Share your computer pranks!

[Dabomb18359]

How old are all you people? It seems you have these awesome hacking skills (at least to me with all these program thingies) yet many of you say "my younger sister" or "to my friend in school." Are these programs (like C++) easy to learn because right now i only know basic computer stuff, like Control-Alt-Delete stuff and none of this DOS stuff with all the C:/ directories.

 

[homeyg]

How old are all you people? It seems you have these awesome hacking skills (at least to me with all these program thingies) yet many of you say "my younger sister" or "to my friend in school." Are these programs (like C++) easy to learn because right now i only know basic computer stuff, like Control-Alt-Delete stuff and none of this DOS stuff with all the C:/ directories.

I wouldn't say C++ is easy to learn, but I learned it pretty quickly.

 

[Comraddict]

I wouldn't say C++ is easy to learn, but I learned it pretty quickly.

Learned what exactly... C++ can be used for about anything.

 

[homeyg]

Learned what exactly... C++ can be used for about anything.

I learned C++ quickly (about 6 months). I'm moving on to the Win32 API now and finishing a rather large book on C++.

 

[Dabomb18359]

But how old are you guys again? Someone said they remembered an experience at 7th grade? How can you know hacking-like stuff by then?

 

[homeyg]

But how old are you guys again? Someone said they remembered an experience at 7th grade? How can you know hacking-like stuff by then?

I'm 14 years old, but I just started programming in November of 2004. 7th grade, I didn't know much about it.

Learning to program is not hard. I assume you could teach a 4th grader to do it in time. Once you get past a certain point in your knowledge of the sytax of the language, learning the rest is not hard at all.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

I'm part of the last generation that learned DOS before Windows. Now that I think of it, it would have been more difficult to try to learn Windows from scratch than with a basic knowledge of the command line. Ever since I got Linux I relearned the value of that simple and and powerful tool, which is often more straightforward than elaborate GUIs.


For a nice computer prank you can do a print screen of the desktop, to to Paint and make it a wallpaper. Then remove a couple of icons from the desktop (or move something like My Computer outside of the desktop). Then sit back and watch someone desperately trying to click something that isn't there

One thing I did (you can only do it with Win95, possibly with Win98 too):
add the following lines to autoexec.bat

echo Your computer has been virused
echo Press any key to delete the hard drive
pause

Edit:
@homeyg
Did you touch virtual functions and the STL a bit? I remember hating programming at that age. I now evolved to hating Bjarne Stroustrup

 

[homeyg]

Edit:
@homeyg
Did you touch virtual functions and the STL a bit? I remember hating programming at that age. I now evolved to hating Bjarne Stroustrup

Not yet. I did buy that book on the STL, but never got around to reading it.

 

[Betrayed]

Whups wrote to the wrong thread accidently....

 

[WildWeazel]

A couple very simple but annoying pranks -

When somebody leaves their computer for a few seconds, go to desktop and hit Ctrl-A then Enter (the more desktop icons the better....) When they return, every program on the desktop is opening at the same time!

Remove mouse balls or put a small sticker over the light of an optical mouse.

Set somebody's screensaver to display an annoying or embarassing message, and set a password so they can't stop it.

For real newbs, especially older people- send them an email titled Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Fw: Hello or something like that, and write this:

Hello! This is a user-friendly computer virus. Please follow these simple steps:
1. Forward this message to everyone in your address book.
2. Erase your hard drive.
Thank you for your cooperation.

I tried it and somebody actually replied to the email asking what they should do to protect themselves from this virus!

 

[homeyg]

When somebody leaves their computer for a few seconds, go to desktop and hit Ctrl-A then Enter (the more desktop icons the better....) When they return, every program on the desktop is opening at the same time!

That has to be the most annoying prank I've ever encountered. Fun to do it to other people's computers, but not fun to have it done to your own.

This is kind of a specialized prank, but in our computer class, we had computers that made the 'beep' when they were starting up, so when the teacher had all the computers off, we would turn on people's computers. When the teacher heard the resulting 'beep', she could be heard several classrooms down. "SHUT IT DOWN 'FOR I PUT YOU OUT!!"

 

[Chieftess]

How old are all you people? It seems you have these awesome hacking skills (at least to me with all these program thingies) yet many of you say "my younger sister" or "to my friend in school." Are these programs (like C++) easy to learn because right now i only know basic computer stuff, like Control-Alt-Delete stuff and none of this DOS stuff with all the C:/ directories.

The term "hacking" is often misunderstood and misinterpreted, I think. Hacking refers to getting entry to another computer. In the old days, this would be making a program that could travel through a comm port (or network cable) to see what's on the other computer, and do stuff (physically)to it. This was before firewalls, so now it's harder to do that, and even still, there's programs that can penetrate things.

All IBM compatible machines have some form of DOS capabilities. You can still go into command mode (DOS! ) and type in DEL somefile.ext and it'll delete. A batch file (.bat) can have a bunch of these commands. (delete, copy, append -- really annoying if you want to mess up exe files), edit, etc. You could even edit a text file, start it with MZ and put gibberish (alt-numpad sequences are good with numbers lower than say, 32), name it to an EXE file, and watch DOS crash. (Windows XP avoids this I think).

But, really, if you test something enough, you start to figure out what makes it break. Those things are called bugs, or exploits. (i.e., a common Windows exploit is that windows recognizes a file based on the filename. So, it assumes *.exe, *.com and *.bat are executable commands, even if they aren't). What it doesn't do is read the first few bytes of the file. It's like anything else - fiddle with it for awhile, and it'll eventually break. Tell a newbie to delete a file, and they'll do it. Windows won't ask any questions other than "Yes/No/Cancel". (this is why the command line is more dangerous. Put /y after del *.* and it'll delete it without asking. A Windows GUI doesn't have that option.)

 

[Chairman Meow]

The term "hacking" is often misunderstood and misinterpreted, I think. Hacking refers to getting entry to another computer. In the old days, this would be making a program that could travel through a comm port (or network cable) to see what's on the other computer, and do stuff (physically)to it. This was before firewalls, so now it's harder to do that, and even still, there's programs that can penetrate things.

"Hacker" also refers to a skillful programmer, though this meaning has fallen out of favor since the media prefers to think of hackers as malicious (i.e. the definition you gave)

All IBM compatible machines have some form of DOS capabilities.

Not really. Only operating systems that are either based on DOS (i.e. Windows 3.1 to ME, or DOS itself), or operating systems that have a DOS subsystem (Windows 2K/XP) have DOS. It can be emulated, however, on other OSs using programs like Dosbox.

But, really, if you test something enough, you start to figure out what makes it break. Those things are called bugs, or exploits. (i.e., a common Windows exploit is that windows recognizes a file based on the filename. So, it assumes *.exe, *.com and *.bat are executable commands, even if they aren't). What it doesn't do is read the first few bytes of the file.

True. A great way to confuse a newbie is to give them a file with a name ending in .jpg.exe. Since Windows likes to hide file extensions, they'll see filename.jpg, think it's a picture, click on it and run the program. Windows doesn't care either way.

It's like anything else - fiddle with it for awhile, and it'll eventually break. Tell a newbie to delete a file, and they'll do it. Windows won't ask any questions other than "Yes/No/Cancel". (this is why the command line is more dangerous. Put /y after del *.* and it'll delete it without asking. A Windows GUI doesn't have that option.)

Perhaps the best command in the older DOSes (MS removed it from the DOS 7.x/Windows 98 and it hasn't appeared since) was "deltree". Just run "deltree C:\" and watch the fun

 

[Chieftess]

Not really. Only operating systems that are either based on DOS (i.e. Windows 3.1 to ME, or DOS itself), or operating systems that have a DOS subsystem (Windows 2K/XP) have DOS. It can be emulated, however, on other OSs using programs like Dosbox.

Go to start->run, type in command (or cmd), and type in commands like:
"md test"
"cd test"
"del /?"

You still get those DOS commands.

 

[Chairman Meow]

Go to start->run, type in command (or cmd), and type in commands like:
"md test"
"cd test"
"del /?"

You still get those DOS commands.

That's only in Windows. Not all operating systems that run on IBM-compatible hardware have DOS - it's only the Microsoft OSs. The only way to be able to use DOS commands on, for example, a Linux computer is to use an emulator.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Perhaps the best command in the older DOSes (MS removed it from the DOS 7.x/Windows 98 and it hasn't appeared since) was "deltree". Just run "deltree C:\" and watch the fun

The only recollection I have of using the command was back some 10 years ago on an old Intel 8086. Just think of a computer newtork running DOS with two dosens inquisitive 10 year old fiddling around, and no such things as access, read or write restrictions

 

[Genocidicbunny]

This is probably a popular one but anyway-back in 7th grade in computers class I 'accidentaly' sat down at someone else's computer and opened up word. Then I set auto-correct to change popular words like 'the' and 'a' to **** and ***. Two days later the guy who's computer it was, was writing some thing in word without looking. Then he sent it to the teacher to read. You can imagine how hard the class was laughing when they caught wind of this after the teacher exclaimed in shock when he saw the doc

 

[homeyg]

This is probably a popular one but anyway-back in 7th grade in computers class I 'accidentaly' sat down at someone else's computer and opened up word. Then I set auto-correct to change popular words like 'the' and 'a' to **** and ***. Two days later the guy who's computer it was, was writing some thing in word without looking. Then he sent it to the teacher to read. You can imagine how hard the class was laughing when they caught wind of this after the teacher exclaimed in shock when he saw the doc

I tried that and I got caught.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

You got to be careful. On our comp's we had easily detachable stickers so I swiched them before doing anything. Another easy one is setting IE's homepage to some bad site or maybe swiching Icon target programs

 

[RameNoodle]

On the Macs in my grade school (7th grade) they had a crappy game called Oregon Trail. I edited it with ResEdit so instead of "John has broken his arm" - "John sprained his wrist masturbating" and instead of "Jane has come down with the flu" - "Jane has come down with gonorrhea". Stuff like that. It was fun.

absolutely hilarious, that game kept us occupied forever. If I had the computer knowledge in fifth grade and had actually known what masturbating and gonnorhea were, I would have done that. Thanks for the hilarity.