16-Year-Old Hacks Vine With Rickroll

Cleveland kid uploads full Astley video, later apologizes to Twitter engineers
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 5, 2013 11:43 AM CDT
16-Year-Old Hacks Vine With Rickroll
Rick Astley waves while riding on a float during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York in 2008.   (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)

Monday turned out to be a milestone day for Vine, the app for Twitter that lets users share six-second videos. Vine became available for Android that day, but the real coming-of-age moment arrived when a Cleveland teenager quickly hacked into the Android code and uploaded the full 3-minute-plus video of Rick Astley's "Never Gone Let You Down," reports CNN. Vine had suffered its first-ever Rickroll.

"I think I broke Vine," tweeted 16-year-old Will Smidlein. He tells the Verge he did it only for the amusement of his friends and Twitter followers and didn't intend for it to go viral. He even apologized via tweet to the Twitter engineers "whose day I ruined with my stupid messing around." The Verge also notes that hackers of this sort often end up landing jobs with the companies they hit, which might explain the politeness. Smidlein blogs about the experience here. Click for another epic Rickroll here. (More Vine stories.)

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