Music…

Never Gonna Give You Up

Whenever You Need Somebody

Rick Astley

and Words

We’re no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I
A full commitment’s what I’m thinking of
You wouldn’t get this from any other guy

I just wanna tell you how I’m feeling
Gotta make you understand

Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down

Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.

If you’ve spent any amount of time online, you’re likely familiar with the term Rick-rolling.  The classic form of this prank is to simply to link the video into a discussion about something else entirely simply to get someone to click on the video and watch it.  It’s almost like an online version of playing tag.  Getting Rick-rolled is entirely harmless.  I have targeted friends with Rick-rolls and have myself been the target of Rick-rolls.  It all ends with simply the realization that you have indeed been gotten.  Depending on your disposition, you’ll either go on with life or plot revenge.  This post is not a glorified Rick-roll.  The link to the song is front and center, so it’s not as if I’m surreptitiously getting you to click on it.

When I first got to Microsoft over thirty years ago, computer security was pretty lax.  The buildings themselves were secure, but the individual computers were mostly accessible.  You still needed someone’s password to access their e-mail, but anything on their computer was mostly accessible.  As we each got access to more sensitive information, we first changed our software to lock out unauthorized use, and we also instructed everyone to lock down their computer upon leaving it unattended.  Of course, the latter entailed a change in culture, and some were more lackadaisical than others.

Eventually, coming up with new inventive ways to prank each other became a sport.  Everyone was susceptible, but only if you left your computer accessible and of course, you shouldn’t.  That said, many of us were not only hardcore computer programmers with a deep knowledge of operating systems, but most of us were also test engineers, which also meant that we generally took pleasure in destroying things.  What could possibly go wrong?

This post is a collection of some of these pranks.

The PC-Speaker prank

When I first worked with computers, many of them did not have audio hardware.  Everyone in my team had them, but that was because we work on audio components.  If you were desperate and wanted sounds on your computer, one of our developers had written a PC-Speaker driver.  There’s a tiny speaker on your motherboard that beeps when you first boot your computer, someone had written software to make it work to play conventional sounds.  The catch was that it didn’t have its own timer chip (or buffering, or DMA, etc.) so the only way that it could work was to disable any other activity on the computer while it played.  When I say any other activity, I mean literally any other activity; the image on your screen was frozen, your mouse would stop responding, etc.  Literally, nothing else would work while that sound played.

This may be tolerable for a second or two at a time.  Combine this with changing someone’s startup or mail notification sound to something really long (like one minute) and it was an excellent prank.

The “extra stuff” on office move prank

Upon each office move at Microsoft, we were each printed a sheet of labels (with your new office location) for all our stuff.  We were all expected to pack and label all our stuff and equipment.  Having been there for close to thirty years towards the end, I needed more boxes (and extra sheets, which I was happy to print myself).  The movers themselves were very efficient at moving just about anything that was labeled.  Sometimes the moves were entire teams moving to another building; other times there were individuals who simply moved to another team.

Many of us took the office move as opportunity to purge those items that we no longer needed.  That box of computer cables that we have not used for years need not be moved to your new office.  Of course, those who were mischievous decided that instead of simply leaving this box of cables behind, it would complement someone else’s new office well.  We snuck one of their labels and put it on this box.  Of course, that’s just one variation on this theme, others that I’ve seen:

• Upon transitioning from another team to ours, a teammate got a parting gift from his former team.  Shortly after leaving his packed office on his final day on his old team, they put a toilet in his office and slapped a move sticker on it.  I cannot make this up.  That toilet followed him for years; new teammates made sure that it was appropriately labeled on subsequent moves.
• Having printed extra labels for one person, people meticulously traversed the building for any computer earmarked for PC Recycle.  There were many of them because people were purging unused computers.  Each of these machines was reappropriated to that new recipient.  Sometimes that number was over 20 extra computers in various states of disrepair upon the completion of the office move.

There were, of course, instances when this was done with more benevolent motives.  I’ve seen parting teammates get farewell care packages this way.  This is low tech but requires an office move.

The send mail prank

This another one is relatively low tech, but it’s also the one that requires the least amount of preparation.  If someone leaves their machine accessible, you simply send mail from their account.  That said, it isn’t sporting for such mail to be deceptive or an activity that may get the target into trouble.  Most of these instances, are simple.  Mail sent to the group with subjects like:

• I don’t lock my computer.
• Tomorrow I’ll bring doughnuts for the entire team.
• I’ll bake a large batch of brownies for everyone.

And yes, most of the time, these would be honored.  I never did this one myself.

However, we had an option where we could change our profile picture in the company directory, and it would show up in Outlook attached to your messages.  We once changed that profile picture to an image that said, “I don’t lock my computer”.  And it remained there for the better part of a day before they noticed.

Change a computer setting prank

This is simple.  Change a computer setting that would make operating their computer a nuisance.  The one that I’ve seen the most frequently are mouse settings.  Here are some options:

• Reverse the left and right mouse buttons.  Yes, you can do this.  I often did it when I used my mouse left-handed.
• Change the double-click speed to something very short.  It will make it very difficult to double-click on anything.
• Reverse the scroll direction on the mouse wheel.  This can be very annoying.

Use your imagination.

The random Rick-roll prank

Now here’s some test lingo.  The key to establishing good repro steps for a bug report is causality.  In other words, something like “You do X, and Y occurs.”  Conversely, in order to establish a good, long-running prank you must make causality as difficult to establish as you possibly can.  One of the most effective ways to do this is to delay the event from the trigger, the impression is that something randomly occurs, when it is not actually random.  It makes it difficult to determine the trigger; that’s the cornerstone of this prank. 

The nature of the prank is relatively simple.  First, the trigger is to unlock your computer, which we needed to do all the time.  Second, the delay was a full eight minutes from the trigger; just ponder how many things you may do on your computer immediately after unlocking it.  Last, the response was simply to launch a video from YouTube, as you might guess, this video was often Rick Astley.  The effect was that the video popped up at random.

This isn’t that tough to do.  There’s a feature in Windows called the Task Scheduler that allows you to configure precisely this.  It may take time to configure this through the UI, but as it happens it allows you to export the details of that task into XML, and subsequently import it from that XML.  In fact, we built a batch file that could accomplish this in seconds.

There was one instance where we pranked someone with this.  First, we patiently waited for them to come back to their computer and unlock it.  Next, at about 7:45 from that time, we walked up to their desk and simply smiled at them, just as the video started.  It took days for him to track down the cause.  We were in stitches.

The lock-your-computer prank

This one is really just a modification of the above random Rick-roll prank.  We had one teammate who was especially lax about locking their computer.  He had been hit many times by different pranks, but still he continued to walk off to a meeting or restroom, leaving his machine available for any prying eyes.  One afternoon, a number of us where simply marveling at the frequency by which this occurred.  Our manager suggested that we should lock it for him; I walked to the computer and simply locked it (Windows-L keys).

Minutes later, I got a message from the above manager with the details of the utility that would lock the machine after a simple web search.  We built a new version of that above batch file that would instead lock your computer, but we shortened the duration to one minute.  Then we simply waited for the next time he wandered off, but it didn’t take long.

We pranked him late one afternoon.  It was pretty late, so I left for the day shortly after; I didn’t think about it much after that.  This was the dialogue the following day:

R: “What did you do to N yesterday?”
Me: “We hit him with the lock-your-machine thing.  Why?”
R: “Last night, he was cursing out of his office in regular one-minute intervals.”

The effect was that upon unlocking your computer, you only had one minute before it would lock by itself.  And no, it doesn’t matter if you were in the middle of something.  It was a persistent reminder to lock your computer.

Remote bluetooth audio prank

In my team, we each normally had a modest collection of desktops but only typically one set of speakers.  We often connected the audio from different computers onto the one set of speakers through an audio mixer (much like you may see in a recording studio).  This was great for convenience, but upon hearing a particular sound, we oftentimes didn’t know from which computer it originated.  Naturally, this could also be a source of abuse.

We had found a bluetooth audio dongle that we could power through micro-USB, we could connect to headphones or speakers, and was very small (the size of about a thumb drive) and easy to hide.  We proceeded to connect it to one teammate’s audio mixer and paired it with one of our less-used test computers.  Bluetooth can easily maintain a connection of 30 feet, so it could’ve been any of us, but as it happens it was the office immediately next door.

Once in place we used it to play sounds through those speakers remotely from another office.  We never used it to play anything too obvious, like “Stars and Stripes”.  We did use it to play sound events (like new mail notification) while they sat at their desk.  Only to have them look at Outlook, perplexed that they don’t see any new mail.  We may do this every few minutes and watch as they repeatedly checked Outlook for new mail.  We could barely contain our amusement.

Swapping sound events prank

Most people are familiar with sound events on the computer.  Most of these are audible notifications that something has occurred, like a new mail arrived, you clicked on a link in the browser, etc.  What most don’t realize is that if a sound event occurs while another one is playing, it stops the first and starts to play the second.  Most sound events are relatively short, so this doesn’t happen very often, but it certainly can happen.

This prank uses the same idea of as the Rick-rolling prank.  If enough time elapses between the trigger and the event, it becomes more difficult to establish causation.  The gag entails:

• Take someone’s existing event sound (mail alert will work) and make a copy of it.
• Add a long silence (use at least a minute) to the end of that sound.
• Add something obnoxious to the end of that silence.  It can be a honk, scream, whatever you’d like.  Something obviously out of place.
• Save that sound file.
• Assign that event to this new sound.

As this event is triggered, they’ll hear the start of the sound the way they normally would, then it continues to play silence which of course they can’t hear.  If that sound is not cancelled by another event, then they’ll eventually hear the other surprise sound at the end.  If enough time has elapsed, they won’t be able to establish the correlation between the event (mail notification) and the random sound.

Furthermore, they can examine their system and there are no stray processes running or suspicious activity.  Everything is behaving as it should.  It’s simply playing a different sound that they don’t expect.

Disabling an application prank

When debugging some types of features, we needed the ability to attach a debugger to an application the moment it starts.  There is a built-in feature in Windows that allows you to do this.  It’s called “Image File Execution Options”.  It involves writing into the registry.  Naturally, anything that involves writing into the registry has a chance of inextricably corrupting your computer, rendering it unusable, but also requires administrative privileges.

In fact, in order to minimize the need to remember these settings (or using them incorrectly), we published a utility called gflags that allowed you to set these with a UI; here’s a walkthrough.  These are computer developer tricks.  It allows you to name a debugger application that will run and attach to whatever application you specify.  However, if you should happen to specify “rundll32.exe” as your debugger, the application simply won’t run.  No warning, no message.  Nothing will happen.

We did this with Power Point, when a teammate needed to work on a presentation.  Note: they could continue to work on it on their laptop, but they wanted to work on it on their desktop computer.  We figured that they would simply complain about it, and we’d have a good chuckle and let them off the hook, but they struggled in silence for days.

This was just before an office move and I had forgotten about it in my new team.  They were justifiably very angry when they found out, and I felt horrible for what we had done to them.  This prank can be pretty mean-spirited.