[HN Gopher] How to mess with your roommate (2018)
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How to mess with your roommate (2018)
Author : goranmoomin
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-03-17 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bernsteinbear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bernsteinbear.com)
| RajT88 wrote:
| Back in college, I had a wireless infrared keyboard which also
| had a thumbstick for moving the mouse. My roommate didn't have
| his own PC so he would sometimes use mine. I would occasionally
| take my keyboard and move the mouse around which would confuse
| him.
|
| Later he bought his own PC, and would loudly blare music while I
| was trying to study. I knew it was a cheap PC, and this was a
| time where CPU power was not massive, and his NIC card was cheap
| and offloaded to the CPU. So I just ping flooded him until the
| music started stuttering.
|
| Lastly - a friend of mine eventually installed some sort of
| remote access software on my roommate's PC which he never locked.
| Again, the mouse moving gag, every ~15 minutes or so. But
| eventually, I moved the mouse over to the start menu, opened
| Paint, and drew "SATAN" which really freaked him out for a second
| until I burst out laughing.
| HankB99 wrote:
| > I would occasionally take my keyboard and move the mouse
| around which would confuse him.
|
| SWMBO and I had the same mouse a while back. One day she
| grabbed my mouse and was complaining "my mouse isn't working"
| while wiggling it back and forth. On my screen my mouse was
| zooming wildly all over the screen.
|
| She now uses a pink vertical mouse.
| livueta wrote:
| During university I worked in campus IT, and we had a robust
| tradition of technical pranks. One day my mouse movement
| stopped working; clicks were fine but no cursor. I
| immediately started in tearing apart the OS of my
| workstation, looking for whatever they'd done to mess with
| it. Didn't find anything so started recompiling the kernel,
| thinking they'd really outdone themselves with a high-quality
| hack. It was only then that I noticed the sticky note over
| the sensor on the bottom of the mouse.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Similar one I did to a colleague just this summer. Went
| into the menu of their monitor and turned green all the way
| up, red and blue all the way down. They spent a day trying
| to debug their Ubuntu, swapping out cables etc. and were
| about to go order a new monitor when I had to confess.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| > SWMBO
|
| This stands for "She Who Must Be Obeyed" for anyone as
| confused as I was.
| sakjur wrote:
| The Swedish term for people in a committed relationship
| that live together without being married is "sambo" (lit.
| "live together"), so my brain just connected it to that
| before second-guessing the W and capitalization.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| Early in my learning how to write shell scripts, I decided to
| prank a coworker. I set a cron job to execute a script on his Mac
| to display an image via QuickLook. I randomized the time to help
| drive him nuts. He found it and deleted it immediately after the
| first execution because it wasn't nearly crafty enough.
|
| Were I to do this today, I would use temporary dirs and such to
| obfuscate the location of the script, but whatever. I'm leaving
| in the raw info with my own debugging lines because that's where
| I was at the time (2007). Script follows:
|
| #!/bin/bash
|
| #roll to determine if the script continues. 0 is true, 1 is false
|
| RANGE=2 number=$RANDOM let "number %= $RANGE"
|
| roller=$number
|
| echo $roller
|
| #roll to determine if torture should begin
|
| if (test $roller -eq 0) then echo roller is 0. we will torture.
| RANGE=59 time=$RANDOM let "time %= $RANGE"
| echo $time minutes until we execute #roll the delay
| before execution gotime=$(expr $time "*" 60) sleep
| $gotime #copy the obscure file, rename it and open
| it cp /bin/effu /tmp/pwned.jpg open /tmp/pwned.jpg
| else echo roller is 1. no torture today.
|
| fi
|
| As an aside, I'm reminded of this classic prank:
|
| https://pete.ex-parrot.com/upside-down-ternet.html
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Back in college, the wireless network didn't seem to have any
| protections against ARP poisoning, so I went through a short
| phase of messing with my roommate by replacing all the images
| loaded by his browser with cats.
|
| Also had the classic move of replacing the desktop with a
| screenshot of itself and hiding the icons and taskbar.
|
| Once we got far enough into our programs we stopped messing with
| each other like that so as to not potentially interfere with
| classwork (and also the ARP poisoning stuff was probably going
| too far).
| x86x87 wrote:
| Back when windows 98 was a thing (targeting the same annoying
| roommate):
|
| 1) there was a way to limit the amount of RAM windows used. It
| was a setting. Set it to 25% and watched him try to debug.
| Eventually he figured out that the game he was trying to play
| could show him how much memory he had. At 2am he was sniffing the
| RAM chips to see which one was burnt.
|
| 2) same a...friend. Wrote a small program that would delete, at
| random a file from system32 (this was at a time when windows had
| no clue how to protect system files). This would be scheduled to
| happen anywhere between 1 day and 2 weeks. When it first happened
| I "helped" him repair it by installing windows over/repairing.
| Pro was that it fixed the problem, con was that the fun mechanism
| was left in place. He had fun with this for around 6 months until
| at a point did a clean install. Nobody that knew him believed him
| when e started ranting about how unreliable win98 was.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| Very crafty. However my favorite computer prank style is almost
| immediately clear you're being pranked but making it very hard to
| find how the prank works. For example, coworker in the previous
| place I worked at, noticed his mouse moves on its own. Classic
| prank, right? He found the wireless USB dongle and removed it.
|
| But it still kept on happening.
|
| By the time he realized it was a patched driver he threatened to
| murder us all a couple of times.
|
| I like this sort of prank because everyone is in the game, the
| victim included. They know they're being pranked and if it stops
| being fun you can end it gracefully.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > I deployed it after squashing some annoying PHP and NGINX
| configuration nonsense
|
| Oh, how I wish the author would have expanded on this.
| alook wrote:
| At a startup I worked at, one of my cofounders was an incredibly
| skilled designer, and he took a lot of pride in the design of our
| homepage. He spent a lot of time in particular finding the right
| fonts, and would often complain when he saw other company
| homepages with inappropriate font choices.
|
| One April fools' day, we thought it'd be funny to make him think
| that we'd changed the company homepage to have a comic sans font.
| Of course it'd be going too far to actually change the website
| publicly, so we decided to set up a DNS proxy inside the company
| office.
|
| We took our company homepage, recompiled a static site with comic
| sans, and hosted it on an internal server. Then we set up a DNS
| proxy that resolved our company homepage for requests coming from
| inside the office to our comic sans static site, but otherwise
| the internet worked normally.
|
| We made sure that everyone else in the company would feign
| outrage when he came in and checked the website, so the joke
| lasted for a couple hours before he thought to check the website
| from his mobile phone. Later, he appreciated the joke and figured
| he should have connected the dots sooner and realized that it was
| April Fools' day.
| DavidPeiffer wrote:
| A former coworker shared the worst networking issue he ever
| encountered. He came in one day and his network wasn't working.
| He tried all the standard things, rebooting, trying different
| protocols, etc but couldn't figure it out. Pulled the cable out
| of the back of his computer and plugged it back in. Running
| around in circles for half a day. Finally he was going to replace
| the networking cable and found a tiny piece of scotch tape
| covering just a couple of the contacts.
| dhosek wrote:
| iMacs ca. 2007 came with a remote control device that would put
| the iMac into entertainment console mode. Then, at some point,
| Apple stopped shipping the remote with the iMac, but left the
| feature in the iMac. What's more, the remote wasn't paired to an
| individual Mac, so it would trigger any iMac within range.
|
| I worked in an office where several of us had iMacs but I was the
| only one with a remote. I would occasionally hit the button and
| send my co-workers' macs into entertainment console mode. Because
| they perceived me as a quiet and unobtrusive person, they didn't
| suspect me for weeks.
|
| Nowadays, I do something similar when my kids are playing with my
| iPhone where I'll use my watch's camera remote feature to enter
| the camera app. Occasionally, I can be quick enough to switch to
| the front camera and take their picture before they return to
| playing 2048.
| don-code wrote:
| While not necessarily "messing with my roommate": I lived with a
| very foul-mouthed roommate during my undergrad. The .NET
| Framework 3.5 (I think?) released during this time, and it had an
| API for speech recognition.
|
| I wrote a small program with a dictionary of a single word - f**
| - and let it count up the number of times that it heard it. (I
| know now that this will result in lots of false positives, but I
| was 19 or 20 at the time.)
|
| Of course, I only had one laptop capable of running Windows, and
| messy as our apratment was, I couldn't just leave my laptop
| outside his bedroom for a day. I instead took one of my CB
| radios, taped down the transmit button, and left _that_ outside
| his room.
|
| If I remember correctly, it counted 19 F-bombs dropped in one
| day.
| narag wrote:
| Those are rookie numbers. My fucking drill sergeant would have
| put him to fucking shame in two fucking minutes.
|
| Edit: Arthur C. Clarke had a short story about a word counter
| that a scientist used with his talkative wife, I can't find the
| reference just now.
| jorgesborges wrote:
| In the early 2000s one of my friends bought TV B Gone which was
| basically a universal tv remote with an off button. We had a lot
| of fun confusing the hell out of family and friends who were
| trying to peacefully enjoy their show. We also had fun at bars
| and restaurants when sport games were on.
| lordfrito wrote:
| So back when I was fresh outta college, and Windows 3.11 was
| king, I decided to mess with the salesguy the engineering team
| worked with.
|
| Windows let you hook into the global message queue and
| intercept/modify stuff. Windows was cool in that you could modify
| the message args passed, and your new values would be sent to the
| other windows in the message chain. Making sure you were in the
| global message queue ensured you got the message first.
|
| So I basically intercepted every WM_MOUSEMOVE message (which is
| sent to windows every time the mouse moves). The arguments are
| the X and Y position of the mouse. Of course, I do the following:
| xPos += 4 * rand() / RANDMAX - 2; yPos += 4 * rand() /
| RANDMAX - 2;
|
| Which would cause the mouse to behave "jittery" -- made it harder
| steer the mouse or land on a button you wanted to click. The
| trick was to make it difficult to use, but not impossible. Just
| really annoying. Especially when you were trying to concentrate.
|
| After about a month or so one of the IT guys I knew stopped by my
| desk, and asked me if I knew anything about this. He knew me
| personally, and knew the reputation of the engineering team, and
| figured we might have had something to do with this.
|
| I promptly went to the salesguy's computer, and held down three
| keys on the keyboard corresponding to the three initials of my
| name. The problem instantly vanished.
|
| Apparently IT had replaced his mouse 3 times before they
| suspected it might be a prank. Felt a little bad about wasting
| the IT guys time.
| tempaccount420 wrote:
| You're a dick and jokes like that are how you get someone
| fired/quit.
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