Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Rick Astley

This College Paper Is Never Gonna Give You Up

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 00:09:41 +0000

Reddit user Mayniac182 spent five hours formatting a college paper to Rickroll his professor. This paper is never gonna give you up. Check it out below [via BuzzFeed]:

This Cat Did Not Like Getting Rickroll’d [VIDEO]

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:11:14 +0000

Rickrolling is an Internet meme trick that you play on someone where the victim unsuspectingly is forced to listen to or watch Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” In this case, the victim is Fro the cat and he wants nothing to do with this trick. Check out the viral video below:

Rick Astley Is Never Gonna Give You Up From YouTube Again

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:36:27 +0000

Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up” was temporarily removed YouTube. Removing the video was a mistake as confirmed by YouTube by Neowin.net. “We review all flagged content quickly, and if we find that a video does violate the guidelines, we remove it, on average in under an hour. We also have a team that is dedicated to identifying and removing spam from YouTube. Occasionally, an account flagged by users or identified by our spam team is mistakenly taken down,” stated YouTube in a message. The music video had about 30 million views on YouTube when it was temporarily removed. [Neowin]

Ashley Towns Rickrolls iPhones, Claims First iPhone Virus

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:02:39 +0000

Ashley Towns is the first person to have created an iPhone virus, or so he claims. He does not regret writing it and he made sure to remind people that Rick Astley is here to stay. The iPhone virus is called “ikee” and it changes the wallpaper of iPhones to a picture of 80′s pop singer Rick Astley. A message on top of the wallpaper states “ikee is never going to give you up,” a pun on Astley’s popular song “Never Going To Give You Up.”

Towns, 21, said he created the virus out of boredom and curiosity. “I had just formatted my iPhone and it told me to set the password in bold, big letters and I wondered how many people have actually done that,” stated Towns in an e-mail to ComputerWorld. “So I ran a scan on my [Optus] 3G network and there was 26 phones running the service that’s vulnerable, and out of that 26, 25 hadn’t changed their passwords.”

Then he scanned the Optus 3G network and found 26 phones that were vulnerable. Of those 26 phones, 25 of them did not have changed passwords. Many jailbroken iPhones have a Unix utility running called SSH (Secure Shell). SSH runs using the iPhone default password, “alpine.”

Towns stands by his virus because it does not do anything malicious, even though it is a form of vandalism. He initially started by spreading the virus on the Optus network in Australia, but then he started targeting networks on Vodafone and Telstra. Towns even claimed he heard a report about his virus hitting a phone in China too.

“Never Gonna Give You Up” Songwriter Pete Waterman Paid Merely $16 From YouTube

Amit Chowdhry — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 19:56:00 +0000

As you all are aware, sometimes you are sent a link to a video that may be of interest but instead you get a music video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up. This meme is called Rickrolling. As a matter of fact, the Never Gonna Give You Up video has been watched over 150 million times on YouTube. This is great for Rick Astley because it gives him more publicity and possibly more sales of his music, but what did YouTube itself pay the songwriter of Never Gonna Give You Up? About $16.

“There was I sitting at Christmas thinking, ‘I must have made a few bob this year with the old Rickrolling’,” stated Pete Waterman, the 62 year old British producer and songwriter of Never Gonna Give You Up. “I rang my publisher and they said ‘You’ll be all right’, until I saw the royalty statement. £11. If 154 million plays means £11, I get more from Radio Stoke playing Never Gonna Give You Up than I do from YouTube.”

Waterman’s fortune itself is worth about £47 million ($68 million). Waterman compared the royalties paid as foreign workers in Dubai. He made less on YouTube and Google than these foreign workers did from the Bahrain government.

[via Telegraph]