DNS Prank

At my first startup, one of the co-founders was a designer with a taste for mischief.

Our CEO was obsessed with billiards at the time. He kept his own cue at the local pool hall and went there almost every night after work. His skill level was debatable. His devotion was not.

On the morning of April 1st, the designer spun up a fake news site. The headline: "Local Pool Hall Destroyed in Overnight Fire." The layout, the ad slots, the typography — all pitch-perfect. It looked indistinguishable from a real news outlet. That's a designer for you.

Then our infrastructure engineer saw it and decided to escalate. He rewrote the office DNS. A domain mimicking the real news site now resolved to the fake one — but only from the internal network. From outside, nothing changed. From inside, a real-looking domain served a completely fabricated article.

The CEO received what appeared to be a perfectly legitimate breaking news story.

A scream echoed through the office like nothing we'd heard before.

A designer's craft and an infrastructure engineer's DNS knowledge fused in the worst possible way. People say technology depends on how you use it. This was not an anticipated use case. The CEO didn't speak to us for a while.

They were good people.