Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell

cornellsun.com

289 pointstdrnd101 comments

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.

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.

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.

That'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.)

It's very difficult to accurately locate the direction of a high pitched chirp sound. The frequency makes a ton of difference here.

This is only true of a periodic sound. This is because when the wavelength is smaller than the distance between the ears, there is aliasing in the phase information (ambiguity). However, the overall group delay is perceptible at the onset and cessation of the tone. That doesn't give you much time to latch on to the direction. At high frequencies, though, level differences are useful. You know which ear is facing that chirp and which isn't.

I've found that particularly high pitched sounds can bounce of hard/flat surfaces very well.

It is possible to find it with a bit of hardware like a microphone. Very easily by taking multiple level measurement and some multilateration.

It gets hard when there is more than one.

The problem with identifying it by ear is that you get already some 20-30 cm precision at best unless you've trained in echolocation like some blind people. For such a small device it could well be a whole room.

Ok. We'll get you to clear any further pranks so you can tell us what's funny before we go and do anything rash such as trying to have some fun.

Shut it all down guys, kazinator will take over from here.

What?

He's just saying it's not that hard to determine the location of a chirping sound.

Not whether it's funny or not.

Whoosh.

>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.

It will stop chirping whether or not you turn on the lights, and then not chirp again for a number of minutes. Unless it is pitch dark, you're not really stumbling; people can find their way around in dark rooms. The searcher can reduce stumbling by tidying the room and possibly even removing some items such as chairs and whatever.

If they are doing those things, I’d say the prank was successful.

I never said the prank is unsuccessful, only that darkness doesn't make it harder to find something by ear. Hearing is hearing, sight is sight.

In the past, I have had a hard time finding by ear which switching power supply in a lab is giving off a squeal.

Seeing the power supplies was of no help; it might as well have been dark.

Basically the "off when the lights are on" aspect just confounds people initially when they don't know that this is the case. They hear something in the dark. They hear it beep again some time later, and then again. They turn on the lights to go looking for it. Unbeknownst to them, doing so deactivates it. It takes time to learn that the chirping is related to it being dark. Once they realize that, it makes next to no difference.

It's still not a bad prank without that embellishment.

Fair enough, you didn’t say that. I just think we disagree on how easy it would be to track this thing down in the dark.

I have a bearded dragon, so I know what it’s like to have loose crickets chirping in your house and having no idea where it’s coming from. Like others have said, the nature of the sound makes it harder to locate.

This is like hunting mosquitoes. You get a couple, turn the lights off, then lie down. Only to hear yet more mosquitoes.

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

Not that hard to do: sample the sound using multiple microphones, discard anything after the first thing you get (usually they're misleading reflections), then measure the delay to build a map of vectors pointing to the object. The military already have devices using that principle to locate the sound source of a weapon firing to send it a bomb. The RF variant is also employed in air traffic control and to detect pirate radio transmissions and uses arrays of omnidirectional antennas just like this one: https://cdn.everythingrf.com/live/direction_finders_teaser_o... Although military smaller ones are usually protected from casual view using dome-like covers.

Never change, HN.

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.

>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.

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

"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? :)

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.

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

"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.)

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. ;-)

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/...

> 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.

The open source community is never gonna let you down

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. :)

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 ;-)

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...

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

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.

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.

You 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.

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

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

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."

I wish I could upvote this a million times.

My old local supermarket had a "jukebox" at the entrance, where you could select a song. Every time I went there, I'd put Never Gonna Give You Up on the queue.

Last time I want there, however, they had removed the song. I guess I wasn't the only one putting the song on every time I walked in.

I was in a very popular bar with a group of friends one rather busy Friday / Saturday night. They were playing all kinds of great music and the crowd was thoroughly enjoying it until somebody* played Wham - Careless Whisper. I have vivid memory of one drunk guy about to smash the jukebox and swearing while the mood in the bar was destroyed for almost 8 minutes.

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

I imagine this part evoked some good chuckles https://youtu.be/1CJ4SD-kWek?t=69

DOWN

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

It actually wasn't thick as a brick

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...

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

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 :)

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

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

MIT has a history of doing similar things:

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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

I am generally up for just about any prank against anyone willing, moreso than most people. And even I have trouble with joking about firing someone.

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

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?

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.

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

It's the only way to be sure.

But what about Aziz' Light?

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

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

"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.

alumni

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

> has been a staple of the internet since about 2007

Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.

2005.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Additionally:

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

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.

I wonder if he owns a soldering iron?

He probably didn't do it (security cams and all), but I would bet he wished he had done it. A little chaos and mystery never hurt anyone. Tis a shame people cannot handle the little mysteries anymore.

Put a week long sleep before it starts going off.

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.

Most MCUs these days have sleep/stop/wakeup functionality. Basically, they can consume astonishingly small amounts of power while waiting on a trigger - usually on a GPIO pin - to wake it back up.

Some MCUs also include a built-in realtime clock peripheral, often with options for running it off a separate backup power supply such as a coin cell. Those RTC peripherals can often serve the same 'wakeup' functionality without even using an external pin. So the device can setup its RTC, set an alarm for a week in the future, and then go into a very low-power sleep mode.

For example, the STM32F030 or 031 would work, although their 32-bit 48MHz cores would be overkill for this application. But they are ultra-low-power ARM Cortex-M0+ which includes an onboard RealTime Clock peripheral and consumes like 5uA in deep sleep. I think TI's MSP432 lines are even more power efficient, but I don't know much about those chips.

You don't need ARM for this. A tiny PIC would be a better choice for it. (Less silicon area means less leakage current.)

MCUs have a low power sleep mode in which their timer still runs so they can be waken up periodically.

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.

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