This has reminded me of an anecdote. I work on a corporate social network. One day a colleague from the parent company comes to us scared because instead of seeing the people photos and the attached images, he saw strange images. As in the past we had some scare with xss reflected, we immediately got scared and went straight to investigate the matter. It turned out that the colleague had a Firefox extension installed that changed his images for Nicholas Cage's faces. He didn't remember having done it, but we did remember his blunder hahaha
I remember one of the students in our school replaced the Windows 95 startup logo with the goatse.cx picture of every computer of a new lab, the rector of the moment called an emergency gathering in the gym BEGGING the students to change it back . promising that there would be no repercussions, he was sweating blood, because authorities picked our school to inaugurate the computer national program that made the lab possible, the next day. nobody talked, they had to change the inauguration to another school, fun times.
Here's anecdote from Google's glory days! We had a similar extension, with Larry Page instead of Nicholas Cage. And anyone leaving their computer unlocked were subject do it.
This became widespread enough to be mentioned at the new employee orientation.
At university, we used this extension to teach our classmates about good security practices, such as locking their computers when left unattended. It was fun, especially when professors didn't lock their computers. And my former classmates did learn to lock their computers :)
I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.
violating security policies in order to “teach a lesson” is a sure fire way to get people to lose trust in you.
Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.
Damn, I was half hoping it was doing some deepfake face swapping rather than just totally replacing the whole image. Part of me would love to install a "Being John Malkovich" style face replacement plugin onto someone's machine.
At a company selling a B2B platform, we had an internal extension used to teach how to write extensions that drew an interactive pet on screen, similar to the one in this VS Code extension. It accidentally got deployed to one client, which caused a complete company shutdown because lots of people suddenly reported being hit by a virus to their internal IT team, causing company-wide panic.
This is actually the first plugin I install on every new installation of a Jetbrains IDE...
Used to include it in my "mentoring about advantages of IDEs" rants, just before configuring debugger.
Sadly they only appear in the right/left hand side, not the editor :( I want a cat that reacts to my code, ideally getting mad at me for writing poor quality code, and stretching/sleeping when I'm thinking.
I got "power mode" (or something similar) installed in Intellij/Jetbrains IDE. The faster I write or bigger change I make the more sparkles and flames etc grow around the cursor. Similar plug-ins exist for other editors as well. A bit fun to enable before pairing with a coworker to see their reaction.
Triggering an animation based on what's under the cursor sounds interesting. Like moving to a loop declaration starts a chase-your-tail animation. Or moving to a function signature gives the pet some paint and paper.
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This became widespread enough to be mentioned at the new employee orientation.
I once pranked a coworker/friend with a Windows installation screen after lunch break. He was … astounded. The thing is, we were all using Debian in this company.
Accessing someone’s computer and manipulating the software was instant termination at my old company. Some new security guy joined and tried to do what you did. Find unlocked computers and mess with them to prove a point. He lasted a week.
Was this the extension? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/niccage/
I'm not sure what the lesson here is.
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https://github.com/giusgad/pets.nvim
Maybe Microsoft could bring back the Bob team to integrate pets with all facets of VS Code.
This... this needs to happen!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neko_(software)