Ask Slashdot: What Happened To the Prank Apps That Used To Be Popular? 134
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Back when PCs were more boxy looking than today and people used floppy disks to store stuff, there were a bunch of prank apps around that one could put on a DOS or Windows computer to annoy the hell out of siblings, classmates, coworkers and others. (Here is a listing of some older prank apps and some more recent Android prank apps.) Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down. Some would make the mouse pointer move in strange ways or make it give you the middle finger. Some would cause you to hit the right keyboard key and still mistype a word. Some would play an audio file in the background every now and then that gave the impression of your computer making strange noises for unknown reasons, even turning the OS volume up before the sound, and then down again, making it impossible to make the sounds stop. There are many more computer users today than there were back then, yet there doesn't seem to be much new in the way of prank apps -- at least for Windows. Why is that? Did Windows 8 cause PC users to lose their humor?
My brother's favorite programing language is ruby (Score:5, Funny)
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In the olden days if a co-worker left their computer unlocked:
typedef int float;
In one of their header files.
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or #define if(X) ( rand() % 2 )
Re: My brother's favorite programing language is r (Score:2)
I had a coworker who would just send letters off resignation from your email if you left your computer unlocked. I like your thing better.
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I had a coworker who would just send letters off resignation from your email if you left your computer unlocked. I like your thing better.
As a manager, if someone sends a letter of resignation, I would accept it. Note that I say "if someone sends a letter of resignation", not "if a letter of resignation is sent from someone's computer".
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That's advanced evil.
An old classic is to do a print screen and then move away all desktop icons and put the captured image as the desktop image.
It would be really confusing until they realize what happened. But with the start button it's not that easy.
A lot of the common prank programs were also listed as annoyances by anti-virus softwares.
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Auto-hide taskbar as well.
I used to do that back in 2000 at the University.
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In the days of 15" CRT monitors, I would set the resolution to 1024 x 768, interlaced, and set a desktop pattern of white-black horizontal lines. The whole desktop flickered at 43,5 Hz.
Re:My brother's favorite programing language is ru (Score:4, Funny)
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"ru" is good language. Is best for hack computer or election.
"All ru comp are mine!"
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I'd already lost mine by Vista (Score:2)
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So like, this one time... at Computer Camp...
We're too worried about malware (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no way to know if that prank app is only a prank app and doesn't have more code to do... interesting things.
Even back in the day some of those apps had viruses in them. There are limits to the amount of trust you have in some guy who wrote a cute little application that inverts your desktop or whatever.
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Well a tiny portion of it is due to the potential for malware (one thing that people used to do was put viruses and backdoors in pirated anti-virus products that weren't detected by that version of the AV product.)
The larger issue is that the shitty script kiddies don't know how to program anything in C anymore. They only know how to use WYSIWYG and macro languages that are built into the OS.
OS's meanwhile don't let you install things that fuck with the UI any more (see all those " wants to send you notific
Re:We're too worried about malware (Score:4, Interesting)
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there's no way to know that about any app. If it comes from google, facebook, or amazon it's actually rather likely.
I saw a cookie monster last year (Score:5, Interesting)
Same as all the other pranks (Score:4, Informative)
Installing those prank apps on someone else's computer is now a felony. Much like other pranks people used to play at school back then that would now get you thrown out if not prosecuted.
Re:Same as all the other pranks (Score:4, Interesting)
After you've been hit with malware, a virus, maybe ransomware, pranks just aren't funny anymore. There are enough stunts pulled by firmware, coders, and people that misconfigure stuff to provide endless entertainment, if that's the sort of thing that gives you giggles.
Re:Same as all the other pranks (Score:4)
Add to it all the ads that are spamming users all the time. The use of computers isn't fun anymore. Add to it that development tools and operating systems now rarely allows you to explore the limits of your computer that you could do in the old days - do things that the computer manufacturer didn't even imagine.
Imagine the things that could be done in the Management Engine if access to it was possible for everyone.
The same thing that happened to groupies (Score:3)
Security!
Tangental apps (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure if this is still true, but I recall one of the only ways to invert a mouse axis for a game that couldn't be arsed to support it (eg Beyond Good and Evil) was with such prank applications.
Hackers (Score:2, Insightful)
You would probably get arrested for hacking today. You have to be careful with cops and prosecutors today. They are vicious and heartless.
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Put a bootable CD with some other OS into the CD drive was the latest thing I did. It was a CD with AROS [sourceforge.net].
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I installed a 'cracked screen' wallpaper on a machine at work.
On the $25,000 prototype of which only 3 existed giant touchscreen.
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You missed to post a video of the reaction of people seeing that!
These days we just call it Windows 10 (Score:1)
"Hey, where did all my data go after the upgrade?"
"lol you got pranked bro!"
My favorite one (Score:2)
My favorite one is from about a quarter century ago, when hard drives were beginning to be a thing most folks could afford - it was a DOS app, and was called a "Hard Disk Cleaner" - no, nothing malicious, it just popped up a few messages and made a few sounds. Don't quite remember it all, but since sounds were VERY rudimentary, and most folks only had the on-board speaker, well, there was only so much it could do, but basically it said "Filling disk with water" - made an appropriate sound, then "Washing Dis
Re:My favorite one (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember that one from the DOS days and another app from the same era that played a voice over the PC speaker saying "Help! I am trapped in your computer. Help, somebody!" It was amazing to hear audio like that out of something that usually only beeped or played monophonic square wave tunes. It wasn't until years later I learned how it was done. When the frequency of the tone was higher than human hearing, the tone would also be out of the range of the speaker, and the cone depth could be programmed by choosing ultrasonic frequencies, thus >1 bit DAC audio.
Re: My favorite one (Score:1)
That is the most fascinating half remembered yet still almost kinda right recollection of pulse code modulation I have ever heard.
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There was a golf game that patented the use of the timing chip to generate an interrupt to send byte codes to the sound port. Called RealSound or something similar. Then AdLib sound cards came out with MIDI audio. They were replaced again with stereo sampled sound.
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I still have fond memories of playing the original Mean Streets and marveling at the speech clips being played on the PC speaker via RealSound.
It even came with instructions for wiring alligator clips onto speaker wire, and vampire tapping the PC speaker's wires to play via a stereo rig.
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I remember a program like that. It was called "DRAIN.EXE" (floppy version) or "NUDRAIN.EXE" (hard disk). It would print a message about water being detected in the hard drive.
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This thing went wild through Lockheed back in 1980something. It got so people, if they saw the tell-tale "C>" prompt, would just hit CTL-ALT-DEL.
SO... this being in DOS pre-AT pre-Windows days when you could actually intercept CTL-ALT-DEL, I wrote one that went through some "seemed amusing at the time" death throes when you did that. "No, don't hit CTL-ALT-DEL!! Aiiiiii, too late!! My mind is going " and eventually (oh, about 20 seconds or so) actually rebooted.
I saw it on some download sites at on
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I remember running across one in college called "Sexplosion" that would pop up a dialogue box with an OK button, but when you tried to click the button it would move the dialogue box around the screen, out of the reach of your mouse.
A buddy of mine also emailed me one, to my *work* address, that turned the volume up to maximum and played a clip saying, "Hey, everybody! Look at me! I'm looking at porn!" The worst part there was it was a PC EXE, and I worked on a Mac, so I had moved the file over to our one o
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Windows 10 ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Windows 10 ... (Score:4)
It can be.
Recently I had a position that required a Win10 machine running alongside some industrial machinery. It was used for measuring output, but it sat idle most of the time, with a desktop image of a woman running along a beach.
I located the image on my home machine and photoshopped some variations; without a shadow, with the shadow but with the woman missing, and a third with both the woman and her shadow replaced by background. I copied them, along with the original image, into a folder in windows/media and set up the desktop with a random cycling slideshow from that directory, changing every five minutes.
I don't think anyone noticed, but I like to imagine someone might, one day.
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Someone will notice, but attribute it to Windows 10. They will probably see the image change, which is a normal Windows thing, and there you go. Background swapping got turned on. Someone adding more pictures will never occur to them.
Although it probably won't get the attention you sought, at least this is truly harmless. It doesn't have to be changed back, ever, and operations are not affected. This is more like wrapping everything on someone's desk in foil when they take a sick day and you're sure they're
Failure is not an option (Score:3)
Re: Simple (Score:1)
Except they didn't.
Exhibit A: systemd
Good Riddance (Score:1)
Q: What happened to the prank apps?
A: Malware detection software happened.
The pranks were just trojan horses (Score:5, Interesting)
I still have a CD that has a library of all the prank apps that I used to use back in the 90s. Nowdays when I read the disk, modern virus scan software reveals that every single one of them was really a trojan horse that was meant to secretly deliver a spyware app, a backdoor, or a virus.
COMPIZ (Score:2)
Are wobbly windows prankish enough?
Or the cube?
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
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but remember these were the days a few MB on a cover floppy was actually quite cool
The capacity of floppies were smaller than you remember.
A typical 3.5" floppy held 720 kB, later 1.44 MB, slightly more on Amiga and Macintosh, but not "a few MB".
A typical 5.25" floppy, which were really floppy and better suited for magazines, could hold 1.2 MB, again not "a few MB".
The Internet happened (Score:3, Interesting)
In the old days, commuters were simple, viruses and trojans were few and you knew who could access your computer. If you turned your computer on one day and all the text was upsidedown, you could turn off the computer, put in the backup DOS disk and turn it back on and be reasonably sure that if it was caused by malware, you would be safe. Now, anyone who can break into your computer over the internet could impersonate you and harm your family and friends, open up bank accounts in your name, blackmail you, etc. Scary.
Also, pranks used to do "impossible" things like play wave files through a speaker that was only intended to create beeps, etc. Computers are far more capable now.
A Close Encounter... (Score:3)
While exploring the windows API's, I wrote a little program that would enumerate all the volume controls in the sound mixer, identify anything that looked like it might stop a sound from playing. It would un-mute and push every playback volume slider to 100%, play a .wav file provided from the command line, then restore the value of each control.
The office I worked in had a standard dell machine on every desk, with a built in speaker. Of course since we were packed together in a cube farm, most people had muted the volume.
For an April 1st one year, I prepared a script that would connect to each machine using PSExec from System Internals to push my small program across the network and play a clip from Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind at full blast.
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You sound like someone I know. I did this same thing but on Sun workstations in my Comp Sci lab in college. Chopped up an AU file and sent portions to different workstations then orchestrated all of the workstations to play the audio file but each portion from the respective workstation. An entire row of freshman straight nope'd their way out of that lab. I still laugh so damn hard after all these years
Re:A Close Encounter... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well I actually *did* do something similar more than 20 years ago with some dumb terminals connected to (i think) a sunos server. Well, technically they weren't logged in at the time.
So I'd written a script to use the finger protocol on each student server, collect the IP addresses of the tty's everyone was logged in from, which I'd draw in an ascii art map of each lab.
I'd worked out that one lab of terminals had a beep pitch you could change, while the other labs would only beep at whole octaves.
And I'd worked out that all the terminals were open to remote connections while there was nobody logged in.
One day the stars aligned, I pulled up a map of this lab and there was only one guy in there. So I picked a bunch of the terminals around him and beeped out the 5 note close encounters tune.
So he comes running down the corridor to our lab saying that was awesome, who did that. And everyone pointed straight at me. Because of course if anything weird happened it was probably my fault.
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You don't need to appify everything (Score:1)
My two favorite app-free pranks:
1. Prankifying WiFi-stealing neighbors [ex-parrot.com]
2. Your colleague leaves his desktop unlocked?
a) Grab a screenshot
b) Make it the desktop background
c) Hide any desktop icons/windows
Lots of fun ensures, especially as an educative measure for colleagues/underlings ignoring relevant IT policies.
The no humor SJWs took over (Score:2)
Now having anything like that available brings down the wrath of the SJWs. You'll get fired for even having the output of such a program. Never mind it was probably a Yacc/Lex thing.
Around th
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Jive filter, it still exists: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Those text filters lost their appeal when AOLers flooded the internet with their all caps rants and ravings filled with misspellings and colloquialisms, and the novelty wore off, as it was no longer populated mostly by intellectuals who learned and typed formal English.
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Back in the 80's there was a, shit, not sure what, but you could run a doc through it and it sounded like a black guy wrote it. Funny as hell, controversial even at the time.
Contraversial as in it was obviously a bit racist but people felt awkward about pointing out blatant racism in the 80s. Well yes, the 80s were kinda racist and most people around then did indeed pick up racism from the general culture, and tha tincludes both you and me.
The difference between us is that I'm not under the impression that
Re: The no humor SJWs took over (Score:3)
Considering all the race violence in america today, including the recent alt right murders. Do you think that you managed to make the 201Xs better than the 198Xs?
This is not trolling, i trily wonder about it, because at times I feel like in the last 50 years, the west stopped progressing and is just slacking around.222
Re: The no humor SJWs took over (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering all the race violence in america today, including the recent alt right murders. Do you think that you managed to make the 201Xs better than the 198Xs? This is not trolling, i trily wonder about it, because at times I feel like in the last 50 years, the west stopped progressing and is just slacking around.
That's a good question. To define "better" you have to essentially assign a scalar to a multidimensional space, in other words, you have to find which things are better and which are worse and assign some sort of weighting to them and add the result.
so in some sense whether it's better depends on how you value the various things that have changed.
It's also important to discount perception: the 24hr news cycle has made it feel like we're in a massice crime wave the likes of whic hhas never been seen before but on average it looks like crime and voilence has actually been decreasing slowly but steadily.
Speaking of perception, people generally are used to their current situation and adapt if things change slowly. The 80s seemed fine (though I was a kid). The 90s seemed fine (I was a teenager). So did the 2000 and th 2010s. But the world has changed a fair bit from them.
An interesting thing to do is to find some old TV series you liked that has more or less vanished (no real cult following, go for something big and popular at the time) from say the mid 90s or 80s and watch some of it on youtube. The popular stuff of no particular merit tends to very much reflct the zeitgeist. It can be surprising. One show I remember loving in the 90s turned out to be unwatchable. It had things like a recurring funny side character: the joke was he is gay. That was it. The sole joke abut him. Repeated again and again.
But yes things are not uniformly getting better. The worsening of the gini coefficients and destruction of the middle class and similar things is stacking up problems. I think that's orthogonal to the reactions against bigorty etc. I'd like to take the latter, not the former if I could.
Naturally and reasonably people who are feeling the pinch of the middle class being destroyed are going to think things were better back then. Problems arise because humans are great at spotting patterns. So some people lump a whole lot of these things together and want to regress everything back because the things feel related (like cargo cults).
Fun fact: in the early middle ages there was a reaction against buttons. Turns out that the tight fitting, form revealing clothes enabled by the invention of buttons came aronud at the same time as the black death. Many people believed that buttons via the more revealing clothes were the problem and cause.
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But yes things are not uniformly getting better. The worsening of the gini coefficients and destruction of the middle class and similar things is stacking up problems. I think that's orthogonal to the reactions against bigorty etc. I'd like to take the latter, not the former if I could.
I am not sure if we reduced bigotry or simply shifted it around. For example, antisemitism seems to be rising both among the left and the right, society is also becoming more and more agist. Sure, gays are better off, but there are other minorities as well, some of whom, as I said above are MORE discriminated against now than before. Hell, maybe even poor people can be considered as such a minority.
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My boss back at Sperry Univac was a prankster, too. One day, I came in and logged in, and got immediately logged back out. He'd put a logout command into my startup script.
Quick deck of cards and a batch run to remove it later... And knowing that there was only one person who could possibly have done that... I went to the system console and patched the OS to remove the block on entering console commands from a terminal. Then, in his login file, a script to determine what terminal he was logging in from
What a Loss (Score:1)
Dick Pics (Score:3)
People used to use their computers for boring things. How many times did I have to remove the AppleTalk-aware Energizer Bunny extension from the machines in the computer lab?
Now people's PC's and phones have lots of personal data on them and you don't mess with that.
Recent Windows versions? (Score:2)
Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down
Since recent versions of Windows can do that, do they qualify as prank apps, too? It makes too much sense now.
What memories ... (Score:2)
... this brings back.
- We used to do a screen shot of the Desktop; set that as the wallpaper; select all the icons and shift them to the center of the screen and capture that.
Rinse, repeat and the victim would freak out trying to locate their active icons.
- We'd drop to DOS, inactivate the primary partition and the victim would get an error that there was no bootable drive. When they were distracted, one of us would reactivate the partition like it was magic.
- We'd write a .bat file that would run on startu
We got older (Score:2)
The prank apps still exist on new platforms. Us old people had to get work done and lost interest to maintain these things on "our" platforms. The OS nowaday is a commodity the same as a Z80 and BIOS was to us is Windows and Mac to the new generation, it isn't interesting there, but go to Slack or Gab or whatever teenagers are using today and you'll see the same.
Android keyboard shortcuts (Score:2)
My friend always adds keyboard shortcuts to his girlfriend's phone.
When she typed:
Joe
It would replace Joe with:
Joe, giving him a blowjob.
He put random stuff in there for different words and misspellings daily, and rotate them so she never knew what she was typing.
Replace work with:
fuck the cat...
Things like that.
It even worked with voice to text on her old phone, till she smashed it:)
It was funny to watch!
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So wishing I had some mod points...
Maybe tomorrow I will! :)
it was a more innocent world (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:it was a more innocent world (Score:4, Funny)
It's not about innocent. It's about being serious.
Computers used to be widely used by the nerdy few. Playing pranks on like minded people was a great pastime. However computers are now essential for everyone so it's a bit less funny.
But the reality is we just moved on from needing the apps. Intel's display driver alone is able to flip screens on command. That got so prolific last year that we actually got bored of pranking each other. So I took it to the next level.
I got a screwdriver and turned the person's screen upside down on it's base. He was using the shortcut key to flip his screen back to the correct orientation and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. Eventually he flipped it to the incorrect orientation and thought all was good until he rebooted his computer and the password prompt was upside down.
Virus (Score:2)
MacHack (Score:2)
There used to be a great Mac programmer's conference called MacHack. It was a weekend hackathon where people would churn out interesting code. Lots of them were pranks. One would cause the OK and Cancel buttons to run away from the pointer in dialog boxes. One turned all system text into Pig Latin. It was easy to pull these off in classic MacOS as it didn't have protected memory, so you could patch basically anything in the system with an application.
My personal favorite was the person who coded Breakout (i
Back Orifice (Score:2)
For true pranking, you couldn't go past Back Orifice. Your co-worker working on a seemingly important Word document? Kill Word. Does that person over there really need to be using IE right now? Nope? Zap.
But the funniest prank I ever had using Back Orifice was to pop up a system request. I targeted a sales guy who did have a sense of fun and made a system message pop up telling him to to call my co-worker (who did IT support). I sent the message, and within seconds my co-worker's phone rang and they
Quality with a capital K (Score:2)
> come up every few seconds on it's own
Quality journalism.
Got Me (Score:2)
Had a good one pulled on me. Came back to my desk to find the wallpaper showing a (subordinate who sat in the next office) coworker with my teenage daughter. All in good fun, though I learned to lock my screen before walking away.
Ventriloquist dummies (Score:2)
Prank apps are no longer popular for the same reason that ventriloquist dummies are no longer popular comedic props.
most falsely flagged as viruses (Score:2)
Many of the older windows and dos prank programs got flagged as a virus by virtue that they did things the user didn't want.
Don't need an app (Score:1)
Simpsons Screensaver (Score:2)
Forget about the old pranks.. What I want is the old Simpsons Screensaver, complete with flying toasters!
Evolution (Score:1)
People eventually recognised that the apps just weren't funny, sent anyone installing them to Coventry and then got on with their lives without annoyance - oh, and they learned how to lock their computer, pranks are much more of a motivation to do that than the threat of security issues...
fine line (Score:2)
the fine line between prank app and malware.
anyway, i never knew these apps were once popular, always avoided them with a passion.
M$ (Score:2)
When Microsoft made Windows it's self into a prank app, that took all the fun out of it... 8-P