8mo ago

Cupholder.exe

129 comments

Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don't think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
- That probably wasn't a virus.
  https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2bs41z/til_that_if_your_bios_was_made_by_awardunicore/
  
  Holy shit, TIL!
  
  Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
  
  I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
  
  Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
  https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
  
  Can't view this without cycling my VPN... We need a way to see reddit posts without visiting reddit. Is this a thing? Like... Piped for Reddit.
  
  It explains that it means "fan failure".
  And there was a link to a video of it happening.
  The only other link to an MS support page did not work.
- Drain.exe would say "water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle" then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.
  Sheep.exe ... would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.
  
  Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like "nobody's in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day". Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
  
  Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can't remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can't remember but they weren't fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
- Motherboards have speakers?
  
  Are you trying to make me feel old?
  
  Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
  
  They do, but it’s a very simple speaker that’s really more of a buzzer than what you might think of as a speaker.
  Many motherboards use a combination of beeps to report hardware errors if you fail on power on.
  
  Bleepers
  
  386 era machines often had a 4 inch speaker in the front panel. It couldn't do much. Some main boards still come with headers for a speaker, some even come with an electret beeper
  
  Beep beep
  
  A good number do, but you won't hear anything during normal operation. If your vomputer has ever beeped at you when you try to turn it on at 0% battery, accessed the bios, etc., there's a good chance that was the motherboard speaker.
  
  Slightly related, it is really annoying you cant stop the boot speaker on the PS4 without voiding your warranty and ripping the speaker out
- There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
- Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a "PC maintenance" credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
  
  Haha evil! I love it!

I remember there was a virus that had a tiny cat on the screen and it would chase your mouse cursor. Once it catches your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It was freaking awesome.
- That's based on a harmless Unix game that you can install forks of which on modern day Linux as well, by the way
  
  What's the name of the game?
  
  i have a vencord extension that does that
- Reminds me of Rensenware.
- What's it called? I wanna see this
  
  I don't remember what it was called. I was in grade school. I just remembered it was the funniest thing.

man i miss these days.
These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.
The modern internet fucking sucks dude.
- Put the rose tinted glasses to one side. We still had harmful viruses back in the day, difference is these days you are storing more private information "online" so the effect of compromise is larger.
  
  Back then, there were still lots of "wipers" that deleted files and/or destroyed the OS. Now it's all spyware and ransomware.
  
  i'm mostly just sad that the funny side of malicious software is gone.
  There's no more funny malware. It's all ransomware and stealers.
  
  Vandalism became theft and kidnapping
- Oh don't worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.
  
  u aren't wrong.
- Sub7 existed before 2000 if I'm not mistaken.
  
  I was just about to comment that this reminded me of the sub7 days. Not sure when it was released, but I definitely used it in 1998
  Edit, memory was wrong, it was released in February 1999

- How could I know, out of curiosity? I probably have the exe from the time period.
  
  Try decompiling it.
  
  Great question! Not really my area of expertise, but probably there are at least a couple of possible avenues. One is decompilation and/or disassembly and static analysis. (Basically use automated tools to reconstruct the original source code as best it can and then read that imperfect reconstruction of the source code to figure out what it does.) Another is isolating it ("air gap" -- no network or connectivity to anything you care about) so you're sure it can't do any damage and running it with tools that record/report everything it does. (On Linux, one could use strace and/or GDB. On Mac, dtrace. Not sure what the equivalent is for Windows programs running on Windows.)
  Actually, I guess another option could be to set up an isolated system, record a whole bunch of information about it before running the .exe then after running the .exe, examine it to see what you can find on the filesystem or in the registry or in RAM or whatever that might have changed. It wouldn't catch everything, though. Like if it made a network connection or something but didn't actually change anything on the filesystem, it might not leave any traces.
  Whatever the case, it'd probably require some specialized tools and expertise. But it'd be an interesting project.
  
  There are tracing programs that let you see when a program makes system calls to read and write files, control hardware, etc. It might be easiest to run it and see what it does in a VM sandbox. Process Monitor looks like a strace equivalent on windows.

Pretty sure this has been around since the mid 90s
- Classics are timeless by definition. You witness the adolescence of culture.

I have a folder of "pranks" like these from way back and they were harmless but sure enough they fire off modern anti virus software.
- I made one called "crash_bandicoot.exe" that opened the windows calculator in an infinite loop.
  
  I had one of those, but it was just called putting something on the calculator key.
  See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvDK8tMyCic
- How about the one that launched a dialog box: "Do you have a small penis? Yes/No", and if you moved your mouse near the "No" button, the button would run away around the screen?
  Man, good times.
  
  Odd, that button always worked for me.
- https://www.rjlpranks.com/
- I remember with mobile phones you'd have an app that was called shave or something like that.
  It would play the sound of a shaving apparatus and you'd run your phone across your cheek pretending to shave

This was a common April Fools prank back in my day. We would put a startup script on a person's computer that opened their CD drive at random intervals. Drove them nuts!

That joke was constant in the early 00s.

I remember a guy who tied his baby’s rocker to the drive and wrote code to open and close the CD drive repeatedly lol. Fun times.
- Hmm. Did the motor last? It's obviously not built to provide that much torque/force, although I can't say for sure it would be damaged by it.
  
  They don't say how much the seat was being rocked.
  Maybe just a couple of inches. Enough for babby to sleep.

Did people download .exe files in 2006? We were so innocent.
- & .bat s & ZIPs

An old fashioned meme but it checks out

naw, what you do is write a small exe to play "youre the best" by joe espesito through the pcspeaker at 15% volume than you can trigger remotely..randomly until the user goes mad
"doesnt anyone else Hear that?!"
- No ur the best (Piped)