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This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of see
by Bloomy22 2y ago
This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of seeing the people photos and the attached images, he saw strange images. As in the past we had some scare with xss reflected, we immediately got scared and went straight to investigate the matter. It turned out that the colleague had a Firefox extension installed that changed his images for Nicholas Cage's faces. He didn't remember having done it, but we did remember his blunder hahaha
- greazy 2y agoThat's hilarious. Sounds like someone was pranking your colleague. Was this the extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/
- Bloomy22 2y agoYes, it was that one!
- sam_bristow 2y agoDamn, I was half hoping it was doing some deepfake face swapping rather than just totally replacing the whole image. Part of me would love to install a "Being John Malkovich" style face replacement plugin onto someone's machine.
- mocamoca 2y agoAt university, we used this extension to teach our classmates about good security practices, such as locking their computers when left unattended. It was fun, especially when professors didn't lock their computers. And my former classmates did learn to lock their computers :)
- iterateoften 2y agoviolating security policies in order to “teach a lesson” is a sure fire way to get people to lose trust in you. Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.
- darkwater 2y agoWhat a sad company you worked for
- userbinator 2y agoIronic, given that a ton of the security dogma these days is "don't trust anyone" --- you can guess why that started happening; precisely because of people like him.
- saagarjha 2y agoIt’s because people like him are usually less polite.
- do_not_redeem 2y agoIt all depends on the company of course. I worked at a place where if you left your laptop unlocked, anyone could use your slack account to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow. That was more effective than any training video they could have made us watch. But I obviously wouldn't do something like that as a lone wolf.
- maeil 2y agoSimilar here at a big company that placed a lot of emphasis on opsec. It worked.
- KineticLensman 2y ago> to announce you were buying breakfast for the team tomorrow Where I used to work the thing was to reply-all to emails simply saying "I love you very much".
- benreesman 2y agoI’m of two minds about it. I agree that these days it’s by far the safer choice to steer clear of such antics. But I do sort of miss the days when we had a little more fun with computers even at work. Twenty years ago it was pretty ubiquitous to get a goofy desktop background if you left your machine unsecured all the time and I never saw any harm come from it. Times change I suppose.
- pjerem 2y agoA pretty good one is https://fakeupdate.net https://fakeupdate.net I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.
- saghm 2y agoA roommate of mine in college used to leave his laptop unlocked all the time, and I found an app that would put an overlay on the screen that looked like a kernel panic. This went on for months, and he became convinced that his laptop had some issue where it would panic if he left it idle for too long. One day he happened to be going through his apps folder, and he saw something with a name like "iPanic.app", and watching his dawning comprehension as he realized what just must have been going on was probably the satisfying conclusion to a prank I've ever experienced.
- Arech 2y agothis is a gem, thanks for sharing!
- veunes 2y agoSome IT departments spend years trying to drill "Lock your computer!" into people’s heads yet you need just really simple solution!
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoWe used to set the desktop wallpaper to David Hasselhoff.
- nunez 2y agoStuff of legends.
- fooker 2y agoHere's anecdote from Google's glory days! We had a similar extension, with Larry Page instead of Nicholas Cage. And anyone leaving their computer unlocked were subject do it. This became widespread enough to be mentioned at the new employee orientation.
- veunes 2y agoI love that kind of tech workplace comedy
- ltr_ 2y agoI remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.
- iamthejuan 2y agoIt is the logo.sys which is actually a bitmap file if I remember it correctly.
- InsideOutSanta 2y agoAt a company selling a B2B platform, we had an internal extension used to teach how to write extensions that drew an interactive pet on screen, similar to the one in this VS Code extension. It accidentally got deployed to one client, which caused a complete company shutdown because lots of people suddenly reported being hit by a virus to their internal IT team, causing company-wide panic. I'm not sure what the lesson here is.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- DontchaKnowit 2y agoAt my company this happened once across all our internal tools. It was a joke inside one department that accidentally got pushed comapny wide
- taikon 2y agohttps://github.com/giusgad/pets.nvim https://github.com/giusgad/pets.nvim