How to mess with your roommate (2018)(bernsteinbear.com)
bernsteinbear.com
How to mess with your roommate (2018)
https://bernsteinbear.com/blog/how-to-mess-with-your-roommate/
27 comments
> I would occasionally take my keyboard and move the mouse around which would confuse him.
SWMBO and I had the same mouse a while back. One day she grabbed my mouse and was complaining "my mouse isn't working" while wiggling it back and forth. On my screen my mouse was zooming wildly all over the screen.
She now uses a pink vertical mouse.
SWMBO and I had the same mouse a while back. One day she grabbed my mouse and was complaining "my mouse isn't working" while wiggling it back and forth. On my screen my mouse was zooming wildly all over the screen.
She now uses a pink vertical mouse.
During university I worked in campus IT, and we had a robust tradition of technical pranks. One day my mouse movement stopped working; clicks were fine but no cursor. I immediately started in tearing apart the OS of my workstation, looking for whatever they'd done to mess with it. Didn't find anything so started recompiling the kernel, thinking they'd really outdone themselves with a high-quality hack. It was only then that I noticed the sticky note over the sensor on the bottom of the mouse.
Similar one I did to a colleague just this summer. Went into the menu of their monitor and turned green all the way up, red and blue all the way down. They spent a day trying to debug their Ubuntu, swapping out cables etc. and were about to go order a new monitor when I had to confess.
> SWMBO
This stands for “She Who Must Be Obeyed” for anyone as confused as I was.
This stands for “She Who Must Be Obeyed” for anyone as confused as I was.
The Swedish term for people in a committed relationship that live together without being married is “sambo” (lit. “live together”), so my brain just connected it to that before second-guessing the W and capitalization.
At a startup I worked at, one of my cofounders was an incredibly skilled designer, and he took a lot of pride in the design of our homepage. He spent a lot of time in particular finding the right fonts, and would often complain when he saw other company homepages with inappropriate font choices.
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.
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.
We did something similar and the boss was quite upset. He said it disturbed sales demos and cost time and money. Which was surprising since he was otherwise a very chill boss who enjoyed all manner of fun and skunk works at the office.
Very crafty. However my favorite computer prank style is almost immediately clear you're being pranked but making it very hard to find how the prank works. For example, coworker in the previous place I worked at, noticed his mouse moves on its own. Classic prank, right? He found the wireless USB dongle and removed it.
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.
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.
Back in college, the wireless network didn't seem to have any protections against ARP poisoning, so I went through a short phase of messing with my roommate by replacing all the images loaded by his browser with cats.
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).
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).
Tried this screenshot trick once on a Windows server that was shared. So stupid. We lost a full day restoring it.
Now I leave the trickery to games at company socials where nothing valuable is at risk, except my ego.
Now I leave the trickery to games at company socials where nothing valuable is at risk, except my ego.
Early in my learning how to write shell scripts, I decided to prank a coworker. I set a cron job to execute a script on his Mac to display an image via QuickLook. I randomized the time to help drive him nuts. He found it and deleted it immediately after the first execution because it wasn't nearly crafty enough.
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 $roller -eq 0) then echo roller is 0. we will torture.
As an aside, I'm reminded of this classic prank:
https://pete.ex-parrot.com/upside-down-ternet.html
Were I to do this today, I would use temporary dirs and such to obfuscate the location of the script, but whatever. I'm leaving in the raw info with my own debugging lines because that's where I was at the time (2007). Script follows:
#!/bin/bash
#roll to determine if the script continues. 0 is true, 1 is false
RANGE=2 number=$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
So back when I was fresh outta college, and Windows 3.11 was king, I decided to mess with the salesguy the engineering team worked with.
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:
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.
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.
You're a dick and jokes like that are how you get someone fired/quit.
I was a kid fresh out of college at the time .. I've matured a lot since then.
Back when windows 98 was a thing (targeting the same annoying roommate):
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.
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.
A former coworker shared the worst networking issue he ever encountered. He came in one day and his network wasn't working. He tried all the standard things, rebooting, trying different protocols, etc but couldn't figure it out. Pulled the cable out of the back of his computer and plugged it back in. Running around in circles for half a day. Finally he was going to replace the networking cable and found a tiny piece of scotch tape covering just a couple of the contacts.
While not necessarily "messing with my roommate": I lived with a very foul-mouthed roommate during my undergrad. The .NET Framework 3.5 (I think?) released during this time, and it had an API for speech recognition.
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 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.
Those are rookie numbers. My fucking drill sergeant would have put him to fucking shame in two fucking minutes.
Edit: Arthur C. Clarke had a short story about a word counter that a scientist used with his talkative wife, I can't find the reference just now.
Edit: Arthur C. Clarke had a short story about a word counter that a scientist used with his talkative wife, I can't find the reference just now.
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In the early 2000s one of my friends bought TV B Gone which was basically a universal tv remote with an off button. We had a lot of fun confusing the hell out of family and friends who were trying to peacefully enjoy their show. We also had fun at bars and restaurants when sport games were on.
> I deployed it after squashing some annoying PHP and NGINX configuration nonsense
IIRC it was something about CGI not being supported, or maybe FastCGI not being supported, so I had to learn about the New Thing (I hadn't setup PHP in >5 years at that point). I think there was a missing php-nginx-fastcgi Ubuntu package that we had to install, maybe. I don't remember the specifics. I don't even know that I remembered the specifics when I wrote this :)
Great, thanks! Yes, those "little problems" are, in my experience, the most important to document.
Great writeup, thank you.
Great writeup, thank you.
iMacs ca. 2007 came with a remote control device that would put the iMac into entertainment console mode. Then, at some point, Apple stopped shipping the remote with the iMac, but left the feature in the iMac. What’s more, the remote wasn’t paired to an individual Mac, so it would trigger any iMac within range.
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.
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.
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Why is this flagged?
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.