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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

We used to play pranks on each other such as logging into the NeWS server on a colleagues machine and manually setting a small rotation in the transformation matrix for a terminal window that someone was typing in....

NeWS had an interactive PostScript shell and almost no security so this kind of mucking about was trivial...

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For april fools' day, on my first job as a troublesome ~16-year-old administering our university lab's firewall (academia was a different land when it comes to trust), I set up some automatic network-wide substring replacement filters for incoming HTTP responses to replace `<body` with something like `<body style="transform: rotate(0.1deg);"`. This was in the time before HTTPS was ubiquitous, so it worked on most websites.

Unfortunately, it broke some pages that lab users needed for school. I later learned one colleague wasn't able to complete a homework assignment because of my prank.

The joy of running Upside-Down-Ternet as transparent proxy on April Fool's day.

I last did this in about 2011-2012 and was shocked and/or pleased to discover many images on my friend's Xbox 360 dashboard turning upside down!!

Ah, good times.... we used to do similar things across the HP Apollo workstations at the place where a friend of mine worked (and I unofficially "borrowed" computing facilities for a project of my own -- though I did also contribute a substantial speed optimization to their main product, so nobody seemed to mind).

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