{"id":93234,"date":"2016-04-01T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=93234"},"modified":"2019-03-13T11:01:33","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T18:01:33","slug":"20160401-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20160401-00\/?p=93234","title":{"rendered":"Is it really a prank if the victim doesn&#8217;t realize there&#8217;s a prank going on?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my friends pranked a colleague by surreptitiously putting a program in the Startup group. This program opened a network socket and awaited further instructions. <\/p>\n<p>Things you could tell the program to do: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Create a thread and put it into a 100% CPU loop. \n<li>Allocate a megabyte of memory (hey, that was a lot back in the day)     and go into a loop accessing every byte of memory     over and over again. \n<li>Display a message on the screen. \n<li>Play a beep. \n<li>Perhaps some other pranky things, I forget. <\/ul>\n<p>My friend told the program to create a thread and peg the CPU, and his colleague didn&#8217;t notice. <\/p>\n<p>Create a second thread. <\/p>\n<p>Still no reaction. <\/p>\n<p>Allocate a megabyte of memory. <\/p>\n<p>Two megabytes. <\/p>\n<p>Four megabytes. <\/p>\n<p>Still nothing. <\/p>\n<p>Beep a few times for no apparent reason. <\/p>\n<p>No reaction. <\/p>\n<p>My friend now decided to pull out all the stops. Create eight threads, each in a CPU spin loop. Allocate another 16 megabytes of memory. Beep five times in a row. Display a message box with a nonsensical error message. (I forget exactly what it was. Let&#8217;s say it&#8217;s &#8220;Printer out of bamboo. Get more bamboo. MOAR!&#8221;) <\/p>\n<p>My friend&#8217;s colleague shrugged and dismissed the error message. <\/p>\n<p>I think my friend had to display a message box that said &#8220;Look behind you&#8221; before his colleague finally clued in that he was being pranked. <\/p>\n<p>So you tell me. Was this a successful prank or not, if the victim didn&#8217;t even realize that he was being pranked? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oblivious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-93234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Oblivious.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}