I am a child

So we’ve pretty much established that I’m 35, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m basically still a child.

When I see something like the page of “revenge” items at Spymall, I just laugh like an evil ten-year old, and spend time coming up with ill-advised scenarios in which I could use that stuff. (And I do mean ill-advised–I should have learned from the disasters that were my experiment with chemistry set revenge at age 9, and the whole Liquid Heet thing on the Grade 7 school trip.)

The chemical stuff interests me most, since I couldn’t do that myself. The little annoying toys are of less interest, since I can do things that are much more annoying myself.

Actually, speaking of childish pranks, I should mention my favourite one I ever pulled in the office.

This was in the late mid-90s. I worked in an office full of geeks, one of the few developers in a building full of people doing phone support.

Among ourselves we had a little game where whenever you came upon someone’s PC in an unlocked state you would immediately set their colour scheme to Hot Dog Stand. Naturally, this lead pretty quickly to everyone developing the habit of locking their machines whenever they left, and eventually to the smarter people deleting that scheme from their machines. (Or in my case, actually hiding the control panel applet that let you change this–I was sneaky.)

In my competition with one particular co-worker, I decided that I was going to put my coding skills to work and snazz up his machine. So I wrote a small application that would set the system colours to those from the Hot Dog Stand scheme (all hard-coded in, so it worked regardless of whether or not the scheme existed on that machine). This application was given a Microsoft-sounding name (and in later refinements, a version resource block with MS-sounding descriptions, and an MS-looking icon). When I next got a shot at his machine, I dropped this application into the system directory, and set windows up to run the application on system startup (via the registry, not the startup group).

Because of the way Windows colour schemes worked at the time, that would mean that whenever the application ran, it would change the colours so that the NEXT time the user started up the system they would be Hot Dog Stand. So the first post-Trojan log in would see the normal colours, the app would run, and the next login would be HDS (and the app would run, changing the settings with no effect). Then if he changed the colours they would stay for the next login (since the app had already run) but would immediately be back to HDS the following time.

This drove him crazy for a while–he knew I wasn’t touching his machine, but it was still getting “Hot Dogged” regularly. This gave me quite a few laughs, especially at his confusion during a week when I was in Boston and his machine still kept getting Hot Dogged.

Eventually he figured it out (with, I think, some help from a leak–I had to tell some people how I had done it, I’m not the perfect criminal). I did a couple of other things: windows has about nine ways of setting things to run on startup, and they were not well documented (and we didn’t have Autoruns back then to check), so I used quite a few of them to start differently named & identified versions of the program.

Eventually he figured out all of them.

So I needed a newer, more devious plan.

I wrote an application with a timer that would trigger processing on a random interval of between 1 to 5 days. Every time processing was triggered, the program would read all the current system colours and would move each one 5% closer to the current background colour (or RGB 1 colour unit if 5% was less than that). This move was immediate, not done by changing the system colours as with the previous program.

I wrote a Windows service wrapper to put around this program, both to hide it more effectively, and so that it could run even when no one was logged in to the machine. Of course I made this exe look like a standard NT service, one that everyone in the office was running, but which no one actually needed. (You’d be surprised at how many things like that are running on your machine right now!). Same name, descriptions, timestamp, and even the same filesize (bless resource files for padding). I then dropped my little program onto his box, at my next opportunity (they were pretty rare now), replacing the real service, and went on my way.

And then, over the next 10-20 days, his display seemed to slowly “fade out”. Each time the program’s timer triggered, all the colours moved a little closer to the background, resulting an that apparently slow fade out. Each step was barely perceptible (and in some cases not), but over weeks it became apparent.

I believe I managed to keep a straight face as he complained about a possible video card or monitor problem.

I think I got a month or two of laughs out of that one.

I am a child.