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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#161

Post by simmons »

myself248 wrote: post #121

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction,…

> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. > ...Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)

I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and discovered that the username included in the message is not authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which) software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)

This should not be construed as a confession of any network shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high school. ;) :D :)

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#162

Post by automationwiz »

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group.

We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#163

Post by wingspar »

linsomniac wrote: post #150
pests wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had discovered the windows net send command as a highschooler too. We mainly just messaged jokes back and forth. One student later decided to try the wildcard to send to everyone, just a simple "Hi". It went out over the entire district hitting multiple schools. I forget why, but no one knew who did it at first. But we had some software installed that let the admin/teacher remotely blank screens or lock the compute…

Speaking of "feeling bad for teaching someone"... I must have been in 5th grade and this other kid was talking about shorting out a power outlet. I said "What I'd do is unfold a couple of paperclips, stick them into a rubber eraser, then plug that into the outlet and twist it to get the paperclips to touch." A few days later the principal calls me in. "Did you tell him to do this?" "I didn't tell him to, we were just…

:)

I’m legit trying to figure out who your calling the petty tyrant flexing their power: - The principal which let off with a warning - The other kid, popping circuit breakers - Or you, ‘corrupting’ other young minds :)

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#164

Post by jeffreygoesto »

myself248 wrote: post #121

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction,…

Once swapped the system disc of a netware server live. Can't remember why exactly, I think it stared to count bad sectors as we watched and we needed to keep it alive copying the data to the new, to-be system disk. Then we made sure, nobody was logged in, it was about midnight, hit Alt-LeftShift-RightShift-Esc and while Netware paused in the kernel debugger, swapped the disks. Continued the debugger and - it worked :)

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#165

Post by kogens »

romanhn wrote: post #112
oldgradstudent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.

To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.

Still in use in many places for some ungodly reason.

At my previous job they had been using Notes since the company was founded in the early 90’s, meaning they lived through it being Lotus Notes, then IBM Notes and now HCL Notes.

Everything was deeply entrenched - email, warehouse inventory, ERP system, all documentation made in the entire company… just everything.

And this is for a scandinavian company manufacturing high tech devices for telecom and aviation, among other things.

It was… an interesting nightmare, constantly got in the way of any sort of productivity. Definitely contributed to me leaving early

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#166

Post by kmoser »

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them.

Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.

Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked.

Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned.

Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#167

Post by krisoft »

freehorse wrote: post #159
wat10000 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.

Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.

There is a very linear relationship between time and money for the one who pays the employees though.

Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.

And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#168

Post by afro88 »

subroutine wrote: post #160
refulgentis wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this overstated? i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy . Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny? I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in…

I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience the fun part of the prank - the number of people who actually saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was going to start charging for printing, which was true.

For 99.9% of people, the funny of the prank would only hit later. Ie, upon finding out it was a prank, and hearing about the "insert 5 cents" part that they probably didn't see with their own eyes. Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction. And reactions of other staff who fell for it (and caused chaos) before 8:30.

And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to others.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#169

Post by travisjungroth »

refulgentis wrote: post #154
glenstein wrote: post #36

I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds. It's just such a gre…

Is this overstated? i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy . Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny? I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in…

As someone who makes dry sarcastic jokes pretty often, I’ve learned you have to really put some ridiculous stuff in there to signal it’s a joke. This also scales with audience size and delivery method.

With so many people, you’d actually have to make the price ridiculous or something like that. Because some people, once they read that the printing is five cents, are going to be upset enough to not read the rest of the email.

I wouldn’t actually do this prank, but if I like had to, it would be more like the “charge” was to sing a song and the email would actually say April Fools in it. Maybe less funny, but a lot more easily seen as a joke. Makes handling the calls to the admins much easier, too.

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