> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
Haha, that's great! I would have loved to hang out in that bar. I think I know which one. Thick As A Brick. I love that album. It comes in one single piece (actually two: SideA and SideB). Jethro Tull did it like that because the critics said that they're just stringing together random bits of music so that's exactly what they did with their next release.
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 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.)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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:
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 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?
109 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadhttps://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.
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.
Also, I just ordered enough to make 10 of these. :)
>Cornell Police Deputy Chief David Honan said CUPD had received no reports regarding the devices.
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.
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.
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.
Do not underestimate these devices. They will utterly dismantle the sanity of the unwitting.
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.
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).
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."
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CJ4SD-kWek
DOWN
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/plvv4v/comedy-central-presents...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Ins...
(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.
Also, you could use a spotlight. If you shine the spotlight somewhere and the chirp stops or changes, search that area.
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 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.
Shut it all down guys, kazinator will take over from here.
He's just saying it's not that hard to determine the location of a chirping sound.
Not whether it's funny or not.
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.
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.
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.
I'd rather get punched in the face and get it over with than endure this.
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? :)
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.
>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.)
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. ;-)
They're sold as kits:
https://www.amazon.com/Velleman-MK104-Electronic-Cricket/dp/...
Because 2007 is when Youtube started up.
At the top of the escalator was a growing crowd of confused people looking around for what the hell did just happen ;-)
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.
* 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 :)
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?
The fact that there are college students that haven't heard the term rickrolling before makes me feel super old.
I did also try out the session command to 'everyone' on the Novell system on my first day of school. They were not amused.
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tippi-turtle/n9...