Ah, but...
...this doesn't really work with BYOD, does it, as you'll have beetled off home with the evidence.
A jokey US ad agency recruitment campaign encouraged users to stage fake computer crashes so that they might be able to ditch work early. The Happy Hour virus from Colorado admen TDA_Boulder came with a series of screensavers that allowed users to claim they were unable to work because their machines had gone wrong, creating a …
In the good old Windows 95 days you could download a lovely program that allowed you to drag a bomb onto any running application and it would immediately crash. That was useful in my college days. And then of course.... there was this site: http://www.rjlpranks.com/pranks/ hours and hours of fun!
Oh sure it's hilarious to fake something like that...ha ha ha...of course the poor bastards in tech support...oh they DON'T get to clock off...oh no...they'll be there dealing with this infantile prank while the laggardly laggards are out wanking about as well as most likely getting blamed for it happening or derided by the staff for "not being able to take a joke" when the tech staff so much as make a comment that actually its not that funny.
Assholes.
@ joeW
Anyone in tech support able to read "derided by the staff for "not being able to take a joke" when the tech staff so much as make a comment that actually its not that funny." as not being able to see through this one in under three seconds should not be touching a keyboard.
Suggest mucking out as a possible career choice. No need to think and even better...no keyboards. A veritable win win.
Anyone from tech support with half a brain would be telling management that this is a particularly serious virus that will require an all nighter on overtime, and that it could only have been caught through the user porn surfing.
Then remove screen saver and go home/pub/whatever. You're getting revenge and paid for doing nothing.
The UTTER bastard is the one wielding the cattle prods and sending abusive e-mails in your name to the CEO to get you fired. Oh, and his PFY would put you on some most-wanted (armed and dangerous) list to give you a well-deserved wake-up call by armed police.
Isn't that about right, Simon?
@ gav
Now we're talking! I approve this. And the overtime. Which of course I charge to the department responsible for the fucking around in the first place.
And make sure that the next time they get uppity I make comment that they seem to have not been involved in any pron related incidents recently. Especially around budget time.
Don't get mad, get even…
Get in touch with the system admins, get them to set up a mirror of the site, with internal DNS pointing the site hostname to that in-house mirror.
Then on the mirror, tweak it to come up, stay there for maybe a minute or two, then print the word "BUSTED!" in big letters across the screen.
A (ex) mate of mine asked for my help to get rid of a virus on his PC. He'd spent days trying to do it, not wanting to admit that I might know more about computers than him.
A short investigation revealed that something had simply changed his desktop picture (possibly one of his kids).
Needless to say I didn't get any thanks and then he proceeded to tell everyone how he managed to fix his computer. Dickhead.
Still, the image was a good one and it looked genuine, but the giveaway was the desktop icons sitting on top of it!
If the beancounters, or similar, play this one too often, print a few creative financial statements on headed paper showing their outrageous expenses at Spearmint Rhino, donkeylust.com etc etc, shred them to only halfway down the page and then leave a sheaf of them in the dumpster and "let" some hack find them. Or maybe the puritan spinster from HR.
Yep, it's one of the Xscreensaver suite. And I have it enabled in my screensaver rotation.
Which was pretty funny the other day. I have two laptops on my desk. My own personal one, which is my actual workstation, dual-boots Gentoo Linux and Windows 7. Spends most of its time in the former OS.
The other is employer-supplied, dual boots Ubuntu 12.04 and Windows 7, spends most of its time in the latter OS.
I front up to work, look across at the work-supplied laptop, and notice a nasty BSOD. The others had seen it, but didn't know if it was the genuine one or not — until I pointed out that the fake ones, tapping the Shift key would prompt Xscreensaver to ask for a password.
As above, on my work PC, I'm running the Sysinternals Bluescreen screensaver. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.aspx
[quote]
Bluescreen cycles between different Blue Screens and simulated boots every 15 seconds or so. Virtually all the information shown on Bluescreen's BSOD and system start screen is obtained from your system configuration - its accuracy will fool even advanced NT developers. For example, the NT build number, processor revision, loaded drivers and addresses, disk drive characteristics, and memory size are all taken from the system Bluescreen is running on.
[/quote]
a simple URL you can use to trigger these? Quickly slipped into the DNS... and the whole department goes down one by one as they use their browsers. And with suitable headscratching and umming until they look away where you can press the escape key and your reputation score increases.
I've had a screensaver stashed for a decade that rotates various BSODs, the spitting image of a paranoid motherboard. but it got old fast. in a real crash, the phone queue system would go away on the desktop, and without a proper logout. so that is no dodge.
in my old TS days, I would just put another yet another VT240 keyboard under my arm, adopt a stern expression, and walk quickly out of the building for a little calm and reflection ;)
Ah memories of night shift operations on old ICL System 4 kit back in the late '70s. 4 HB pencil, line drawn between two exposed pins on PCB in controller cabinet and call the hardware techs. 3 hours across the road in the Station Inn downing hose pipes* whilst the board swap/hunt was under way. All solved with a soft eraser, great surprise when it worked again! Ah the days of big components and hand assembled PCBs.
* pint of Guinness draft with enough sipped of the top to insert a triple brandy - five of those and you knew you'd had a drink.