This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!
The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
231–240 of 268 posts
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#232Subject: You're hired!
Body: April Fools!
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#233[dead]
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#234So 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…
> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door. Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks . Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it. Other more refined versions exist now fr…
On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything.
At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al. Anyway when…
> I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives? My expectation is that laws probably specify that gaining access that you know you’re not supposed to be able to get is probably illegal, but I get your point. Reminds me, however, of the pen-testers that got hired to infiltrate a court system and got harassed by a prosec…
The Florida Computer Crimes Act was passed in 1978 so as you can imagine it’s very draconian. I’m pretty sure it was a misdemeanor for 16-year-old me to boot Linux from a live USB as a means to get around the IE-only web filter the school district used.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al. Anyway when…
Someone at my high school (late 90s/early 2000s) was apparently distributing something on CDRs. I got called into the police station , where a cop asked me, verbatim: "Son, did you copywrite them there CDs?"
Classic
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al. Anyway when…
I did something similar in 7th grade, with the extra naughtiness of charging my peers 50 cents or so to drop the basic Windows games like pinball and Ski Free into their home drive. I created a couple of joke files in my favorite teachers' directories and then notified the IT admin before someone more nefarious saw what I was doing. That admin became my mentor and is now a lifelong friend.
The IT admin at my high school was a prick and from what I’m told took it very personally when my friend was caught mapping network drives.
The closest thing we had to a computer class was graphic design where you played with Photoshop and Premier for a year. God forbid we learned to write code or whatever.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al. Anyway when…
It sucks when school administrators are needlessly punitive. In my school, some jackass kid made a photocopy of a $20 bill, on a little mid-1990s HP Officejet in the library. Even in those days, they were programmed to make bad copies of US currency (I think they were enlarged and the color messed up). It was more of an innocent “woah look at this thing”, there was no intent or effort to glue it together and try to u…
I would imagine as in the professional world, there are certain school jobs that attract sociopaths/narcissists/psychopaths. Yes, I’m talking of course about vice principals. My elementary, middle and high school principals were very nice. The VPs were mostly unapproachable hardasses. It may have something to with the principal vs vice principal responsibilities in the U.S. I’m not sure how it is elsewhere in the world.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#239[dead]
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.
The interesting bit is that social expectations matter. There is a social expectation that people can generally only enter your home with explicit permission, and so if they didn't invite you it's trespassing even if the door is unlocked. But maybe you have some close friends who you get used to coming over and just entering even if you may be out at the moment -- and then it's not trespassing anymore. Remote compute…
There are echoes to discussions a few months ago about IMG_0001.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547
The site displays random, ancient videos uploaded from the early iPhone YouTube app, often without people understanding what they were doing.
I tend to err on the side of caution: I don't expect most people to be tech savvy, and I think those of us who are must exercise restraint to avoid trespassing.