HACK YOUTUBE COMMENTS ... and other pranks! -- Up All Knight #4
Vsauce! On Wednesday, a lot of you guys were asking for a new episode of Up All Night, our technical pranks and curiosities show. Unfortunately, these guys are still on vacation, but I'm going to try to do this alone. Let's go to begin.
You can break into locked luggage just by poking it with a pen and pulling. But let's get more digital! To secretly view websites while at work or school, you can use vanished.com. It covers what you're doing with something innocuous, like google.com or a spreadsheet. But by scrolling your mouse wheel up and down, you can open and close a little viewing window that lets you take a peek at what you're really viewing.
The next time one of your friends leaves themselves logged into Facebook, click on account settings and go into language. Now, don't pick a weird language; pick something subtle like English upside down. Now, whenever they log into Facebook, and wherever they log into Facebook, some of the words will be flipped.
Another fun trick, if your friend has a Mac, is to switch a simple keyboard shortcut to something ridiculous. For instance, let's make the keyboard shortcut to invert colors Command C. That way, the next one tries to do something simple like copy and paste, this happens. And if you haven't seen it yet, enter your home's address into this Arcade Fire HTML 5 video and see what happens.
A few episodes ago, we showed you some JavaScript that lets you edit a website, but with Google Chrome, you can take it one step further. The explanation for this is kind of long, but basically what I can do is, on my machine, booby trap a YouTube page so that when someone tries to leave a comment, YouTube tells them that their past comments have violated U.S. criminal code and their name has been submitted to the FBI. Pretty sweet!
Crushbits.com is a hilarious way to prank your friends. The site, unfortunately, has a lot of popups, so just close anything that doesn't look like what you see on the screen. First, type in your name, I don't know, a fake birth date, and an email address. I'm going to use michael@fromtheoffice@mailinator.com because you can just make up anything at mailinator.com and get those emails without needing a password and without giving out your real email address.
Now I trade the code they give me to a friend and tell them that the site is amazing at determining if their secret crush likes them. So, let's say I give it to Jake and he says, "Oh boy, I don't want anyone to know this, but I have a crush on Patty Smith, Tarzan, and the pink Power Ranger. Well, I hope no one finds out, and I hope this site tells me they like me." Wait, what? My answers have been emailed to Michael Stevens, and sure enough, I can go to mailinator, type in Michael Stevens from the office, and view the email with no password. And yep, Jake admitted to liking Patty Smith, Tarzan, and the pink Power Ranger. Nice!
This next trick requires Photoshop and is pretty involved, but it's fun to watch. Basically, I'm going to hide a message in a song. First, I start with an MP3; this one is the Key of Awesome's Electronic Wuss. Now first, I change its extension to RAW, and now I open the file with Photoshop or some other image editor that supports RAW files. I'll tell it to guess the right size and TDA. I get a visual representation of all the digital information in the song.
Now, I can write my secret message; the password is "dony pizza," and then save as Photoshop RAW. Now, I go back to this file and I can change the extension back to MP3 so that when people see it, it plays just like normal. Though in the middle, where the code is, it's creepy space alien messy stuff. I can trade this MP3 to friends who know the secret, and when they change the extension back to RAW and open in Photoshop, they get to see the code.
So there you go! A lot of those were super technical, but I hope you had fun. Be sure to subscribe to Vsauce for more information videos, and as always, thanks for watching! [Music]