alt.hn

4/1/2025 at 7:11:30 AM

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

 http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-april-fools-joke-that-might-have.html

by goldenskye

4/1/2025 at 3:58:10 PM

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display.

The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do.

One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately.

Hmmmm.

A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".

A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked.

Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

by myself248

4/1/2025 at 6:48:33 PM

> In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. > ...Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)

I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and discovered that the username included in the message is not authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which) software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)

This should not be construed as a confession of any network shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high school. ;) :D :)

by simmons

4/2/2025 at 2:08:15 PM

> You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing.

It's entirely possible that it wasn't part of Netware, I don't remember the hard details as it was a very long time ago. However, it worked in DOS text-mode (we rarely ran Windows), and my impression was that Microsoft didn't do much network-aware stuff until well into Windows. So that's why I thought of it as a Novell thing rather than a Microsoft thing.

> the username included in the message is not authenticated at all

Oh.... oh dear.

by myself248

4/2/2025 at 10:34:29 AM

I believe that Netware had NET SEND before Microsoft had any networking at all. But maybe I’m wrong. Certainly NT had a netware compatible stack, but this was way after netware blazed the trail.

by diroussel

4/1/2025 at 4:16:26 PM

I had discovered the windows net send command as a highschooler too. We mainly just messaged jokes back and forth. One student later decided to try the wildcard to send to everyone, just a simple "Hi". It went out over the entire district hitting multiple schools. I forget why, but no one knew who did it at first. But we had some software installed that let the admin/teacher remotely blank screens or lock the computer, etc. I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net send.

by pests

4/1/2025 at 5:36:20 PM

Speaking of "feeling bad for teaching someone"... I must have been in 5th grade and this other kid was talking about shorting out a power outlet. I said "What I'd do is unfold a couple of paperclips, stick them into a rubber eraser, then plug that into the outlet and twist it to get the paperclips to touch."

A few days later the principal calls me in. "Did you tell him to do this?" "I didn't tell him to, we were just talking about how to do it." "... well, he's done it before. Don't do anything like this again. Dismissed." I still can't believe that I got out of it; petty tyrants love to flex their power.

by linsomniac

4/1/2025 at 6:53:52 PM

:)

I’m legit trying to figure out who your calling the petty tyrant flexing their power: - The principal which let off with a warning - The other kid, popping circuit breakers - Or you, ‘corrupting’ other young minds :)

by wingspar

4/1/2025 at 11:07:14 PM

It refers to the principle, who didn't flex his power which came as a surprise. The other kid is a gremlin. GP was playing the clueless engineer type who forgets to give thought to who is asking the question and how the answer will be used.

by fc417fc802

4/2/2025 at 11:55:48 AM

>playing the clueless engineer type

Or... Maybe I was just 10 and hadn't really learned that lesson yet. ;-)

by linsomniac

4/1/2025 at 4:45:39 PM

I did the same thing by accident, except mine was "test", I heard murmors around about some strange message on computers in multiple schools in our district, so I fessed up immediately. Our network administrator was just mildly amused about the whole affair and no punishments were carried out.

by BrainBacon

4/2/2025 at 11:54:08 AM

I got a three day suspension from school for doing this. I sent something mundane like “hello” to entire school. Few minutes later, the IT admin came running down, told me off and took my details.

Made the mistake of telling a couple friends what happened. Said friends thought it would be hilarious to send swear words to the entire school (I was not there).

They played dumb saying they didn’t know what would happen and got off with one day each, I got suspended for three days.

I wouldn’t have minded so much except the next day was an inter-school chess tournament. Thankfully the sympathetic chess coach told me to wait behind the school the next morning and picked me up in the school bus.

by nraf

4/1/2025 at 4:19:45 PM

I just wrote a comment on this thread and I almost thought you were talking about me for a second. lol

by xeromal

4/1/2025 at 5:11:44 PM

In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al.

Anyway when he was caught (a fellow classmate ratted him out) he got 10 days out of school suspension. The VP threatened to call the police… for what offense I’m not really sure. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of cybercrime and cybercrime laws. I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

They removed the ability for student accounts to map network drives, but the district IT guy was not fired. I really don’t get that. Maybe the union saved him… but dog, everyone knows you can map network drives by right clicking on the desktop. I never thought to try it, but that doesn’t mean the district’s IT SME gets a pass.

by gymbeaux

4/1/2025 at 5:22:18 PM

> I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

My expectation is that laws probably specify that gaining access that you know you’re not supposed to be able to get is probably illegal, but I get your point.

Reminds me, however, of the pen-testers that got hired to infiltrate a court system and got harassed by a prosecutor despite having explicit approval to conduct an audit.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/

Our judicial system is ludicrous.

by alsetmusic

4/2/2025 at 3:06:22 AM

The Florida Computer Crimes Act was passed in 1978 so as you can imagine it’s very draconian. I’m pretty sure it was a misdemeanor for 16-year-old me to boot Linux from a live USB as a means to get around the IE-only web filter the school district used.

by gymbeaux

4/1/2025 at 10:11:31 PM

If someone didn't question, or otherwise call out, the pentesters activity, that would have been a blemish against the security training of the org being pentested. This is why pentesters need a way to immediately escalate to the hiring party, to satisfy legit concerns over access and ensure those claiming to be pentesters legitimately are.

by thwarted

4/1/2025 at 11:14:12 PM

In this case IIRC they did have exactly that but were caught up in drama between different factions within the justice system. Unfortunately a few of the people involved behaved in bad faith and thus they got stuck in jail for a while.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is probably a cautionary tale about petty individuals prioritizing workplace politics over ethical integrity.

by fc417fc802

4/1/2025 at 11:18:51 PM

If you listen to the episode you'll learn that such escalation did occur, and unfortunately the harrassment by local LEO did not cease.

by Full_Clark

4/1/2025 at 9:58:17 PM

> I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

It may not pass as hacking, but it certainly was unauthorized. Network policy in software should reflect reality, but the source of authority comes from humans. Your friend literally was not authorized to access teachers' files, regardless of poor software configuration permitting the capability.

by chungy

4/1/2025 at 11:49:09 PM

Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.

by dandelany

4/2/2025 at 1:06:07 AM

The interesting bit is that social expectations matter.

There is a social expectation that people can generally only enter your home with explicit permission, and so if they didn't invite you it's trespassing even if the door is unlocked. But maybe you have some close friends who you get used to coming over and just entering even if you may be out at the moment -- and then it's not trespassing anymore.

Remote computer access is a much younger phenomenon than people living in houses, and so social expectations aren't as established. There's a legitimate need for discussion there.

For example, if you have an open webserver that you want people to access, is it trespassing if people fiddle a little with the URLs and encounter documents that you didn't mean to put out there? I'd argue it would make for a healthier and more tech-savvy society if we didn't consider that trespassing.

If we try to push the houses analogy further, it's a bit like inviting people into your house for a big party, and then somebody enters a room that you didn't want them to enter. It's a faux-pas, but you'd probably also have a hard time if you tried to label it trespassing.

by atq2119

4/2/2025 at 3:27:33 AM

There are echoes to discussions a few months ago about IMG_0001.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42314547

The site displays random, ancient videos uploaded from the early iPhone YouTube app, often without people understanding what they were doing.

I tend to err on the side of caution: I don't expect most people to be tech savvy, and I think those of us who are must exercise restraint to avoid trespassing.

by macintux

4/2/2025 at 12:18:39 PM

I actually agree with you, but the point is the balance.

Don't steal. Don't share embarrassing or humiliating information you may come across.

At the same time, there should be safety from prosecution overreach.

I ask for this mostly not for my current self but for "kids" (including young adults, e.g. college students) who are on a hacker journey in the original sense of the word. As a society, we should encourage rather than stifle that sort of exploration.

by atq2119

4/1/2025 at 8:27:41 PM

Someone at my high school (late 90s/early 2000s) was apparently distributing something on CDRs.

I got called into the police station, where a cop asked me, verbatim: "Son, did you copywrite them there CDs?"

by pavel_lishin

4/2/2025 at 3:08:09 AM

Classic

by gymbeaux

4/1/2025 at 8:20:54 PM

I did something similar in 7th grade, with the extra naughtiness of charging my peers 50 cents or so to drop the basic Windows games like pinball and Ski Free into their home drive. I created a couple of joke files in my favorite teachers' directories and then notified the IT admin before someone more nefarious saw what I was doing.

That admin became my mentor and is now a lifelong friend.

by pathartl

4/2/2025 at 3:10:38 AM

The IT admin at my high school was a prick and from what I’m told took it very personally when my friend was caught mapping network drives.

The closest thing we had to a computer class was graphic design where you played with Photoshop and Premier for a year. God forbid we learned to write code or whatever.

by gymbeaux

4/1/2025 at 11:25:45 PM

It sucks when school administrators are needlessly punitive.

In my school, some jackass kid made a photocopy of a $20 bill, on a little mid-1990s HP Officejet in the library. Even in those days, they were programmed to make bad copies of US currency (I think they were enlarged and the color messed up). It was more of an innocent “woah look at this thing”, there was no intent or effort to glue it together and try to use it.

The assistant principal, who was a petty drunk who was uniquely unsuited for her job, flipped out and called the secret service. The kid was arrested & had a lot of issues over nothing.

It always stuck in my mind and accelerated the development of my contempt for petty tyrants who experience joy from the pain of others.

by Spooky23

4/2/2025 at 3:14:32 AM

I would imagine as in the professional world, there are certain school jobs that attract sociopaths/narcissists/psychopaths. Yes, I’m talking of course about vice principals. My elementary, middle and high school principals were very nice. The VPs were mostly unapproachable hardasses. It may have something to with the principal vs vice principal responsibilities in the U.S. I’m not sure how it is elsewhere in the world.

by gymbeaux

4/2/2025 at 10:21:10 PM

I've never met a principal or vice principal who was not either bullied as a child or a bully.

Something about having healthy self esteem in childhood causes you to avoid education administration career paths.

by BizarroLand

4/2/2025 at 1:04:46 AM

Is it really breaking and entering if they left their key under the flowerpot and you found it?

by ummonk

4/2/2025 at 5:23:52 AM

Even with a key it is breaking and entering

by lurquer

4/1/2025 at 4:18:55 PM

I have a very similar story. In high school, our library was using a windows environment and through some luck, I discovered NET SEND or something like that. I figured out my friend's computer names and I started sending them messages. We eventually communicated this way even under the strict librarian and I eventually hatched a plan to annoy everyone. I put together a crappy batch file that iterated through every computers name and just mass sent messages but screwed up the iterator and it went forever. I think we had to restart all the computers but no one figured out it was me except my friends.

Miss those days and also miss playing soldat on those crappy PCs.

by xeromal

4/1/2025 at 8:21:36 PM

Though no further work is being done on the original and the FLOSS forks aren't ready yet (soldank++ and opensoldat) the game is still playable on modern PCs and even free on steam ;) (Disclaimer: former maintainer)

by shoozza

4/1/2025 at 8:50:10 PM

I had no idea it was in steam but we used to play that game all the time. We had probably 10 or 15 guys playing in the library lol.

Thanks for making such a fun game!

I'll check it out

by xeromal

4/1/2025 at 6:54:38 PM

Once swapped the system disc of a netware server live. Can't remember why exactly, I think it stared to count bad sectors as we watched and we needed to keep it alive copying the data to the new, to-be system disk. Then we made sure, nobody was logged in, it was about midnight, hit Alt-LeftShift-RightShift-Esc and while Netware paused in the kernel debugger, swapped the disks. Continued the debugger and - it worked :)

by jeffreygoesto

4/2/2025 at 1:34:15 AM

A bunch of NET SEND stories in this old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28844101

As I said there, back in the day I wrote a C++ program that was basically an IM interface on top of NET SEND. Fun times.

by Cyphase

4/1/2025 at 9:00:29 PM

We used to pull similar shenanigans in middle school. Teacher computers were finally on wifi, So I'd pull out my little android tablet and USB Wi-Fi card. Run an evil AP, deauth, downgrade to HTTP, and put whatever I wanted on the web page. Good times.

by _bin_

4/1/2025 at 6:24:59 PM

Oh, wow, Novel Netware. That takes me back to high school.

Our computer lab had Novel Netware, I forget which version. Every once in a while, our regular programming classes (Pascal in first two years, C and Assembly Language in third year, Prolog and Theory of Relational Databases in fourth year) would be held in the lab, instead of the classroom, and we would get to put what we learned to use and do some actual programming.

Now, some of us had computers at home and had been using them since before the high school, so we tended to finish our work really fast and then get bored. And just like a lone sharpie cap is the most terrifying thing a parent can stumble upon, so a bored high school kid is the worst thing for your computer security.

Each student had their own account, but teachers shared a limited number of teacher accounts, with special privileges, such as monitoring other students' screens, having full write access to every student's files, etc.

For some reason, I don't remember why, teachers would occasionally go to a student's workstation and log in as a teacher there, to fix the problem. I honestly can't remember why, but it was a common enough problem that it wouldn't raise any brows even if one of us "advanced" kids did it.

So, of course, I eventually came up with the idea of writing a really small and simple program that would look exactly like the Netware login prompt, with one small difference: when you entered the password, it would write it to a file on the filesystem spit out whatever the "incorrect password, try again" reply was, and then execv the actual login program.

The ruse worked perfectly: I called the teacher, they tried to log in, thought they mistyped the password, tried again, succeeded, did whatever it was they were supposed to do, and logged out. Now I had the teacher account password, and so did my best friends in mischief.

We had some innocent fun by pulling a couple of very minor pranks on our fellow students that flew under the radar, so none of the teachers realized that the security was compromised.

But then the annual programming competitions came, and those went all the way from school level, to municipality, to city, to republic, to federal. I was one of the people who qualified to the city-level competition, and what do you know, that year it was hosted in our school's lab.

I finished all the problems with plenty of time to spare, which is how I came up with the "brilliant" idea of helping some of my peers by sharing my solutions with them using the teacher account. Now, one thing they neglected to teach us was the importance of testing, but I'll be honest, even if they did that, I was a typical teenage "gifted kid", which meant I was overconfident and lazy. As a result, everyone who I shared my solutions with happened to have the exact same bugs in them.

A few days later, they called me to the teachers' room in the computer lab, and said that they knew I cheated, that I was already disqualified, and that I should save myself some trouble and explain what I did. So naturally, I came clean and I thought that was the end of it.

Indeed, it was the end of it for me. Nothing else happened, at least nothing of consequence for me. Years later, I found out that I almost got expelled. They held a teacher assembly or conference or whatever it's called when you get all of them together to make a decision, and the decision was whether to kick me out of the school. Fortunately, they decided to let me off with a warning and the official reprimand from the headmaster.

My mom didn't think that was funny at all.

by CodeMage

4/1/2025 at 9:40:21 PM

On Windows these messages are created using SMB IPC and you'd think this would mean the "sender" (user and host) are authenticated, but nope, the sender name is just a string field that can be anything. You'd also think the host would be based on something like the client IP and a reverse DNS lookup, what with the whole Active Directory thing, but nope, it's also just a string field that can be anything. And with SMB IPC you'd think only some privileged component can invoke it, but nope, any user can send those message popup commands to any machine pretending to be anyone on any other machine. I did not make wise use of this knowledge back then.

by formerly_proven

4/1/2025 at 10:02:17 PM

In my high school, we put SETI at home on the image used to ghost all the PCs, and set it to run at night. Our high school had a few hundred PCs so we were climbing the leaderboard for a while until the District IT department found out and did not approve of using that much bandwidth...

by VirusNewbie

4/1/2025 at 12:34:06 PM

I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds.

It's just such a great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position.

I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.

by glenstein

4/1/2025 at 1:55:35 PM

Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.

by dullcrisp

4/1/2025 at 2:19:04 PM

Yea, that’s what I thought, too. The prankster inadvertently floated a very unpopular plan that leadership had and proved it was unpopular before they could implement it. That was probably the root of what actually got admin pissed. Nobody gets disciplined for a harmless joke—you get in trouble when you make the boss’s boss’s boss look bad.

by ryandrake

4/1/2025 at 3:25:31 PM

Oh yeah. That'll get you.

Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that, when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because apparently, computer services had cut off-campus access for data-tracking purposes as prelude to an as-yet-unannounced shift to pay-per-page printing (i.e., they wanted to see how much inconvenience the student body would tolerate), and having the inconvenience routed around in software fucked up their numbers.

... now that I tell this story, it occurs to me that nobody ever called computer services on the whole "Running an unsanctioned social experiment on the faculty and student body" part of all this...

(p.s: I think, perhaps, computer services learned the wrong lesson here, because when they rolled out the program at a uni with a massive computer science program, the techniques the students invented to route around paying for print jobs were legendary. Things like "wrap the PostScript job in a detector that tells the daemon tracking pagecount 'I am printing one blank page' and tells the daemon that feeds the job to the printer 'here are the actual pages'". Perhaps their takeaway should have been "If you add friction and cost to the process, bored students will volunteer time to reduce the friction and cost").

by shadowgovt

4/1/2025 at 8:48:17 PM

We had a similar setup at my university - printing to a lab printer was disallowed from a machine that wasn't physically in the lab. The printers had routeable IPs, so I'm guessing they did some kind of whitelisting at the printer itself.

The problem was, we were a Sun campus, and my tablet PC ran Linux. So I could SSH in, open up StarOffice, and hit Print on a document - all from the tablet PC in the crook of my elbow - then walk into the lab and pick the documents up out of the tray.

I never got in "trouble" for this, per se, but I did have a lab technician once look at me as if to say, "that's not allowed..."

by don-code

4/1/2025 at 7:26:18 PM

The trickster is indeed an ancient archetype that can bring both wisdom and chaos. Historically, however, my understanding is that prior to Plato, essentially all knowledge, including philosophy, was understood to be received from divine sources. It was through the Socratic dialogues that the idea of knowledge as being something gained through human reason gained a foothold.

One could easily argue then that Plato was essentially a prankster and what we know as western civilization is a consequence of his trickery.

by norir

4/2/2025 at 1:15:40 AM

> essentially all knowledge

In one particular European tradition, maybe? But elsewhere the trickster may themselves be a divine source of insight. Hermes in Greek, the Southwest American Kokopelli, etc.

My point is that the trickster as philosophical root is an idea that has tendrils far beyond a Western viewpoint. I cant find the ref now but IIRC some Native American traditions have the viewpoint that connecting to the divine cannot be made without first laughing, as that opens the mind to the new experience. Reminds me of some Far Eastern traditions where you need a sharp break from your normal world view to achieve an enlightening breakthrough.

by kjellsbells

4/1/2025 at 6:10:03 PM

Is this overstated?

i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy.

Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny?

I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in having it before, not after.

I almost feel like I missed something huge in the email that signals it's a joke, or adds another layer of humor, but after multiple readings, it looks identical to a janitor emailing everyone on campus to tell them keys will be required for bathrooms from now on. Although, that is significantly more implausible than the IT worker emailing everyone on campus to tell them there are charges for printing.

by refulgentis

4/1/2025 at 7:18:45 PM

As someone who makes dry sarcastic jokes pretty often, I’ve learned you have to really put some ridiculous stuff in there to signal it’s a joke. This also scales with audience size and delivery method.

With so many people, you’d actually have to make the price ridiculous or something like that. Because some people, once they read that the printing is five cents, are going to be upset enough to not read the rest of the email.

I wouldn’t actually do this prank, but if I like had to, it would be more like the “charge” was to sing a song and the email would actually say April Fools in it. Maybe less funny, but a lot more easily seen as a joke. Makes handling the calls to the admins much easier, too.

by travisjungroth

4/1/2025 at 6:40:42 PM

I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience the fun part of the prank - the number of people who actually saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was going to start charging for printing, which was true.

by subroutine

4/1/2025 at 7:16:05 PM

For 99.9% of people, the funny of the prank would only hit later. Ie, upon finding out it was a prank, and hearing about the "insert 5 cents" part that they probably didn't see with their own eyes. Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction. And reactions of other staff who fell for it (and caused chaos) before 8:30.

And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to others.

by afro88

4/1/2025 at 7:25:24 PM

Someone relating that sequences of events to me as funny, especially if they said it was only funny after the pileup, would significantly adjust my prior as to dark triad characteristics in their psychology.

"prank" = IT guy sent campus wide email saying some printers will now charge $0.05/page

"that they probably didn't see with their own eyes" = they did not check physically very every printer on campus to verify none of the printers had the characteristic, the only way to falsify what the IT guy said, that some printers had a characteristic.

"Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction." = 3x the time wasted for everyone on campus

"And reactions of other staff who fell for it" = people who believed the dry email from IT

"(and caused chaos)" = chaos isn't funny

"And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to others." = It sounds like we're assuming the relayer would get value from relating this, but the extra value is to the listener, it'd only harm the relayer.

As a listener, now I know that I have to verify 100% of everything the relayer tells me. They think a good prank is when you leverage your professional role to lie and cause chaos, which is justified because those poor sheep were complaining about something they didn't even verify with their own eyes. i.e. thousands of people should have gone through an absurdly onerous verification rather than trust communications you make in your professional role.

by refulgentis

4/1/2025 at 7:36:07 PM

Me checking my inbox at 9:30am...

    7:28 New Campus Policy printing now costs 5-cents per page

    8:34 Re: New Campus Policy - April Fools! Printing is free.

    9:14 Re: Re: New Campus Policy - Printing is still free, for now.
delete, delete, mark spam

by subroutine

4/1/2025 at 7:39:14 PM

Absolutely.* Does that shed any light, here? They're not claiming it is a triviality, instead, quite specifically, they are claiming the funny part is chaos and the number of people who reacted differently.

* modulo marking the IT department as spam

by refulgentis

4/1/2025 at 11:45:43 PM

The fact that you don't find the ensuing chaos amusing has me wondering - do you find Bedlam DL3 entertaining?

Note that finding something amusing isn't necessarily related to whether or not you feel the perpetrator conducted himself appropriately.

by fc417fc802

4/1/2025 at 1:31:38 PM

Both the OP and your summary are very astutely written. Thank you.

by cnity

4/1/2025 at 4:19:02 PM

What a beautiful bit of history! I had no idea.

You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!

by disqard

4/1/2025 at 1:41:42 PM

Great comment! That's it.

by jimmydddd

4/1/2025 at 11:02:16 PM

I think people who perform these kinds of pranks vastly overestimate the positive reactions they get.

FTA,

> Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies.

I doubt a single person "laughed uproariously". Most often they probably rolled their eyes and gave a sympathy chuckle. The people who knew he was a "practical joker" understood how much of this guy's ego was tied to his inaner sense of humor and laughed along to get out of the conversation with him.

by mvdtnz

4/1/2025 at 1:30:23 PM

At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.).

Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department.

One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me.

I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops.

Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email.

Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen.

Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.

by autarch

4/1/2025 at 1:45:31 PM

> We used Lotus Notes for email

My condolences.

by oldgradstudent

4/1/2025 at 4:04:53 PM

I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.

by enlightens

4/1/2025 at 9:01:27 PM

That sounds both wholesome and horrifying. Like we are well into the digital age but sometimes people are just stubbornly analog.

by cloudwalk9

4/1/2025 at 3:33:15 PM

To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.

by romanhn

4/1/2025 at 4:18:21 PM

There are tons of things I miss about Notes email almost daily when I use Outlook. I supported Notes though, so I actually knew how to use search and agents and stuff that most of the people that whine about Notes never learned to use correctly. It's funny how all the companies that ditched Notes end up rewriting all the same applications in Sharepoint and then again in ServiceNow. The industry eats and regurgitates itself every couple of years without actually improving much.

by Suppafly

4/1/2025 at 5:43:52 PM

Switched from notes to Microsofts cloud thing and Lync, notes was better. We also had hundreds of not thousands of small apps in notes. Supposedly Microsofts solution was going to be much cheaper if everyone got off notes, but we were given to time, budget, framework or even guidance when it came to the apps. Several years later they still paid a lot for notes.

by Hikikomori

4/1/2025 at 11:39:46 PM

Totally agree.

I didn’t use notes much, but it was a platform ahead of its time, that thanks to IBM’s… IBM-ness was ignored and allowed to rot.

by Spooky23

4/1/2025 at 7:00:03 PM

Still in use in many places for some ungodly reason.

At my previous job they had been using Notes since the company was founded in the early 90’s, meaning they lived through it being Lotus Notes, then IBM Notes and now HCL Notes.

Everything was deeply entrenched - email, warehouse inventory, ERP system, all documentation made in the entire company… just everything.

And this is for a scandinavian company manufacturing high tech devices for telecom and aviation, among other things.

It was… an interesting nightmare, constantly got in the way of any sort of productivity. Definitely contributed to me leaving early

by kogens

4/1/2025 at 7:19:33 PM

F5 to close Lotus Notes. On every app including MS Outlook, F5 was to refresh / fetch the new email, except in Lotus Notes. In Lotus Notes it just means “lose your work”. Can’t believe it didn’t start as an April Fools, like Gavin Belson’s Signature box.

by eastbound

4/1/2025 at 3:33:27 PM

Nah. It was amazing back then.

by martinsnow

4/1/2025 at 3:49:27 PM

Yeah it was sort of cool. There were entire software products built on top of Notes and its forms and workflow.

I never had to program any of that, so can't speak to that side of it, but where I worked we used Notes to quickly build a lot of internal forms and workflows, and had some internal discussion forums and documentation in it, it all worked pretty well as I recall.

The one weird thing was we had to run it on OS/2. The only OS/2 machine in the server room.

We didn't use it for email though.

by SoftTalker

4/1/2025 at 5:05:01 PM

My only experience with it was in 1999, I took a distance-learning class to learn C++. The teacher would send us mail about assignments, reading that we needed to do, quizzes at the end of a unit, etc. We submitted our projects through that system too.

Maybe I'd have a different opinion now, but I remember it working pretty well for that purpose back then.

by khedoros1

4/1/2025 at 6:34:07 PM

> but one reason is that it was more challenging

I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom

by hnaccount_rng

4/1/2025 at 9:29:01 PM

Absolutely. I had the same problem through most of school until college.

by autarch

4/1/2025 at 3:01:59 PM

So... Did everyone wear pants on the designated pants-less Friday?

by kspacewalk2

4/1/2025 at 3:10:11 PM

Sadly, yes.

by autarch

4/1/2025 at 3:12:38 PM

If you did this on April 1st it would have been hilarious.

by kypro

4/1/2025 at 3:51:29 PM

[flagged]

by SilasX

4/1/2025 at 3:53:14 PM

I think it was funny for being unexpected in the work context, not because "no pants" was some brilliant bit of humor.

by autarch

4/1/2025 at 3:59:29 PM

Because it's so hard to come up with something inappropriate to do in a work environment?

by SilasX

4/1/2025 at 4:02:32 PM

Well, clearly you are a smarter and funnier person than I am. And now you've shown it to everyone on HN. That must feel amazing! This must be one of the best days of your life.

by autarch

4/1/2025 at 6:33:08 PM

I'm not claiming to be better than anyone, I just want to know if there's some subtlety I'm missing, or it's just people overplaying regular toilet humor.

If toilet humor is your thing -- more power to ya! I just have a hard time reconciling it with "best joke ever".

by SilasX

4/1/2025 at 4:48:12 PM

This was the most hilarious part to me:

  That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact

by thruway516

4/1/2025 at 7:45:14 PM

Probably because they were considering more per page and 5 cents was too low.

by instagib

4/1/2025 at 7:46:04 PM

Right? It actually kinda makes it most believable!

by whycome

4/1/2025 at 2:34:34 PM

In high-school I replaced all the printers ready message to “Insert Coin”. I didn’t not check the parameters of the script and because of their network configuration, deployed to the whole district. Surprisingly this wasn’t the reason the banned me from the network.

by jamesrat

4/1/2025 at 3:10:06 PM

Ok, what was the reason?

by lief79

4/1/2025 at 7:13:31 PM

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them.

Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.

Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked.

Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned.

Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

by kmoser

4/2/2025 at 5:50:26 AM

More pranks, this time after I got a job in the corporate world working for Big Company in the late 1980s:

Corporate Prank #1: Back in the DOS days, when the standard office computer was an IBM AT with a small built-in speaker capable of being programmed to beep, I set up the autoexec.bat file for several workstations to play (quickly, and at low volume) the first eight notes from the melody from "Brazil." The movie had just come out, and I thought the tune would be a fitting commentary on the parallels to the corporate life.

Corporate Prank #2: Every year or so the cafeteria would print surveys on blue cardstock and put them on all the tables asking questions like "Were the cashiers friendly?" and "How was the temperature of the food?" My friend and I found matching cardstock and mocked up copies, but changed the questions subtly, e.g. "How was the temperature of the cashiers?" and "Was the food friendly?" and distributed them to all the tables. Never found out what happened, but I'm sure management wasn't happy.

Corporate Prank #3: One day I went with my friends "B" and "C" to a different corporate cafeteria where you paid a flat rate just before exiting. "B" managed to find an emergency exit door just before the cashiers which let him make his way to the elevators without paying. Now the setup for the prank: every few months one of the departments would distribute company-wide security memos (on paper) which would get distributed to every desk. Me and "C" mocked up one of those security memos (complete with a police artist style sketch of "B", who had skipped out without paying) which warned everybody to be on the lookout for the suspect who was last seen exiting the cafeteria through an unmarked door, and should be considered dangerous. We made photocopies and put them on every desk.

by kmoser

4/2/2025 at 12:44:22 AM

> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it.

Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.

by snerbles

4/2/2025 at 3:01:51 AM

On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything.

At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!

by flakes

4/1/2025 at 1:08:07 PM

I think the joke would have been funnier without the accompanying email. The fear I guess is people trying to jam change into the printers.

by donatj

4/1/2025 at 2:20:32 PM

Throughout the whole story that’s what I expected to happen. The administration getting mad because people were trying to stick coins in the printers and breaking them costing a lot of money to fix.

by MBCook

4/1/2025 at 11:45:51 AM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by tux3

4/1/2025 at 12:10:26 PM

[preflagged for convienence]

by kotaKat

4/1/2025 at 1:10:23 PM

We have detached this thread, as it was off-topic

by alex1138

4/1/2025 at 11:46:29 AM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by _tk_

4/1/2025 at 12:43:34 PM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by blueflow

4/1/2025 at 2:22:45 PM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by enterpriss

4/1/2025 at 2:51:21 PM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by spogbiper

4/1/2025 at 3:07:03 PM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by BanazirGalbasi

4/1/2025 at 3:37:14 PM

<The above comment has been deleted>

by romanhn

4/1/2025 at 4:38:44 PM

<The below comment has been deleted>

by thecosmicfrog

4/1/2025 at 4:55:18 PM

[Deleted]

by peterpost2

4/1/2025 at 7:19:18 PM

[Removed by Reddit]

by kps

4/1/2025 at 9:06:09 PM

Snook boom five seven supercalifragilisticexpialidocious bum fortnite.

This post has been removed by Redact for HN.

by simondanerd

4/2/2025 at 6:43:53 PM

[flagged]

by LADuranRizo

4/1/2025 at 1:15:29 PM

<This comment requires Internet Explorer 6>

by datadrivenangel

4/1/2025 at 1:26:55 PM

This comment has been redacted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

by b8

4/1/2025 at 12:22:40 PM

(User was banned for this post)

by as1mov

4/1/2025 at 12:32:43 PM

Hope you got 10 bux!

by Bluecobra

4/1/2025 at 11:56:22 AM

Can anyone tell me how to setup a premium account? I can’t figure it out.

by tdstein

4/1/2025 at 11:58:31 AM

You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like this: ****.

by mankyd

4/1/2025 at 11:59:34 AM

hunter2

edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me

by Aardwolf

4/1/2025 at 9:06:38 PM

HOw did you get my password ??? Delete. it immediately. This is your Final warning.

Warm regards,

by tdba

4/1/2025 at 12:02:30 PM

Everybody else but you sees the stars, but not you because you are logged in to your account.

To me your message appears as:

    *******

    edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me

by actionfromafar

4/1/2025 at 12:08:33 PM

That's why I always set my password as 8 asterisks - that way when my password gets leaked the hackers still think it's encrypted.

by jjbinx007

4/1/2025 at 12:29:35 PM

Makes sense! Thanks for the tip.

by johnisgood

4/1/2025 at 7:34:47 PM

Bash.org salutes you.

by selimthegrim

4/1/2025 at 8:36:39 PM

I just don't understand why he would tell us how many asterisks he's using, I will try 16 for extra security. You can never be sure these days!

(BTW I love bash.org!)

by johnisgood

4/1/2025 at 12:06:42 PM

You can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2

by colejohnson66

4/1/2025 at 12:18:46 PM

Al#&291xuijL1

by minraws

4/1/2025 at 11:59:29 AM

123456

edit: What now?

by virgilp

4/1/2025 at 12:56:53 PM

AMAZING! That's the same combination on my luggage.

by MisterTea

4/1/2025 at 3:23:18 PM

your luggage locks have six digits? or is that two locks: 123 and 456?

by em-bee

4/1/2025 at 12:36:31 PM

...just wait for the email, click the link, enter your credit card number, and...

by waltwalther

4/1/2025 at 10:02:36 PM

rightcattlecapacitorpaperclip

by mjmas

4/1/2025 at 8:40:03 PM

Just log in with your Twitter account. It uses "Sign in With X" now.

by notfed

4/1/2025 at 12:29:47 PM

You have to insert 5c.

by pwagland

4/1/2025 at 1:34:56 PM

<The Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny the presence of this post>

by MadVikingGod

4/1/2025 at 11:53:29 AM

<This comment has been redacted due to National Security reasons>

by xg15

4/1/2025 at 12:06:06 PM

HN is now a federal organization. Your account is marked for deletion in the next efficiency round.

by actionfromafar

4/1/2025 at 11:54:07 AM

Look, whilst I agree with you in principle, your metaphor on the sexual preferences of honey badgers really did not do you any favours.

<Replying to this comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by tetris11

4/1/2025 at 11:56:36 AM

While that may be the case, this subject is quite delicate and is best debated within the confines of informed animal sexology:

<Parts of this comment are protected by Hacker News Premium Private Debates>

by aneutron

4/1/2025 at 12:22:37 PM

Yeay, I'm a premium user.

by zakki

4/1/2025 at 11:48:55 AM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by deadbabe

4/1/2025 at 4:04:13 PM

Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April.

The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.

by tempestn

4/1/2025 at 7:28:50 PM

I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing documents.

I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted.

I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.

by jsphweid

4/1/2025 at 6:49:41 PM

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group.

We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.

by automationwiz

4/2/2025 at 2:04:15 AM

This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!

by temporallobe

4/1/2025 at 5:26:00 PM

The funniest part was that he also got in trouble for, in his retraction, saying the admins weren’t considering per page fees when in fact they were.

Some people get fired for making their bosses look bad. He screwed up by making them look good.

by zusammen

4/1/2025 at 12:00:10 PM

I worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago.

- Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names).

- For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

- So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last names).

- "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc.

- Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name.

- So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about."

- Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.

- Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."

by busyant

4/1/2025 at 12:20:12 PM

For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and Proofpoint, ironically. not naming them. I've done similar pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not recommend people do this early in their career especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.

by LinuxBender

4/1/2025 at 12:41:34 PM

> especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.

Funny thing is that I cleared my prank with Peter Sachs because he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he told me to go for it and he thought it was hilarious.

I didn't clear it with Jim Collinsworth because he was a bit of a jokester himself so I (incorrectly) assumed he'd have no problem with it.

by busyant

4/1/2025 at 1:15:05 PM

Having approval from one of them would be quite the saving grace.

I had a CTO tell me to fill a cubicle with quick drying cement after a prank went wrong but I stalled him long enough to cool down. I knew the building management company would have been furious had I followed orders. The CSO had pranked the CTO with a dongle that opens excel and slowly types "I know what you were doing..."

by LinuxBender

4/1/2025 at 3:30:48 PM

the building company would be more than furious. you could lose your lease over this and pay damages.

next time recommend using expanding insulation foam instead, but first cover everything with big sheets of plastic. the victim will still have a hell of a time getting rid of the foam. that stuff hardens...

by em-bee

4/1/2025 at 6:08:19 PM

Oh trust me I know. This was CBRE and they are cantankerous and contentious on good days.

by LinuxBender

4/1/2025 at 2:19:14 PM

Some jokesters are surprisingly picky about which side of the joke they're on.

by mwigdahl

4/1/2025 at 2:48:49 PM

I showed a new to IT guy about open relays and he was about to send an email from the CEO but thinking better, he sent the joke email from "JohnDoeTotallyTheCEO@gmail.com" (real name instead obviously) - the amount of people STILL thinking it was the real thing was embarrassing.

by hobs

4/1/2025 at 1:22:03 PM

>leadership are sensitive to embarrassment

Or they don't want distractions that are too costly.

by dennis_jeeves2

4/2/2025 at 1:00:03 AM

To your point the incident I described took several windows admins a while to find the USB prank. They thought we had a live extortion hack in progress and that was about the time they called me into it.

by LinuxBender

4/1/2025 at 1:22:30 PM

Seems like a memorable way of showing them that the email system could be configured better.

by bee_rider

4/1/2025 at 12:04:34 PM

> For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.

by mschuster91

4/1/2025 at 12:36:11 PM

A year ago on March 31st, was my ex's birthday - she told me she loved me. Today, I just don't know if that was the most elaborate prank I ever fell for.

Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.

by anshumankmr

4/1/2025 at 1:22:26 PM

April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?

by xandrius

4/1/2025 at 2:20:49 PM

She called him from New Zealand.

by moduspol

4/1/2025 at 12:36:16 PM

Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.

by paxys

4/1/2025 at 1:39:42 PM

And 90% about the delivery ;)

by antisthenes

4/1/2025 at 1:33:22 PM

probably more like 20/80

by permo-w

4/1/2025 at 10:15:35 PM

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed?

Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".

I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.

We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.

by geocrasher

4/2/2025 at 5:34:07 AM

EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right.

I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.

by geocrasher

4/1/2025 at 11:59:59 AM

<Please disable your ad blocker to view this comment>

by distalx

4/1/2025 at 11:17:47 PM

I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message.

In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.

by miningape

4/1/2025 at 11:22:24 PM

Omg, I know I did this, but throw a double proxy. I thought a special education pupil howto remote shutdown and wrote a script. I told him they'd know it's him. So we scripted the Internet Explorer icon with a pre-exec command script, that basically did a network-scan for IPs and shutdown each one remotely. Poor fella sitting there didn't even know what's happening. Was a bully, but still. They interrogated him and he didn't even know what happened.

We sat there and saw every computer at the school turn off with a custom message. Except his computer. He really looked dumbfounded.. I get a smile when I think of it.. it wasn't anything evil or bad, but just fun.

Good 'ol times. He didn't get into any trouble, just disciplinary extra curricular work. Which I think was good for that bully anways.. he was lacking behind.

Also I remember accesing everyone $C drive and copy a counter-strike map of the school I was modeling into. So, the next time anyone went to a LAN-Party (THOSE were GOOD Times), everyone would see the school name as a map and nobody would know who made it. Obviously no violence intended. I just wanted to play in an environment that I spent most of my day and have fun afterwards at they way we could have some fun. Asking everyone to download it would've just led to trouble. Of course I heard of school shootings, but counter-strike was harmless. Those who did think of worse had this in mind anyways.

by ALLTaken

4/1/2025 at 2:06:33 PM

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...

(there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

by rcarmo

4/1/2025 at 2:36:17 PM

I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?

by genewitch

4/1/2025 at 2:41:57 PM

the implication

by 4ggr0

4/1/2025 at 8:36:17 PM

Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time! Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like two decades. Gah!)

by russellbeattie

4/2/2025 at 6:54:26 AM

I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)

by rcarmo

4/1/2025 at 2:59:06 PM

Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank.

I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job.

I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.

by beAbU

4/1/2025 at 8:35:45 PM

I guess I'll contribute my best prank.

In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about).

I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing.

I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet.

Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction.

They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little.

After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.

by mywittyname

4/2/2025 at 1:38:05 AM

At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.".

For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration.

I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.

by dexen

4/1/2025 at 1:07:24 PM

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).

Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

by ToddWBurgess

4/1/2025 at 2:05:24 PM

I tell you, I was an HP-UX sysadmin into the late '90s and the regional telco used a LOT of HP-UX.

Around '95 I spent a solid year setting up a pair of T520s worth about a million bucks, to be a HA cluster responsible for part of the billing process, which was being ported to Unix from the IBM mainframe by a team of 20 (mostly inept, a few smart cookies) programmers. Only to be cancelled at literally the last possible moment to keep on the mainframe. I highly suspect that it was all a ploy to get better mainframe upgrade terms.

Not on April 1st, but at one point management spent the last of their budget for the year on upgrading this pair of T520s from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. BUT they didn't buy extra drives to grow swap, and we were already WAY into the deployment so we couldn't just go repartitioning. HP-UX required all memory to be backed by swap to be able to use it, so the extra 2GB of RAM went entirely unused.

by linsomniac

4/1/2025 at 3:05:14 PM

My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel). She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so I have a soft spot for it.

I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.

by hylaride

4/1/2025 at 10:54:32 PM

I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.

by lopatin

4/2/2025 at 7:30:26 PM

The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.

by tracker1

4/1/2025 at 10:21:44 PM

>That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

oof

by ycombinatrix

4/1/2025 at 1:10:35 PM

Informix is the april fools joke.

Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.

by blantonl

4/1/2025 at 5:13:53 PM

I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.

by pedrocr

4/1/2025 at 3:24:18 PM

This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager.

The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years.

This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!

by dan_can_code

4/1/2025 at 3:46:41 PM

> be me

> start up BASIC

> PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececec"

> thunderous footsteps as my dad RUNS to pick up the phone that isn't ringing

by bitwize

4/1/2025 at 1:18:17 PM

> By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already planning.

by CivBase

4/2/2025 at 12:26:15 AM

> Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course

This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.

by philsnow

4/1/2025 at 4:12:01 PM

somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.

by ffitch

4/1/2025 at 12:48:26 PM

As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!

by sillyboi

4/1/2025 at 11:15:16 PM

Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.

by mortar

4/1/2025 at 1:57:43 PM

The funniest part

"...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"

by locallost

4/1/2025 at 7:59:29 PM

The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.

by Civitello

4/2/2025 at 6:16:46 PM

sl is installed in /usr/games so that can be a check. Otherwise, I think this is quite reliable:

    $ grep -q --binary-files=text ACCIDENT `which sl`
    $ echo $?
    0

by noisy_boy

4/1/2025 at 1:32:03 PM

I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst.

The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.

by empath75

4/1/2025 at 3:50:20 PM

Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London.

The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they were full of ports that could be attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability.

So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made...

Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :)

I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one of the vectors).

[technical aside]

The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the event/interrupt being the index into that table).

Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was a hackers dream of a computer, really.

[/aside]

What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) - this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was still there...

The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account, it would be activated on that machine.

Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to your account.

We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work, and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on and then logging in re-infected the machine...

It spread like wildfire.

We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a sore thumb.

A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called. "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went back, and life went on.

About a week later, the virus again raced through the network, infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened - someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn infectious for its own good.

If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We came up with a plan...

We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new virus, waited, and prayed.

Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled.

And breathe

I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.

by spacedcowboy

4/1/2025 at 11:05:38 PM

That’s a pretty wild ride. Thanks for sharing. You must have been absolutely terrified when it began again the second time !

by urbandw311er

4/3/2025 at 12:01:08 AM

Yep, it was sufficiently "up there" that I remember all the details many decades later.

It makes a good story now, though :)

by spacedcowboy

4/2/2025 at 3:01:30 PM

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

by that_guy_iain

4/2/2025 at 2:24:13 AM

Subject: You're hired! Body: April Fools!

by kittikitti

4/1/2025 at 9:19:33 PM

"....could have got me fired"

by zootski

4/1/2025 at 9:22:52 PM

"....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".

by zootski

4/1/2025 at 12:11:32 PM

Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.

It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.

Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

by glimshe

4/1/2025 at 12:27:30 PM

All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.

by fkyoureadthedoc

4/1/2025 at 12:37:37 PM

The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.

There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.

by roenxi

4/1/2025 at 2:04:07 PM

> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad

Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me

by circlefavshape

4/2/2025 at 1:00:18 AM

There is an irony that you're adjudicating away other people's stress while holding up your own opinions and feelings of repugnance as evidence of a problem.

The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I hope there wasn't a student tired and on edge trying to meet a deadline. It'd feel awful to think the print system was out, spend a morning running around and then learn that some IT bloke was abusing his power out of a misplaced sense fun. It isn't a serious offence but it is bad behaviour.

by roenxi

4/1/2025 at 2:54:17 PM

Ah, but do you get to have fun at the cost of others?

That is the question.

by StefanBatory

4/1/2025 at 5:14:00 PM

Of course! I'm doing it right now!

by Cycl0ps

4/1/2025 at 7:58:00 PM

[flagged]

by StefanBatory

4/1/2025 at 3:08:27 PM

It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer thousands of dollars with a prank.

You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 4:07:59 PM

> timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes

Not the best way to measure time imo.

by freehorse

4/1/2025 at 4:59:31 PM

The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 6:40:13 PM

Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.

by freehorse

4/1/2025 at 7:24:25 PM

No, it assumes some linear relationship between pay and time. Which is a little iffy for salaried workers, but only a little.

My employer gets about 40 hours/week of "work" from me, whatever that might consist of. I cost them $X every two weeks in pay and benefits. It's pretty reasonable to say my attendance in a one-hour meeting has a $X/80 cost to my employer.

You don't need to overcomplicate this. The employment relationship is pretty simple at its foundation: the employer buys the time of its employees.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 7:14:56 PM

There is a very linear relationship between time and money for the one who pays the employees though.

Nobody says “you know boss, that two hour meeting today was a total waste of time, please deduct two hours worth of my salary from my paycheck”. So the company quite literally pays for everyone’s time who was at the meeting. And that is a function of who is present and how long the meeting goes. It is very much not a function of productivity/value.

And the point of having a, more often rethorical than real, taximeter showing the cost of the meeting puts this into perspective. The more people you invite the more the meeting costs. The longer it goes the more it costs. The goal is not to abolish all meetings, but to make people think if the bang to buck ratio of the meeting is right. To instill a culture where people prepare for meetings, they have concrete questions or decision outcomes they are looking for, and to criticaly think about the length of the meeting and right-size the invite list.

by krisoft

4/1/2025 at 3:05:05 PM

That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a laugh.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 5:02:43 PM

It's just disingenuous to pretend it's about corporate efficiency when it's more about personal feelings/vibes.

by fkyoureadthedoc

4/1/2025 at 5:23:59 PM

“Corporate efficiency” is vague and largely meaningless. “Don’t waste a bunch of your coworkers’ time” is a lot more concrete. Especially don’t set up the people who answer the phones to get angry calls due to your prank.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 12:29:13 PM

Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then. At times, active thinking of your peers just needs to be challenged so they don't get too confident...

by lynx97

4/1/2025 at 12:51:54 PM

This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any pictures of people actually doing those things though, just "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.

by RandomBacon

4/1/2025 at 12:41:47 PM

Meanwhile the Xbox 360 kamikaze hack actually involved drilling a chip...

by nyanpasu64

4/1/2025 at 12:35:56 PM

Nah. I like the small things that remind us we're still humans, and a little inconvenience is a small price

by causal

4/1/2025 at 2:42:43 PM

Small things are fine.

It's not fun when the corporate marketing team meets in September to start planning their April Fools jokes.

by Symbiote

4/1/2025 at 12:24:24 PM

I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.

by ghaff

4/1/2025 at 3:44:46 PM

Y’know, I’m inclined to agree here, but I don’t think it was always this way. Over the last few years I’ve been feeling really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool’s Day, and I think feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be amused by pranks in good faith, we’re mentally on-guard every day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you’ve got people sending you stuff like “ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS” accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI images, now it’s every day, and still not everyone is in on the joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator’s intent).

by xxr

4/1/2025 at 1:46:02 PM

I feel the opposite. Work pranks are the best pranks because they only waste time that I was already selling anyway.

by namenotrequired

4/1/2025 at 1:52:19 PM

My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.

by II2II

4/1/2025 at 12:23:02 PM

"Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole Internet, however.

by johnisgood

4/1/2025 at 1:02:35 PM

<Please disable your ad blocker to view this comment>

by 0x3444ac53

4/1/2025 at 2:13:13 PM

April 1st always falls on a weekend though

by hackable_sand

4/1/2025 at 5:14:57 PM

My brother in Christ it's Tuesday

by Cycl0ps

4/1/2025 at 5:20:37 PM

Woosh

by nosrepa

4/1/2025 at 4:25:56 PM

>Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't appreciate it either.

by Suppafly

4/1/2025 at 1:25:15 PM

HP LaserJet 4s squarely date TFA’s prank in the early-mid 90s. I can agree with you that lame corporate April Fool’s Day jokes on the Internet are overdone; but 1990s-era campus sysadmin’ing ruled. Sysadmins kept a close eye on things to ensure no one (especially the servers) got hurt, but computer geeks were far from mainstream and a spirit of playful tolerance and taking-care-of-our-own prevailed. Well do I remember telneting to sendmail on port 25 and sending spoofed email to classmates…

The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.

by jonstewart

4/1/2025 at 8:40:32 PM

haha, very funny!

by dilyevsky

4/1/2025 at 3:12:25 PM

I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Don't waste hours of other people's time for your fun.

Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.

by wat10000

4/1/2025 at 12:58:44 PM

[flagged]

by itsanaccount

4/1/2025 at 11:56:31 AM

[dead]

by heavymetalpoizn

4/2/2025 at 3:15:57 AM

[dead]

by curtisszmania

4/2/2025 at 3:00:36 AM

[dead]

by TacticalCoder

4/2/2025 at 6:43:38 PM

[flagged]

by LADuranRizo

4/1/2025 at 1:14:20 PM

TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts.

For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872

Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too.

---

BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a life.

by gwbas1c

4/1/2025 at 1:55:13 PM

The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke. As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know it's a "silly April Fool's email".

Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look serious.

Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not going to "take a joke" well.

The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be. Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.

by jfengel

4/1/2025 at 1:37:48 PM

The whole post is very well written and worth reading. But maybe it's just me always liking a nice BOFH story.

by darkwater

4/1/2025 at 3:27:00 PM

Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans

by ge96

4/1/2025 at 12:37:43 PM

I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.

by cab11150904

4/1/2025 at 1:42:04 PM

As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.

by swader999

4/1/2025 at 3:08:25 PM

<This comment requires a B-level leadership position>

by keybored

4/1/2025 at 4:20:50 PM

Then you should be happy to learn that Trump just passed an executive order making workplace pranks a felony, so hopefully the world will be finally free of this plague on efficiency and profits.

by freehorse

4/1/2025 at 1:38:14 PM

<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>

by darkwater