this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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obnoxious virus (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

oop

(page 2) 50 comments
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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Three options come to mind.

A virus that adjusts your mouse sensitivity by like 5% every time you unlock your computer. Just enough that existing muscle memory is off, so you either have to adjust to the change or change it back every time.

A virus that installs and/or sets a similar but not quite right keyboard layout, and swaps to it randomly few boots. For example, setting the keyboard to Canadian Multilingual Standard instead of US English, where its only some of the punctuation keys that are changed.

A virus that randomly pops up a terminal window and outputs suspicious-looking text, and closes itself before the user has time to read it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago

I swear my old computer already had that keyboard virus. POS was constantly trying to type French at me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago

You are fucking devious. Mouse sensitivity/acceleration curve is my largest 'minor annoyance' between various machines/operating systems. Having that change on me randomly without changing systems would really mess with me.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 1 day ago (3 children)

In a programming class, one of my professors sometimes remolety opened the xeyes program (Linux program that opens a pair of eyes that follow your cursor) on students that were not paying a lot of attention.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 day ago

Thank you, I have wondered why xeyes existed for the last 28 years.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I used to do the same thing to a few people back in the day. Linux distros used to ship with the X listening port just conveniently wide open and the config set to allow input from any other device on the LAN. I'd start with only one xeyes, and then they'd close it. I'd do it a few more times until they got irritated with me, and then I'd push it further by putting xeyes into a bash loop to open dozens at a time.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

In the early 90s there was a virus going around that made the floppy drive's loading noises play the Imperial March.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No wonder people here keep talking about how awesome 90s internet was.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

No, you don't understand.
The virus was distributed on a floppy disk with the Empire's logo printed on the label.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

How about 512 floppy drives, 16 hard drives and 4 scanners?

https://youtu.be/3KS02q0BUnY

[–] [email protected] 6 points 19 hours ago

A virus that changes Windows' sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

I don’t remember the details but my mom’s first cousin called me once to fix her computer when I was a teenager.

No matter what she typed it came out as, “I AM FUCKING GAY!”

Seems like all I had to do was type “stop”.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Autohotkey script that shuts the system down whenever someone types out certain key words. They of course include words related to looking up the issue like "help", "randomly", "virus" and so on. Not the most sophisticated but one I've actually done before.

Edit: Forgot to mention that ahk needs to be installed and the script must be placed in the autostart folder. Both can be achieved on a coworker's or family member's machine with a ducky usb stick.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Oooh, that's evil. You don't even need administrator privileges for that IIRC.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As long as ahk can be installed and the autostart folder isn't locked it will work

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I call bullshit. In the 90s you had to turn a phisical wheel to increase the volume of the computer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago

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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago

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.

[–] Skyline969 40 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Every time you log in, maximize a window, lock your PC, etc, your desktop icons randomly arrange themselves by penis. Open a folder, forced to display files as icons and arranged by penis. Try to view all your open windows on your desktop, you guessed it, penis.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No, no, change it back! I had internet explorer at the tip of penis

Chip, you can't arrange by penis

Just change it back okay

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

For those who haven’t seen the masterpiece:

https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE

The whole thing is worth the watch but the reference is at (about) 7:50

[–] [email protected] 6 points 21 hours ago

«I’m watching porno» - not porn. This was around y2k

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

2000s office culture sounds like frats

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago

RedReader my beloved 😢

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago

In my highschool programming class we made a TSR (in Borland pascal) that would change every 15th keypress to an "e". It wasn't self propagating, so it wasn't a virus per day, but it was highly annoying. It survived on memory after the netware logoff, and you could only get rid of it by rebooting.

We also had these everex brand 286 or 386 computers.... They had a little LCD screen that would read out what sector/track was being read on the disk. We found the memory address (80h) where we could write arbitrary text to the LCD. That was fun.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Uhh, it was "Hey everybody, I'm looking at gay porno!" and then it proceeded to spawn hundreds of internet exploder windows pointing at goatse.cx. Thank God I was at home, alone, when it got me.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I used to make a batch file that opened a command prompt that opened the batch file again and again and put it on the computers as the internet Explorer logo.

People would get so mad when they opened it as a cascade of cmd would open until the computer crashed

So something like that i think

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Sounds like a weak fork bomb.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago

Supposedly there was a DOS virus that would spawn a pacman that would eat your letters as you typed them.

[–] Revan343 3 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago)

I'd make Windows 11

Edit: Whoops, that's not harmless

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