What's the best or nerdiest prank you have ever pulled?

I've pulled a few browser script pranks, where I get access to someone's computer when they're not around and load a script that turns their whole browsing experience monochromatic, or replace all the <img src with cat pics, etc.

It's a little mean 🙃

Been pranked on:

My friend left his computer cuz it was too slow (typical developer stereotype: you're a programmer, fix my computer plz)!

He went to the living room to smoke, so I started looking at the apps he's got suddenly I saw folders opening without me touching anything!

I thought it was infected in the beginning, so I started looking at the Task Manager... and suddenly the mouse moved to close it!

I left the mouse a bit thinking how to tackle this cuz it seems hacked 🤔

This time a creepy song opened in a YouTube tab, and at the same time my room light got switched off, that's when I said: BRO YOUR LAPTOP ISN'T HACKED, IT'S HAUNTED.

While going to tell him that, the bastard was remote controlling the laptop using his phone, and he's one that switched off the electricity from the fuse box 😂😂

I created a small server, waited for my colleague to take a quick toilet break with his laptop unlocked. I only had a few minutes available so I quickly opened a terminal, installed the openssh server, curled to my laptop to download a small script that behaved almost like sudo, so that when invoked it would send the passphrase inserted to my server and returned a notice of incorrect password, tricking the user into thinking of a mispell, then I edited his .bash_profile adding an alias to sudo so that it would invoke my script once and then delete both the alias itself and the malicious sudo script.

When my colleague returned to his laptop, after a bit, I asked a newbie question "Could you tell me if sudo whoami works for you? I get a funny behavior on my machine..".
He took the bait, sent me his user passphrase, notice the apparent mispell, re-entered the passphrase and obtained the expected result.
I thanked him and planned a bit.. 🤓😈
I started ssh-ing on his machine, ejecting the cd tray every once in a while.
Then I shared the fun with the other colleagues so that they kept ejecting the cd tray randomly, even when I was not there.
After a few days he gave up and kept the tray open. 😆
I eventually told him the prank.

Best prank pulled on me:
The sales team at my first startup swapped the magic mice of all the devs. There were four of us and we all got in around the same time. It took us a good 10 min to figure out what was going on.

Best prank I have pulled:
I had a coworker at Kenna that went to MIT and MIT is kinda rivals with Havard. Given this fact, for almost a year I put Havard business school stickers in random places all over his desk and things he brought to the office. Every couple of months he would find one, freak out, and blame another group of guys he thought were doing it. He never found out it was me until I left. Long haul pranks are the BEST!!!

A few simple ones:

1.) This may require some research depending on OS. When someone steps away, make sure the shortcut is enabled for it. But enabling high contrast mode.

2.) Take a screenshot of their desktop, remove everything on their desktop. Set their wallpaper to the screenshot you took. They will be so confused as to why they can not click anything on their desktop.

Back in my college days, one of my friends was in Student Government, and he enjoyed pranking and scaring the living daylights of everyone, especially the ladies.

So I instructed the secretary to wait until he was in a meeting, go to his office computer (she had access), and select the setting "swap primary and secondary mouse buttons".

I checked in later, and she reported he had gone into his office, and after a moment shouted "What in the heck?" before storming out and heading for class. So I had her move to phase two: a block-script printed note that said "Check the settings, stupid."

He never found out who was behind it, and never dared prank anyone again.

One doozy I'm keeping in my hat until I need it is to rearrange the keys on a keyboard to say "GOTCHA" along the top, instead of "QWERTY".

Not mine, but one of my coworkers pranked another person on our team by randomly playing an audio clip of Nicolas Cage saying, "I'm going to steal the Declaration of Independence" from the movie National Treasure. At once an hour at low volume, it took our coworker a long time to notice it, but the first time he noticed, it was gold. He snapped out of his zone, took off his headphones, looked around for a minute with a confused expression, asked us if someone was talking to him, and then put his headphones back on and got back to work. A couple days later, I tried to ask him a question and he told me to go away because he thought he heard Nicolas Cage on his computer.

He eventually found it :D

I wrote a small script to open up a "My Little Pony" youtube video once an hour, gave it an official-looking name "system-mlp" and started running it on the background of a friend/co-worker's computer. He hated "My Little Pony".

Installed a mouse app on our phone so when our coworker sat down to work we would move the mouse slightly to trip him out.

One of my favorites was when I added a browser plugin to my friend/co-worker's laptop that replaced all images in the browser with a random Nicolas Cage image. We didn't know it at the time, but his browser was synced to his home browser where his wife was working on something for her mom's business. My friend stepped away from a meeting after his wife called in a panic, "Excuse me, my wife thinks there's a virus on our computer". He came back a few minutes later laughing while calling us colorful names :D

This was all the same coworker.

If you think we were totally unfair to him, he dished out plenty.

He one time opened up a port with netcat and piped the output to the wall command. While I was working in vim or doing other terminal things, I had my whole team typing random characters or sending me creepy messages like "I'm watching you" or "print('lol')".

Once, somebody put a "free bike" ad up on Craigslist Manhattan for a super cool road bike. They listed my wife's number in the ad and her voicemail & text message inbox filled up in no time.

To be honest, she never found out if it was meant to be a prank or if it was just a mishap. Ultimately, she had to contact Craigslist to take it down.

This was almost 10 years ago, so maybe they have more safeguards in place now... then again, maybe not! 😈

Back in school, I made a batch file that would open Chrome on loop and there was no way of stopping the script as it would open Chrome quicker than you could close the CMD window as it always focused on the new Chrome instance.

Then I put it on the desktop of some my class mates, changed the file icon to the Chrome logo and named it Google Chrome. Even pinned it to the taskbar. Then sat back and watched the carnage ensue as even the teacher didn't know how to stop it.

It normally ended with the computer freezing when it ran out of RAM and getting powered off and on for it to only happen again when they tried to start Chrome again. Oh the good times...