Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell

http://cornellsun.com/2017/11/10/hundreds-rickrolled-in-mysterious-campus-prank-at-cornell/

by tdrnd • 9 years ago

289 99 9 years ago

cornellsun.com

frgtpsswrdlame2• 9 years ago

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

btown2• 9 years ago

See my top level comment - about $10 per unit.

blakes• 9 years ago

If 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• 9 years ago

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

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.

btown2• 9 years 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-ow...

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

With great power comes great responsibility, friends.

skate22• 9 years ago

The open source community is never gonna let you down

busterarm2• 9 years ago

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. :)

itomato• 9 years ago

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

jondiggsit• 9 years ago

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

jimrandomh• 9 years ago

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

arkades• 9 years ago

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.

jotux• 9 years ago

Additionally:

Cornell Police Deputy Chief David Honan said CUPD had received no reports regarding the devices.

protomyth2• 9 years ago

The 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.

frgtpsswrdlame2• 9 years ago

Put a week long sleep before it starts going off.

ratsimihah• 9 years ago

How long do batteries last on these kinda circuits?

Also, is there such a thing as a low power trigger that can turn on a device that consumes more power? I guess I could google that up.

toomanybeersies2• 9 years ago

You're being melodramatic, but that's almost happened before: https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/1f86yl/tifu_by_playin...

tl;dr Redditor puts annoyatron in Canadian office. Someone finds it and thinks it might be an espionage device, so sends pictures to the RCMP. RCMP thinks it might be a bomb, sweeps the building. OP somehow doesn't get fired.

Obviously it's a reddit story, so take it with a few grains of salt.

matte_black• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

harry8• 9 years ago

It's the only way to be sure.

PoachedSausage• 9 years ago

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

praptak• 9 years ago

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

themark• 9 years ago

That is what I immediately thought of. Shouldn’t be too hard to redesign one to play a different tune.

snerbles• 9 years ago

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.

vvanders3• 9 years ago

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.

WillyF• 9 years ago

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...

busterarm2• 9 years ago

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpwa7w/i-played-the-boys-...

bfuller2• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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.

burger_moon• 9 years ago

When those internet connected jukeboxes came out some bars in the area for some reason had the Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Body Workout on it. That one was always fun to put on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CJ4SD-kWek

LambdaComplex• 9 years ago

You're probably talking about Thick as a Brick, in case you're wondering

gingericha• 9 years ago

John Mulaney has a hilarious bit about doing something similar in a diner with "Whats New Pussycat"

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/plvv4v/comedy-central-presents...

pc863• 9 years ago

It's not a bad song, but it's way longer than I thought. And it's got like a dip in the middle.

userbinator• 9 years ago

MIT has a history of doing similar things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...

squarefoot3• 9 years ago

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.

kazinator6• 9 years ago

If 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.

natch2• 9 years ago

I 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.

edmccard• 9 years ago

If you're locating a chirper by sound, you're not seriously impaired by the lights being out.

Even if you're locating it by sound, you probably don't want to stumble around in the dark while you're trying to find it. So you turn on the lights, and you can't find it because it stopped chirping. Then after you turn off the lights, it starts back up, so you turn the lights back on, etc.

mmjaa2• 9 years ago

There should be an app that allows one to triangulate sound sources to locate these darn things ..

pc863• 9 years ago

Never change, HN.

jameskegel2• 9 years ago

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.

rublev• 9 years ago

I like pranks like this where nobody gets hurt physically.

I'd rather get punched in the face and get it over with than endure this.

PhasmaFelis• 9 years ago

If you think keeping someone awake all night against their will is "benign", please stay the hell away from me.

squarefoot3• 9 years ago

"Are there other things like this that one could do to spice things up at the office?"

There was a variation on keyloggers disguised as USB hubs used to sniff passwords and text, basically a man in the middle attack on keyboards. They're essentially read only devices which store what they sniff into internal memory or retransmit it using other means. They however could be reprogrammed not to spy but just to emit certain text appended or in place of what comes from the keyboard, possibly in a spectacular way like waiting for a sentence written by the victim, then sending N backspaces to delete it and swapping it with a new one. ...who you gonna call? :)

gvb2• 9 years ago

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.

j_s• 9 years ago

"Neighbor's house alarm triggers when I put my car in reverse" | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15947540

mindcrime: This seems like a particularly evil variation of that idea:

http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=C6...

Electronic Cricket Kit $5.75; min $10 order + at least ~$7.20 shipping (U.S.)

gvb2• 9 years ago

I actually have one of these on my desk at work, showing the youngsters what we did "back in the day." I made it when I was in college in the 80s (yeah, I'm old fart).

My first version was built with the classic 556 timer chip - you can still find schematics of this on the web.

The one on my desk is my second version. I did the circuitry, taped out and etched the circuit board, and assembled it in a small box. I have long ago lost the schematic so I need to reverse engineer it.

Chips:

* 4049 inverter - used as a 6KHz oscillator and probably the photoresistor sensor buffer for gating.

* (2) 4020 2^14 dividers => divide by 2^28: 6000 / 2^28 =~ 12 hours

* Battery and jumper.

12 hours before activation time (say 3:00PM), you connect power with the jumper. Sometime in the evening, you visit the victim and leave the "present." In the middle of the night it activates.

I'm a much nicer person nowadays. ;-)

jacquesm• 9 years ago

Elektor magazine ran a schematic back in the 80's, it was also part of the Radio Shack 150 in one kit.

They're sold as kits:

https://www.amazon.com/Velleman-MK104-Electronic-Cricket/dp/...

kazinator6• 9 years ago

has been a staple of the internet since about 2007

Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.

jackvalentine• 9 years ago

2005.

sotojuan• 9 years ago

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.

xpac• 9 years ago

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 ;-)

jxramos4• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

Took him a couple weeks to figure it out.

stevekemp• 9 years ago

I liked the Rick-Roll access-point:

* 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• 9 years ago

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

24gttghh• 9 years ago

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

kjrose• 9 years ago

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

mmjaa2• 9 years ago

These are the "LED Throwies" of the current generation of hacker misfits:

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

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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

alumni

b3lvedere• 9 years ago

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.

bigeasy• 9 years ago

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...

Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell

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