Scaring people with fullScreen


When Flash Player 9 goes into full screen mode, it pops up a little security message that tells the user how to exit full screen mode. It appears as white text on a semi-transparent black background so it is generally always visible (which is good). Still, I wondered if it could be obscured.

The message is always on top, so it is impossible to draw over it. But what if we tried distracting the user from the actual security message?

Here’s a silly test:

This movie requires Flash Player 9

Of course, you can press Esc (or alt+tab to another window) to escape.

UPDATE: I have made the source code available, warts and all, under a ZLib licence. Share and enjoy :)

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Reader Comments

Bravo! Best use of FP9 fullscreen feature I’ve seen so far :)

This is too cruel :)
For bonus points, detect the platform and display the error message appropriately (the current bsod is from Win98 I think), imagine displaying a kernel panic for Linux and the equivalent for Mac.

Nice.Can you provide the source ?

Oh that’s nasty indeed - great idea! I think you could spice this up with a little bit of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

you are right… it really confuses users.

heh, not bad. I honestly didn’t see the message the first time.

Now I’m curious whether one can enter fullscreen automatically with flash… I am tempted to freak out my fiancee that way :P

Funny! The BSOD was a strange sight to see on my MBP.

Very nice!!

The first time i clicked your link i was looking for the message that told me how to exit full screen.
I couldn’t see it and I was looking for it… I’m sure that anyone not looking for it will get freaked!

It would be more effective if the distracters contained actual words and phrases, rather than just random letters.

Pretty sweet though :)

Source please!! THIS WAS GREAT!

Heh, thanks everyone :)

@Gaspy: Very astute! I grabbed the BSOD image from a Google image search. Platfrom-specific screens is a good idea.

@Mario: Haha that did cross my mind too :)

@Brady: Yeah, that thought occurred to me too, but I was already awake too late as it was ;)

I will be making the source available for anyone who wants to add stuff or just hack on it. The code is an embarrassing spaghetti mess, though!

EDIT: I’ve edited the original post with a link to the source code.

And I forgot to reply to @Joequincy: Flash full screen mode can only be triggered in response to a keypress, mouse click or menu selection.

Thats hillarious! Great use of the bsod.

Eeep! That’s cool. I haven’t seen that screen for a while now acutally. The blue screen on death.

Unfortunately, the BSOD instructs the user to hit Ctrl+Alt+Del, which will snap them out of the full-screen. You could probably just edit the image text to say something else, though….

Jesus. Scared the crap outta me. I woulda went NUTS if I didn’t know it was a test.

Scanning my computer for the next week, hah.

Great!

I lol’d because im using linux :P

Awesome idea. Only suggestion; hide the mouse on BSOD.

retarded

I have not seen that - or any, come to think of it - crash message since I banished Windows into the VirtualBox on my Linux desktop.

eh, font is off a bit, which is why i noticed the original msg at first, but otherwise its pure genious

I’m running on Linux, it was so strange to see a windows blue screen. lol

Haha, that’s nasty. I love it.

Its not long enough in animation, I still spotted it fairly easily.

I didn’t see the actual warning message until the 2nd time I looked at it. Clever…

How about making the messages fade out in sync to the full screen exit message? I didn’t see the message until it started fading out, and I had time to read it.

funny and wicked

That was the funniest thing ever. Genius. Gaspy is right, display one for mac and linux too!

Hi, i came here from Su. Just stopped by to say kudos!

This is just great. So … evil :)
I just saw it and I already pranked one of my friends with it.
Awesome job, looking forward to some updates for linux and mac :D

Loved it. I remembered when I was working at an Internet caffee and we had win ‘98, XP was just out on the market and I got tones of BOSD’s a day. Crappy times …that led to Linux fun times. Thanks again for the flashback.

Great flash test.

That’s great… I had to run it several times before I could spot the message (and I’ll admit to thinking I’d been had at first… made me quite nervous when the bsd popped).

hehehe

i love this “prank”
I will send it to my distribution group and wait for angry responses :)

This is why I use the NoScript addon for Firefox. I only allow flash and java on websites that I approve.

I don’t leave my homepage without it :)

Wonderful way to play a trick on someone. Check out CoComment for some other useful developer’s tools…

LOL! funny. evil.

as long as NO REAL DAMAGE happens..then it’s hilarious!!

Thank god i know some flash … nice one.

this is just too cool, it did scare me a bit coz i turned off my anti virus and i was using windows,hehe, nice work

Not as believable when you have a Mac and it tells you there’s a Windows fatal error. I guess there probably are people who think Macs run on Windows, though…

It should disable the cursor in the blue screen

You shouldn’t do that! That just freaked me out. Yes, you may be making people aware but make sure they have their morning coffee or tea first.
Thank you for the info and the near pulsating beating in my chest.
I never should have clicked on it.

I can see how this could aggravate someone pretty easily lol. Nice use of flash, interesting.

lol, i almost hit control alt delete. Great post anyway.

It will be cooler with the mouse hidden :))
and if you can, make it start without having to click :D
send me a email with the source please
i have made the mouse hidden but i cannot do the fullscreen thing

To be honest, you need to disable right clicking, that kinda destroys the illusion.

Funny thing. How can I get BSOD on Linux :S

Impressive. The b* screen was an unexpected cool touch.

This is hilarious…but I’m running Slackware…OS detection would be killer XD

It was so cool dude !
Thanks a lot.

Haha thanks for the laughs!

How to scare the crap out of people who visit your website | nerdd.net…

\r\nThis would be the perfect prank if someone could hide the \"esc to exit full screen\"…

And here I was thinking switching to Ubuntu would rid me of the BSOD forever :)

LOL, i almost got panic…

LOL, that is insane. I sent my wife a link to her laptop and she almost lsot it! LMAO, too funny.

JJ
http://www.Ultimate-Anonymity.com

That was cool. What you should do is detect the native OS the user has and customize the BSoD. Then you could freak out us OSX users a bit more. :)

I think it’s work better if the jumbled backparts were also english - the way we view things, we look for recognisable patterns in things like that, making “press ESC to exit” stand out as the only pattern on screen that we can make sense of - if people were so busy reading all the other messages, odds that they note the exit prompt are smaller.

[...] bunnyhero used Flash Player 9 that goes into full screen mode to develop a pretty cool scary effect. [...]

Nice, but not perfect. The fade-out gives away the real message.

That’s brilliant. Only thing better would be if you could hide the mouse too. :D

Huh, that BSOD scared me off . Nice job man. :)

[...] bunnyhero dev » Scaring people with fullScreen [...]

[...] bunnyhero dev » Scaring people with fullScreen When Flash Player 9 goes into full screen mode, it pops up a little security message that tells the user how to exit full screen mode. Still, I wondered if it could be obscured. (tags: humor) [...]

Nice :D I bet some ppl WILL hit CTRL-ALT-DEL when they see this.

Oh! I watched it a couple of times and I didn’t notice the Full Screen message!

This is great!! pretty funny!

Nice job. Took me 20 times before I saw the notice about hitting ESC.

Oh, that is just evil. Brilliant… but nicely evil. You deserve to be hired by some giant marketing machine, to wreak your havoc on a broader, unsuspecting public. Bravo!

i nearly screamed at the BSOD - shoulda read the comments.

hah. good one. couldn’t be more obvious i’m not hard at work when i should be

“Were no strangers to love
You know the rules and so do I…”

[...] bunnyhero devの人が作った、ギョっとするフラッシュ。 [...]

Nice post, I really don’t like the full screen movies and animations on the site especially if I don’t request them by my self.

Cool!! I actually got to see a BSD on my Linux Box! I LAWLD

Oh you are bad… and brilliant!

Very nice example. Well done!

[...] bunnyhero dev » Scaring people with fullScreen (tags: flash funny prank) [...]

Haha, I’m so tempted to send that to my brother that knows nothing about computers and is having all sorts of problems.

Oddly, with Flash 9.0 r115 on Linux with Firefox 3, I don’t get any sort of hovering or popup message telling me how to exit full-screen.

The BSOD is nice, though.

One thing you could also do is to fade out all of the fake text boxes at the same time that Flash’s message fades away, to obscure it then as well.

“Press any key to restart the computer” would be the best error message, since that’ll scare ‘em out of hitting ESC.

Simply, gloriously, amazing!

wow! BSOD on my mac!

@Brady: Wrong. If the messages were readable, you would focus on that section of the screen.

soo i have a question how do you share it well with the sorce code and everything i was wondering how to make it a clickable link and whatnot

Just fiddling with the source,
the message boxes look much more like the real one without any effects, and if you use bitmap fonts rather than anti-aliased ones.

Just another thought, can you simulate key presses/mouse clicks with javascript?

Oh yeah, one thing for people who want to hide the mouse.

Just add Mouse.hide(); to the top of the blueScreen function.

[...] 09:34 AM Mit Flash 9 können Flashfilme offensichtlich im Fullscreen-Mode ablaufen. Auf diese Website gibt es eine erschreckende Demo davon.Dieses “Feature” könnte eine vollkommen neue [...]

What a moron.

[...] Schaut euch das mal an, und wenn auf der Seite, klickt auf den blauen ‘click here’ link.. Genial. Tolle Idee um Leute komplett zu verwirren. Hach. [...]

*chuckle* .. loved it! Must leave this on my screen when i go out for lunch ;)

I agree with #1.. best use of full screen EVAR!!

Type your comment here.
ula bılgısayar coktu sandım bu ne ya odum bokuma karıstıı

Read At Work
http://www.readatwork.com/
employs a similar, albeit less menacing, tactic.

Heh, certainly distracting and very amusing as well. Not sure it’s quite enough to exploit people using flash to replace their desktop just yet though. If there were a way to disrupt video output long enough for the video to load as full screen and have the warning go away it would have some serious attack potential though.

[...] bunnyhero No Comments, Comment or [...]

PRICELESS!

[...] flash, blue screen of death, wnidows, xp I think this has to be the best use of Adobe Flash ever. Trick your friends into think they’ve been hacked. [...]

Took me three tries to spot it. Even then, it was only because the box faded away. If you really want to be nasty, make all those boxes fade away at the same time. >:-D

I also smiled as the BSOD came up on my Mac’s screen. To everyone saying it could be made platform-specific: Mac OS X’s “kernel panic” screen is a message about restarting overlaid on a dimmed and darkened view of the existing screen — that is, windows and apps that were in use up until the moment of death are still visible under the error message. This strikes me as being hard to fake, unless you managed to get Flash 9 to do a screen grab. (Not just of the browser window, but of the entire contents of the monitor.)

[...] La versión 9 del Flash Player permitió incoporara la opción “fullScreen” de Flash directo en el navegador, de este modo uno puede ver a pantalla completa cualquier sitio web. Cuando uno activa esta opción el plugin muestra un mensaje que te indica que oprimas la tecla “esc”, el detalle es que apenas está visible, así que se pueden hacer cosas divertidas aprovechándose de esta característica. Si quieres tener un poco de diversión y bajar el código oprime aquí. [...]

[...] Scaring people with Flash Fullscreen mode « Squirrelfish (!) [...]

my friend, Fred McLain once created an activex plugin called “exploder” that did a clean shutdown of your computer (still does, if you’re running W95 and IE3)… micro$oft was none too pleased about it, i can tell you.

i find that your flash thingie is a lot more amusing if you’re not running windoesn’t… 8)

[...] No hagas click en "click here"www.bunnyhero.org/2008/05/10/scaring-people-with-fullscreen/ por pentateuco hace pocos segundos [...]

[...] Scaring people with fullScreen [...]

It would work better if, instead of having random letters, you displayed the same text but with other keys, eg. Shift, Delete, etc.

[...] of for a while. Though it does present some interesting problems/ideas if used cleverly, as in this wonderful example. It could of course be something far worse like tricking a user into thinking they are in a full [...]

[...] bunnyhero dev » Scaring people with fullScreen (tags: flash fullscreen webdesign development) [...]

Well didn’t bother me to much as I read the comments and knew what was about to happen. Not to mention I run linux too.
But one thing I am surprised hasn’t come up already. Multiple monitor setups, now correct me if I am wrong, been a while since using windoze and longer since a bsod, but wouldn’t that take down both monitors and not just one. Dead giveaway…

Unfortunatly, the existance of a cursor on the BSOD gave it away that this was not a true BSOD. To fake a real BSOD, you need to erase the mouse cursor….
Ed

awesome, i can see the flash one more time!!

[...] Fonte: bunnyhero dev [...]

Wow~ too handsome! All my friends and me cried!

I couldn’t be bothered to read every comment in case this has been said before, but it doesn’t fool you if you have dual screen, as it only works on the primary monitor thus giving itself away.

Not as effective with dual monitor. Might want to update the code to deal with dual monitor situations :-D

LOL Im on linux and still nearly pissed myself.

This is great. I want to prank some friends with this but have no clue how. Can someone set this up on an innocent looking website? Post the link here and then I’ll send everyone I know to it.

that truly is the best i’ve seen in a long time.

[...] http://www.bunnyhero.org/2008/05/10/scaring-people-with-fullscreen/ hecgo | Curiosidades | Trackback | RSS Feed [...]

How embbed this to blog?

[...] just stumbled upon something funny/crazy about flash movies running in fullscreen. [...]

do you have like a link i can post somewhere that will lead them to this?

[...] geek test v.3.1Animation about procrastinationStrange McDonald’s imageryBacon flossGo here and click on “click here” after you read the instructions Charlie Todd launches Urban [...]

[...] The blue screen is back, brought you by Adobe! Ok not exactly by Adobe. It’s done by this guy. [...]