Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don’t think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
That probably wasn’t a virus.
Holy shit, TIL!
When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.
Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won’t stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Huh yeah that’s MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.
Sadly, many motherboards don’t have POST code displays.
Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast “<Type> Error” during startup to be infinitely more helpful.
I don’t think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that’s about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
Computers in 97 didn’t need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They’re not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a “PC maintenance” credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
Motherboards have speakers?
Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
Damn, I feel old now…
And you could plug in your joystick into the soundcard, because where else would you put joystick, right? Perfectly logical.
I thought I was the cool kid when I got my SoundBlaster 16!
Slightly related, it is really annoying you cant stop the boot speaker on the PS4 without voiding your warranty and ripping the speaker out
Are you trying to make me feel old?
Drain.exe would say “water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle” then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.
Sheep.exe … would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like “nobody’s in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day”. Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
I remember there was a virus that had a tiny cat on the screen and it would chase your mouse cursor. Once it catches your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It was freaking awesome.
That’s based on a harmless Unix game that you can install forks of which on modern day Linux as well, by the way
i have a vencord extension that does that
What’s the name of the game?
The original was just neko. It probably hasn’t been maintained in forever though.
There is a webneko that you can embed on your website:
https://webneko.net/
It’s just Linux. It chases you and your mouse throughout the fediverse, and when it catches you and you install it, it crashes your computer because the mouse drivers are written by a 12 year old with undiagnosed ADHD.
I’ve seen 12 year old adhd or autistic kid writing better software than most tech companies
I have had far more driver issues on windows on linux things just work lol
Does windows still reinstall drivers for some hardware when you plug them in, regardless of whether you installed them previously?
I think i have had that happen with maybe usbs but idk about anything else
Reminds me of Rensenware.
man i miss these days.
These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.
The modern internet fucking sucks dude.
Put the rose tinted glasses to one side. We still had harmful viruses back in the day, difference is these days you are storing more private information “online” so the effect of compromise is larger.
i’m mostly just sad that the funny side of malicious software is gone.
There’s no more funny malware. It’s all ransomware and stealers.
There’s no more funny malware.
That depends who gets infected.
You or me infected by malware? No thanks!
Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!
Yeah I haven’t had harmful application on my computer in over a decade. I feel like you really have to go out of your way to get one these days (not including spyware that you download intentionally, like Windows 11).
The thing is, harmful apps are now difficult to detect compared to years ago. The hackers prefer to get the control of your device without ruining it.
There’s even extreme edgecases where a compromised machine being part of a botnet actually improves security because the malware shores up security to help itself remain persistent and not find itself removed/blocked by other malware or attackers
Did people download .exe files in 2006? We were so innocent.
& .bat s & ZIPs
How could I know, out of curiosity? I probably have the exe from the time period.
Try decompiling it.
Great question! Not really my area of expertise, but probably there are at least a couple of possible avenues. One is decompilation and/or disassembly and static analysis. (Basically use automated tools to reconstruct the original source code as best it can and then read that imperfect reconstruction of the source code to figure out what it does.) Another is isolating it (“air gap” – no network or connectivity to anything you care about) so you’re sure it can’t do any damage and running it with tools that record/report everything it does. (On Linux, one could use
straceand/or GDB. On Mac,dtrace. Not sure what the equivalent is for Windows programs running on Windows.)Actually, I guess another option could be to set up an isolated system, record a whole bunch of information about it before running the .exe then after running the .exe, examine it to see what you can find on the filesystem or in the registry or in RAM or whatever that might have changed. It wouldn’t catch everything, though. Like if it made a network connection or something but didn’t actually change anything on the filesystem, it might not leave any traces.
Whatever the case, it’d probably require some specialized tools and expertise. But it’d be an interesting project.
This was a common April Fools prank back in my day. We would put a startup script on a person’s computer that opened their CD drive at random intervals. Drove them nuts!
I remember a guy who tied his baby’s rocker to the drive and wrote code to open and close the CD drive repeatedly lol. Fun times.
Hmm. Did the motor last? It’s obviously not built to provide that much torque/force, although I can’t say for sure it would be damaged by it.
I have a folder of “pranks” like these from way back and they were harmless but sure enough they fire off modern anti virus software.
