Switch the M and N keymaps

Also delete and enter

“sleep 1 >> etc/rc.local” >> etc/rc.local

Change the start menu search so instead of finding local applications and files, it searches the internet.
Would be even funnier if it used the worst search engine available.
Oh wait…

On my dads computer, back in the day, I set the sound for every action in Windows to a silly song i downloaded off kazaa (Windows xp days, i believe)

So this was the sound that played for clicking the start menu, hovering over programs/apps, whatever it was and making that menu appear, and any sub menu for individual games or apps following that. Any kind of prompt like errors or “are you sures” etc, minimising/maximising a window. Everything!

That’s what my virus would do. I just need the perfect sound to apply. Maybe that annoying tiktok song “Oh no! Oh no! Oh no no no no no!”

Occasional mouse and keyboard lag up to 1 second.

I had a friend who sent me a “Y2K fix” program back in '99. Said it would patch the error so I’d be safe. When I ran it, it swapped the letters Y and K on my keyboard.

The version I recall was once if those Flash animations with a cute squirrel or whatever saying something… but it was really quiet so you’d need to turn up the volume to hear. Then partway through it changed to sex stuff and blasted out in a voice like a monster truck announcer

“anal sex dot com, all anal, all the time!”

It was not a virus, but still great fun: coworker had a fat UNIX workstation, but no idea of the particulars except for the program he was using. I knew my ways around such machines, and I could log in from another machine via serial terminal.

What the coworker knew about the audio capabilities of his machine was the occasional “beep” it made. I found the “auplay” command, and a list of 8-bit audio samples.

So one day I was sitting at the PC next to him, logged in, and command ready to run, and waited for an error message to pop up. Then I pressed return, starting “auplay laughter.au”.

That face.

Finds anything and everything that can be set to dark mode and sets it back to light mode, but not while you’re using it and not immediately.

Simple, every now and again switch a key input with a neighboring key. Imagine slowly losing your confidence in your motor skills as you just can’t seem to type properly no matter how careful you are.

It would do it like once every 10-1000 minutes, you will never catch it and slowly lose your grip on reality.

I had a boss that wasn’t exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said “good job”, which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off… Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.

I offered to take a look and see if I couldn’t stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)

I wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker’s computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he’d figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.

There was a guy in my dorm who really didn’t like his roommate. Really, really didn’t like him. This was in the early aughts.

So one day he goes on his roommate’s computer and puts a text file in his startup folder. The file says, “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus!”

For context, Snood was a free video game people downloaded in the early aughts. Basically the same as Bust-A-Move, which probably doesn’t clarify anything if you didn’t already know what Snood is.

Anyway: “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus! If you don’t score [extremely difficult but not completely unrealistic high score] points, all of your files will be deleted!”

He laughed to himself and promptly forgot about it.

Weeks later, the roommate is on his computer in the middle of the night.

“What are you doing up? Go to bed.”

“I can’t. It’s this stupid Snood virus.”

Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you’re done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can’t close this one, only slightly minimize it.

used to be fun at the office to take a screenshot of someone desktop, and make it the desktop background, then put all their icons into one folder.