
Invite Rick to Rick Roll Your Zoom Calls - adnanaga
http://inviterick.com
======
m0ck
Love this idea! Just few weeks ago we had a little scandal in my country, when
password to top-level government coronavirus-related Zoom meeting was leaked
by one of the politicians accidentally on Facebook and random people started
hijacking it and it was hilarious (part of it was uploaded to YT, skip to 3:12
for their reactions
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub82Xb1C8os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub82Xb1C8os))

~~~
rathel
Polish politicians had this in 2013:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljNIU38sUU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vljNIU38sUU)

(For context: Macierewicz is a nutjob politician at PiS, then opposition, now
ruling party. He led an unscientific "investigation comitee" to explain how
Smolensk 2010 plane crash happened. It obviously never really explained
everything, for its goal was to accrue political capital on the death of
president Lech Kaczyński (PiS), claiming it was Russian interference, TNT,
artificial fog, birch and whatnot.)

~~~
moolcool
The youtube link doesn't work in Canada. Here's a mirror someone uploaded to
Vimeo though [https://vimeo.com/148751763](https://vimeo.com/148751763)

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jonplackett
Anyone interested I just found the source code for this on Github
[https://jonplackett.github.io/astley](https://jonplackett.github.io/astley)

~~~
sreekotay
"Just found". Dude - it's a cute project (really) - but... c'mon ;)

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Kiro
I presume you didn't click the link because it's written in COBOL so that's
noteworthy in itself.

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jonplackett
Of course. Everyone knows COBOL is the new Clojure ;)

I like how this is showing how few people click on links before commenting.

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giarc
I thought this was going to be like www.cameo.com and Rick Astley was really
going to show up in your zoom calls. You'd pay $40 for a 2.5 minute cameo or
something.

~~~
dhosek
Sort of like Goat To Meeting

[https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting](https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting)

~~~
dhosek
It just occurred to me (and thankfully it's likely no one will ever read to
me) that someone could combine memes and do goatse to meeting.

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tams
It's fascinating how this meme refuses to die.

A Slashdot commenter was already pondering about its longevity 10 years ago:
[https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563258&cid=312739...](https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563258&cid=31273926)

~~~
gadders
It's more benevolent than the Goatse man [NSFW] that used to be common on
Slashdot via disguised links. In the end they had to put the domain next to
the link text so people couldn't get caught.

~~~
rpmisms
I'm upset that you made me remember that meme.

~~~
gorgoiler
The curse comes in many forms: I can’t remember the last time I felt
comfortable looking at a schematic diagram of a coil/ferrite transformer:

[https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-
tr...](https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-transformer-
figure-compressor.jpg)

Apologies for the puerility.

~~~
tbassetto
I feel you. I have a similar issue with the logo of this Norwegian company:
[https://www.bus.no](https://www.bus.no).

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benatkin
I thought at first this was a cameo.com - like thing from Rick Astley where
he'd personally rick roll for like a hundred bucks.

I think he'll probably hear about this from some of his fans. He relaunched
his career. He's an awesome dude.

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montenegrohugo
I love these stupid fun projects. There's no commercial motivation, no shady
manipulation: it's just _fun_.

'Whimsical' is the word that I think best describes it. I love the whimsy of
it. I wish more of the internet was like this.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
_> I wish more of the internet was like this._

It used to be.

I'm am old pre-WWW guy. We had a lot of whimsy, "back in the day."

Then serious money started to happen, and that changed everything.

It's not all bad -at all. I think a lot of modern stuff is very cool, and I'm
glad folks are making money on this, as it helps with that ol' "rising tide
lifts all boats" thing.

But I do sort of miss the "dorky" whimsy (I wonder if anyone remembers "Kill
Dean's Inits!"). The current IT scene is fairly cutthroat and deadly serious.

~~~
bjt
By pure volume, there's got to be more whimsy on the internet today than back
then. There are orders of magnitude more people on it.

But sure, the percentage is probably lower.

That says to me that this is a search problem. Could we build a search engine
that favors indie/personal labors of love over commercial sites?

Or maybe it's a curation problem rather than search. In which case a site like
HN is just the thing to help it bubble to the surface.

~~~
dhosek
Back in the early days of the web, one of my regular stops was Worst of the
Web which was a collection of the most embarrassing things people put up on
personal "home pages."

(As an aside, at a work meeting last week, someone used the term home page to
refer to a web page and I was instantly transported to 1995. I remember one
upper level manager excitedly declare that the term home page should only
refer to the page that opens when you start the browser and not to the page
that we had at our companies main address.)

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njsubedi
The author explains how he came up with the idea.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

~~~
kamyarg
Nice try, but no

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obiefernandez
Tried inviting Rick to our morning management scrum. I was sitting there
grinning for about 15 minutes, then our admin was like "oh hey, some stranger
named Rick is trying to get into the room! good thing I've got streaming on,
no strangers getting in here today, no sir!"

Oh well, it was fun thinking bout it.

~~~
roryokane
I was confused for a moment – you meant “good thing I’ve got _screening_ on”.

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shakna
> There’s a simple intake form on the site that you can drop your meeting
> invite link into. That saves to a local database that I, sorry, Rick, will
> be monitoring. When Rick sees a new link come in, off he goes to deliver
> happiness, smiles, and cybersecurity audits. Once rolling has been completed
> to Rick’s satisfaction (about 15 seconds) he’ll check that meeting off the
> list and move on to the next one.

As users tend to re-use meet links, this seems like a privacy breach waiting
to happen, even if it is done in jest, and does seem like a fun idea.

How long until someone decides they might be interested in trying to get
access to that database?

~~~
KORraN
Exactly this. I'm surprised that I had to go way down the comments to find
someone raising the issue of giving away zoom links that usually are static
for recurring events.

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santiagobasulto
This thread is a minefield of Ricks. I can't trust HN ever again. (This is
very fun guys, a good break from all the tech and serious news)

~~~
surround
Shh

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kej
My pet conspiracy theory, with absolutely zero evidence, is that Rick Astley
is behind the rickrolling meme. Other people might get a laugh out of it, but
he stands to gain financially every time it happens. Follow the money!

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motoboi
For those who (like me) didn't understand, this is a meme involving the music.

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

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event-horizon
If this could be modded to invite any youtube video, that would be kind of
cool.

~~~
badwolf
This is something that should be a native feature. I especially don't get how
it's not a native feature for Google Meet.

edit: from the "how does Rick do this" ... seems he's just using a video loop
with Manycam virtual webcam.

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vizzah
Yep, it's nice to spice up those Zoom calls sometimes. I've been playing music
videos for my friends from a spare computer. Get & compile v4l2loopback and
then it's just this bash script on any video file (which you get with youtube-
dl first ;)

#!/bin/bash mkfifo /tmp/pipe videofile=$1;
(/opt/v4l2loopback/examples/yuv4mpeg_to_v4l2 /dev/video0 < /tmp/pipe & );
mplayer $videofile -vf scale=480:360 -vo yuv4mpeg:file=/tmp/pipe

Of course, first rickrolling was a sexy webcam girl joining in the chat =D

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michaelmior
Tried this out in my own personal Zoom meeting. Can confirm that it works :)

~~~
SubiculumCode
My work requires a password for zoom. Will this work I wonder?

~~~
singlow
As long as your company does not have a security policy which would frown upon
handing out your zoom password to a random troll.

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probe
Super cool!! Is he manually joining these Zoom calls or is there a script
running to let him join automatically (seems to be the former)?

Was looking into a side project that was a Zoom Timer (i.e. dial into Zoom
with a timer background to keep everyone on track), but was worried we'd hit
captcha if we tried to automate. Curious if he solved this :o

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arxpoetica
Can someone create this for unwanted phone calls? "Answer" "Straight to Voice
Mail" "Rick Roll"

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Press2forEN
Links in this thread are not to be trusted!

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njsubedi
You could have kept Rick Roll a secret. It's more fun when we randomly click a
YouTube link on the internet, and Rick Roll plays!

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tilolebo
I wanna try this, but what if the zoom link points to a zoom room? Will Rick
keep popping in forever?

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sebazzz
Now we need something for Microsoft Teams as well of course.

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PeterBarrett
The styling of the site is so on point, nicely done!

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snvzz
Hopefully this will degrade the Zoom experience, helping adoption of better,
safer, open alternatives.

~~~
oarsinsync
If you look at the way it's implemented, it's not difficult to adapt this to
work with "better, safer, open alternatives" as well.

~~~
snvzz
Sure, but so what.

