Invite Rick to Rick Roll Your Zoom Calls | Hacker News Reader

Invite Rick to Rick Roll Your Zoom Calls

inviterick.com

335 pointsadnanaga96 comments

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)

Well I don't know what I was expecting

The UK PM did tweet images of cabinet meetings containing the id, albeit after the meetings were finished. This turned into a few security stories e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/1/21202584/zoom-security-pri...

At the time, people were (at least) less aware of the password options for zoom calls, so it was easy to hijack meetings knowing only that id if the host wasn't careful.

I don't think you can be faulted for expecting this to have happened again.

Their reactions were hilarious.

I could watch that all day long!

Super video. Related, a Dutch governmental meeting got disrupted by people saying racist things [0]. The politicians now don't trust zoom, and claim it was hacked... But they published the link on their website and didn't set a password )facepalm(. They are now also afraid of getting viruses via zoom (even though they went digital to avoid them huehuehue).

[0] https://www.gelderlander.nl/west-betuwe/online-raadsvergader...

It was not of the government, but munipal/city.

That's a government.

Polish politicians had this in 2013:

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.)

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

Might this be an opportunity for Platforma Obywatelska to run a campaign claiming Rickrolling promotes an ideology more harmful than even Osoby LGBT?

(on second thought, maybe encouraging politicians to troll, no matter how amusingly, might be counterproductive)

They never give up on that call do they?

And they never let down!

just wow

atthis point i'll just enjoy the music anyway.

Congrats. Haven't lost The Game in quite a while, and you got me.

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

Savage

Your username matching the github pages gives it away.

You didn't click the link did you :-)

Well, it didn't for me

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

Maybe the poster forgot where it was hosted, and they had to search for it so they could post it here. The code could have been in a CVS repo or SVN repo or in GitLab vs Github or even CodeCommit. Let's be honest, do you remember where all of your repos are hosted? ;-)

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

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

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

Never expecting this on HN. Good job!

I try ;)

No one can https://time.com/5855001/rick-roll-rick-astley/

Just wrote some code and shared it on github, feeling pretty, may delete it later I dunno.

Removed now

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.

Sort of like Goat To Meeting

https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting

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.

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...

Last month or so, Rick had an AMA on Reddit, where for the first time (publicly, at least), he was rick rolled.

https://xkcd.com/351/

I clicked on the comic. Should have known better.

The best was the 2008 Macy's Day Parade, where they got Rick Astley to rickroll America live on TV:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8D1vXYwz_U

https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/haucpf/ive_found_a_fe...

Ever since Eduard Van De Walle, the man behind the 'Wow' demo meme passed on, the meme died with him since he became a meme back in 2007.

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.

I always reference that as my example for why you have to have moderation on social media services.

Slashdot was moderated so that wasn't enough.

Slashdot was user-moderated, so you just needed enough people to find something +1 Funny or +1 Interesting. And rick rolls were always +5 Funny. The fun really started with the meta-moderation though. I’m still not sure how that experiment turned out.

It’s strange to think how changes in moderation and up-voting have led us from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit (and HN).

As someone who was a pretty early Slashdot user -- apparently, my user number there is 3616 -- I think the meta-moderation mostly worked. That's not a universally shared opinion. :) But I thought that the discussion level was consistently decent throughout the 2000s, and I think the moderation system definitely helped there. On the other hand, the multiple layers of user moderation require at least a handful of users to be regular "comment gardeners," which probably requires a fairly large user base to be viable.

(I drifted away sometime around when they were bought by Dice; I can't swear there's a causal connection, but it seemed to me the site kind of lost its mojo through the 2010s.)

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

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...

Apologies for the puerility.

I feel you. I have a similar issue with the logo of this Norwegian company: https://www.bus.no.

Good old days

The wild west days of the late 90's, early 2000's Slashdot...

It's fascinating because like many memes it didn't make sense in the first place.

I don't think anyone really gave a shit if they heard that (actually quite catchy) song. But everyone had to act like they were completely screwed over by hearing the song.

I don't think it was ever that the song was disappointing but the fact you went somewhere expecting something only to see the trademarked, "ah ha, fooled you!"

It's a great song. The longevity of the very friendly prank is probably perpetuated by how great the song actually is.

I think it has to do with the intro as well. Hearing that drum beat means you lost, a less punchy intro wouldn't be as effective.

Plus you get to listen to the song, so you can't be too sour about it.

I agree. Those drums are everything.

It's got universal appeal.

It's very apparent that it is absurd right up front so everyone gets it. The likelihood of a misunderstanding is fairly low.

The song is so bubbly and happy there's no apparent negative connotations.

And it's a nice song generally.

An example of this: When I was in my last year of secondary school a few years ago my physics teacher was explaining how she was completely dumbfounded that a little 13 year old just picked up a microphone (Doppler effect demo) and belted out an almost completely random pop song from the 80s? I explained the meme but it's still bizarre how people who would otherwise have no idea who Rick Astley is know all the words to the song.

It's also a great song, so I honestly enjoy being rickrolled for the most part.

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.

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.

>I wish more of the internet was like this.

I love that they're hosted on their own websits, too. Like the hamsterdance and other stupid things from the 90s.

So much fun stuff nowadays is just memes on Reddit, fb or other social networks. They're still fun, but they close the gardens one joke at a time. Can you imagine how much less conformity there would be if even 10% of fb users also had fun on their own website or self-hosted blog?

Even better, it actually saps productivity.

>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.

My favorite bit of old-school whimsy was Kibo, who would join any usenet thread that his name was mentioned in. Then there was the green card lottery spamming which was, in my estimation, the day the internet died.

> Kibo

Wow. I'd forgotten all about him/her (probably him).

Him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Parry

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.

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.)

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

Nice try, but no

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.

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

> 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?

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.

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)

Shh

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!

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

you can invite someone with the password in the url so I think yes.

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

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

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

Links in this thread are not to be trusted!

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!

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

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

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

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

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.

Sure, but so what.

More open is certainly nice, but I don't see how this existing points to any safety issues in Zoom. You can lock down meetings so that they aren't accessible to anyone just by URL and I'd be surprised if this would work in that case.

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