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How is this for an office prank?

by Volker Weber

1. On your mark's computer, go to the Desktop and make a new folder.
2. Rename the new folder to e.g. “Porn”
3. Make a screenshot
4. Delete the folder that you’d just created
5. Install the screenshot image as a Desktop wallpaper
6. Enjoy!

[via Tom]

Comments

God, that brings me back

Screenshot the desktop, then remove all the icons and hide the start bar.. then set the screenshot as the desktop....

Create porn folder in the middle of the screen. Put all icons in there. Hide the bar. Take screenshot and make it the wallpaper. Put all icons back. Remove the porn folder. :-)

We did this a few times to a guy I used to work with. He'd walk away from his computer without locking it when he was logged in with full domain admin rights.

Another trick we had was to use the windows ROUTE command to create a permanent route for the IP address of the proxy server to point to the localhost. The victim would not be able to surf the web but would be able to reach everything else on the network and even pinging the rerouted IP address would work as localhost always replies and as it would be a permanent route a reboot would not solve the problem.

I'm sorry to find that (despite me emailing them...) the Scott Adams website still have not updated their desktops from Mac System9, and something reminiscent of Windows NT.

... and replace the Windows boot and login sounds with very explicit sound recordings, preferrably min. half a minute per sound, the boot sound should be even longer.

In old times Windows wouldn't start until the sound ended. My nasty trick was to sample a 3 min long sound (the guy didn't even know his computer had an internal speaker), then a Virus warning desktop image and finally I had replaced the default font with... Wingdings . Poor guy nearly had a heart attack.

I don't know if it is common knowledge, but the most effective way to hide the start bar is kill the explorer.exe task. :-) It won't come back until the process is manually restarted or the system is rebooted.

I also used to enjoy making screenshots of the desktop and making that the background image when I was in college back in '98. I'd offset all of the icons so that there were two of everything (beforehand, I'd put the actual icons in random positions on the desktop).

Many of the computers at the college in those days still had Windows 95, and I knew of a trick where you could actually close the Start menu down (I think you had to make sure it had focus but not be open, then press Alt and -, to make a hidden menu appear); normally the close and move options were ghosted. Imagine the look on many students faces to see a crazy desktop AND no Start menu. Most of them didn't even know you could use Ctrl+Alt+Del to shut it down either, and thus panicked and swiftly moved on.

I replaced some of the system sound files with my own fart sounds. The trick is to record the fart file so there is about a two minute silence before the first fart starts. That way it comes as a total surprise. You can then add more farts but be sure to space them out with silence. The user has no idea why or where the sounds are coming from. And it's quite embarrassing especially if someone else is in the cubicle when it happens.

And it’s quite embarrassing especially if someone else is in the cubicle when it happens.

Not nearly as embarrassing as owning up to recording one’s own alimentary dissipations on a widely-read website :o)

For *nix with root access
1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Go to your victim's home directory.
3. Go to their desktop directory.
4. type "mkdir porn"
5. Chown the directory to root or yourself.
6. Make it writable only to the user you chown'd to.

One of the easiest and most fun-to-watch pranks:

Set the mark's keyboard to the Dvorak keyboard layout.

They usually think they have a virus.... :>

Rocky, that is evil. :-)

Another thing you can do: Drag start-up from the start menu onto the desktop (it becomes a new folder that operates individually) and put the contents of the desktop in it (or whatever else you want). Right click on it and go to properties and then security. You can change the permissions so nobody can delete it or change it without going back there. Change its icon to blank and its name to a space and make it a hidden file.

Ceci n'est pas un blog

vowe.net is a personal website published by Volker Weber a.k.a. vowe. I am an author, consultant and systems architect based in Darmstadt, Germany.

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