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« Last post by kyrathaba on February 26, 2012, 01:23 PM »
In reference to the overreaching of bills like SOPA, PIPA, etc., let me relate a hilarious incident that happened at work the other day...
We have this one bleeding-heart liberal in the office who likes to argue with the rest of us sensible folks about SOPA and other protections. He's a strong advocate of taking away what I, and many of us, consider essential freedoms. He believes normal citizens shouldn't be allowed to own guns (that's only for law enforcement and military), that Obama is wonderful, etc. You get the picture...
So, we got tired of this *!+@, and whipped up the following little program (I've since modified it slightly on my own PC).
The program presents a full-screen app that looks like a system-level message. It has the emblem of Homeland Security on it, and explanatory text that the user's computer will be scanned for fiiles that may be threats to homeland security, or else violations of the soon-to-be-law SOPA.
After giving the user time to read this dire warning, the program begins going through top-level files in the user's Music, Pictures, and My Videos folders, deleting files. It doesn't really delete any files, but sure looks like it is -- progress bar and all. The user can try escaping with Alt-tab, Ctrl-Escape, even Ctrl-Alt-Del then Task Manager -- all to no avail.
Buddy of mine wrote a batch file to call this program on the target employee's machine about 2 minutes after log-on. This guy has a laptop and is a low-level manager, and is known to have lots of mp3's, pictures (don't ask), etc. on his laptop. You shoulda heard the uproar!
After the incident, one of our IT guys with a poker face explained that this behavior would be seen more and more, as Microsoft is incorporating such measures in its Windows Updates, to comply with entertainment industry demands, etc. Had the guy pretty torn up.
Needless to say, we let the dummy in on the truth, and removed the program for him. He has since then changed his opinion toward SOPA at least (he's also changed his laptop password).
It's a cute little hoax proggy. Use responsibly.
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