SSH Computer Possession Prank – Part V
Jordan’s possessed computer started upping the ante with control over his webcam. What is this all about? See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
Disclaimer: This prank involves some steps taken which may be ethically unacceptable if abused. I assure you that we did not do anything to harm anyone, and we certainly wouldn’t encourage that kind-of behavior. It was all in kind-hearted fun, and though we had absolute power over Jordan’s computer, we only ever utilized it for comedy.
March 28, 2010
At this point in the prank, Ariyan and Dave were having second thoughts, thinking that we should just stop doing this for Jordan’s psychological well-being, and never tell him it was us.
I disagreed, and Mark was on board as well, but because what we were about to do was the most intense and creepy thing yet, we thought it best to make sure somebody was in the room to make sure Jordan didn’t do anything rash.
So I went out on the interwebs and found a tool for using the webcam via terminal: here. I was then able to upload the binary wacaw file to my web-server and use curl to download the file:
curl -O "http://..."
Now we had this brilliant command at our disposal, which takes a 30 second video and saves it as video.avi, which could then be launched remotely or accessed later with a flash-drive for You-Tube upload.
./wacaw --video --duration 30 video
So the creepy plan begins. Mark goes to Jordan’s room and asks if he wants to watch the last episode of Tim & Eric. After 10 minutes, I take a 20 second video, say “Would you like to activate video surveillance?” followed by “Video surveillance activated.” I then launched the video I just recorded, which is below:
[VIDEO HERE PLEASE]
The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. Apparently the video started recording immediately as Mark sat down, which led Jordan to believe that the computer somehow knew there was somebody else using it, like some kind of bizarre space-age LoJack. Jordan and Mark immediately ran into my room to tell me what had just happened.
A while later, Jordan started exploring some things and found a video in the trashcan of his empty room with the lights off. He concluded that the computer was recording him sleep, though in reality, it was just me practicing the webcam feature while he wasn’t home. But the creepy-factor of the thought of his computer watching him sleep was pretty funny.