Microblog Memes

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...

I shall write a virus that makes the computer play the "USB device detached" sound followed shortly by the "USB device attached" sound. Dee doo. Doo dee. Just that. three or four times a week.

Alt+Tab goes to a random window instead of being in the order of recency

I'll call it Windows 11.

At first it all seems normal, every now and then a random sound effect is replaced by ominous hooting. Every hour, on the hour, a green owl flashes on the screen for a frame or two, it's eyes boring into you before vanishing. Once every 50 or so times it pumps your volume up, selects speakers as output and let's loose a screeching hoot. Random popups slowly ramping up "Restart your streak today", "Where did you go?", "Duo misses you". At first just once or twice a day, but steadily increasing in intensity till it's one every 23 seconds.

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.

A virus that changes the font every time you go to a new page or hit refresh

There's a 1 in 50 chance that any copy text command cuts the text instead, and vice-versa.

How harmless are we talking? I'm thinking of one that randomly "locks" the next file you try to open that was last accessed over 30 days ago. It prompts you with "File locked by last user, please enter username/email and password"

No matter what you enter, it unlocks the file.

Then the next time it triggers, it prompts you again, but blocks you from using the same username and password.

Rinse and repeat while the user keeps giving you all their user names and passwords over time.

Bootable USB with w11

I did this in high school, it was just a basic script that spawned a warning dialog box (the kind thats always on top) that just said you can't close this, part of the script action was making tge task scheduler check every few seconds if the script was running... If it wasn't then run it.

Since I was making the task scheduler do the checking it meant even if you tried to task manager force close the script it would just open again in a few seconds, it was not a permanent task it was a temporary one and every opening of the script would reset that task so basically the only way to get rid of it was to restart the computer as that would clear the task.

When you click the mouse button, the pointer position moves up to 10px in a random direction before applying the click.

It wasn't a file, it was a webpage. And it loaded infinite popups showing a dude's gaping anus, turned the volume up to 100%, and played a loop of "Hey everyone, I'm looking at gay porno!"

goatse

The mouse cursor switches between normal and inverted every 2 seconds.

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.)

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!"

I was in college during the years leading up to y2k and supported myself at the time getting IT infrastructure ready. Some friends and I decided to write a "virus" that, on bootup, checks to see if the current date is in the first week of January 2000 and if it is and a backup of the fonts is not found (so it'll only run once) then it'll back up your fonts and alter the originals to replace the y character with the k. This affected everything system wide.

That created more chaos than anticipated.

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.

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.

I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.

I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school's server that I shouldn't have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students' laptops interrupting the class at max volume.

Best bit? I "taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity" and didn't get in (much) trouble!!

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!"

I remember a harmless over that just randomly opened your CD tray while it ran. Called something like cup holder, or something like that.

Shit that was a long time ago...

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.

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."

Occasional mouse and keyboard lag up to 1 second.

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.

Switch the M and N keymaps

Also delete and enter

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.