Yep, back in the very early 2000s, this was something we did at school to jokke around.
The cupholder joke was neat, it had a nice official looking UI with the Coca Cola logo, and a corporate style promotion text, there was a button to click to accept the “gift”, and only then did the CD drive open.
Then I remember running a joke program that would make the startbutton jump around on the screen.
Now they’ll install any random fucking app a company tells them to install. Oh, you want to see a menu at the restaurant? Just install this app. How about fuck you?
Modern mobile OS’ and apps are quite strictly sandboxed so, with reasonable vetting like Google Play Store and Apple Store, you can reasonably safely install random crap and uninstall it later. It’s a different realm from running random binary executables.
That depends on your definition of safe. Everyone wants to be a data broker these days, and the amount of data that can be gleaned from basic app permissions is startling. Not to mention that it’s just annoying. We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser. 90% of the apps out there could be websites, and the world would be better if they were. But having an app gives the publisher a lot more control over what they can do, how they can spam you, and what they can scrape, and that’s why everyone has their own stupid apps now.
We already solved this “an app for everything” problem 40 years ago with the HTML/CSS/W3C standards and a regular old web browser.
God, please, no. There’s a really good reason WebOS experiments all, universally, failed, and it isn’t because Big Brother wants your data. They can get it through web apps just fine, anyway. No, the reason is because web apps suck.
Seemingly innocuous Play store apps get found to be viruses all the time, most recent in my memory being a few barcode scanner apps, farthest back in my memory being flashlight apps back before android did it natively, but there’s been more over the years. Trusting apps “because play store” is horrible practice.
Because play store and OS permissions. Nothing is 100% safe but that’s two layers of defense these apps have that a random exe designed for an OS that gives root perms to every process does not have
Here’s an unsigned APK that’s just our website in a container plus all of the tracking and data mining we could shove in there. Why dont you go ahead and oauth us to all of your social media accounts too? Don’t worry, we only need post permissions so that we can bring you these sweet customized bargains.
I liked the random.exe that unmuted your computer, turned the volume to max, and said “hey everybody, I’m downloading pornography!”. My friend got a big kick out of that when he ran it at work. …ah, those were the days…
You could tell your friends that you were going to “hack” their computer.
They would of course not believe you.
You would then send them a few images that looked hackery and a few that were broken.
The broken images were actually a link to “A:/fakeimage.jpg” and “D:/fakeimage.jpg”.
This would cause A drive, the common “floppy” drive, to turn on and look for a fake image for a few seconds. As I recall this worked even with no disk inserted and made a bunch of noise.
Similarly the D drive, the common CD drive, would spin up, also making noise. I believe this did require a disk in the drive, but at the time everyone always had some form of disk in the drive.
What you had really done was nothing, but making your friends computer make noise unexpectedly was still funny.
Not a remote trick but put a small sticky note on the bottom of the mouse to cover the light. Or CTRL + ALT + DOWN ARROW to rotate the screen upside down, should work on win10.
There was an AOL instant messenger exploit back in the day where you would send a link or attachment or something and it would cause the other person’s desktop wallpaper to change to a big dick or something, and all of the desktop icons were turned into other porn thumbnails. Lastly, it would turn the windows 95 or 98 or whatever volume up to 100% and blast porn tracks. It was brutal. My friends would do it to each other all the time.
There was a whole collection of “hacker” programs seemingly exclusively made and used by 12.5-13.5-year-olds that did these things. AOHell was the most well-known.
Back in the early 2000's I was working tech support, which gave me admin access to users' computers over the network. I could pop open their CD drives from my desk; drove one particular user absolutely batty for a day.
I can’t speak to the executable, but I know back in '95 the joke about someone calling support and asking why they have a cup holder but no CD drive was already crusty. There were a bunch of variations, but here’s the first one I found for those too young to remember:
Customer: “Can you help me, the cup holder on my new computer broke, and I don’t know what to do?
Friend: “Cup holder? What are you talking about? None of our computers come with a cup holder attached to them, and I’ve never heard of one that did.”
Customer: Yes, well the one you sold me did, and the other day I went to set a mug of coffee on it and it just snapped off!”
Friend: “Sir, can you describe what the cup holder looks like, because I still can’t picture what a cup holder on a computer would look like?”
At this point the customer is getting a little irritated!
Customer: “Look, I don’t know how you could not know that you sell computers with cup holders on them, because it’s right in the middle of the thing, and when you push a button on the side, it pops out so you can set your drink on it, and it says 4X on the front cover!”
A long pause . . .
Friend: Sir, are you telling me, you’re using your CD-Rom drive as a beverage holder?"
Customer: “What’s a CD-Rom Drive?”
And now, a terrible bonus joke that is completely unrelated but was around at about the same time:
How do you know if you’re addicted to the Internet? You get a tattoo that says “This body best viewed with Netscape 2.01 or higher.”
It wouldn’t shock me, honestly. I did home support in a small computer repair shop for extra cash and all the leftover parts I could carry in high school in the 90s, then I did some time at an MSP for many years in the 00s and early 10s. I heard many versions of that particular anecdote from the time I started until CD drives stopped coming standard.
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