Microblog Memes

In a programming class, one of my professors sometimes remolety opened the xeyes program (Linux program that opens a pair of eyes that follow your cursor) on students that were not paying a lot of attention.

It was not a virus, but still great fun: coworker had a fat UNIX workstation, but no idea of the particulars except for the program he was using. I knew my ways around such machines, and I could log in from another machine via serial terminal.

What the coworker knew about the audio capabilities of his machine was the occasional "beep" it made. I found the "auplay" command, and a list of 8-bit audio samples.

So one day I was sitting at the PC next to him, logged in, and command ready to run, and waited for an error message to pop up. Then I pressed return, starting "auplay laughter.au".

That face.

used to be fun at the office to take a screenshot of someone desktop, and make it the desktop background, then put all their icons into one folder.

Three options come to mind.

A virus that adjusts your mouse sensitivity by like 5% every time you unlock your computer. Just enough that existing muscle memory is off, so you either have to adjust to the change or change it back every time.

A virus that installs and/or sets a similar but not quite right keyboard layout, and swaps to it randomly few boots. For example, setting the keyboard to Canadian Multilingual Standard instead of US English, where its only some of the punctuation keys that are changed.

A virus that randomly pops up a terminal window and outputs suspicious-looking text, and closes itself before the user has time to read it.

On somethingawful back in the day if you were on any one page on their forums for more then about 20 minutes, a audio clip would play that said something like "HEY EVERYBODY I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORNO"

"sleep 1 >> etc/rc.local" >> etc/rc.local

Finds anything and everything that can be set to dark mode and sets it back to light mode, but not while you're using it and not immediately.

Every time you log in, maximize a window, lock your PC, etc, your desktop icons randomly arrange themselves by penis. Open a folder, forced to display files as icons and arranged by penis. Try to view all your open windows on your desktop, you guessed it, penis.

Autohotkey script that shuts the system down whenever someone types out certain key words. They of course include words related to looking up the issue like "help", "randomly", "virus" and so on. Not the most sophisticated but one I've actually done before.

Edit: Forgot to mention that ahk needs to be installed and the script must be placed in the autostart folder. Both can be achieved on a coworker's or family member's machine with a ducky usb stick.

In the early 90s there was a virus going around that made the floppy drive's loading noises play the Imperial March.

When I was in high school I made a .bat file that autoran when you put it in a device. All it would do is open the disc drive every 90 seconds however it did convince one teacher that she had a virus which caused giggles all around.

I don’t remember the details but my mom’s first cousin called me once to fix her computer when I was a teenager.

No matter what she typed it came out as, “I AM FUCKING GAY!”

Seems like all I had to do was type “stop”.

albanian virus.

I used to make a batch file that opened a command prompt that opened the batch file again and again and put it on the computers as the internet Explorer logo.

People would get so mad when they opened it as a cascade of cmd would open until the computer crashed

So something like that i think

Uhh, it was "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!" and then it proceeded to spawn hundreds of internet exploder windows pointing at goatse.cx. Thank God I was at home, alone, when it got me.

In my highschool programming class we made a TSR (in Borland pascal) that would change every 15th keypress to an "e". It wasn't self propagating, so it wasn't a virus per day, but it was highly annoying. It survived on memory after the netware logoff, and you could only get rid of it by rebooting.

We also had these everex brand 286 or 386 computers.... They had a little LCD screen that would read out what sector/track was being read on the disk. We found the memory address (80h) where we could write arbitrary text to the LCD. That was fun.

Sounds like a variation of the Ohio virus. I used to have a copy of it for the Amiga Amstrad. It would trigger and make the piezo speaker say “Ohio Ohio Ohhhh!”

Supposedly there was a DOS virus that would spawn a pacman that would eat your letters as you typed them.

A virus that changes Windows' sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.

I have made some silly programs. One that moved the mouse pointer one pixel left, then down, right and up. It was quite annoying. Another that moved the mouse pointer when you reached the edge of the screen, touching the rightmost pixel row would move it to the left side of the screen and vice versa, same thing with top and bottom.