Managers have no sense of humour where it doesn't matter. Well, some managers.
I still remember fondly my messing with a coworker's PC menu. I don't remember
which menu system we were using at the time, but Roberto had found some little
gag app that would display a blimp for a few seconds with your selected message
scrolling across it. So while he was out I fixed up his menu so that when he
fired up Word, it would 1) display the blimp ("Roberto is a doofus!"), 2) erase
the blimp call from the Word menu option so it would look normal, and 3) start
Word. The Harvard Graphics option would put the blimp back in his Word option.
So until he figured out the pattern, it would display the blimp at seemingly
random intervals, but whenever he looked at the Word option under the covers
there was nothing there.
I was also charmed by a (different) coworker who modified his copy of PC DOS;
instead of "Bad command or file name", it said "Say what, hippo fingers?". I
never bothered until just now to verify that those two messages are exactly the
same length; I just assumed that his replacement was no longer than the
official text.
All very harmless. I guess I'm just not a serious hacker.
---
Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313
/* While mathematicians often do not have much humility, we all have lots of
experience with humiliation. -Dan Goldston, in his acceptance speech for the
prestigious Cole Prize */
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> On Behalf Of CM
Poncelet
Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 22:23
This reminds me of someone at a Company I worked for, can't remember which,
where some programmer had displayed a prompt for whatever to which an end-user
replied "f*@k" - upon which the program then replied, "Your place or mine?"
Needless to say, management was not amused by this and the programmer was given
a "good talking to" if not then also put on "garden leave". <grin>
--- On 10/10/2021 15:52, PINION, RICHARD W. wrote:
> The only thing I ever put on a system, similar to that, was a TSO program
> which produced a crude picture of the one finger salute. You could put
> whatever message you wanted on the hand. Silly me, I had the program
> executing at TSO logon. Management was not amused.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Sylvester
> Sent: Sunday, October 10, 2021 9:36 AM
> You could have "protected" the VM systems as much as you want, if a "friend"
> send you an exec/script/clist and you execute it. the was actually created as
> small joke by a student at one of the EARN/BITNET nodes who did not see that
> it could escape from the site.
>
> my old friend Helmut on the neighbour node detected "patient 0". It rapidely
> entered vnet which was shutdown (to remove all copies afaik), earn bitnet was
> saved by Eric Thomas by filtering in rscs. You had to execute it, a global
> social attack/joke, not like the other real worm in sendmail
>
> --- On 08/10/2021 16:43, David Spiegel wrote:
>> "... What about the Christmas Card Worm? ..."
>>
>> That was AFAIK on a VM system, not, an MVS system.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
