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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

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

#241

Post by lurquer »

ummonk wrote: post #226
gymbeaux wrote: post #142

Earlier 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…

Is it really breaking and entering if they left their key under the flowerpot and you found it?

Even with a key it is breaking and entering

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

#242

Post by geocrasher »

geocrasher wrote: post #206

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed? Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and t…

EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right.

I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.

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

#243

Post by kmoser »

kmoser wrote: post #166

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…

More pranks, this time after I got a job in the corporate world working for Big Company in the late 1980s:

Corporate Prank #1: Back in the DOS days, when the standard office computer was an IBM AT with a small built-in speaker capable of being programmed to beep, I set up the autoexec.bat file for several workstations to play (quickly, and at low volume) the first eight notes from the melody from "Brazil." The movie had just come out, and I thought the tune would be a fitting commentary on the parallels to the corporate life.

Corporate Prank #2: Every year or so the cafeteria would print surveys on blue cardstock and put them on all the tables asking questions like "Were the cashiers friendly?" and "How was the temperature of the food?" My friend and I found matching cardstock and mocked up copies, but changed the questions subtly, e.g. "How was the temperature of the cashiers?" and "Was the food friendly?" and distributed them to all the tables. Never found out what happened, but I'm sure management wasn't happy.

Corporate Prank #3: One day I went with my friends "B" and "C" to a different corporate cafeteria where you paid a flat rate just before exiting. "B" managed to find an emergency exit door just before the cashiers which let him make his way to the elevators without paying. Now the setup for the prank: every few months one of the departments would distribute company-wide security memos (on paper) which would get distributed to every desk. Me and "C" mocked up one of those security memos (complete with a police artist style sketch of "B", who had skipped out without paying) which warned everybody to be on the lookout for the suspect who was last seen exiting the cafeteria through an unmarked door, and should be considered dangerous. We made photocopies and put them on every desk.

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

#244

Post by rcarmo »

russellbeattie wrote: post #187
rcarmo wrote: post #82

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-... (there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time! Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like two decades. Gah!)

I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)

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

#245

Post by diroussel »

simmons wrote: post #161
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 S…

I believe that Netware had NET SEND before Microsoft had any networking at all. But maybe I’m wrong. Certainly NT had a netware compatible stack, but this was way after netware blazed the trail.

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

#246

Post by nraf »

pests wrote: post #128
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,…

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…

I got a three day suspension from school for doing this. I sent something mundane like “hello” to entire school. Few minutes later, the IT admin came running down, told me off and took my details.

Made the mistake of telling a couple friends what happened. Said friends thought it would be hilarious to send swear words to the entire school (I was not there).

They played dumb saying they didn’t know what would happen and got off with one day each, I got suspended for three days.

I wouldn’t have minded so much except the next day was an inter-school chess tournament. Thankfully the sympathetic chess coach told me to wait behind the school the next morning and picked me up in the school bus.

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

#247

Post by linsomniac »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #211
wingspar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) 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 :)

It refers to the principle, who didn't flex his power which came as a surprise. The other kid is a gremlin. GP was playing the clueless engineer type who forgets to give thought to who is asking the question and how the answer will be used.

>playing the clueless engineer type

Or... Maybe I was just 10 and hadn't really learned that lesson yet. ;-)

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

#248

Post by atq2119 »

macintux wrote: post #240
atq2119 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually agree with you, but the point is the balance.

Don't steal. Don't share embarrassing or humiliating information you may come across.

At the same time, there should be safety from prosecution overreach.

I ask for this mostly not for my current self but for "kids" (including young adults, e.g. college students) who are on a hacker journey in the original sense of the word. As a society, we should encourage rather than stifle that sort of exploration.

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

#249

Post by myself248 »

simmons wrote: post #161
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 S…

> You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing.

It's entirely possible that it wasn't part of Netware, I don't remember the hard details as it was a very long time ago. However, it worked in DOS text-mode (we rarely ran Windows), and my impression was that Microsoft didn't do much network-aware stuff until well into Windows. So that's why I thought of it as a Novell thing rather than a Microsoft thing.

> the username included in the message is not authenticated at all

Oh.... oh dear.

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

#250

Post by that_guy_iain »

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.
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