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MIT Building Hack Ethos
The Boston Globe has a cool (but short) article on building-hacking at MIT. Timely, with April 1st coming up. Lesse at Hope I ... uh ... swore on the radio station! Woo-Hoo!
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When it comes to student "hacks," two done by California Institute of Technology (CalTech) students have become awesome legends.
The first--and perhaps most famous--was one time a bunch of CalTech students managed to bamboozle an entire placard cheering section at the Rose Bowl so when the placard patterns were displayed during the football game, it spelled out "CALTECH"! Done before computers were widely available, that must have taken a huge amount of planning to pull off.
The other one was one time some students managed to take over the electric scoreboard at the Rose Bowl and showed the score CalTech 38, MIT 21 (or something like that). I'd like to know how CalTech managed to pull off that stunt.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
See if your university is on the list: /ctunnels.html
http://members.tripod.com/~tunnels
Maps page:
http://members.tripod.com/~tunnels/map s.html
I figure the tunnels are better in the areas with more colder winters - steam lines to warm buildings - so small and medium sized institutions like UCSB are just gonna be a bore. UCLA supposedly is good though.
Let me know if anyone has any info for UCSB.
but back in High School some friends and I started exploring the steam tunnels in the school. Much more confined, not nearly as exciting.
But the final act we did in our last year of school: broke in on New Years Day through a faulty rear door, went through the tunnels to the boiler room to lead to the rear hallway, and played Lazer Tag for a couple of hours.
I was sooo jealous when I saw how nice the girls locker room was compared to the guys.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
They did compare solving the quadratic to watching football. Which mindless exercise would you rather engage in?
When I was in HS (lo these many years ago), I didn't write my name on math homework. Instead, where my name was supposed to be, I derived the quadratic formula from a general quadratic equation. I could do it in my sleep...
William H. Gates Center for Software Engineering
Yeah, you can't miss it. It's just south of the Adolf Hitler Center for Cultural Sensitivity, east of the Mark Hamill School of Acting, west of the OJ Simpson Criminal Justice building, and north of the Jesse Ventura College of Political Science.
A fitting fortune at the bottom of the page just now: ``It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.''
Considering that I am a student at Caltech...I would have first hand knowledge.
Yes, the underside of Caltech is riddled with steam tunnels through which you can get access to most buildings. I have been "tunneling" (we don't call it 'hacking') and have played a few pranks..
But probably the best prank is when students at Caltech changed the Rose Bowl scoreboard to show Caltech vs. MIT. And at another Rose Bowl game they changed the card stunts for the University of Washington to spell out Caltech.
Some of these pranks are mentioned here.
actually, the tetris hack has been discussed for years at MIT, but never accomplished. the building targetted for such hackage is the green building, a 20 (only 18 accessible for normal people, i think) story bulding with the lighting configuration very similar to tetris resolution. the biggest problem is that in some rooms, one light switch illuminates two windows. also, if you could wire just one light individually, light would spill out through the other window, and kinda ruin the effect.
these are just a few of the difficulties, but you can get an idea of how much time it would really take to pull something like this off. if you want it all remotely controlled, dont forget you would need to install transmitters in each light switch, as i do not believe lighting can be controlled from one source. so you would have to pick roughly half of all locked rooms to install such devices (all rooms have windows, but only half face one side - assumedly the side facing the charles river and boston). lotsa time, lotsa money. it could happen, but i do not put it past the hacking community.
oh, and dont forget the Great Droid hack last year.
bisquit
The Boston Globe article said that these people are not to be confused with people who vandalize computers. It doesn't really say that hackers are or aren't vandals at all. It merely sets people straight concerning the article, those people that don't know the difference between a vandal and a hacker.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
For those not aware of it, "tooling" is MIT slang for (approximately) studying to the exclusion of all else (such as exploring the university's inner space) and a "tool" is a person who does such things and little else. Thus the "toomb of the unknown tool" is a site where one might imagine a bookworm studied so hard he didn't notice he was being walled in by a building renovation. B-)
The rhyme with "fool" is apparently deliberate, to give you an idea of the opinion of such activities held by the users of the slang.
Or at least that's how I (who never went to MIT) understand it third hand. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm actually a CMU student, but I have spent a fair amount of time doing roof and tunnel hacking at MIT. MIT makes it easy. For instance, at CMU all the locks are slide proof, making it much harder to get through locked doors, you have to pick the lock. At MIT 80% of the doors can be opened with a credit card.
But the exploring kicks ass... gaining access to the roof of the green building (MIT's tallest building) is definantly a feat of good thinking more than of brute force such as lock picking. I think that publically posting the method would be against the hackers code, (I'm not sure) so I won't go into it.
CMU buildings are boring compared to MIT's as well. Now I've managed to get into the attick and onto the roof of just about every building at CMU, (except wean, the crowned jewel) but never have I come across things like these shafts that exist in MIT. Just a huge empty shaft, that goes who knows how deep. If only I had had a rope...
vandalizing computers, indeed
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
During my days at the U.S. Naval Academy, we pulled off some pretty excellent hacks. Much of the same activity went on as MIT - especially the week before the Army-Navy football game.
;)
However, the best one by far took a year of planning and a huge amount of organization. We stole ALL of Army's mules and brought them back to Annapolis. A difficult feat considering they keep them ON their campus, unlike the Naval Academy.
We definitely didn't want to get caught on that one, considering that Army personnel were subdued and impersonated, amongst other things.
Stupid mules
Best regards,
SEAL
There is an old story about how a bunch of people at Reed College filled up one of the steam tunnels with pilfered lawn gnomes. Many students made the pilgrimage to the Hall of the Mountain King that year.
These are breasts; this is source code.
Why do you have a problem with those two things belonging to one person?
Sorry URL should be: http://etv.et.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/englis h.html
-- Alper
This is awesome! I didn't think others were interested in this kind of stuff the same way that my friend and I are.
...and... they're usually willing to open that locked door to the roof/steam-tunnel.
/. effect the steam-tunnels!!
At my school we've found some crazy places, but our current challenge is on top of a tall smokestack. It's now unused, but taller then anything else on campus.
Here's a tip that's not in that article:
Become good friends with the custodial staff. As a grad student, I bullsh&t with the custodians for my office all the time. They are really cool,
-Let's
...for the Slashdot hack, where some MIT student change the huge ten commandments plaque in building 51 into a giant Slashdot style top ten plaque.
1. Despite the conspiracy theories, neither MIT's administration nor its students desired the existence of the article in question. The Glob is.
2. It is unwise for non-MIT-students to attempt to explore MIT's campus. The note about student IDs at the beginning of the article derives from the severe exception the campus police take to any not carrying them.
Many people here probably already have this bookmarked, but I'm astonished this link wasn't in the story:
Mit Hacks Archive
(Strange... very slow to answer.... Has it been pre-slashdotted?)
(Ah, there it is. I was afraid for a minute this was lost in the Land of Broken Links.)
Gosh that article took me back (to constantly coming with a hairs breadth of flunking out because of the nights spent roof and tunnel hacking -- I never said no if anybody wanted to go).
I believe roof hacking (also called acrophilia in other places) predates MIT by centuries. It's just better at MIT than just about any place else could be.
The main part of campus is essentially one humungous interconnected network. "Buildings" are really just part of a room numbering scheme -- numbers increase as you go away from the Charles River and all even numbered buildings are east of the Great Dome, odd to the east. Thus if I mention room 26-100 you'd have a pretty good idea of where the room is, even if you didn't know it was a major lecture hall. This system makes tremendously more sense than naming everything after some rich old fart. In the old core of the campus, as you pass from "building" to "building", mainly what changes is the room number prefixes.
What is the upshot of this? Well if you are roof hacking, you get really good "air time", because everything in the central part of the campus is just one humungous, complex building of roughly uniform height, with enough barriers and height changes between to make it interesting. The western part of the campus is across Mass Ave are off network, as it were; the middling-old buildings at the east and north of the main campus area break the height uniformity. They're still worth investigating because the roofs frequently have interesting instruments or equipment on them.
Many of the buildings that can't be travelled to along a roof are still interconnected by basement corridoors which are full of interesting detritus like mineral samples and curious old machines waiting to be carted off, or stuff that just wouldn't fit into somebody's lab. It used to be you could always find a thermos full of liquid nitrogen if you looked hard enough, although maybe the safety office is doing a better job these days.
Furthermore, it is pretty clear that even the new outlying buildings on campus must be linked by a network of utility tunnels for things like telephone networks, power and steam ducts. Like the mythical primeval North American squirrel, who could travel from Atlantic to Pacific without touching the ground once, you <i>could</i> in principle get from any point on campus to any other point without traveling through a single space you are <i>supposed</i> to be in. Furthermore, it is all laid out to the logic of convenience -- which is to say in apparently incomprehensible fashion. The tomb of the unknown hacker(at least what <i>we</i> used to call the tomb of the unknown hacker) was an apparently arbitrary set of walls (perhaps some are load bearing?) that form a useless little space about the size of a small dorm room under one of the buildings.
This underground network is complex and utterly user non-friendly and in places dangerous. It is not <i>meant</i> to be to be navigated, which is why it absolutely <i>must</i> be navigated. The more so because the newer buildings clearly break with the old architectural vision for the campus, that it would be a single, integrated organic whole and not a motley collection of independent fiefdoms. To the tunnel hacker, the break is only skin deep -- down underneath, the original vision still holds true.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
One of the traditions used to be unbolting the static display aircraft from their mountings in the cadet area, and rolling the planes to a new, more creative location. There were 2 incidents that sort of put a halt to that particular trick though. First, an F-4 Phantom "got away" from the cadets as they rolled it down the big ramp, and it almost made it all the way across a parking lot to a 60 ft drop onto the parade ground. They finally got it back under control, but it was a close thing.
The event that finally caused the leadership to forbid messing with the planes was a classic though. The dorms at the Academy are organized in a series of open center "quads", with the rooms arranged around an open square. The quads are 6 stories high, some quads have grass inside, some have volley ball courts, etc. The cadets managed to squeeze an F-16 past the dorm support columns into the center of the quad.
The next day however, nobody could figure out how to get the plane back out. The engineering department went out and measured everything, and the dimensions were simply impossible. To this day, according to cadet lore nobody really knows how they managed to get the plane inside the quad. The result was that a very large construction crane was brought in and the F-16 was lifted straight up out of the quad back onto the terrazo where the static displays are.
Although the planes are still occasionally used as a backdrop or location for current pranks, actually moving them is now verboten. The consequences (potentially getting disenrolled thereby aborting any potential military career before it even starts) aren't worth any possible benefits from moving the planes anymore. Your kinder, gentler military at work.
The article (when I read it in the globe) was full of misinformation and inaccuracies. The Globe has been very anti-MIT for the past few years. This has largely focused on the fraternities (as a fraternity brother, I'm biased) but they have been extremely critical of the administration and the student body.
Under sever harassment from the administration, they promised to present a more balanced image, and this is what they came up with.
Hacking at MIT is part real, part imaginary. Hackers wandering through building late at night are real, although I haven't joined them since the Orange Tours (where they take freshmen around, including on top of the dome), they are a known portion of our campus. However, the impressive feats being common is quite exaggerated, although they may be slowly making a come back (R2D2 last year, for example).
However, the Boston Globe article was the latest in a concerted effort by the Globe's editorial staff to paint MIT students as a group running amok. They are also trying to paint MIT as ineffectual in dealing with the students. They have been one of the forces behind demanding local governments take over the governing of undergraduates. (When a smoke bomb misfired in a classroom to advertise a fundraising Halloween Party at one of the fraternities, they were part of the media that misrepresented the story and called for Cambridge to press charges.)
The situation with hacking, the campus police, and administration is an awkward one. MIT cannot acknowledge that they know what is going on, and this recent Globe article is putting MIT in a very bad light. Also, the comment about "I'm on my way to Baker House" is NOT part of hacking. During the Orange Tours, when, as freshman, you're relatively new, they want to make it seem more risky. As a result, they tell you that if CPs show up, they'll disappear, and you're supposed to act like a confused freshman and say "I'm on my way to Baker House."
However, the Globe tried to present this as MIT students mocking the administration that is powerless to prevent it.
I'm sorry to interupt this discussion of the MIT legend with a rant on the Globe, but I just want to put things in perspective.
Alex Hochberger
MIT CS '01
Moscow Inst. of Physics and Technology (MIPT) is pretty much the Russian analogue of MIT and have done pretty cool April 1 pranks in the past. I don't remember too many, but the few I do remember are pretty cool:
:)
- The amount of coordination required was amazing, but they did it! On the night of March 31 they added a new station "PhysTech" to the Moscow subway map. It was done extremely well, with exactly the same fonts, colors, and style. The task was enormous - each subway train has 8 or more cars with 3 or more maps per car ( and there are a LOT of trains), plus maps on train stations, etc., but this was done so well that the next day tons of Muscovites started calling the newspapers and radio stations and asking about this new stop. Moreover, at some later point a pocket-size map was produced by some publisher and it had this station...
- Also on the night of March 31 (though very long ago) they went to a nearby railroad and covered one (!) of the rails with coal. Now imagine a train operator in his train seeing only one rail in front of him.... Obviously, he panics, tries to stop the train, etc.
Pretty extreme - MIT doesn't even come close
I'll add more if I remember more....
Too bad the article didn't include any links to the Hacks page or any pictures.
MIT students are notorious for this kind of thing. They're very good at April Fool's jokes especially. I can't wait to see what they do this year. A few years ago, they turned the clocktower into a giant beenie cap, complete with rotating propeller, overnight! That was probably the best one.
At another school (Please tell me if you know which one...), the students rigged the electrical lines on one dorm so they could play Tetris: using the room lights as blocks.
"I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy." -Richard Feynman
People interested in this, may also be amused by some of the stuff at Infiltration.org.
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