How to mess with your roommate (2018)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

As an aside, I'm reminded of this classic prank:

https://pete.ex-parrot.com/upside-down-ternet.html

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;

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.

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.

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.

  > I deployed it after squashing some annoying PHP and NGINX configuration nonsense

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.