While the computer is on, at random intervals, it shall play the sound of a smoke alarm's low battery beep using audio technology to make it sound like it's coming from somewhere else in your house.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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I have made some silly programs. One that moved the mouse pointer one pixel left, then down, right and up. It was quite annoying. Another that moved the mouse pointer when you reached the edge of the screen, touching the rightmost pixel row would move it to the left side of the screen and vice versa, same thing with top and bottom.
You basically invented the endless desktop functionality, lol
When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a 'virus' that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.
«I’m watching porno» - not porn. This was around y2k
How about a programm which screams "aaaaaaa" after you unlock your screen. Barely hearable at first and it gets louder with every minute. People who don't know how to remove it would have to lock and unlock their screens every 5 minutes or so.
That poor guy that thought he accomplished it by just having a virus that changed peoples files to pictures from Clannad but got arrested for copyright.
Like genue wishing this one.
I believe that specific site was called "Last Measure". It would also open up a bunch of shock sites...
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I had one guy in the late 90s at my HS who made a program that copied itself onto every directory on the computer at startup. It was a .com file and if you ran it it would use the PC speakers to play a tone increasing in volume and pitch until it was unbearable. You had to do a hard boot to end it.
I also remember the Form virus that made the PC speakers make a sound each time you pressed a key. Can't remember if it did anything else.
When I worked at an MSP in early 2000s they would “prank” new hires with a site that did this. It would keep creating popups so you couldn’t close them. That stopped after customers heard it. More horrid graphical “pranks” replaced it of course.
2000s office culture sounds like frats
Pretty much. Maybe worse. I'm not sure how the business survived for so long. That is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Im afraid to post my obnoxious virus idea as I don't want mailboxes filled with job offers from microsoft and other big tech.
back when I was in school someone wrote a script that just openened the optical drive at random intervals and put it in the Autostart of every PC in the Comouter room
I call bullshit. In the 90s you had to turn a phisical wheel to increase the volume of the computer.
Right it was like those jumps scare sites where it would play something very quietly so you'd turn up the volume, then they would announce the porn at full volume. It was a gag site/video file, not a virus.
As someone caught out by this, most of us had speakers and windows had volume controls as well. They're kinda useless to have super low volume, so the tendency was to turn the speakers up and have windows control it. (what could go wrong? mine was always set low in windows, this was before lots of ads on browsers would randomly come on too) Fortunately everyone thought it was the guy in the cubicle next to me, with about 10-15 heads popping out of cubicles in our direction.
And for what it's worth the audio clip finished with an enthusiastic "YEE HAW"
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Instant flashback to the MSN Messenger virus where you could remotely open your friends CD-drive
That one got my mom once and she freaked out at the neighbor kid because he 'knew computers' so it must have been him.
A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.
Depending on you definition of harmless, I'd randomly replace one character every 1000 with an alternative version, newlines from crlf to lf, spaces, even some printable characters have similar options in other languages
A virus that replaces the normal space with a random one of similar space characters that all look normal to the end user but would fuck up programming.
One that replaces tab with 4 spaces.
If you just replace letters with alternate versions of those letters, with different Unicode, wouldn’t it set off the spell checker?
Oh, that would be fun.
I was thinking more about source code, bash scripts won't run on Unix if you got a crlf and cli editors do not display them differently (by default). Python scripts needed a declaration on top to run with a certain encoding, but the error there is clearer. If you use them as string constants it's also going to just work internally but may break if you compare them with an external value
Careful, satan. That could lead to some suicidal ideation
I'd make Windows 11
Edit: Whoops, that's not harmless
Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.
theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.
RedReader my beloved 😢