrong with having light-hearted moments at work. And as long as there's no damage or loss, what's the harm??
And for the record, I'm not in America, so you (the uptight stick-in-the-mud) can't use that against me.
Admin
At a more recent job, someone put tape on the bottom of my optical mouse. Then they unplugged my keyboard. I left my terminal unlocked and ended up with spyware and keyloggers and random other things being mangled on my computer.
About half the office was playing this "game" and the rest of us didn't want to be bothered. Well, it continued. So I would spill coffee on their desk, keyboard, papers, and pants (especially on days when they had presentations). I would randomly unplug the power cable on their computers when they were working. The one time I got pure enjoyment was when one guy duct taped the power plug into his pc with tons of tape. So I unplugged it from the wall. I eventually took to stealing personal effects and pictures they had in their cubes.
They tried joking about "Oh that was a good one." They tried being offended "C'mon man you're going too far." My reply was always "Don't touch my sh*t."
They finally caught on that I was just being an a-hole and I wasn't playing along with their game.
Admin
My favorite to do to coworkers was to change the windows screen saver to 3dtext or marquee and type in "I'm such a dumbass" or something more vulgar.
Admin
Boy I sure hope you backed up his porn directory first...that is, if there was enough free space. ;)
Admin
Owned.
Admin
The classical one is using NET SEND to send messages like "You have a Virus! Your computer will blow up!" over the LAN.
Not that it is funny anymore, but...
Admin
You must not have been held enough when you were a child. Lighten up man. Most of the time, when people play with you like that it's because they like you. But when you cry about being the butt of a joke like that, you're no fun anymore. I guess you will always just have stunted social skills. That's too bad.
Admin
When I worked as a sysadmin/jack of all trades at a visual effects studio there was a culture among all of the artists of fucking with each other's computers. I decided to get in on the action one day and make it so that every time a friend clicked his mouse, 5 seconds of a Snoop Dogg song would play. He was a pretty smart guy so I also moved his Sounds control panel to another location. ;)
The kicker was that when he called me to have me fix the problem (not knowing it was I who had done it) I could not talk from laughing so hard because he sounded so genuinely annoyed.
Admin
Of course... just on one of our computers instead of his. The best part was a day or two later when he comes out of his room and says, "Um, did you guys do something to my computer?" and we just sat there with a straight face saying, "Why? What's wrong with it?"
Admin
I had a smilar experience when I left my computer unlocked by accident (yeah - really).
When I returned to my desktop everywhere I went was porn.
Someone had changed my hosts file to have ip addresses for our corporate portal, yahoo and other sites point to pornsites.
Very simple. Very effective. I never leave my computer unlocked anymore. Lesson learned.
Admin
I left on vacation and returned to this:
Pirate Cubicle
Admin
Another prnak we used to play was in college. It seemed that everyone that used the public labs would also install and use ICQ. At the time there was a utility for extracting the user name and password for the last ICQ session on a system.
We would site down at the PC, fireup the utility and start sending out messages to everyone one their buddies list. It was a male, then the messages were usually something like "I am really drunk and have been watching way too much gay porn all afternoon...anyone feel like coming over?"
Admin
Admin
That's just evil. I like it.
Admin
Not computer related but at my old job, the know-all boss decided to move his desk from the cubes with the rest of us to a large closet. He had an office with a door though....
But since there was no room, his chair was right up against the wall behind him. Every few days, we'd go in and move the desk 1/2 an inch closer to the wall.
I'm not sure if he ever figured it out, or started some kind of diet, but I'll never forget watching him squeeze between the desk and wall trying to fit into the chair.
Admin
This happened a few times to me in university, particularly because I would leave my laptop in the lab while I went for lunch (it was a safe place, if not a mad house). The one day I opened up Firefox and realized I hadn't plugged in my wireless card. Good thing too, because the first thing I got was a message saying, "Couldn't connect to www.tubgirl.com: host not found."
In the office, we did less pranking with our computers and more with the things left on people's desks. I had a bad habit of bringing containers of food for lunch and forgetting to take them home. The one day I came in to see one particularly nasty container on top of my computer, with a USB light over it and a sign in front that read, "4th Year Design Project: Mold Grown at Room Temperature". Everybody in the office that day had to ask me how my design project was doing.
It's unfortunate that some (corporate) cultures don't allow for a little play. Sure, it's not productive, but it helps bring the team together and releives stress, both of which will help productivity immensely. As long as it doesn't become hurtful (angry customers, lost work, or too-much-picking-on-one-guy), it has a lot of benefits.
Admin
WTF really means:
What's This For?
Would have been a lot better than "Worse Than Failure".
Admin
The real WTF is that you have all these people with nothing better to do than mess with someone's system. I mean once is funny, but every time the guy leaves his desk?
Sounds to me like a group that could benefit from some down-sizing.
Admin
A number of years ago (ah, glorious dot com bubble days) I worked at a place in the online entertainment publishing industry (just so you know that it was normal to have goofiness in the office) that was in the process of becoming more corporate. If you left your computer unlocked, someone (usually in the editorial department, but occasionally a developer) would send a simple email to the company from your desk that was basically just the subject "My cat's breath smells like catfood" (from the Simpsons), along with a numerical value (the number of points you thought this person was worth). Lower numbers for people who always leave their computer unlocked, aren't very technical, etc, and higher numbers for someone who always locked their computer, or a developer, etc. Because it had to be done quickly, there would be frequent misspellings in the subject heading.
After a day or two of this, our CTO (a young kid with no formal CS education and a self-professed black-hat background... but essentially a script-kiddie with good connections) thought an incredibly sophisticated virus had infected the company (the sophistication was that the subject headings were always slightly different, and that it had somehow gotten past all of his defenses). Emergency meetings with the CEO, shutdowns of servers across the company, etc. Hilarious. He was not happy when he found out the truth, but I hope he learned something from it.
The company still exists. He's no longer there (not directly due to this, of course, although I think eventually the company realized they needed someone more experienced in this position).
Admin
I played along and ignored them with a smile until they installed the keylogger and spyware on my computer. Wasting my time and trying to steal my personal information isn't going to fly. And this was the really nerdy cliq who thought they were the "cool kids" at work. Everyone else actually had social lives outside of work but they were always together. Just think of nerds trying to be cool. It's very VERY annoying.
If you scroll up in the thread you see one of my earlier posts where I have no problem participating in office space shenanigans. There's a right and wrong way to do it though.
Admin
Back when I was running a computer lab at a university, I would occasionally come across a computer where someone had left the lab, but was still logged in to the VAX system. I'd modify the login script so that it would nag them about remembering to log out: a message on login, occasional random changes to the command prompt, emails from themselves to themselves, that sort of thing.
Nobody ever made that mistake twice.
Admin
That said, I have played practical jokes in a few cases (like changing the text on the motivational posters, which took months for people to notice). But the jokes need to be harmless, and not cause the victim to lose lots of time or work, and should be played on people you like and who can enjoy a joke.
(I have noticed also that the number of practical jokes goes up at places with bad morale)
Admin
In my workplace, locking your PC is mandatory, and little pranks are common when someone doesn't do it. Rather than being considered juvenile, it's considered a lesson learned for the lack of security consciousness. I've only ever had "I suck because I don't lock my PC" written in a text editor when I've been forgetful, or a bogus mail will be sent to similar effect to the whole department. I think it's a good thing. If people are not security conscious enough to lock their PC when it's company policy, then they might not be security conscious enough to use their PC's safely. Saying that you shouldn't have to lock your PC is all well and good, but when it's policy, and someone doesn't do it, they are in the wrong, and having people who are trustworth enough to teach you a lesson in a non malicious way is a good thing. Not that I agree with rebooting peoples computers randomly and not coming clean about it ;]
Captcha: Don't I get one :[
Admin
Evil things to do to people who keep an unlocked mac:
cmd-opt-8 (enables screen zooming) cmd-opt-= (zoom in pretty close) ctl-cmd-opt-8 (invert the screen)
I got my manager with this a while back and he absolutely lost his mind trying to search google for how to fix it :)
--
also on a PC: the accessibility high-contrast theme is ultra annoying
Admin
Nice... once again. Free Sticker Week Sorry, all out for today. Try tomorrow at noon.
DAMN! You stick tease!
Admin
I think the best one I have seen is when somebody left his linux desktop unlocked and ended up with a cron job that randomly opened or closed his CD tray.
In second place, but not by much, is using the --hide option of ls to create an alias that arbitrarily doesn't show certain files. For example, anything ending in 't', or anything containing a '-'.
Admin
Admin
Back in my CS classes, most everyone brought their laptops to class for note taking, etc. One of my friends (let's call her Ann), a "non-traditional" student, used the built-in mouse devices on her laptop, and didn't use an external mouse. So, we got a friend who sat next to her to discreetly plug his mouse into her computer during class. For about 15 minutes or so, the mouse would move "randomly" while she was typing, and she was starting to freak out. Finally, the guy sitting on the other side of her (who was in on it, too) suggested that she was probably just hitting the tracking device on her laptop accidentally; he did that sometimes, himself. When she looked back at her computer, the guy operating the mouse "took it up a notch" and decided to select a block of text. She turned back to the guy she was talking to and said, "How did that happen?!"
Eventually, she figured out what was going on, and we all got a good laugh. One of the guys who was in on it was the son of the prof, so he told his dad what had been going on afterwards (he thought it was funny, too). The next day, before class, the prof reminded everyone to make sure they didn't have any unexpected peripherals attached.
Admin
Waaay back in the day, I worked at a local Kinko's in the computer services department. The CS dept had a couple of computers in their office, and then the public ones... we'd design fliers, do photoshop stuff, etc, on the office machines.
I photoshopped up a desktop which consisted entirely of randomly placed mouse pointers. Everything still worked fine, but if you stopped moving the mouse it would disappear.
The other fun thing was to move all the icons around, take a screenshot, set it as the desktop, move them again, take a screenshot, move 'em again, and use the final shot as the desktop. So 1/3rd of the icons were real and the rest weren't...
Admin
This is just lame, not even worthy of being on the site. This is the type of juvenile crap that you expect from a low security site. This isn't a WTF, this isn't a Worse than failure, this is just lame.
Another sign the name change does not bode well.
Admin
You're a tool
Admin
Presumably using your giant stash of gay porn .... interesting