[HN Gopher] The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
___________________________________________________________________
The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
Author : goldenskye
Score : 397 points
Date : 2025-04-01 07:11 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (oldvcr.blogspot.com)
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| peterpost2 wrote:
| [Deleted]
| kps wrote:
| [Removed by Reddit]
| simondanerd wrote:
| Snook boom five seven supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
| bum fortnite.
|
| This post has been removed by Redact for HN.
| deadbabe wrote:
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| xg15 wrote:
| <This comment has been redacted due to National Security
| reasons>
| actionfromafar wrote:
| HN is now a federal organization. Your account is marked for
| deletion in the next efficiency round.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Look, whilst I agree with you in principle, your metaphor on
| the sexual preferences of honey badgers really did not do you
| any favours.
|
| <Replying to this comment requires a Hacker News premium
| account>
| aneutron wrote:
| While that may be the case, this subject is quite delicate
| and is best debated within the confines of informed animal
| sexology:
|
| <Parts of this comment are protected by Hacker News Premium
| Private Debates>
| zakki wrote:
| Yeay, I'm a premium user.
| tdstein wrote:
| Can anyone tell me how to setup a premium account? I can't
| figure it out.
| mankyd wrote:
| You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like
| this: ****.
| virgilp wrote:
| 123456
|
| edit: What now?
| waltwalther wrote:
| ...just wait for the email, click the link, enter your
| credit card number, and...
| MisterTea wrote:
| AMAZING! That's the same combination on my luggage.
| em-bee wrote:
| your luggage locks have six digits? or is that two locks:
| 123 and 456?
| Aardwolf wrote:
| hunter2
|
| edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Everybody else but you sees the stars, but not you
| because you are logged in to your account.
|
| To me your message appears as: *******
| edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| You can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| That's why I always set my password as 8 asterisks - that
| way when my password gets leaked the hackers still think
| it's encrypted.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Makes sense! Thanks for the tip.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Bash.org salutes you.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I just don't understand why he would tell us how many
| asterisks he's using, I will try 16 for extra security.
| You can never be sure these days!
|
| (BTW I love bash.org!)
| tdba wrote:
| HOw did you get my password ??? Delete. it immediately.
| This is your Final warning.
|
| Warm regards,
| minraws wrote:
| Al#&291xuijL1
| mjmas wrote:
| rightcattlecapacitorpaperclip
| pwagland wrote:
| You have to insert 5c.
| notfed wrote:
| Just log in with your Twitter account. It uses "Sign in With
| X" now.
| kotaKat wrote:
| [preflagged for convienence]
| alex1138 wrote:
| We have detached this thread, as it was off-topic
| as1mov wrote:
| (User was banned for this post)
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Hope you got 10 bux!
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| <This comment requires Internet Explorer 6>
| b8 wrote:
| This comment has been redacted by the United States Federal
| Bureau of Investigation.
| MadVikingGod wrote:
| <The Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny
| the presence of this post>
| distalx wrote:
| <Please disable your ad blocker to view this comment>
| busyant wrote:
| I worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago.
|
| - Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and
| Peter Sachs (not their real names).
|
| - For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through
| the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.
|
| - So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the
| entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and
| last names).
|
| - "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of _"
| In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the
| Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x>
| is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All
| laboratory generated results will be reported using the following
| units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight
| ...."_ etc. etc. etc.
|
| - Well, _Jim_ Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even _he_
| thought that the email had been sent under his own name.
|
| - So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did _NOT_ send
| this. I don 't know what this is about."
|
| - Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.
|
| - Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was
| really funny. Don't EVER do it again."
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails
| through the company's Windows email server under any name that
| I wanted.
|
| The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its
| infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let
| tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of
| users themselves instead of some noreply address.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| _For reasons I can 't remember, I was able to send emails
| through the company's Windows email server under any name that
| I wanted._
|
| I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this
| due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and
| Proofpoint, ironically. _not naming them._ I 've done similar
| pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not
| recommend people do this early in their career especially if
| leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.
| busyant wrote:
| > especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.
|
| Funny thing is that I cleared my prank with Peter Sachs
| because he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he told me to
| go for it and he thought it was hilarious.
|
| I _didn 't_ clear it with Jim Collinsworth because he was a
| bit of a jokester himself so I (incorrectly) assumed he'd
| have no problem with it.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Having approval from one of them would be quite the saving
| grace.
|
| I had a CTO tell me to fill a cubicle with quick drying
| cement after a prank went wrong but I stalled him long
| enough to cool down. I knew the building management company
| would have been furious had I followed orders. _The CSO had
| pranked the CTO with a dongle that opens excel and slowly
| types "I know what you were doing..."_
| em-bee wrote:
| the building company would be more than furious. you
| could lose your lease over this and pay damages.
|
| next time recommend using expanding insulation foam
| instead, but first cover everything with big sheets of
| plastic. the victim will still have a hell of a time
| getting rid of the foam. that stuff hardens...
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Oh trust me I know. This was CBRE and they are
| cantankerous and contentious on good days.
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Some jokesters are surprisingly picky about which side of
| the joke they're on.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| >leadership are sensitive to embarrassment
|
| Or they don't want distractions that are too costly.
| hobs wrote:
| I showed a new to IT guy about open relays and he was about
| to send an email from the CEO but thinking better, he sent
| the joke email from "JohnDoeTotallyTheCEO@gmail.com" (real
| name instead obviously) - the amount of people STILL thinking
| it was the real thing was embarrassing.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Seems like a memorable way of showing them that the email
| system could be configured better.
| glimshe wrote:
| Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't
| funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's
| time.
|
| It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once
| wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool
| joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset
| to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.
|
| Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations
| where it wastes everybody's time several times per day...
| Including on HN.
|
| Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or
| the Internet, please.
| johnisgood wrote:
| "Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole
| Internet, however.
| ghaff wrote:
| I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing
| some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading
| up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke
| in print, just don't.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man
| hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I
| could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.
| roenxi wrote:
| The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up
| with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the
| article are causing people stress for no reason and with no
| compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of
| misbehaviour.
|
| There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad
|
| Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral
| framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends
| God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant
| to me
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Ah, but do you get to have fun _at the cost_ of others?
|
| That is the question.
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| Of course! I'm doing it right now!
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money.
| Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in
| dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the
| time spent by random people calling the main office, and
| by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one
| thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because
| you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and
| quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars
| with a prank.
|
| You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people
| should have known better and it's their own fault for
| falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
| freehorse wrote:
| > timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes
|
| Not the best way to measure time imo.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The whole point is to measure what really matters to the
| business, instead of measuring time.
| freehorse wrote:
| Not every second of working time has the same level of
| productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in
| dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear
| relationship between them.
| krisoft wrote:
| There is a very linear relationship between time and
| money for the one who pays the employees though.
|
| Nobody says "you know boss, that two hour meeting today
| was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth
| of my salary from my paycheck". So the company quite
| literally pays for everyone's time who was at the
| meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how
| long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of
| productivity/value.
|
| And the point of having a, more often rethorical than
| real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this
| into perspective. The more people you invite the more the
| meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The
| goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people
| think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right.
| To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings,
| they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they
| are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length
| of the meeting and right-size the invite list.
| wat10000 wrote:
| No, it assumes some linear relationship between _pay_ and
| time. Which is a little iffy for salaried workers, but
| only a little.
|
| My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me,
| whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two
| weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say
| my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to
| my employer.
|
| You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment
| relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the
| employer buys the time of its employees.
| wat10000 wrote:
| That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a
| laugh.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| It's just disingenuous to pretend it's about corporate
| efficiency when it's more about personal feelings/vibes.
| wat10000 wrote:
| "Corporate efficiency" is vague and largely meaningless.
| "Don't waste a bunch of your coworkers' time" is a lot
| more concrete. Especially don't set up the people who
| answer the phones to get angry calls due to your prank.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april
| fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil
| (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your
| pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about
| the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering
| how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU
| back then. At times, active thinking of your peers just needs
| to be challenged so they don't get too confident...
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Meanwhile the Xbox 360 kamikaze hack _actually_ involved
| drilling a chip...
| RandomBacon wrote:
| This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a
| hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or
| microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any
| pictures of people actually doing those things though, just
| "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Someone actually did it (for real):
| https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA
| causal wrote:
| Nah. I like the small things that remind us we're still humans,
| and a little inconvenience is a small price
| Symbiote wrote:
| Small things are fine.
|
| It's not fun when the corporate marketing team meets in
| September to start planning their April Fools jokes.
| 0x3444ac53 wrote:
| <Please disable your ad blocker to view this comment>
| jonstewart wrote:
| HP LaserJet 4s squarely date TFA's prank in the early-mid 90s.
| I can agree with you that lame corporate April Fool's Day jokes
| on the Internet are overdone; but 1990s-era campus sysadmin'ing
| ruled. Sysadmins kept a close eye on things to ensure no one
| (especially the servers) got hurt, but computer geeks were far
| from mainstream and a spirit of playful tolerance and taking-
| care-of-our-own prevailed. Well do I remember telneting to
| sendmail on port 25 and sending spoofed email to classmates...
|
| The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying
| INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.
| namenotrequired wrote:
| I feel the opposite. Work pranks are the best pranks because
| they only waste time that I was already selling anyway.
| II2II wrote:
| My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they
| affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't
| deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| April 1st always falls on a weekend though
| Cycl0ps wrote:
| My brother in Christ it's Tuesday
| nosrepa wrote:
| Woosh
| wat10000 wrote:
| I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Don't waste hours of
| other people's time for your fun.
|
| Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those
| phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite
| angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron
| in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank
| that lands on your head.
| xxr wrote:
| Y'know, I'm inclined to agree here, but I don't think it was
| always this way. Over the last few years I've been feeling
| really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool's Day, and I think
| feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything
| on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be
| amused by pranks in good faith, we're mentally on-guard every
| day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an
| image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you've
| got people sending you stuff like "ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED
| UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS" accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI
| images, now it's every day, and still not everyone is in on the
| joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator's
| intent).
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or
| the Internet, please.
|
| Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't
| appreciate it either.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| haha, very funny!
| glenstein wrote:
| I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little
| prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social
| reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received
| cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge
| on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether
| you're physically present before a particular impression
| crystallizes in people's minds.
|
| It's just such a great example of how people could react either
| with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has
| been violated and can think that either reaction was the most
| self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it
| were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only
| really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's
| position.
|
| I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in
| Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in
| interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things
| regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to
| certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you
| can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to
| be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced
| it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions
| playing out in real time.
| cnity wrote:
| Both the OP and your summary are very astutely written. Thank
| you.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Great comment! That's it.
| dullcrisp wrote:
| Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were
| considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn't
| their preferred method of communicating that.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yea, that's what I thought, too. The prankster inadvertently
| floated a very unpopular plan that leadership had and proved
| it was unpopular before they could implement it. That was
| probably the root of what actually got admin pissed. Nobody
| gets disciplined for a harmless joke--you get in trouble when
| you make the boss's boss's boss look bad.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Oh yeah. That'll get you.
|
| Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users
| off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I
| knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that,
| when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-
| campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc
| to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because
| apparently, computer services had cut off-campus access for
| data-tracking purposes as prelude to an as-yet-unannounced
| shift to pay-per-page printing (i.e., they wanted to see how
| much inconvenience the student body would tolerate), and
| having the inconvenience routed around in software fucked up
| their numbers.
|
| ... now that I tell this story, it occurs to me that nobody
| ever called computer services on the whole "Running an
| unsanctioned social experiment on the faculty and student
| body" part of all this...
|
| (p.s: I think, perhaps, computer services learned the wrong
| lesson here, because when they rolled out the program at a
| uni with a massive computer science program, the techniques
| the students invented to route around paying for print jobs
| were _legendary._ Things like "wrap the PostScript job in a
| detector that tells the daemon tracking pagecount 'I am
| printing one blank page' and tells the daemon that feeds the
| job to the printer 'here are the actual pages'". Perhaps
| their takeaway _should_ have been "If you add friction and
| cost to the process, bored students will volunteer time to
| reduce the friction and cost").
| don-code wrote:
| We had a similar setup at my university - printing to a lab
| printer was disallowed from a machine that wasn't
| physically in the lab. The printers had routeable IPs, so
| I'm guessing they did some kind of whitelisting at the
| printer itself.
|
| The problem was, we were a Sun campus, and my tablet PC ran
| Linux. So I could SSH in, open up StarOffice, and hit Print
| on a document - all from the tablet PC in the crook of my
| elbow - then walk into the lab and pick the documents up
| out of the tray.
|
| I never got in "trouble" for this, per se, but I did have a
| lab technician once look at me as if to say, "that's not
| allowed..."
| disqard wrote:
| What a beautiful bit of history! I had no idea.
|
| You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!
| refulgentis wrote:
| Is this overstated?
|
| i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and
| _sending a dry email_ to _everyone_ re: a _new printing
| policy_.
|
| Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious
| laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from
| others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what
| context would this be _uproariously_ funny?
|
| I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in
| having it _before_ , not after.
|
| I almost feel like I missed something huge in the email that
| signals it's a joke, or adds another layer of humor, but after
| multiple readings, it looks identical to a janitor emailing
| everyone on campus to tell them keys will be required for
| bathrooms from now on. Although, that is significantly more
| implausible than the IT worker emailing everyone on campus to
| tell them there are charges for printing.
| subroutine wrote:
| I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience _the
| fun part_ of the prank - the number of people who actually
| saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to
| zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people
| the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was
| going to start charging for printing, which was true.
| afro88 wrote:
| For 99.9% of people, the funny of the prank would only hit
| later. Ie, upon finding out it was a prank, and hearing
| about the "insert 5 cents" part that they probably didn't
| see with their own eyes. Plus the retraction, and 2nd
| retraction. And reactions of other staff who fell for it
| (and caused chaos) before 8:30.
|
| And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to
| others.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Someone relating that sequences of events to me as funny,
| especially if they said it was only funny _after_ the
| pileup, would significantly adjust my prior as to dark
| triad characteristics in their psychology.
|
| "prank" = IT guy sent campus wide email saying some
| printers will now charge $0.05/page
|
| "that they probably didn't see with their own eyes" =
| they did not check _physically very every printer on
| campus_ to verify _none_ of the printers had the
| characteristic, the only way to falsify what the IT guy
| said, that _some_ printers had a characteristic.
|
| "Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction." = 3x the time
| wasted for _everyone on campus_
|
| "And reactions of other staff who fell for it" = people
| who believed the dry email from IT
|
| "(and caused chaos)" = chaos isn't funny
|
| "And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to
| others." = It sounds like we're assuming the relayer
| would get value from relating this, but the extra value
| is to the listener, it'd only harm the relayer.
|
| As a listener, now I know that I have to verify 100% of
| everything the relayer tells me. They think a good prank
| is when you leverage your professional role to lie and
| cause chaos, which is justified because those poor sheep
| were complaining about something they didn't even verify
| with their own eyes. i.e. thousands of people should have
| gone through an absurdly onerous verification rather than
| trust communications you make in your professional role.
| subroutine wrote:
| Me checking my inbox at 9:30am... 7:28
| New Campus Policy printing now costs 5-cents per page
| 8:34 Re: New Campus Policy - April Fools! Printing is
| free. 9:14 Re: Re: New Campus Policy -
| Printing is still free, for now.
|
| delete, delete, mark spam
| refulgentis wrote:
| Absolutely.* Does that shed any light, here? They're not
| claiming it is a triviality, instead, quite specifically,
| they are claiming the funny part is chaos and the number
| of people who reacted differently.
|
| * modulo marking the IT department as spam
| travisjungroth wrote:
| As someone who makes dry sarcastic jokes pretty often, I've
| learned you have to really put some ridiculous stuff in there
| to signal it's a joke. This also scales with audience size
| and delivery method.
|
| With so many people, you'd actually have to make the price
| ridiculous or something like that. Because some people, once
| they read that the printing is five cents, are going to be
| upset enough to not read the rest of the email.
|
| I wouldn't actually do this prank, but if I like _had to_ ,
| it would be more like the "charge" was to sing a song and the
| email would actually say April Fools in it. Maybe less funny,
| but a lot more easily seen as a joke. Makes handling the
| calls to the admins much easier, too.
| norir wrote:
| The trickster is indeed an ancient archetype that can bring
| both wisdom and chaos. Historically, however, my understanding
| is that prior to Plato, essentially all knowledge, including
| philosophy, was understood to be received from divine sources.
| It was through the Socratic dialogues that the idea of
| knowledge as being something gained through human reason gained
| a foothold.
|
| One could easily argue then that Plato was essentially a
| prankster and what we know as western civilization is a
| consequence of his trickery.
| anshumankmr wrote:
| A year ago on March 31st, was my ex's birthday - she told me she
| loved me. Today, I just don't know if that was the most elaborate
| prank I ever fell for.
|
| Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.
| xandrius wrote:
| April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?
| moduspol wrote:
| She called him from New Zealand.
| paxys wrote:
| Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about
| the audience.
| permo-w wrote:
| probably more like 20/80
| antisthenes wrote:
| And 90% about the delivery ;)
| cab11150904 wrote:
| I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to
| pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space
| however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.
| darkwater wrote:
| <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
| swader999 wrote:
| As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and
| team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some
| of these pranks.
| keybored wrote:
| <This comment requires a B-level leadership position>
| freehorse wrote:
| Then you should be happy to learn that Trump just passed an
| executive order making workplace pranks a felony, so hopefully
| the world will be finally free of this plague on efficiency and
| profits.
| sillyboi wrote:
| As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in
| this case, with great printer access comes great pranking
| potential!
| ToddWBurgess wrote:
| I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy
| that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).
|
| Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!
| linsomniac wrote:
| I tell you, I was an HP-UX sysadmin into the late '90s and the
| regional telco used a _LOT_ of HP-UX.
|
| Around '95 I spent a solid year setting up a pair of T520s
| worth about a million bucks, to be a HA cluster responsible for
| part of the billing process, which was being ported to Unix
| from the IBM mainframe by a team of 20 (mostly inept, a few
| smart cookies) programmers. Only to be cancelled at literally
| the last possible moment to keep on the mainframe. I highly
| suspect that it was all a ploy to get better mainframe upgrade
| terms.
|
| Not on April 1st, but at one point management spent the last of
| their budget for the year on upgrading this pair of T520s from
| 2GB to 4GB of RAM. _BUT_ they didn 't buy extra drives to grow
| swap, and we were already WAY into the deployment so we
| couldn't just go repartitioning. HP-UX required all memory to
| be backed by swap to be able to use it, so the extra 2GB of RAM
| went entirely unused.
| hylaride wrote:
| My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's
| work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research
| department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel).
| She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me
| in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so
| I have a soft spot for it.
|
| I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early
| 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do
| sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.
| donatj wrote:
| I think the joke would have been funnier without the accompanying
| email. The fear I guess is people trying to jam change into the
| printers.
| MBCook wrote:
| Throughout the whole story that's what I expected to happen.
| The administration getting mad because people were trying to
| stick coins in the printers and breaking them costing a lot of
| money to fix.
| blantonl wrote:
| Informix is the april fools joke.
|
| Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to
| be alive that was.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts.
|
| For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to
| write blog posts that developers read":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872
|
| Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs
| 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke"
| before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end,
| too.
|
| ---
|
| BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people
| who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a
| life.
| darkwater wrote:
| The whole post is very well written and worth reading. But
| maybe it's just me always liking a nice BOFH story.
| jfengel wrote:
| The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke.
| As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know
| it's a "silly April Fool's email".
|
| Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the
| trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they
| figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a
| bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the
| date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look
| serious.
|
| Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem
| they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that
| problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their
| day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not
| going to "take a joke" well.
|
| The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be.
| Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill
| -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.
| CivBase wrote:
| > By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up
| to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me
| I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in
| big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said
| that campus administration was not considering charging per-page
| fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and
| send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.
|
| I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher
| ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual
| pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about
| having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already
| planning.
| autarch wrote:
| At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech
| support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email
| (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had
| programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user
| requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole
| programming language, workflows, etc.).
|
| Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you
| could wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past,
| when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes).
| This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder
| about this from an admin person in the department.
|
| One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email
| announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this
| admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify
| that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because
| I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the
| sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin
| person, not me.
|
| I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other
| tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally
| (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops.
|
| Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I
| immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't
| pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology
| email.
|
| Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the
| funniest thing they'd ever seen happen.
|
| Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I
| think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is
| that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my
| hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| > We used Lotus Notes for email
|
| My condolences.
| romanhn wrote:
| To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it
| remains the worst software product I have had to work with.
| It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of
| it.
| Suppafly wrote:
| There are tons of things I miss about Notes email almost
| daily when I use Outlook. I supported Notes though, so I
| actually knew how to use search and agents and stuff that
| most of the people that whine about Notes never learned to
| use correctly. It's funny how all the companies that
| ditched Notes end up rewriting all the same applications in
| Sharepoint and then again in ServiceNow. The industry eats
| and regurgitates itself every couple of years without
| actually improving much.
| Hikikomori wrote:
| Switched from notes to Microsofts cloud thing and Lync,
| notes was better. We also had hundreds of not thousands
| of small apps in notes. Supposedly Microsofts solution
| was going to be much cheaper if everyone got off notes,
| but we were given to time, budget, framework or even
| guidance when it came to the apps. Several years later
| they still paid a lot for notes.
| kogens wrote:
| Still in use in many places for some ungodly reason.
|
| At my previous job they had been using Notes since the
| company was founded in the early 90's, meaning they lived
| through it being Lotus Notes, then IBM Notes and now HCL
| Notes.
|
| Everything was deeply entrenched - email, warehouse
| inventory, ERP system, all documentation made in the entire
| company... just everything.
|
| And this is for a scandinavian company manufacturing high
| tech devices for telecom and aviation, among other things.
|
| It was... an interesting nightmare, constantly got in the
| way of any sort of productivity. Definitely contributed to
| me leaving early
| eastbound wrote:
| F5 to close Lotus Notes. On every app including MS Outlook,
| F5 was to refresh / fetch the new email, except in Lotus
| Notes. In Lotus Notes it just means "lose your work". Can't
| believe it didn't start as an April Fools, like Gavin
| Belson's Signature box.
| martinsnow wrote:
| Nah. It was amazing back then.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah it was sort of cool. There were entire software
| products built on top of Notes and its forms and workflow.
|
| I never had to program any of that, so can't speak to that
| side of it, but where I worked we used Notes to quickly
| build a lot of internal forms and workflows, and had some
| internal discussion forums and documentation in it, it all
| worked pretty well as I recall.
|
| The one weird thing was we had to run it on OS/2. The only
| OS/2 machine in the server room.
|
| We didn't use it for email though.
| khedoros1 wrote:
| My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-
| learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail
| about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at
| the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through
| that system too.
|
| Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it
| working pretty well for that purpose back then.
| enlightens wrote:
| I had a client (a national company with multiple locations
| and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in
| 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They
| had to run parallel calendars to work with external event
| invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a
| system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone
| was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.
| cloudwalk9 wrote:
| That sounds both wholesome and horrifying. Like we are well
| into the digital age but sometimes people are just
| stubbornly analog.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| So... Did everyone wear pants on the designated pants-less
| Friday?
| autarch wrote:
| Sadly, yes.
| kypro wrote:
| If you did this on April 1st it would have been hilarious.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| > but one reason is that it was more challenging
|
| I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people
| do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom
| autarch wrote:
| Absolutely. I had the same problem through most of school
| until college.
| empath75 wrote:
| I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to
| being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the
| message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it
| and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about
| it at worst.
|
| The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major
| impediment to people, at least mentally.
| locallost wrote:
| The funniest part
|
| "...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got
| in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my
| retraction said that campus administration was not considering
| charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"
| rcarmo wrote:
| I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...
|
| (there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album -
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... -
| I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)
| genewitch wrote:
| I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| the implication
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time!
| Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have
| been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like
| two decades. Gah!)
| jamesrat wrote:
| In high-school I replaced all the printers ready message to
| "Insert Coin". I didn't not check the parameters of the script
| and because of their network configuration, deployed to the whole
| district. Surprisingly this wasn't the reason the banned me from
| the network.
| lief79 wrote:
| Ok, what was the reason?
| beAbU wrote:
| Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank.
|
| I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my
| first job.
|
| I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy"
| label can stay sane in the office.
| dan_can_code wrote:
| This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat
| scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager.
|
| The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend,
| convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals
| of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them
| go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds)
| was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest
| in computers in the following years.
|
| This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I
| am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!
| bitwize wrote:
| > be me
|
| > start up BASIC
|
| > PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececec"
|
| > thunderous footsteps as my dad RUNS to pick up the phone that
| isn't ringing
| ge96 wrote:
| Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains
| and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was
| an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London.
|
| The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro
| computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made
| by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they
| were full of ports that could be attached to experiments for
| data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the
| time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those
| ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers
| together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a
| primitive (by today's standards) networking ability.
|
| So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the
| letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured
| out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to
| YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the
| supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a
| copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and
| history was about to be made...
|
| Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked
| virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly
| came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something
| nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of
| government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we
| took it :)
|
| I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything
| destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to
| the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one
| of the vectors).
|
| [technical aside]
|
| The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms
| ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so
| on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location
| provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the
| event/interrupt being the index into that table).
|
| Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a
| device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy
| disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was
| a hackers dream of a computer, really.
|
| [/aside]
|
| What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press
| mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the
| interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made
| it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made
| the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) -
| this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to
| disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was
| still there...
|
| The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the
| current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you
| couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account,
| it would be activated on that machine.
|
| Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus
| on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in
| the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that
| wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to
| your account.
|
| We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work,
| and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person
| logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a
| problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that
| second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first
| machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was
| on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on
| and then logging in re-infected the machine...
|
| It spread like wildfire.
|
| We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key
| combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves
| very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after
| release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts
| unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a
| sore thumb.
|
| A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called.
| "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the
| network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network
| server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They
| said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do
| it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went
| back, and life went on.
|
| About a week later, the virus again raced through the network,
| infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-
| released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened -
| someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then
| brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the
| machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn
| infectious for its own good.
|
| If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this
| time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find
| who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in
| close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't
| "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did
| with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We
| came up with a plan...
|
| We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a
| time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and
| (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old
| virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new
| virus, waited, and prayed.
|
| Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus
| for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of
| that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been
| taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled.
|
| And _breathe_
|
| I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.
| myself248 wrote:
| In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest
| account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for
| some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a
| little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's
| display.
|
| The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which
| was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing
| started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as
| some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would
| not do.
|
| One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during
| school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN
| informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we
| should save our files and log out immediately.
|
| Hmmmm.
|
| A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology
| program realized that having everyone log off would free up some
| bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and
| used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF
| BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within
| about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do
| (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET
| SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".
|
| A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he
| repeated the drill. It still worked.
|
| Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the
| district administrator, who eventually called an electrical
| contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so
| flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a
| _very_ red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off",
| and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a
| lot fewer privileges.
| pests wrote:
| I had discovered the windows net send command as a highschooler
| too. We mainly just messaged jokes back and forth. One student
| later decided to try the wildcard to send to everyone, just a
| simple "Hi". It went out over the entire district hitting
| multiple schools. I forget why, but no one knew who did it at
| first. But we had some software installed that let the
| admin/teacher remotely blank screens or lock the computer, etc.
| I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he
| complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much
| trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net
| send.
| xeromal wrote:
| I just wrote a comment on this thread and I almost thought
| you were talking about me for a second. lol
| BrainBacon wrote:
| I did the same thing by accident, except mine was "test", I
| heard murmors around about some strange message on computers
| in multiple schools in our district, so I fessed up
| immediately. Our network administrator was just mildly amused
| about the whole affair and no punishments were carried out.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Speaking of "feeling bad for teaching someone"... I must have
| been in 5th grade and this other kid was talking about
| shorting out a power outlet. I said "What I'd do is unfold a
| couple of paperclips, stick them into a rubber eraser, then
| plug that into the outlet and twist it to get the paperclips
| to touch."
|
| A few days later the principal calls me in. "Did you tell him
| to do this?" "I didn't tell him to, we were just talking
| about how to do it." "... well, he's done it before. Don't do
| anything like this again. Dismissed." I still can't believe
| that I got out of it; petty tyrants love to flex their power.
| wingspar wrote:
| :)
|
| I'm legit trying to figure out who your calling the petty
| tyrant flexing their power: - The principal which let off
| with a warning - The other kid, popping circuit breakers -
| Or you, 'corrupting' other young minds :)
| xeromal wrote:
| I have a very similar story. In high school, our library was
| using a windows environment and through some luck, I discovered
| NET SEND or something like that. I figured out my friend's
| computer names and I started sending them messages. We
| eventually communicated this way even under the strict
| librarian and I eventually hatched a plan to annoy everyone. I
| put together a crappy batch file that iterated through every
| computers name and just mass sent messages but screwed up the
| iterator and it went forever. I think we had to restart all the
| computers but no one figured out it was me except my friends.
|
| Miss those days and also miss playing soldat on those crappy
| PCs.
| shoozza wrote:
| Though no further work is being done on the original and the
| FLOSS forks aren't ready yet (soldank++ and opensoldat) the
| game is still playable on modern PCs and even free on steam
| ;) (Disclaimer: former maintainer)
| xeromal wrote:
| I had no idea it was in steam but we used to play that game
| all the time. We had probably 10 or 15 guys playing in the
| library lol.
|
| Thanks for making such a fun game!
|
| I'll check it out
| gymbeaux wrote:
| In high school a friend figured out you could map any network
| drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since
| everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last
| name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to
| anyone's network drive (essentially "home folder"). He used it
| to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty)
| folders named "porn", "porn 2", et al.
|
| Anyway when he was caught (a fellow classmate ratted him out)
| he got 10 days out of school suspension. The VP threatened to
| call the police... for what offense I'm not really sure. There
| seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of cybercrime and
| cybercrime laws. I mean was it really unauthorized access (they
| called it "hacking" of course) if his user account literally
| had permission to map network drives?
|
| They removed the ability for student accounts to map network
| drives, but the district IT guy was not fired. I really don't
| get that. Maybe the union saved him... but dog, everyone knows
| you can map network drives by right clicking on the desktop. I
| never thought to try it, but that doesn't mean the district's
| IT SME gets a pass.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it
| "hacking" of course) if his user account literally had
| permission to map network drives?
|
| My expectation is that laws probably specify that gaining
| access that you know you're not supposed to be able to get is
| probably illegal, but I get your point.
|
| Reminds me, however, of the pen-testers that got hired to
| infiltrate a court system and got harassed by a prosecutor
| despite having explicit approval to conduct an audit.
|
| https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/
|
| Our judicial system is ludicrous.
| thwarted wrote:
| If someone didn't question, or otherwise call out, the
| pentesters activity, that would have been a blemish against
| the security training of the org being pentested. This is
| why pentesters need a way to immediately escalate to the
| hiring party, to satisfy legit concerns over access and
| ensure those claiming to be pentesters legitimately are.
| pathartl wrote:
| I did something similar in 7th grade, with the extra
| naughtiness of charging my peers 50 cents or so to drop the
| basic Windows games like pinball and Ski Free into their home
| drive. I created a couple of joke files in my favorite
| teachers' directories and then notified the IT admin before
| someone more nefarious saw what I was doing.
|
| That admin became my mentor and is now a lifelong friend.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Someone at my high school (late 90s/early 2000s) was
| apparently distributing something on CDRs.
|
| I got called into the _police station_ , where a cop asked
| me, verbatim: "Son, did you copywrite them there CDs?"
| chungy wrote:
| > I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it
| "hacking" of course) if his user account literally had
| permission to map network drives?
|
| It may not pass as hacking, but it certainly was
| unauthorized. Network policy in software should reflect
| reality, but the source of authority comes from humans. Your
| friend literally was not authorized to access teachers'
| files, regardless of poor software configuration permitting
| the capability.
| CodeMage wrote:
| Oh, wow, Novel Netware. That takes me back to high school.
|
| Our computer lab had Novel Netware, I forget which version.
| Every once in a while, our regular programming classes (Pascal
| in first two years, C and Assembly Language in third year,
| Prolog and Theory of Relational Databases in fourth year) would
| be held in the lab, instead of the classroom, and we would get
| to put what we learned to use and do some actual programming.
|
| Now, some of us had computers at home and had been using them
| since before the high school, so we tended to finish our work
| really fast and then get bored. And just like a lone sharpie
| cap is the most terrifying thing a parent can stumble upon, so
| a bored high school kid is the worst thing for your computer
| security.
|
| Each student had their own account, but teachers shared a
| limited number of teacher accounts, with special privileges,
| such as monitoring other students' screens, having full write
| access to every student's files, etc.
|
| For some reason, I don't remember why, teachers would
| occasionally go to a student's workstation and log in as a
| teacher there, to fix the problem. I honestly can't remember
| why, but it was a common enough problem that it wouldn't raise
| any brows even if one of us "advanced" kids did it.
|
| So, of course, I eventually came up with the idea of writing a
| really small and simple program that would look exactly like
| the Netware login prompt, with one small difference: when you
| entered the password, it would write it to a file on the
| filesystem spit out whatever the "incorrect password, try
| again" reply was, and then execv the actual login program.
|
| The ruse worked perfectly: I called the teacher, they tried to
| log in, thought they mistyped the password, tried again,
| succeeded, did whatever it was they were supposed to do, and
| logged out. Now I had the teacher account password, and so did
| my best friends in mischief.
|
| We had some innocent fun by pulling a couple of very minor
| pranks on our fellow students that flew under the radar, so
| none of the teachers realized that the security was
| compromised.
|
| But then the annual programming competitions came, and those
| went all the way from school level, to municipality, to city,
| to republic, to federal. I was one of the people who qualified
| to the city-level competition, and what do you know, that year
| it was hosted in our school's lab.
|
| I finished all the problems with plenty of time to spare, which
| is how I came up with the "brilliant" idea of helping some of
| my peers by sharing my solutions with them using the teacher
| account. Now, one thing they neglected to teach us was the
| importance of testing, but I'll be honest, even if they did
| that, I was a typical teenage "gifted kid", which meant I was
| overconfident and lazy. As a result, everyone who I shared my
| solutions with happened to have the exact same bugs in them.
|
| A few days later, they called me to the teachers' room in the
| computer lab, and said that they knew I cheated, that I was
| already disqualified, and that I should save myself some
| trouble and explain what I did. So naturally, I came clean and
| I thought that was the end of it.
|
| Indeed, it _was_ the end of it for me. Nothing else happened,
| at least nothing of consequence for me. Years later, I found
| out that I almost got expelled. They held a teacher assembly or
| conference or whatever it 's called when you get all of them
| together to make a decision, and the decision was whether to
| kick me out of the school. Fortunately, they decided to let me
| off with a warning and the official reprimand from the
| headmaster.
|
| My mom didn't think that was funny at all.
| simmons wrote:
| > _In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the
| Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges.
| But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which
| popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination
| machine 's display._ > ...Nobody noticed that these messages
| came from GUEST
|
| You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you
| describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft
| networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between
| the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)
|
| I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware
| network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and
| discovered that the username included in the message is not
| authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which)
| software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable
| formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your
| own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you
| could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very
| easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)
|
| This should not be construed as a confession of any network
| shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high
| school. ;) :D :)
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| Once swapped the system disc of a netware server live. Can't
| remember why exactly, I think it stared to count bad sectors as
| we watched and we needed to keep it alive copying the data to
| the new, to-be system disk. Then we made sure, nobody was
| logged in, it was about midnight, hit Alt-LeftShift-RightShift-
| Esc and while Netware paused in the kernel debugger, swapped
| the disks. Continued the debugger and - it worked :)
| _bin_ wrote:
| We used to pull similar shenanigans in middle school. Teacher
| computers were finally on wifi, So I'd pull out my little
| android tablet and USB Wi-Fi card. Run an evil AP, deauth,
| downgrade to HTTP, and put whatever I wanted on the web page.
| Good times.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| On Windows these messages are created using SMB IPC and you'd
| think this would mean the "sender" (user and host) are
| authenticated, but nope, the sender name is just a string field
| that can be anything. You'd also think the host would be based
| on something like the client IP and a reverse DNS lookup, what
| with the whole Active Directory thing, but nope, it's also just
| a string field that can be anything. And with SMB IPC you'd
| think only some privileged component can invoke it, but nope,
| any user can send those message popup commands to any machine
| pretending to be anyone on any other machine. I did not make
| wise use of this knowledge back then.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| In my high school, we put SETI at home on the image used to
| ghost all the PCs, and set it to run at night. Our high school
| had a few hundred PCs so we were climbing the leaderboard for a
| while until the District IT department found out and did not
| approve of using that much bandwidth...
| tempestn wrote:
| Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real
| last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the
| company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to
| be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April.
|
| The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.
| ffitch wrote:
| somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of
| one of the sentences: "did not not only did not". it does make
| sense in the sentence btw.
| thruway516 wrote:
| This was the most hilarious part to me: That went
| wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration
| was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they
| actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction
| that didn't call attention to that fact
| instagib wrote:
| Probably because they were considering more per page and 5
| cents was too low.
| whycome wrote:
| Right? It actually kinda makes it most believable!
| pedrocr wrote:
| I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a
| very short print file to be able to change the status message of
| any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just
| queued the file into the global print queue and was able to
| change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To
| not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever
| put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay
| area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it,
| or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to,
| but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.
| zusammen wrote:
| The funniest part was that he also got in trouble for, in his
| retraction, saying the admins weren't considering per page fees
| when in fact they were.
|
| Some people get fired for making their bosses look bad. He
| screwed up by making them look good.
| automationwiz wrote:
| Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early
| 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild
| vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of
| the yearbooks and their cliquey group.
|
| We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then
| used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with
| this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco
| (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year
| book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the
| QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50%
| off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say
| sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school
| had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.
| kmoser wrote:
| So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull
| them.
|
| Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It
| accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with
| a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.
|
| Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers
| cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school
| peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer
| magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix
| printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I
| owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the
| authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer
| worked.
|
| Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole
| book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank
| and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the
| check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and
| told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could
| come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took
| out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped
| it up in his face. He was stunned.
|
| Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated
| TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen,
| I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few
| minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.
| jsphweid wrote:
| I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job
| I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing
| documents.
|
| I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other
| employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a
| script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that
| was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have
| been deleted.
|
| I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw
| the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out
| when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone
| immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the
| corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.
| Civitello wrote:
| The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should
| have been sufficient.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I guess I'll contribute my best prank.
|
| In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that
| had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They
| got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it
| together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept
| burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager,
| Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy
| about).
|
| I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a
| bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed
| an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some
| cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the
| popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT
| Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing.
|
| I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook
| server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-
| machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE
| REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of
| the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags
| remaining in the cabinet.
|
| Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully
| get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script
| and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a
| chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off
| of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a
| visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was
| _his_ job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with
| a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my
| direction.
|
| They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-
| pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager
| tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a
| funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a
| little.
|
| After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking
| Tim in the future.
| zootski wrote:
| "....could have got me fired"
| zootski wrote:
| "....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".
| geocrasher wrote:
| Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't
| taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at
| lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess
| what these computers had installed?
|
| Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that
| let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will,
| and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".
|
| I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec
| that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original
| autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.
|
| We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was
| informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was
| it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| >That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus
| administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in
| fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new
| retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.
|
| oof
| lopatin wrote:
| I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to
| sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in
| technical documentations.
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