I believe that specific site was called "Last Measure". It would also open up a bunch of shock sites...
When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a 'virus' that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.
I'd make Windows 11
Edit: Whoops, that's not harmless
When I worked at an MSP in early 2000s they would “prank” new hires with a site that did this. It would keep creating popups so you couldn’t close them. That stopped after customers heard it. More horrid graphical “pranks” replaced it of course.
A screamer virus could bring the world to its knees.
Instant flashback to the MSN Messenger virus where you could remotely open your friends CD-drive
That one got my mom once and she freaked out at the neighbor kid because he 'knew computers' so it must have been him.
Depending on you definition of harmless, I'd randomly replace one character every 1000 with an alternative version, newlines from crlf to lf, spaces, even some printable characters have similar options in other languages
A virus that replaces the normal space with a random one of similar space characters that all look normal to the end user but would fuck up programming.
One that replaces tab with 4 spaces.
If you just replace letters with alternate versions of those letters, with different Unicode, wouldn’t it set off the spell checker?
Oh, that would be fun.
I was thinking more about source code, bash scripts won't run on Unix if you got a crlf and cli editors do not display them differently (by default). Python scripts needed a declaration on top to run with a certain encoding, but the error there is clearer. If you use them as string constants it's also going to just work internally but may break if you compare them with an external value
Careful, satan. That could lead to some suicidal ideation
I had one guy in the late 90s at my HS who made a program that copied itself onto every directory on the computer at startup. It was a .com file and if you ran it it would use the PC speakers to play a tone increasing in volume and pitch until it was unbearable. You had to do a hard boot to end it.
I also remember the Form virus that made the PC speakers make a sound each time you pressed a key. Can't remember if it did anything else.
That poor guy that thought he accomplished it by just having a virus that changed peoples files to pictures from Clannad but got arrested for copyright.
Like genue wishing this one.
Not so harmless to the guy living in Iran that got stoned.
theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.
RedReader my beloved 😢
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