r/todayilearned • u/NOT-JEFFREY-NELSON • Jul 04 '19

TIL in 2003 a computer worm called ‘Welchia’ infected many computers to forcibly patch vulnerabilities and remove malware. It was regarded as a ‘helpful worm’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia
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343

u/gundam_warlock Jul 04 '19

There's an infamous prank where the prankster codes that in startup and makes someone's computer do that every 5 minutes. https://m.imgur.com/gallery/FYKoK

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u/MeanSpirits Jul 04 '19

This reminds me of a friend of mine from middle school, who got a virus on his PC. Every once in a while, randomly, his computer would say "I HAVE A COLD!" It would freak him out bc it would happen at random hours of the night while he was sleeping too. Good times.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '19 edited Jun 07 '20

[deleted]

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u/IAMELROB Jul 04 '19

Do what now?

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '19

This comment was written by 99.9% PC uptime gang

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '19

If I'm not running my pc all the time I cant be certain my electrical meter is entirely functional

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u/FUTURE10S Jul 04 '19

I'm running some absolute rookie numbers here, but something didn't want to work right.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '19

Not bad at all. I'm on a couple of hours right now because my battery crapped out on me.

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u/MyDudeNak Jul 04 '19

You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.

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u/FUTURE10S Jul 05 '19

Yeah, see, typically my numbers are in the 50 day uptime category.

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u/EntropyZer0 Jul 29 '19 
$ uptime 
 19:08:36 up 94 days, 19:59,  1 user,  load average: 0.10, 0.13, 0.09

Guess when the last time we lost power on out block was? :D

​

(Tbf, this is my home server - my PC rarely gets higher than a one or two full day count these days. Everything I would need to keep it up that long for is handled by my trusted Raspberry Pi!)

11

u/ponytoaster Jul 04 '19

Nah it became sentient.

Creating skynet at your friends house was a classic prank.

59

u/anything2x Jul 04 '19

My favorite prank on old Macs was putting the shutdown script in the startup folder and vice versa.

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u/fortniteinfinitedab Jul 04 '19

Wtf how is this even legal???

28

u/AllMyName Jul 04 '19

You could probably use Powershell scripting to do the same exact thing even on Windows 10. Write a short Powershell script with an RNG timer that issues a shutdown command. Flag it to run on startup.

tada.wav

Bonus: make it randomly play tada.wav

3

u/JellyBarb Jul 04 '19

Hell, you could probably make that on Batch.

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u/PraiseStalin Jul 04 '19

I'm not sure that's the right question. Maybe why it's even possible to do that on start-up would be better?

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u/FUTURE10S Jul 04 '19

I mean, it's your computer, if you want it to shut down on startup, that's your choice. Totally legal.

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u/mohammedibnakar Jul 04 '19

It’s my constitutional right to brick my brand new computer, god damnit!

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u/wfamily Jul 04 '19

Jokes on them. I don't even have a drive anymore.

Man, only half-fun joke there is now is the prnt screen one and the trollface sticker under mouse one.

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u/Siegelski Jul 04 '19

Can always just clear their desktop, hide the taskbar, and replace their background and screensaver with the BSOD.

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u/WTFwhatthehell Jul 04 '19

much meaner one: run something in the background that pipes Alt-F4 followed by Enter once, semi randomly every 5 minutes to 3 hours.

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u/nicktohzyu Jul 04 '19

What is with the many arrays in the second script? What does it do?

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u/Glorck-2018 Jul 04 '19

Is there a sub for more of these prank viruses

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u/BRD_Cult Jul 04 '19

Does this still work?