
Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell - tdrnd
http://cornellsun.com/2017/11/10/hundreds-rickrolled-in-mysterious-campus-prank-at-cornell/
======
squarefoot
An 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.

~~~
jameskegel
This is quite possibly the most evil benign prank I've ever seen. I'd like to
give a wink and a finger gun point to the person who thought of this. Are
there other things like this that one could do to spice things up at the
office? I like pranks like this where nobody gets hurt physically.

~~~
gvb
My all time favorite prank is getting harder to do but it is still possible.

Back in the day, most people had full size umbrellas. When it looked like rain
in the morning, they would take their umbrella in to work and hang it by the
handle on the wall of their cubicle.

I would loosen the umbrella (partially open while holding upside down), put
hole punch chad in the umbrella, and then re-close the umbrella and hang it
back up.

If it was raining at the end of the day, you knew you got the victim by the
hole punch chad at the door. :-D If it wasn't raining, you knew it was just a
matter of time. :-D

With the compact umbrellas, it is harder to get access to sneak chads into
them and hole punch chad is somewhat harder to come by.

~~~
jameskegel
I haven't been this excited to talk about Chads since the election, this was a
pleasure to read!

------
btown
> 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-
ow...](https://pedroliska.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/building-your-own-annoy-a-
tron-with-an-attiny85/)

EDIT: Code for those who don’t want to read the article:
[https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-...](https://github.com/pedroliska/ATtiny85/blob/master/watchdog-
wake/watchdog-wake.ino)

With great power comes great responsibility, friends.

~~~
busterarm
The parts are MUCH cheaper on digikey. Everything but the programmer and the
protoboards is like half as much.

Also, I just ordered enough to make 10 of these. :)

------
xpac
On 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 ;-)

------
WillyF
When 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...

~~~
bfuller
I 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
My 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.

~~~
emodendroket
You know what, joking aside, I like Rick Astley, and "Never Gonna Give You Up"
isn't a bad song, as pop songs go.

~~~
DoreenMichele
He's got a great sense of humor about it too. He live Rick Rolled the Macy's
Thanksgiving Parade on a day so cold he had to do his performance in a heavy
coat and gloves.

[https://youtu.be/wL-hNMJvcyI](https://youtu.be/wL-hNMJvcyI)

Apropos of nothing:

A punster friend of mine pun Rick Rolled himself in a dream. In the dream,
someone gave him a bunch of movies, but withheld the movie _Up._ The dream
ended on the pronouncement "I'm never gonna give you _Up_."

------
stevekemp
I 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 :)

~~~
Splines
I wonder if you could build an app for Android to do this. Rick roll people on
the go...

~~~
24gttghh
Just gotta plug the little esp8266 into an external battery with usb and you
can Roll on the go :)

------
userbinator
MIT has a history of doing similar things:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology)

------
praptak
The idea has been commercialised for years if not decades: check out annoy-a-
tron.

~~~
snerbles
I 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
Totally.

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
Kudos to you all, I could not keep a straight face being in on a joke like
that. Talk about being totally gaslighted!

~~~
vvanders
Oh 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).

~~~
emodendroket
I do not see how someone could enjoy being pranked on the kind of level you're
talking about these guys doing.

~~~
vvanders
Let's just say that the game industry lack a maturity that you find in other
software engineering professions.

------
itomato
Surely they should be awarded a prize in the Hackaday's Coin Cell Challenge.

------
mmjaa
These 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?

------
matte_black
There 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
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

~~~
PoachedSausage
No need to be quite so drastic, a mere EMP from high altitude should clear the
problem.

~~~
AstralStorm
Low altitude too. Especially local. Get an MRI sized electromagnet in there,
might be sufficient.

------
jkingsbery
"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
alumni

------
frgtpsswrdlame
Hah, classic. How cheaply could you put one of these together?

~~~
foopod
Less than $2, just get one some of these...

[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-1pcs-
Digispark...](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)

Wack a buzzer on them, add some code and then leave them in a usb port near
your victim. Easy.

------
gonzo
I’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.

------
bigeasy
Tippy 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/n9...](http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-
turtle/n9255?snl=1)

------
jxramos
[https://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.

------
b3lvedere
We 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.

------
kazinator
> _has been a staple of the internet since about 2007_

Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.

~~~
sotojuan
They 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.

------
kjrose
Oh man. The list of times stuff like this was done in mc ar Uwaterloo would
fill a novel.

------
jondiggsit
In today's world, the culprit will probably be found, expelled and jailed for
20 years

~~~
jimrandomh
> "Crans, the director of facilities, said he had considered reviewing
> surveillance video, but that it is not “a serious enough issue.”"

~~~
arkades
That 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
I 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.

