PDA

View Full Version : School/Lab Computer pranks



ultimatebuster
July 20th, 2009, 02:25 AM
I recently made a top 5 list on the best school/lab computer pranks at my blog: http://thekks.net/?p=262

I only have Windows stuff on it, and I wonder, what about Ubuntu? What are some good pranks on Ubuntu?

philcamlin
July 20th, 2009, 02:33 AM
http://www.linuxloop.com/2008/11/29/5-pranks-for-your-linux-using-friend/

some cool stuff in there :popcorn:

Irihapeti
July 20th, 2009, 02:41 AM
Well, not necessarily a school/lab one, but I was wondering the other day, when I had to work on an XP computer, about installing the logon sound to someone's Ubuntu installation, and wondering how they'd react when they turned it on and heard the XP logon tune instead of the Ubuntu one. Would be especially good if they had it set to logon automatically, and had a suitable wallpaper as well.

Guaranteed harmless, except for the effect on the blood pressure...

Edit: and of course you'd have to think about licensing issues. Maybe have a sound that's close enough to be mistaken for the real thing, which wouldn't be hard.

ultimatebuster
July 20th, 2009, 03:58 PM
Is there similar trick on Ubuntu that terminates the desktop and just leave a desktop wallpaper? That would be pretty awesome.

Edit: I see it on the list that philcamlin wrote, but how do you do it?

clonne4crw
July 21st, 2009, 07:27 PM
Been there, done that. I remember how the lab 'pooters ran Windows 2000, and me and my friends would use NET SEND to scare the living f--- out of the teachers and other students. I've done everything and more thats on that list. The best one is when you unplug someone's headphones when they're listening to music.

Kingsley
July 21st, 2009, 07:49 PM
Pop out and rearrange a few commonly-used keys on the keyboard. That's sure to **** off a person or two.

Mornedhel
July 21st, 2009, 07:55 PM
setxkbmap dvorak

pizza-is-good
July 21st, 2009, 07:58 PM
Pop out and rearrange a few commonly-used keys on the keyboard. That's sure to **** off a person or two.

I remeber doing that in a computer lab once. Never went back to that lab, so don't know what happened to it, but it was funny.

markp1989
July 21st, 2009, 08:04 PM
I remeber doing that in a computer lab once. Never went back to that lab, so don't know what happened to it, but it was funny.


yer, thats fun, swaping over N and M are the best :D

another linux prank i have seen done before, is to log in via ssh and run the following in the terminal

im gona need to get my sisters laptop and install sshserver on it so i can do this to her :D



while true; do
DISPLAY=:0.0 xmessage some fake error message &
sleep 1
done


all it will do is fill up the screen with xmessages, you can remove the sleep if you really want for more effect :D

skintythe1andonly
July 21st, 2009, 08:08 PM
=Irihapeti;7643741 Well, not necessarily a school/lab one, but I was wondering the other day, when I had to work on an XP computer, about installing the logon sound to someone's Ubuntu installation, and wondering how they'd react when they turned it on and heard the XP logon tune instead of the Ubuntu one. Would be especially good if they had it set to logon automatically, and had a suitable wallpaper as well.

Guaranteed harmless, except for the effect on the blood pressure...



it would be very convincing if you also put in a script that disabled his desktop for a good minute on login

Yownanymous
July 21st, 2009, 08:18 PM
7. Find something called explorer.exe
8. Click it, and then click End Process

That's not particularly safe.

Barrucadu
July 21st, 2009, 08:48 PM
One that was suggested to me by an IT teacher at my school for a leavers' prank was to get VLC to display a video as the wallpaper (it can do that on Windows, magic) on every computer.
That would be brilliant.

Irihapeti
July 21st, 2009, 10:09 PM
[QUOTE=Irihapeti;7643741]Well, not necessarily a school/lab one, but I was wondering the other day, when I had to work on an XP computer, about installing the logon sound to someone's Ubuntu installation, and wondering how they'd react when they turned it on and heard the XP logon tune instead of the Ubuntu one. Would be especially good if they had it set to logon automatically, and had a suitable wallpaper as well.

Guaranteed harmless, except for the effect on the blood pressure...

/QUOTE]

it would be very convincing if you also put in a script that disabled his desktop for a good minute on login

:lolflag:

ultimatebuster
July 22nd, 2009, 05:00 AM
net send is removed in windows. unfortunately

Sneaky07
July 22nd, 2009, 05:15 AM
This is not a Ubuntu prank but still pretty effective. If you have two computers back to back switch the mouse and keyboards. Definitely throws people a loop if both computers are used. :lolflag:

Tipped OuT
July 22nd, 2009, 05:22 AM
That's not particularly safe.

Lol. Who told you that?

markp1989
July 22nd, 2009, 02:09 PM
This is not a Ubuntu prank but still pretty effective. If you have two computers back to back switch the mouse and keyboards. Definitely throws people a loop if both computers are used. :lolflag:

lol, we used to do that at school, good times :D

another fun thing is to do what you have done, but with the monitor insted has the similar effect, just when they decided to power off there pc in frustration, the screen will still be showing them an image

ultimatebuster
July 23rd, 2009, 03:46 PM
Big operation, should be really fun:
Switch the monitor.

BTW, my site is moving domain, so that link may or may not work

Kristo, act 1
July 23rd, 2009, 04:13 PM
How about, when working side by side or face to face, take their monitor off and put yours there instead. When they are away, of course, and just don't do anything.

Except maybe you could open up some menu or something, if in the mood, some embarrasing photo gallery or diary, even though they would suspect it then.

The point would be the same mentioned earlier: The menu doesn't disappear with the power cord in hand :)

Kristo

EDIT: Just noticed that might have been exactly what markp suggested. Didn't get it that way at first. Sorry.

Kristo, act 1
July 23rd, 2009, 04:17 PM
Op!

Came up with another one, more difficult to spot:

Take their cord for the possible speakers. Put on some music, volume looow... Then gradually start adding volume to it. Weird al should do the job :)

Kristo

markp1989
July 24th, 2009, 07:45 PM
If they use usb keyboards, plug 2 of them in to the same pc, when your friend is typing, just slip in random words and see if they notice, could do the same with the mouse, just move it around ar the same time as they do.

Tristam Green
July 24th, 2009, 08:06 PM
That's not particularly safe.

qué? That's hilariously fun.

What's even better is if you can get an XP machine that's actually been around pre-SP1, do this:



1.) Terminate explorer.exe from task manager.
2.) From Task Manager, FILE -> New Task.
3.) Type progman.exe, hit Enter, and let the Windows 3.1 madness ensue.

Fun for all.

heroidi
July 24th, 2009, 09:47 PM
I used to put on startup vbs scripts that looked like errors (error messages) with funny things written on them and used to open thousants of cmd's on startup witha script i made with notepad and puted the script on startup well doing pranks with windows is very funny lol so i got to install Ubuntu on one of the pc's i made it crash LOL:D:D

lisati
July 24th, 2009, 09:56 PM
Well, not necessarily a school/lab one, but I was wondering the other day, when I had to work on an XP computer, about installing the logon sound to someone's Ubuntu installation, and wondering how they'd react when they turned it on and heard the XP logon tune instead of the Ubuntu one. Would be especially good if they had it set to logon automatically, and had a suitable wallpaper as well.

Guaranteed harmless, except for the effect on the blood pressure...

Edit: and of course you'd have to think about licensing issues. Maybe have a sound that's close enough to be mistaken for the real thing, which wouldn't be hard.

Reminds me of the time on Rove (http://www.rovedaily.com.au/home.htm) when they were talking about Bill Gates's retirement, they played the XP logoff sound. Quite effective.

shodai100
July 24th, 2009, 10:02 PM
bring a live-cd and install it over ur school os. sure to make people mad...

Dullstar
July 24th, 2009, 10:23 PM
Terminating explorer.exe is not dangerous.

By the way, shodai100, I think even booting a school computer off a live CD is dangerous enough just because of rules.

ultimatebuster
July 25th, 2009, 02:17 AM
Another cool trick: bring in a wireless usb mouse, plug it in, and move it around

markp1989
October 31st, 2009, 12:58 AM
on linux computer a prank that will take a long time to have side effects, so you dont get the blame :D

add

od -tx1 /dev/input/event5 >> /home/mark/test.img
to someones rc.local file,

adssuming that event5 is the input for the persons keyboard every key that person presses will take up space on the hard drive eventualy making it fill up,

i also tried chaning it to event6 which is my mouse and as expected with every mouse movement i made it made the file bigger , only a few mb when testing , but still enough accumulate . using iotop to measure disk usage, event6 which is the mouse caused about 80kb/s to be writen to the drive when moving the mouse.

i can see this one working better using the network interfaces file so any data sent/recieved over the network card will be stored to a file that would in a short time end up getting huge

earthpigg
October 31st, 2009, 01:11 AM
not really a prank, but vandalism:

when i was in 7th grade, the computers where running Windows 3.11 with a custom shell that disallowed access to anything but a specific subset of apps.

...but did not have any permission control. the teacher would never let me actually play with / learn about computers, only userland applications. i did not like that.

so, one day i bounced from computer to computer wrecking the autoexec.bat and other plain-text files read at boot in various ways (edited them in MS Works). normally during class, i would do my project really quick and then help others for the rest of class, so it wasn't unusual for me to bounce from computer to computer. i got to about one third to half of them. some would drop to a command prompt with 'f___ off!' displayed, among other things.

so, next morning when the computers where turned on it became apparent something was up. it was quickly discovered it was me.

i faced banishment from school computers for the remainder of middle school because the school computer dude couldn't figure out how to fix it. i saw that as my chance to get computer access back (we didn't have one at home. this was early/mid 90's, so not uncommon.), by helping him. i told him to boot from a boot floppy and transfer 'vanilla' boot files from one of the computers i didn't get to from there -- iirc, they decided not to suspend me because of that but i was still banned from touching the school computers for the rest of middle school. :( :(

Bungo Pony
October 31st, 2009, 02:20 AM
Simple and easy: Turn the brightness all the way down on the monitor.

Didn't get to play around too much in the early days of computers. I installed the Stoned virus on a few of the school's computers back when anti-virus software wasn't used regularly.

In my electronics class, we were learning about computers. The teacher had made boot disks for everyone. I took our disk and renamed the following files:

Command.com -> replaced the "o" with "u" in "com"
Fixdisk.exe -> replaced the "s" with "c"
Format.com -> Floormat.com

I then swapped the floppy with another student's while he wasn't looking. Took the teacher about 15 minutes to figure out why it didn't work.

Another thing I did in that class: I had a copy of Tetris on floppy and installed it on every computer. The teacher got frustrated with everyone playing games instead of doing schoolwork, so he removed it. Lucky for everyone, I kept the floppy in the back of my binder, so I just kept on re-installing it.

NoaHall
October 31st, 2009, 02:44 AM
Simple and easy: Turn the brightness all the way down on the monitor.

Didn't get to play around too much in the early days of computers. I installed the Stoned virus on a few of the school's computers back when anti-virus software wasn't used regularly.

In my electronics class, we were learning about computers. The teacher had made boot disks for everyone. I took our disk and renamed the following files:

Command.com -> replaced the "o" with "u" in "com"
Fixdisk.exe -> replaced the "s" with "c"
Format.com -> Floormat.com

I then swapped the floppy with another student's while he wasn't looking. Took the teacher about 15 minutes to figure out why it didn't work.

Another thing I did in that class: I had a copy of Tetris on floppy and installed it on every computer. The teacher got frustrated with everyone playing games instead of doing schoolwork, so he removed it. Lucky for everyone, I kept the floppy in the back of my binder, so I just kept on re-installing it.

I don't understand. How is this a good or clever thing to do?

j.bell730
October 31st, 2009, 02:55 AM
Oh...computer pranks...
Last year (my senior year) I kept telnetting into people's computers and issuing

shutdown -s -t 15 -m "OMG A VIRUS!!!11onehundred"
(Replace the message with something else clever, though I did actually use that message, I changed it every time)

Eventually, they found out me and my friend were doing it and we were kicked off the computers for two weeks. I was so far behind in that class, I ended up failing. It was hilarious though.

Good times.

clonne4crw
October 31st, 2009, 03:25 AM
on linux computer a prank that will take a long time to have side effects, so you dont get the blame :D

add

od -tx1 /dev/input/event5 >> /home/mark/test.img
to someones rc.local file,

adssuming that event5 is the input for the persons keyboard every key that person presses will take up space on the hard drive eventualy making it fill up,

i also tried chaning it to event6 which is my mouse and as expected with every mouse movement i made it made the file bigger , only a few mb when testing , but still enough accumulate . using iotop to measure disk usage, event6 which is the mouse caused about 80kb/s to be writen to the drive when moving the mouse.

i can see this one working better using the network interfaces file so any data sent/recieved over the network card will be stored to a file that would in a short time end up getting huge

Awesome! It works for me.

Ms_Angel_D
October 31st, 2009, 04:40 AM
I pulled this one on my hubby last april fools thanks to the helpful folks here at the UF.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1113114

Basically what I did was replaced his favorite game icon with a link to a bash script so instead of opening his game up it gave him and error message than a few moments later another message popped up and said April Fools...lol It was classic and he never saw it coming.

I suppose this could be replicated...in any number of ways(ie replace all desktop icons in such a manner or something similar).

The Real Dave
October 31st, 2009, 10:23 AM
Oh...computer pranks...
Last year (my senior year) I kept telnetting into people's computers and issuing

shutdown -s -t 15 -m "OMG A VIRUS!!!11onehundred"
(Replace the message with something else clever, though I did actually use that message, I changed it every time)

Eventually, they found out me and my friend were doing it and we were kicked off the computers for two weeks. I was so far behind in that class, I ended up failing. It was hilarious though.

Good times.

A better trick is to create shortcuts for all their desktop icons that point to


shutdown -s -t 15 -m "Windows has detected a critical virus error. To prevent data loss, C:\ will now be formatted. Your computer will reboot."

Use those shortcuts, right click, properties, icon, browse to the correct icon, and rename the shortcut to Firefox or whatever :) Now anytime they click an icon, their computer will tell them that its formatting itself and shutdown.

If you have time, you can do the same for their start menu :)

3rdalbum
October 31st, 2009, 11:36 AM
I can't believe nobody mentioned this:


while true; do sleep $(($RANDOM/1000)) && beep -f 2000 -l $(($RANDOM/100)) ; done

Run that command (relies on the "beep" command being installed, it's not installed by default on Ubuntu) and the computer will beep its speaker every so often.

Substitute the entire "beep" bit with "aplay <filename.wav>" and it's a bit more fun :-)

The only real prank I pulled was changing the Macintosh alert sound to a 1 minute audio file of a pop song. I think you could only do that on some OS versions- mighty annoying, and I was pretty sure everyone would know who did it, so I changed it back the next day.

markp1989
October 31st, 2009, 08:45 PM
Simple and easy: Turn the brightness all the way down on the monitor.

Didn't get to play around too much in the early days of computers. I installed the Stoned virus on a few of the school's computers back when anti-virus software wasn't used regularly.

In my electronics class, we were learning about computers. The teacher had made boot disks for everyone. I took our disk and renamed the following files:

Command.com -> replaced the "o" with "u" in "com"
Fixdisk.exe -> replaced the "s" with "c"
Format.com -> Floormat.com

I then swapped the floppy with another student's while he wasn't looking. Took the teacher about 15 minutes to figure out why it didn't work.

Another thing I did in that class: I had a copy of Tetris on floppy and installed it on every computer. The teacher got frustrated with everyone playing games instead of doing schoolwork, so he removed it. Lucky for everyone, I kept the floppy in the back of my binder, so I just kept on re-installing it.

the easiest is to just swap the m and n keys on the keyboard :D

bonfire89
October 31st, 2009, 09:33 PM
I once put all the computers in a high school lab on high contrast mode.... that was fun.

We'd also do things like widening the screen past the monitor edges to hide the task bar.

Win pop up was great. not sure if the school admins locked down on that, or if it disappeared or what. Someone used to it to make a bomb threat. It wasn't a serious threat, but, something like that is always taken seriously.

oh, there was a really stupid fad waaaayyyy back in the middle school days where people would steal the mouse balls.. lol. eventually, the mouse ball stopper things were epoxied shut, and we had to deal with terrible working mice cause we couldn't clean them. In fact, one kid started up a club, and to get in, you had to steal a mouse ball.

clonne4crw
November 1st, 2009, 04:52 AM
Simple and easy: Turn the brightness all the way down on the monitor.

Didn't get to play around too much in the early days of computers. I installed the Stoned virus on a few of the school's computers back when anti-virus software wasn't used regularly.

In my electronics class, we were learning about computers. The teacher had made boot disks for everyone. I took our disk and renamed the following files:

Command.com -> replaced the "o" with "u" in "com"
Fixdisk.exe -> replaced the "s" with "c"
Format.com -> Floormat.com

I then swapped the floppy with another student's while he wasn't looking. Took the teacher about 15 minutes to figure out why it didn't work.

Another thing I did in that class: I had a copy of Tetris on floppy and installed it on every computer. The teacher got frustrated with everyone playing games instead of doing schoolwork, so he removed it. Lucky for everyone, I kept the floppy in the back of my binder, so I just kept on re-installing it.

Awesome. Simply awesome. C*mmand.com, Fixd*ck.exe.

markp1989
December 18th, 2009, 09:16 PM
i got bored today and wrote a tiny script that will annoy people :)



#!/bin/bash
##Specify delays in seconds between events.
maxdelay=100
mindelay=1
wordlist=wordlist.txt

for i in `seq 1 100`;
do
word1=$(sort -R "$wordlist" | head -n 1)
word2=$(sort -R "$wordlist" | head -n 1)
sleeptime=$(seq $mindelay $maxdelay| sort -R | head -n 1)
xmessage $word1 $word2!!!!!! &
echo $sleeptime ##just in during testing, not needed.
sleep $sleeptime
done


you will need a word list, i have 1, but its a txt file too big to upload, and way to long to post on the page.

what it does is choses 2 words the dictionary list, puts them in an error message using xmessage, then waits a random amount of time i set the max to 100 sec, you can change that in the sleeptime variable at the the top , then it does another message with 2 more random words.

i will only do it 100 times each run. be nive with it.

i attached a screnie for you lot to see lol.

if any one wants the wordlist then message me and i will email u it.


best messages i have seen so far so far are "Warhead Insomniac!" and "dampening *******!"

alphaniner
December 18th, 2009, 09:24 PM
Everybody's familiar with the 'canned air' used to clean computer components, right? Here's two using just that:

1) Hold the can upside down and spray into a Ziploc bag. Seal the bag. The air will expand as it warms up, eventually causing the bag to burst. Place near a sleeping or intently focused co-worker.

2) Get a long bit of heat-shrink tubing and attach one end to the straw that connects to the canned air. Hide the other end somewhere in a co-worker's cubicle/workstation. See how long it takes for co-worker to catch on or freak out.

pricetech
December 18th, 2009, 10:59 PM
On a winders box; Ctrl + Alt + arrow keys will rotate the display. Ctrl Alt Down will turn the screen upside down for example.

It happens from time to time here and I have to remind the non technical staff how to upright it.

When I was in computer school, my last day I stayed late and created a DOS partition on the remaining few megs of the hard drive in the server and made it active. I then created an autoexec.bat file that displayed something to the effect that the partitions had been deleted and all files were gone, followed by "you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny" The instructor knew I was doing it as a joke to the underclassmen who would follow so no problem.

pricetech
December 18th, 2009, 11:02 PM
Everybody's familiar with the 'canned air' used to clean computer components, right?

If you really want to offend someone; I bought a common, inexpensive brand of canned air which has a positively putrid smell. (probably to discourage huffing) I hated using it on customer's computers.

alphaniner
December 18th, 2009, 11:06 PM
On a winders box; Ctrl + Alt + arrow keys will rotate the display. Ctrl Alt Down will turn the screen upside down for example.

I just tried that on an XP box and it didn't work.

markp1989
December 19th, 2009, 12:54 AM
I just tried that on an XP box and it didn't work.

it works with some xp computers, i think they have to have intel graphics chipset.

Onez&Zeros
December 19th, 2009, 01:08 AM
On windows boxes, I would take a screenshot of someones desktop then remove all their icons and hide the taskbar. then replace the wallpaper with the screenshot.

jrusso2
December 19th, 2009, 01:09 AM
I was in a computer lab so long ago the joke was to shuffle someone's punch cards when they left the room.

alphaniner
December 19th, 2009, 01:31 AM
it works with some xp computers, i think they have to have intel graphics chipset.

I did some Googling and I believe you are correct, it seems to be an Intel thing. Too bad, I was going to get back at my supervisor for popping off and re-arranging the keys on my keyboard. Of course that was payback for changing her keyboard configuration to Dvorak.

marshmallow1304
December 19th, 2009, 02:35 AM
These are the two best I've done/seen done.


1) Just for kicks I ran SIW (http://www.gtopala.com/) on one of the school's machines and it gave me the RealVNC Server password that was used universally on every pre-Vista machine on the network (which was most of them). I popped a VNC viewer on my flash drive, and from that point forward, I could take control of nearly any powered-on computer on the network, including administrators' machines. Great fun was had messing with people.

2) One of my friends found that someone left a logged-on machine unattended. He got into her Word settings and set up auto-complete to replace common words with extraordinarily impolite alternatives. Both user and teacher were baffled.

MoebusNet
December 19th, 2009, 04:52 PM
Way back when Windows 95 was new, I replaced the screensaver with the message "Press any key to reformat hard drive." That brought things to a screeching halt!

BandD
December 19th, 2009, 08:36 PM
on windows boxes, i would take a screenshot of someones desktop then remove all their icons and hide the taskbar. Then replace the wallpaper with the screenshot.

genius!

markp1989
January 29th, 2010, 02:25 AM
i got another one :)

just wrote this because i was bored:

it types a random word as if you the user typed them you need a word list (can be a complete dictionary or just a list of swear words). you can find them online. just needs to be a plain text file with each word on its own line.

it requires xdotool



#!/bin/bash
while true; do
maxdelay=3000
mindelay=60
sleeptime=$(seq $mindelay $maxdelay| sort -R | head -n 1)
wordlist=~/wordlist.txt
word1=$(sort -R "$wordlist" | head -n 1)
xdotool type " "$word1
echo waiting for $sleeptime seconds ##just in during testing, not needed.
sleep $sleeptime
done