This is a funny story from a while ago when we were tasked to play audio content in a web application and we used the opportunity to rickroll our web frontend developer. Well, we didn’t exactly rickroll him, we made him rickroll himself.
Our application architecture consisted of a serverside API that could answer a broad range of requests and a client side web application that sends requests to this API. This architecture was sufficient for previous requirements that mostly consisted of data delivery and display on behalf of the user. But it didn’t cut it for the new requirement that needed audio messages that were played to alert the operators on site to be send through the web and played in the browser application, preferably without noticeable delay.
The audio messages were created by text-to-speech synthesis and contained various warnings and alerts that informed the operators of important incidents happening in their system. Because the existing system played the alerts “on site” and all operators suddenly had to work from home (you can probably guess the date range of this story now), the alerts had to follow them to their new main platform, the web application.
We introduced a web socket channel from the server to each connected client application and sent update “news” through the socket. One type of news should be the “audio alert” that contains a payload of a Base64-encoded wave file. We wanted the new functionality to be up and usable on short notice. So we developed the server side first, emitting faked audio alerts on a 30 seconds trigger.
The only problem was that we didn’t have a realistic payload at hand, so we created one. It was a lengthy Base64 string that could be transported to the client application without problem. The frontend developer printed it to the browser console and went on to transform it back to waveform and play it as sound.
Just some moments later, we got some irreproducible messages in the team chat. The transformation succeeded on the first try. Our developer heard the original audio content. This is what he heard, every 30 seconds, again and again:
Yes, you’ve probably recognized the URL right away. But there was no URL in our case. Even if you are paranoid enough to recognize the wave bytes, they were Base64 encoded. Nobody expects a rickroll in Base64!
Our frontend developer had developed the ingredients for his own rickroll and didn’t suspect a thing until it was too late.
This confirmed that our new feature worked. Everybody was happy, maybe a little bit too happy for the occasion. But the days back then lacked some funny moments, so we appreciated it even more.
There are two things that I want to explain in more detail:
The tradition of rickrolling is a strange internet culture thing. Typically, it consists of a published link and an irritated overhasty link clicker. There are some instances were the prank is more elaborate, but oftentimes, it relies on the reputation of the link publisher. To have the “victim” assemble the prank by himself is quite hilarious if you already find “normal” rickrolls funny.
Our first attempt to deliver the whole wave file in one big Base64 string got rejected really fast by the customer organization’s proxy server. We had to make the final implementation even more complex: The server sends an “audio alert” news with a unique token that the client can use to request the Base64 content from the classic API. The system works with this architecture, but nobody ever dared to try what the server returns for the token “dQw4w9WgXcQ” until this day…
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