WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 15969262

Hundreds ‘Rickrolled’ in Campus Prank at Cornell

289 points| tdrnd | 8 years ago |cornellsun.com

101 comments

order
[+] squarefoot|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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. ;-)

[+] kazinator|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] btown|8 years ago|reply
> 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.

[+] busterarm|8 years ago|reply
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. :)

[+] skate22|8 years ago|reply
The open source community is never gonna let you down
[+] xpac|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] stevekemp|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
I wonder if you could build an app for Android to do this. Rick roll people on the go...
[+] praptak|8 years ago|reply
The idea has been commercialised for years if not decades: check out annoy-a-tron.
[+] snerbles|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] themark|8 years ago|reply
That is what I immediately thought of. Shouldn’t be too hard to redesign one to play a different tune.
[+] itomato|8 years ago|reply
Surely they should be awarded a prize in the Hackaday's Coin Cell Challenge.
[+] matte_black|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
[+] jkingsbery|8 years ago|reply
"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.

[+] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
Hah, classic. How cheaply could you put one of these together?
[+] blakes|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] btown|8 years ago|reply
See my top level comment - about $10 per unit.
[+] gonzo|8 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jxramos|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
> has been a staple of the internet since about 2007

Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.

[+] sotojuan|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
Oh man. The list of times stuff like this was done in mc ar Uwaterloo would fill a novel.