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Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoHah, classic. How cheaply could you put one of these together?
- btown 9y agoSee my top level comment - about $10 per unit.
- blakes 9y agoIf you get the bits directly from China and put them together yourself, you could probably make them for a few dollars a piece in quantity.
- foopod 9y agoLess than $2, just get one some of these... https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-1pcs-Digispark-kickstarter-development-board-ATTINY85-module-for-Arduino-usb/32697283942.html?spm=2114.search0104.8.29.2h1SOp https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-1pcs-Digispark... Wack a buzzer on them, add some code and then leave them in a usb port near your victim. Easy.
- btown 9y ago> The devices seem like they are handmade, said Dennison, who was in the Statler lounge when Simcox found the device. “Some person smarter than I am is manufacturing those out of their dorm room,” she posited. https://pedroliska.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/building-your-own-annoy-a-tron-with-an-attiny85/ https://pedroliska.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/building-your-ow... EDIT: Code for those who don’t want to read the article: https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-wake/watchdog-wake.ino https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-... With great power comes great responsibility, friends.
- itomato 9y agoSurely they should be awarded a prize in the Hackaday's Coin Cell Challenge.
- jondiggsit 9y agoIn today's world, the culprit will probably be found, expelled and jailed for 20 years
- jimrandomh 9y ago> "Crans, the director of facilities, said he had considered reviewing surveillance video, but that it is not “a serious enough issue.”"
- arkades 9y agoThat was a relief. As I read the article I had this ratcheting tension as I kept expecting the next sentence to be about some irrationally overblown response from the admin.
- aikinai 9y agoI had the exact same reaction reading this. I couldn't enjoy the story until I knew there wasn't an ongoing manhunt. And even then, I was sad that I had to worry so much about the overreaction so still couldn't enjoy it.
- jotux 9y agoAdditionally: >Cornell Police Deputy Chief David Honan said CUPD had received no reports regarding the devices.
- protomyth 9y agoThe hero of the story. I can see a lot of places that would find the prankster and subject them to all sorts of punishment for creating "terrorist" devices. Its nice to see an administrator that keeps a reasonable perspective.
- Uhhrrr 9y agoI wonder if he owns a soldering iron?
- matte_black 9y agoThere is no defense against these devices. Implanting a ton of these in a quiet study area is akin to a denial of service attack.
- exhilaration 9y agoI say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
- harry8 9y agoIt's the only way to be sure.
- AstralStorm 9y agoBut what about Aziz' Light?
- PoachedSausage 9y agoNo need to be quite so drastic, a mere EMP from high altitude should clear the problem.
- AstralStorm 9y agoLow altitude too. Especially local. Get an MRI sized electromagnet in there, might be sufficient.
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- praptak 9y agoThe idea has been commercialised for years if not decades: check out annoy-a-tron.
- themark 9y agoThat is what I immediately thought of. Shouldn’t be too hard to redesign one to play a different tune.
- snerbles 9y agoI used the ThinkGeek Annoy-A-Tron about a decade ago in a prank. Do not underestimate these devices. They will utterly dismantle the sanity of the unwitting.
- vvanders 9y agoTotally. We had a tech lead and senior engineer involved in an escalating prank war. The engineer eventually won with a 3 month long annoy-a-tron session. He even managed to send in home in the lead's backpack and pick it out the next day. We were all in on the gig so whenever it went off during a meeting we denied hearing anything. At one point he started pulling apart the HVAC system in his office. He moved all computer equipment and UPSes out into the hallway for a day. Do. Not. Underestimate. how effective these things are.
- jxramos 9y agoKudos to you all, I could not keep a straight face being in on a joke like that. Talk about being totally gaslighted!
- vvanders 9y agoOh it was well deserved. The previous prank was to pull the engineer into his office and proceed to tell him(with us all there) that they were going to have to let him(along with a few others) go due to a non-poaching clause from the previous employer that they had worked for. It was pretty elaborate and only came out at the end that it was a late April fool's joke(this was on the 2nd).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- WillyF 9y agoWhen I was at Cornell in the mid 2000s, one of the frats did a prank similar to this--though all it took was a roll of quarters. They loaded up the jukebox in the Ivy Room with quarters and set it to play Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping" on repeat. The brilliance was that the song faded out for about 30 seconds and with all of the noise in the dining hall, it sounded like the madness had finally ended. And then it would start again...
- busterarm 9y agohttps://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpwa7w/i-played-the-boys-are-back-in-town-on-a-bar-jukebox-until-i-got-kicked-out-832 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpwa7w/i-played-the-boys-...
- bfuller 9y agoI used to go to a bar that had a 30 minute jethro tull song on the jukebox. It was internet connected and I could pay for songs from home. They eventually unplugged the thing.
- dkarl 9y agoMy brother-in-law has Down Syndrome and is a sincere Rick Astley fan. (He went to a show in February and got a t-shirt signed, which he still wears.) He uses a jukebox app to play songs at one of our regular bars, and more often than not ends up picking Never Gonna Give You Up before the night is over. Every time I'm afraid to look around because I know everyone in the bar is eyeing each other wondering who the asshole is.
- jxramos 9y agoYou guys need to tamper with the jukebox one unexpected evening and see if the RICK will do a live cameo for the man. That would be awesome, score a ton of YouTube views.
- emodendroket 9y agoYou know what, joking aside, I like Rick Astley, and "Never Gonna Give You Up" isn't a bad song, as pop songs go.
- userbinator 9y agoMIT has a history of doing similar things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- squarefoot 9y agoAn even more evil version, dated early 80s or even earlier, used cmos counters and gates to make a piezo buzzer emit a cricket like sound (1). The evil touch was adding a photoresistor and a timer circuit, so that it kept inactive until there was dark, then it waited for like 10 minutes and started chirping, only to stop immediately as long as someone would turn on the lights. That made it the best prank to hide in someone's dorm room: super hard to locate and awfully annoying:) (1) a realistic cricket chirp can be made by driving an oscillator using 3 or more outputs of a binary divider; a cd4060 could be used alone by setting the internal oscillator to a few KHz frequency, then sending it to an amp (bjt, mosfet etc) keyed combining some of the 4060 binary divider outputs, so that the continuous tone becomes an intermittent chirp.
- kazinator 9y agoIf you're locating a chirper by sound, you're not seriously impaired by the lights being out. Also, you could use a spotlight. If you shine the spotlight somewhere and the chirp stops or changes, search that area.
- natch 9y agoI think you’re assuming too much from the description. In order to be evil, when it’s chirping, the chirps are many minutes apart, not continuous.
- kazinator 9y agoThat's the main factor then. If you're relying on sight to find it, then it's irrelevant whether it makes a sound. If you're relying on sound, you're impeded by the infrequent occurrence. That's would still be the case if the chirping went on with the lights on. If the chirping requires near total darkness, because then to search by sound you have to go through the trouble of covering the windows (with something more than the blinds or curtains, if there are any) or else you're restricted too searching by sound only in the night hours, and doing a visual sweep by day or lamplight. (But then the device only chirps in near total darkness, it may be defeated by a relatively dim night light.)
- kazinator 9y ago> has been a staple of the internet since about 2007 Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.
- jackvalentine 9y ago2005.
- sotojuan 9y agoThey are talking about the Rickroll meme which did start in 2007 when people in /v/ would post a link to it saying it was a GTAIV trailer.
- xpac 9y agoOn the 33c3 (last year‘s Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg), some folks brought their self made directional loudspeaker, mounted on a camera tripod. They set it up so it hit the ceiling right above an escalator, so everybody on the escalator was rickrolled, but only for like 2-3 seconds. Short enough to get confused, but not long enough to be sure it was actually meant for them. At the top of the escalator was a growing crowd of confused people looking around for what the hell did just happen ;-)
- jxramos 9y agohttps://clyp.it/01ylefbr https://clyp.it/01ylefbr I like how its truncates at the end making it harder to identify what it is that you're hearing exactly. Smart move, if it closed with the last handful of notes I think it would have dawned on folks a lot sooner.
- gonzo 9y agoI’m reminded of the time I took the little gimmick out of a NUC box (which would play the Intel tune when you opened the box) and hid it in the ceiling next to the overhead light of an office mate. Every time he came to work and flipped the light switch he was greeted with: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-ihRPi4wcBY https://youtube.com/watch?v=-ihRPi4wcBY Took him a couple weeks to figure it out.
- stevekemp 9y agoI liked the Rick-Roll access-point: * https://github.com/idolpx/mobile-rr https://github.com/idolpx/mobile-rr Pretends to offer free WiFi, but once you connect redirects you to a audio/video of Rick singing. I built my own version and it was a lot of fun to watch the count of "victims" increase :)
- kjrose 9y agoOh man. The list of times stuff like this was done in mc ar Uwaterloo would fill a novel.
- mmjaa 9y agoThese are the "LED Throwies" of the current generation of hacker misfits: http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/ http://www.instructables.com/id/LED-Throwies/ .. or, for you 60's/70's-era greybeards, the "seed bombs" of the digital generation: http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html I sit here wondering whats next .. maybe one day, when AR/VR gets the consumer uptake it needs, we'll be seeing 'fiducial bombing' graffiti or whatever the equivalent would be .. I wonder what it is?
- jkingsbery 9y ago"Never heard of the term 'rickrolling" before." - one of the comments on the page. The fact that there are college students that haven't heard the term rickrolling before makes me feel super old.
- tullianus 9y agoalumni
- b3lvedere 9y agoWe were lazy . We just charged the capacitors in electronics class so the next class would get a nice jolt when they needed to use them. I did also try out the session command to 'everyone' on the Novell system on my first day of school. They were not amused.
- bigeasy 9y agoTippy Turtle did it first! (This is actually the premise of a Saturday Night Live cartoon from 1984.) http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-turtle/n9255?snl=1 http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-turtle/n9...