theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.
A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.
Every time you log in, maximize a window, lock your PC, etc, your desktop icons randomly arrange themselves by penis. Open a folder, forced to display files as icons and arranged by penis. Try to view all your open windows on your desktop, you guessed it, penis.
No, no, change it back! I had internet explorer at the tip of penis
Chip, you can’t arrange by penis
Just change it back okay
For those who haven’t seen the masterpiece:
The whole thing is worth the watch but the reference is at (about) 7:50
I believe that specific site was called “Last Measure”. It would also open up a bunch of shock sites…
Yep. I remember you could go to *.on.nimp.org and it’d lock up the browser with alert() loops, play something loud and obnoxious, and show shock images. In middle school we’d convince people to go to something like runescapehacks.on.nimp.org in school. I specifically remember one that said “Everyone come look, I’m looking at gay porn!” on repeat.
Something like that web site happened to our secretary ages ago. The boss, standing behind her, had asked her to look something up, she innocently clicked on one “search result”, and porn ads popped up. Whenever she closed a window, more opened. All while the CEO was looking over her shoulder. I was called, and killed Netscape, and had to explain that this was not the secretaries fault. I entered the same search, and showed them both the amazingly genuine looking result, and the CEO said that this could have happened to him, too. And he was thankful to learn how to kill the browser in such a case.
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.
Excuse me sir, they said “harmless”
I swapped the N and M keys on a co-worker’s keyboard and even made a custom keyboard mapping for it as well.
That’s nasty
I’d make Windows 11
Edit: Whoops, that’s not harmless
I call bullshit. In the 90s you had to turn a phisical wheel to increase the volume of the computer.
As someone caught out by this, most of us had speakers and windows had volume controls as well. They’re kinda useless to have super low volume, so the tendency was to turn the speakers up and have windows control it. (what could go wrong? mine was always set low in windows, this was before lots of ads on browsers would randomly come on too) Fortunately everyone thought it was the guy in the cubicle next to me, with about 10-15 heads popping out of cubicles in our direction.
And for what it’s worth the audio clip finished with an enthusiastic “YEE HAW”
I still can, rocking the Logitech Z5500s that I bought close to 20 years ago now. Absolutely the Pinnacle of PC speakers.
Right it was like those jumps are sites where it would play something very quietly so you’d turn up the volume, then they would announce the porn at full volume. It was a gag site/video file, not a virus.
When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a ‘virus’ that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.
A virus that changes Windows’ sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.
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”
deleted by creator
I knew a guy who had a shitty boss so he set every key press and program function click (ok, cancel, etc.) to play that sound.
Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.
In a programming class, one of my professors sometimes remolety opened the xeyes program (Linux program that opens a pair of eyes that follow your cursor) on students that were not paying a lot of attention.
I used to do the same thing to a few people back in the day. Linux distros used to ship with the X listening port just conveniently wide open and the config set to allow input from any other device on the LAN. I’d start with only one xeyes, and then they’d close it. I’d do it a few more times until they got irritated with me, and then I’d push it further by putting xeyes into a bash loop to open dozens at a time.
I used to operate a dashboard on a wall-monitor in an IT ops center. For Halloween, I wrote a script that very briefly played a video of a creepy set of eyes that opened, looked around the room, focused on something/glared, then closed, all over around like 2 seconds, but ran 1-3 times an hour. It was funny the first few times it happened and I got told to turn it off.
Instead I changed it to run 1-3 times a year.
My manager thought that that was absolutely hilarious without being too disruptive and let me keep it. We had enough turnover that there was always a newbie in the pool and every now and then, someone would say ‘what the fuck was that!?’ and we’d get a good laugh.
Thank you, I have wondered why xeyes existed for the last 28 years.
I used to make a batch file that opened a command prompt that opened the batch file again and again and put it on the computers as the internet Explorer logo.
People would get so mad when they opened it as a cascade of cmd would open until the computer crashed
So something like that i think
Sounds like a weak fork bomb.
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.
sounds like something I’d see on dancoot1
We used to edit the system keymapping on the school Macintoshes and duplicate a letter somewhere, and then we’d do the same to a second machine using the letter that the first could no longer type; then we’d switch the physical keycaps
kou know, to this dak i alwask wondered whk my computer alwaks did that. kou wilk rascal, kou!
I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dutch.
Kanker lekker
i assume that translates to “you pay half” :P
y2k
replace the y character with the k
I see what you did there
I’m dumb and/or stoned. Can you explain please? Shk gkpsk, slklk, sprklk, trkst bk mk crkpt?
Koure missing an a in sparklk
Mk bad tkvm
swaps Y and K keys.
Y to k Y 2 k
Bootable USB with w11