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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

Working at a big bank in the early 90's we all had Sparks on our desks. If you walked away without your screen locked, you might come back to find 'ls' aliased to a fork bomb or 'rm -rf *' or something else fun. The guy who sat next to me was truly a master. He would start with aliasing cat, more, ls, cd and then alias itself.

The other fun trick was finding someone who had left xhost+ open and while a boss was at their desk, popping open NSFW pictures on their screen in an xv window.

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I worked in IT at a hospital where leaving workstations unlocked is a big no-no. Any time my coworkers did so it was standard procedure to do the following:

1) Change all their desktop icons to target shutdown.exe (I had a script on the shared drive for this).

2) Screenshot the desktop, rotate it 180 in paint then set it to the desktop background.

3) Select all the icons on their destop and hide them.

4) Close all the open applications.

5) Hide the task bar.

6) Hit CTRL+ALT+Up Arrow to enter “projector mode” and get the inverted desktop screenshot back to “normal” but completely screwing up mouse movement.

7) Turn the monitor off.

8) Unplug the keyboard and mouse.

Always fun to watch them struggle through the process in reverse just to end up shutting down when trying to open outlook.

I had an internship at a mostly Apple place at one point. Using the mac `say` command with cron or a timeout in the background was a lot of fun.

One of the Linux guys had a script that detected changes to his wallpaper, set it back to the previous one and insulted the person who attempted to change it.

I had a great cron prank that I pulled on the only other linux user at my high school 2 years ago. It made a folder, took a screenshot of his background, moved all of his desktop into said folder, then changed the background to the screenshot. In retrospect, It was probably overkill, but at least he learned to use ctrl+alt+l when sharing a lunch period with another linux enthusiast.

I stopped a few people from doing this much mischief on a couple occasions and substituted minor mischief instead.

A friend and I arrived at changing their .plan or .project to say "I really need to learn to log out when I leave the computer lab." then log them out and amuse ourselves with how long it would take them or their friends to notice.

What I should have done was note the account name and check in from time to time to see how long it took, but I apparently wasn't that forward-looking.

Adding "echo sleep 1 >> ~/.profile" to .profile should be adequate

Oops. I said .profile but meant .project

However I do believe I knew another person who put a sleep and a giant banner in .profile to drive the point home.

  echo "ponysay remember to log out" >> .profile

or maybe:

  echo "ponythink i should always log out" >> .profile

(or the lesser cowsay)

The early Suns had no security on /dev/framebuffer so one could remote into someone else's machine, and run a process that would continuously dump their screen to yours. The LAN was fast enough to get a near-realtime display that would update every few seconds. Obviously one could do the opposite and send NSFW content to the remote screen as well. No need for any XWindows permissions because the hardware layer access was wide open.

They had a similar security issue with /dev/audio where one could "bug" a remote machine and play the audio locally.

Or just cat core dumps to /dev/audio. Actually, don't do that. Most of the time you'd get a panic. :/

We did both of those. We took screen caps of our managers -- the issue with that was that there was a noticeable pause when you were snapping and we were afraid of getting caught.

In terms of audio there was a desk analyst on the MBS trading desk who wrote a script that would play a clip of someone in a thick accent screaming 'You are a stupid man!' on the targeted machine. The traders and analysts did it to each other for a while. When that got boring and they modified the script to play it on all the machines on the MBS trdaing desk, repeatedly. When the head of mortgage research would stop by to speak to one of the traders, someone would quite subtly run the script and every ones machine would start barking 'You are a stupid man!'

Weirdly it never occurred to us to use the microphone.

For Christ's sake. This comment made me laugh so hard because you just gave me some ideas for a colleague that keeps leaving his screen unlocked. :)

please don't alias ls to rm -rf ....

it is not funny.

Rule of thumb: funny things don't cause (permanent) damage. Therefore aliasing something to `rm -rf` is definitely _not_ funny.

Well, your coworker surely would have proper backups of all the important stuff, wouldn't he?

Snark aside, I agree. Accumulating 'sleep 1' in their login-scripts is more fun anyway.

Naa that's too nasty. However, a sleep or something that gets printed just for fun is less harmful and somewhat fun :)

I got downvoted. I think my colleague also reads HN. :p

> The other fun trick was finding someone who had left xhost+ open and while a boss was at their desk, popping open NSFW pictures on their screen in an xv window.

Did this ever end up actually getting someone in trouble? I've worked at a few places where it certainly would.

No. There was some judgement involved. (Also back in those days, there were honestly a lot fewer NSFW images floating around -- this is pre Netscape days.) The goal was to freak people out, not get them (or you) fired.

> back in those days, there were honestly a lot fewer NSFW images floating around

How far back would this be? The people I know who lived through the '90s don't seem to agree…

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