chaos
MT: Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error
— Peter Ritchie (@peterritchie) November 16, 2014
chaos is a pastejacking tool which modifies text copied to the operating system clipboard. The idea is to replace the ASCII character semicolon (;) with an identical looking Unicode character Greek question mark (;) as soon as any text is copied to the clipboard, so that when a user tries to compile some copied code, their life becomes harder.
Click here for a small demo showing what happens when chaos is running in the background.
Warning - Please read before proceeding
Running chaos is a potentially destructive action, and it can cause irreversible damage when important text (say a password, or a cryptographic key) is copied to clipboard without any visible indication that the text was modified.
I wrote it as a proof-of-concept tool to show how easy it is for a rogue program to manipulate your system clipboard (after reading about a malicious clipboard hijacker discovered in PyPI), as well as a tool which can be used to play practical jokes on people, if that's your thing.
As the name signifies, it is an agent of chaos. Please use it judiciously, if you decide to do so.
Installation
Download the pre-built binary
Download the latest release from the releases page and unarchive it. No further installation is required.
Build from source
Before building, make sure the folowing software is installed and added to the PATH-
- Python 3.6 or higher
poetryvirtualenv
To build chaos from source, execute the Bash script build.sh with necessary privileges-
./build.sh
Usage
chaos runs in the background as a Unix-style deamon process named chaosd. To run it, execute the binary chaosd present inside the directory chaos/-
./chaosd
To stop it, kill the daemon by sending a SIGTERM or SIGINT-
kill -SIGINT $(cat $(echo /tmp/chaos-$(id -u).pid))