1337 Hakorz Pranks for April Fool's 2008

by Todd Ritter Apr 1st 2008

Today is the day many people will tie their friend's shoelaces together, pull the chair out from under an unsuspecting coworker, or tell their boss that they are quitting to work on American Idol audition songs.

If you prefer pranks of the technical nature however, check out these suggestions:

Screw with Firefox - download/install the Total Confusion Combo pack on the victim's computer to wreak havoc on their Firefox installation. The pack of Firefox extensions will (at various times through the day) go two links back instead of one link forward, Rick Roll 2% of videos watched, change the user's Gmail inbox to display "666" messages, add "sigh" and "lol" to the end of sentences, and remove letters from text links. Thankfully though, the extensions will only be effective today (even if the victim doesn't uninstall them). [Via Lifehacker]

Remap keys - by using a program like SharpKeys or KeyExtender, you can do tricky things like flip the layout of a victim's keyboard (make 'a' become ';' , 's' become 'l' , etc.).

Disorient optical mouse - by sticking clear tape over the sensor on an optical mouse and coloring the matte side with marker, you can really cause the mouse to, um, not work properly. [Via Wired]

Use a specific Windows prank program - RJL Software has a bunch of small Windows programs that could drive your favorite victim nuts. For instance, "ScreenScrew" makes the monitor look like it's going bad by drawing scan lines, changing the color, making the display blurry, etc. "Follow Me" makes the user's Start button follow the mouse pointer horizontally on the task bar.

Use these pranks at your own risk, and happy AFD '08!

Tags: afd08

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

justin said 11:48AM on 4-01-2008

i installed the confusion pack on my roomates pc. right now i can hear him running his spyware programs to figure out what is going on. ha.

julian said 1:21PM on 4-01-2008

lol nice i wish i had a roommate right now

Robert H said 12:47PM on 4-01-2008

Be very careful with the programs from RJL Software. I downloaded the Screen Screw one, and when I unzipped it, I got a ton of antivirus warnings.

Todd Ritter said 1:25PM on 4-01-2008

Always good advice, but I assume your AV software is just flagging the programs due to it's virus-like activity. My AV software did not say anything about the programs which means either my AV software sucks (or is out of date), or the programs aren't really viruses.

Robert H said 1:32PM on 4-01-2008

That makes sense - 1/2 the virus scanners that found a problem saw this as a "joke virus" and the others as "Win32:Finaldo-S"

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