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4chan, Ebaumsworld Launch Porn Attack Against YouTube

Paul Lilly — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:00:00 -0500

Jonas Brothers fans and those looking for marblecake recipes on YouTube may get more than they bargained for today. That's because 4chan and eBaum's World have teamed up for "Operation Porn Day," which involves uploading explicit video clips to YouTube using innocuous tags.

Many of the clips have already been removed, but according to Arstechnica, it was able to find others that haven't yet been caught (still reading?). In addition to the false tags, a lot of the clips contain 20 to 30 seconds of seemingly legitimately content, such as a newscast, before getting down and dirty.

"It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site," Google spokesperson Scott Rubin said. "Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable."

In other words, you may want to keep your kids and nephews occupied with something other than YouTube for the time being.

Domino's Pizza Incident Shows Just How Dangerous YouTube can Be

Paul Lilly — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 15:00:00 -0500

It's all fun and games until the prank backfires, spreads like wildfire thanks to the advent of social media, and ends with felony charges and a PR mess to clean up. Or at least that's how it went down for Kristy Hammonds and Michael Setzer, a pair of Domino's Pizza employees who filmed a prank in the restaurant's kitchen and posted it online.

The pranksters will be hard pressed to find any sympathy for the fallout, as their antics included filming an employee "putting cheese up his nose, nasal mucus on the sandwiches, and violating other health-code standards while a fellow employee provided narration," according to a report by The New York Times.

In just a matter of days, the video received over a million views on YouTube and was spreading nearly as fast via Twitter. After being identified, Hammonds and Setzer, who maintain that they never actually delivered the sandwiches, have been charged with delivering prohibited foods.

"We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea," said a Domino's spokesman, Tim McIntyre. "Even people who've been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino's, and that's not fair."

McIntyre also said the company is also preparing a civil lawsuit.

Image Credit: Flickr isriya

10 Lies I Told Passersby While Waiting in Line For the iPhone 3G

Norman Chan — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 01:54:13 -0500

Let's get the obvious out the way: yes, I bought the new iPhone 3G. Max PC's ex-podcast producer Jeremy Williams and I waited outside the Stonestown Galleria mall in San Francisco for three hours this afternoon to get ahold of Steve Job's latest shiny gadget. Both of us were existing iPhone owners and have no shame about it.

The wait was about three hours long, and we had to do most of the waiting outside the mall to prevent clogging up foot traffic in front of the Apple store. Every half an hour, 10 to 15 people would be led inside to stand in another line before finally making it inside the store to make their purchase. Maybe it was because I was wearing an ironed buttoned-down shirt and carrying a laptop, but many people passing by stopped to ask me what the line was for. More than a few of them had no idea that a new iPhone had been released when I told them, which was pretty shocking for me to hear. Even my tech-phobic parents who couldn't send email if their lives depended on it knew about the iPhone; I genuinely could not imagine being so out of the tech-news loop. Then I decided to just start lying. Here's what I told the next ten people who asked what we were standing in line for:

10. Free back massages

9. Weezer Concert Tickets

8. Vasectomies

7. Geforce GTX 280 cards

6. Jamie Lynn Spears book signing

5.Two-for-one special at The Gap

4. Auditions for Beauty and the Geek

3. Sneak screening of The Dark Knight

2. The new Microsoft Zune

1. Will Smith is signing autographs

The Best Prank Ever: Make All the Phones in Your Office Ring Simultaneously

Will Smith — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:49:52 -0500

Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Children of all ages! Have we got a killer prank for you, perfect to pull on your co-workers. And, with April 1 just around the corner, you need to have a fresh stock of tricks in your bag.

It’s going to cost you ten bucks, but the outcome and hilarity are worth every penny. The first thing you need to do is install Skype and create an account, if you don’t already have one. Then, you’ll need to load up the account with cash--$10 is the minimum you can buy, but the actual prank won’t cost you a cent, and you’ll have ten bucks worth of Skype credit to make cheap long distance calls with when you’re done. You need to buy the Skype credit well in advance of the designated pranking hour, sometimes Skype takes a few hours to credit your account.

The hard part is collecting the numbers and typing them in to Skype. After that, it's nothing but laughs!

Skype lets you run a conference call with up to 24 people simultaneously, but the trick is that they can be a mixture of Skype accounts and phone numbers. To setup your call, you need to do is start a conference by clicking on the conference button on the main Contacts tab, then type in the numbers of the people you want to call. For maximum LOLs, I recommend making every phone in your work area ring—desk, fax, and personal cell numbers, if you have everyone’s numbers. When you press the Start Call button at the bottom of the window, all the phones in your office will ring at once. Caller ID will show Unknown Caller or 000-000-0000, and when people pick up, they’ll hear each other talking, but no other callers. The effect in and of itself is quite eerie and hilarious, but we've got three variants on the next page if you want to take this one step further over the line.

The Rick Roll

Grab some popular sound clips from the web, and make a quickie sound board using the Emotion Sounds feature of the Pamela (www.pamela-systems.com) plugin for Skype. You’ll need to chop your sound bites into small WAV or MP3 files, then open Pamela and configure the Mega Emotion Sounds Player. You can open it up by starting Pamela, right-clicking on the Pamela icon in the system tray, and selecting Show emotion sounds player. Add your sound files by clicking on the plus sign in the top right of the window. With a little Googling, you should be able to track down soundboards that include the relevant clips from pretty much any popular movie. Hell, you could even simultaneously Rick Roll two dozen people by phone. Now that's ground breaking!

The "Phone Glitch"

Setup two conference calls on two different machines. With one, call everyone’s desk phones. Act surprised, but suggest that it may just be a glitch in the building's phone system. After the hubbub has started to die down, but before everyone else is back to work, hit the button to ring everyone’s cell phones. With a little acting on your part, you can have your co-workers calling for Mulder and Scully in a matter of minutes, but be sure to let them off the hook fairly quickly. This variant isn’t as much funny as it is terrifying. I’d only do this if I didn’t like my coworkers.

The Patsy

Our third variant requires a little more setup, but the potential for hilarity is high. You’ll need either an innocent patsy, or an accomplice who can keep his act together for the length of the call. What you need to do is call everyone in your office, plus the accomplice/pawn at the same time. If you use the pawn, we recommend against bothering actual real people or businesses, but instead calling some sort of funny automated hotline, or even just the central switchboard for your office. If you choose to go the accomplice route, have him ham it up with some personalized info, such as, “Hello, I’m calling from the public health department for Bob Jones. It’s regarding his rash. Please call us back at your earliest convenience at 415-555-1284.” Or something similar.

That’s it for this installment of The Best Prank Ever. We’ll be back later this week with more new and glorious pranks, perfect for your April Fools Day shenanigans. If you liked our Skype prank, let us know how it went by posting a comment below! And, if you really liked the story, we'd love it if you'd give us a Digg!