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.
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.)
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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)
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.
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).
(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.)
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? ;-)
> 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.
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!"
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!
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 ;)
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
101 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadA Slashdot commenter was already pondering about its longevity 10 years ago: https://idle.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1563258&cid=312739...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8D1vXYwz_U
It’s strange to think how changes in moderation and up-voting have led us from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit (and HN).
(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.)
https://circuitglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ideal-tr...
Apologies for the puerility.
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.
It's a great song. The longevity of the very friendly prank is probably perpetuated by how great the song actually is.
Plus you get to listen to the song, so you can't be too sour about it.
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.
It's also a great song, so I honestly enjoy being rickrolled for the most part.
https://www.sweetfarm.org/goat-2-meeting
'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 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?
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.
Wow. I'd forgotten all about him/her (probably him).
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.
(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.)
edit: from the "how does Rick do this" ... seems he's just using a video loop with Manycam virtual webcam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling
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.
[0] https://www.gelderlander.nl/west-betuwe/online-raadsvergader...
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.)
(on second thought, maybe encouraging politicians to troll, no matter how amusingly, might be counterproductive)
I like how this is showing how few people click on links before commenting.
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?
I think he'll probably hear about this from some of his fans. He relaunched his career. He's an awesome dude.
Oh well, it was fun thinking bout it.
#!/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
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