McAfee Anti-virus protects us from jokes?

April 7, 2011 11:42 AM

I was surprised to find an option in the McAfee anti-virus enterprise management software, that "jokes" are a category that they block (screenshot). What sort of jokes? Are any of these jokes awesome and/or funny?

All that really comes to mind is that old BSOD screensaver, though I do remember an old DOS program that would make your computer sound like a toilet.

posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo to Technology (5 answers total)

Most early computer viruses were just that.
posted by tremspeed at 11:43 AM on April 7, 2011

I used to have a joke .exe that mirrored what was on the monitor left to right until you pressed a key or clicked the mouse. It was always picked up by virus scanners if I did a hard drive scan.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 11:46 AM on April 7, 2011

Best answer: Some programs popped your cd drive out at random intervals, or switched the left and right mouse buttons. Others made loud inappropriate noises. That sort of stuff. You can see a lot of them in action here.
posted by deezil at 11:53 AM on April 7, 2011

Best answer: Also a decent number of these sorts of prank programs pretend to be viruses or otherwise appear to do damage to your system without actually doing anything. For example they may bring up a legitimate-looking dialog box that appears to be going through the filesystem and deleting everything, when in reality it is just printing the file name of each file without deleting them.

A lot of novices would not get the joke (for example, they might immediately unplug their machine, missing any "Ha ha, just kidding" message), attempt to reinstall things, report them as real viruses, etc. So it makes sense for AV companies to add these sorts of programs to their virus identification databases, even if they are actually harmless.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:23 PM on April 7, 2011

Best answer: My goofball 10 year old figured out how to write a visual basic script that would just endlessly give you a dialogue box to clear. One part proud poppa that he's that interested in computers and can figure things out, one part feeling like the dad in Bloom county whose little kid had the Banana 6000 and kept hacking BoA. I had to sit him down and explain that even though he knew that you could just interrupt it and shut it down, someone like Grandma or Grandpa might have a conniption trying to figure out how to make it stop.

So, yeah - jokes are a category of virus...
posted by randomkeystrike at 12:58 PM on April 7, 2011