Slashdot Mirror
Great Hacks and Pranks Of Our Time
Luther Blissett writes "There's a history of pranks and hacks in the year-end issue of the Economist, including MIT hacks, the Bonsai Kitten, and the Pentagon hack by my favorite, Abbie Hoffman." From the article: "At Harvard's neighbour, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 'hacks', as the MIT crowd calls them, are more serious. So serious, in fact, that in 2003 the institute's best hacks were assembled in a 178-page book, 'Nightwork'. The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across. Mr Peterson's book includes an 11-point code for pranksters: leave no damage, do not steal, do not drop things off a building without a ground crew, and so on. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, at least, student pranks have become an establishment activity."
*cough* check links *cough*
Like lemmings we click on the bonsai kitten link to find out more. The snopes bonsai kitten link is here.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
I have no idea how relations are today, but at The University of Alabama in the mid 80s people who lived in greek houses and those that lived off-campus were constantly at odds over who should be elected to student council.
Usually the Greeks banded together and block voted their person into office against a normally fractured off-campus crowd.
So for this particular election season a particular popular off-campus person was running for student council president. He was likely to be elected.
The ensuing rivalry from all accounts was as bitter as had been witnessed in a long time. Spying, dirty tricks, etc. were frequently reported.
The student newspaper had withheld judgement but it decided to print a negative article about the greeks' candidate the day before the election.
All was fair about this, it had been done plenty of times before...
But, this particular issue of the paper was different.
It had something incredibly desirable in it. That will be revealed a bit later...
So the day the paper was printed came upon the campus. The paper was delivered in the night to all the free locations all around the campus.
Now that particular day two intrepid mates of mine had a very early engineering class, something insane like 6:30 am, maybe 7am at the latest.
Irregardless of the eaxct early time, my friends went off to their class. While waiting for their class, that took a look at the paper.
Low-and-behold there was a coupon in it for two whoppers and two frys for two dollars at the local BK. Now that was great in and of itself, but what made this coupon incredibly desirable was that it didn't have an expiration date.
So, in a pure stroke of pure genious, my friends skipped class and rushed from building to building around campus grabbing all of the newspapers and stuffing them into their light blue rambler.
By all accounts they managed to grab a fast majority of the newspapers which had been distributed earlier that morning. And they did it without being detected.
Personally I knew none of this, I had no idea what my two friends had done.
By midday the fury of the off-campus people was at a boil. Obviously the greeks had stolen all of the newspapers. It was a conspiracy of the grandest nature.
Of course the greeks were at a loss over the entire matter.
The news of the greeks supposed theft traveled quickly and the next day the off-campus candidate was easily elected.
The bad feelings went on until the next year when the greeks probably took back the presidency, I don't remember. I just remember it took a long time for the bad feelings to go away.
A couple months after the election I happened to be over at my friends apartment and I was offered some BK coupons. I gladly accepted and was lead into one of my friend's bedroom. Lining the walls of this bedroom was the most awesome collection of the campus newspaper I had ever seen. Every wall was lined/stacked from floor to ceiling with newspapers.
I was personally provided a five foot high stack of papers.
I ate whoppers off of that stack for easily a year.
After six, or so, months it was funny to walk into the local BK and they would look at the coupon, see the correct address, and they would ask where I got it from since they hadn't seen one. High-turnover you see. This was before the days of laser printers, etc.
As far as I know this story has never been told in a public forum, but it actually happened.
Caution: Contents under pressure
what is this, april fool's day?
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
... has to be the Harvard "WE SUCK" prank. It's there for everybody to see, it's during the Yale-Harvard football game when everyone who cares about Yale-Harvard is out in force, it requires a non-trivial amount of planning and good execution, and, last but not least, it is self-inflicted. An absolute thing of beauty. I wish people would do that at a Raiders or Yankees game. Although that might end in a brawl. Which would make it even better. :D
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I think the best of them all still has to be the Caltech rose bowl prank. Nothing I've read about even comes close to the level of skill and amazingness that they pulled back in the sixties.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
Caltech has a long tradition of pranks as well. Not sure if they still do it, and even these stories are second-hand, but senior ditch day was a tradition in which seniors would go off campus and booby-trap their rooms, while underclassmen tried to break in. Depending on the fiendishness of the defenses, the underclassmen would carry out various levels of pranks upon entering the room.
One example: Someone once poured a concrete barrier behind his door. An underclassman, catching wind of it, messed with the mix beforehand so that it wouldn't set properly and was easily removed.
My favorite, of course, is the group that disassembled a car and reassembled it inside the room, in working order.
It's not a mistake. The links are a prank, get it?
But, I understand that a lot of pranking can easily get out of hand... still it's a shame.
Unlikely as it seems, that happens in a 'fast majority' (sic) of /. posts.
Not really.
The recent MIT administrations have a very two-faced policy toward hacks. While they pretend to extoll the virtues of such creative acts (sending out a picture of the Wright Flier hack as part of the alumni literature), they also discipline any students involved harshly (As in the aformentioned Wright Flier case). I suspect that this is one of the reasons that the hacking culture has gotten weaker lately.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
The pranks at MIT tend to be feats of engineering. They are positively encouraged, because they teach students to work in teams, solve complex problems and, sometimes, get a message across... and how to run from the authorities.
The recent Wright Flyer hack - the same one that gave the university much positive publicity - resulted in severe consequences: the students have a mark against their permanent record, and were fined $50. They were about to change the fine for being caught on the roof to a maximum of $500, but the students succesfully petitioned to change that to 10 hours of community service - because students said that if there was a possible $500 fine, hackers would be more willing to run and seriously injure themselves than risk getting caught by the police.
Of course MIT has the legal responsibility if someone falls from a roof, but there ought to be a way to cover that without punishing the same hackers that the university celebrated. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
In this video, MIT's Samuel Jay Keyser discusses the culture and history of hacks at MIT; he's for them. You can read excerpts from the Nightwork book on the MIT alumni site.
One of the best pranks that I ever heard of was one done by a bunch of my cousins friends in high school. Now, he graduated in the late 70's and the lockers all had external combination pad locks, by the time I got there 10 years later all the locks were mounted in the doors. What they managed to do was to steal the master key for all the locks(this part of the story left out as there is too much lore into how and where he lost the janitor), hideout in the school until everyone left for the night. Then the few hiding in the school opened up the doors for the rest of the group and then proceeded to take the locks off and switch them....not just one or two down, but from one locker bank in one part of the school to a locker bank on the other side of the school. Oh yeah, all done at the start of finals week in the spring. Good prank, and they spent the summer sorting out locks as punishment.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Although it wasn't really a prank, it could be up there with the all-time hyped events that had little or no climax to them. People thought that on January 1, 2000 all the electricity and communication grids were going to shut down and the world was going to turn into the Planet of the Apes.
"You see, they wrote all this software and to save space, they put 98 instead of 1998. So I go through these thousands of lines of code and, it doesn't really matter. I don't like my job. I don't think I'm gonna go anymore."
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
...It's a school project.
The whole point is to do things that are mildly wrong and get away with it. If you're allowed to do it, what the heck is the attraction? Of course you might get caught, but good hackers know where the line is and stay within it (e.g. no destruction, no injury, etc).
$50 and a warning is, let's face it, a tiny slap on the wrist. I'd question whether anyone so concerned with their "permanent record" really has the stomach for pranks in the first place.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Can be found here. Unfortunately it ends in 2004...
One of the favorite ones that I witnessed firsthand was the police car on top of the MIT dome.
I also get a kick out of all the hacks that MIT has pulled off at the Havard/Yale football games. One at least one of those occasions the local papers stated that MIT had won the game. (In fact I seem to recall they DID win, technically, by hacking into the scoreboard and changing the score during one game)
I once impersonated President Bill Clinton on a military hospital computer system. This text based system (CHCS) has an email system and I responded to one message, typed several blank lines, and then typed in a fake message from the President congratulating us on our good work. Quite a few people totally bought it. I was identified as the prankster the next day.
ever heard of George P. Burdell?
Plenty of pranks have happened at the account of this name. You might even check your employee database for existence of him. He almost made Time's Man Of The Year 2001, before Time found out about the ficticious character.
Moral of the Story: Ramblin' Wrecks from Georgia Tech are Helluva Engineers, and are VERY creative.
I had college once, but I drank some fluids and got a lot of rest and eventually it was cured.
You kid, but yea, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (the UA he speaks of is in Tuscaloosa) is actually an excellent engineering school. Huntsville is the home of one of the 2nd largest research park in the US (fourth in the world), huge missile and space access R&D occurs here (Marshall space flight center, Army Aviation & Missile Command, Strategic Missile Command, Redstone Arsenal [where I work]) ... we're #4 on the hit list if nuclear war ever breaks out... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huntsville,_Alabama
-everphilski-
as you type, but THE University of Alabama. You unwashed illiterate heathen hoards should cow in shame.
I'm not a graduate of UA BTW.
BC
When I was a teenager some friends and I climbed up onto the roof of the local high school, just 'cause, y'know, it seemed the thing to do. One of the janitors, wanting to catch us, so he climbed up on the roof. He did indeed catch us and, seeing as how the cops also showed up, we followed him back down off of the roof. As we all climbed down, I realized that this not-too-coordinated janitor could easily tumble down the rickety drain piping. I had visions of having the book thrown at us because some janitor was as stupid as we were.
Pranks are great, but I would personally avoid anything that might incite people to climb or move large, heavy objects. In general, I would avoid anything that someone else has to repair.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
When I was at Warwick Uni I heard about this prank which supposedly happened a few years earlier, although I can't confirm it:
There were some roadworks going on near the Westwood campus, so the students phoned up the foreman and told him that some students, dressed up as policemen, were going to come and try to stop them. Then they phoned the police and told them that some students, dressed up as workmen, were digging up the road.
And as they say, hilarity ensued.
Ho hum for the life of a bear
I was gonna post this if you didn't. Reading the submitted article almost made me sick with all the glowing references to MIT and how they are the masters and we should all bow to them. They truly got their asses handed to them by Caltech in the most spectacular prank of all time. So let's quit drooling over MIT already. Caltech has been known to pull a hack or two.
I disagree with you. This hack has been done before, and its boring. I think can be cool to try something new and forget the roof area for a while.
-Woof woof woof!
Same sort of "paper chase" happened in the mid-90s. Would explain a lot!
Don't pick up the pho*(@)$*@&@!@ NO CARRIER
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Skaggs
He's pulled some *GREAT* hoaxes on the media and general public.
In my sophomore year (1991) at Oregon Institute of Technology, we had a problem with Navy jets from nearby Kinsley Field buzzing campus (their "floor" was set a mile above sea level- campus was only 680 feet below this). A group of laser students and Software Engineering students conspired to find an old 1980s frequency for Soviet Air-to-Air missile radar- and built a laser pointer on that frequency. For a couple of weeks in there if you looked up at just the right time, you'd see a pair of Navy jets buzzing campus- and then suddenly one of them would go evasive for a split second and recover. Took them about two weeks to take the OIT campus out of their flight pattern. Don't know if anybody was ever caught- or if the Navy ever figured out what was causing the error in their friend-or-foe systems.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Why not use that creativity to start a start-up while in school? There's no bigger joke on the jocks than becoming a millionaire in your Junior year. Even if fails, the experience while you're young and very little reponsibilities would be invaluable. If you look at the histories of all of the multi-millionaires and billionaires, just about all of them were getting started somehow in there late teens or early twenties.
In soviet Russia, prank drops you!
How could the greatest prank of all time not be tricking the whole world into thinking we actually landed people on the moon??
Like most grad students in liberal arts, I spent an inordinate amount of time in Sterling Memorial Library. A wonderful building but at that time still fairly antiquated: the electronic book database didn't extend to pre-1975 titles, there was no air conditioning in the stacks (meaning book rot was even more accelerated) and there were two systems a book could be indexed under: Library of Congress or the "Yale system," a maddening combination of letters and numbers that was sure to send you in the wrong direction.
If I recall, and it has been a while, the library has 6 floors accessible by elevator and within those 6 more "between-floors" accessible only by twisty staircase. You would find your book's call number on the main floor (especially since the few computers within the stacks were either malfuctioning or being used) and then delve into the stacks.
To guide you on your way, there were one-page charts posted throughout the stacks and in the elevators that indicated which floor your book could be found, based on its call number. It was a common sight to see a confused student looking at the chart, then at the paper in their hand, then back at the chart, ad infinitum.The library also left a handy stack of these guide charts by the front desk for students to take.
I took a chart home and set about changing the floors for about half of the call number groups on the chart. Since this was way back when I worked off a grayscale Powerbook 520 with no Photoshop etc., I had to use exacto knife and photocopier.
I printed off a shitload of the fake call number charts and then, first thing in the morning on April 1, replaced every posted chart in public areas throughout the library, including within the two elevators. Then, for good measure, I replaced the helpful "take one" stack with my own version.
I left a few clues on the chart--for those who had looked for their books and then returned to look again, more carefully--indicating that it was a prank. By April 2 all the bogus charts had been replaced, but I had gotten a good laugh out of it, even though it was a subtle prank that didn't have a large, noticable payoff.
heathen hoards [sic] should cow [sic] in shame
Lemme guess -- math major?
Just junk food for thought...
I had a co-worker that was at Cornell at the time, and claims to know the perpetrators. Further inquiries were met with vague comments about the statute of limitations.
that's a cool prank.
While not high on the complexity level, my favouite segment was when they asked some people to deliver a large box (which was actually empty) to a specific office. The box was sized to just make it through the office door. The delivery people were distracted while they were in the office, and a small addition was made to the door jam so the doorway was just that much smaller. The delivery people were then told they had the wrong office. Hilarity resulted when they tried to get the box out the same door that they had just entered. They *knew* they had just come in that door, but couldn't figure out why the box wouldn't fit any more.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The Yale "We Suck" prank was much funnier back in 1961 when it was originally done at the Rose Bowl (in a much more clever way) by Caltech.
My favorite was taking a screen shot of the open Pegasus mail program (at full screen) and then saving it as the desktop wallpaper. The student council president, who approved the purchase of this first computer for the 2-year college's student senate, could not figure out why he could not open his messages, or close the program!
It stayed that way through the entire second semester. He even mentioned his disappointment with the computer during his final address to the senate. After he left the room, the rest of us all looked around in shock--most people figured it out rather quickly, but our poor president never used the email program all term...
I wonder if anyone ever told him.
>;}
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
One of the best I've seen was Alan Sokal's experiment with cultural studies. Sokal is a physicist at NYU who wrote a completely ridiculous paper entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" and managed to get it published in a reputable social science journal. While hilarious, the prank has a very serious message. The cultural studies fields are far too preoccupied with making themselves appear scientific rather than actually following the scientific method.
My roommate and I were infamous for our pranks at LSU. My roommate and I set up a girl who was having a bunch of other girls sleep over (church group deal). We got another friend to put on a dickie's jumpsuit and knock on their door. He asks if they're having trouble with their air conditioner, and the girl says no. He says they'll be working on it, so if it goes out for a while, don't worry about it. She says ok and closes the door. We then proceed to walk downstairs and shut off their A/C then leave laughing. 20 girls in one apartment all night, in 100-degree Louisiana summer.
Han shot first.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/takeaway.html
its not really a 'hack' but its funny.
...escalation? After all if you're risking $500, it better be one hell of a hack. Maybe harsher penalties will just bring out the real hardcore pranksters. :-)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
A co-worker thought he found blood in his stool and went to the Air Force clinic. The doc told him it was probably nothing, but to be sure scheduled him for a lower gastrointestinal at the big Air Force hospital at RAF Lakenheath. For the next two weeks we heard nothing else from this guy but how much he was dreading having a camera inserted into his rectum.
When the big day arrived we were all treated to a graphic and minutely-detailed (and hilarious - the guy was funny at least) account of having his bowel snaked by a nonplussed female buck sergeant medical technician.
After my co-worker left for the day (he worked day shift and I worked swing-shift on my own), I realized an opportunity existed that simply could not be passed up. Back in the day, we used large sheets of back-lit plexiglas and grease pencils to track the status of our aircraft and ground-support equipment. One section of the plexiglas board was reserved for phone messages. In this section I wrote:
I didn't say anything to the mid-shift controller when he came in and had almost forgotten the whole thing when I arrived the next afternoon for my shift. As I entered the building SSgt W was leaving our workcenter. When he saw me he rushed me and threw me into the nearest wall.
"You son-of-a-bitch! I can't believe you did that to me!" he yelled and then began laughing. He told me when arrived that morning and saw the message he thought it had to be a joke. But nobody knew anything about it so he began to think maybe it was true - maybe the there was a problem and he would have to go through the terrible experience of having a camera shoved up his butt again.
He refused to call the number for two hours, instead accusing everyone around him of setting him up. The other day shift workers told me he became quite frantic. Of course, nobody knew anything about the message but me. When he finally did call the number, he got the Burger King that had just opened at RAF Lakenheath.
What?
Prank photography at its best!
My other account has mod points.
w00t!
According to the dictionaries I checked today:
Irregardless is a word that many mistakenly believe to be correct usage in formal style,
when in fact it is used chiefly in nonstandard speech or casual writing.
It is certainly a word, just not the way many think.
Nothing to say here... move along
University of British Columbia and espcially the Engineering students are well known for pulling various pranks.
A favorite target of theirs is the Lion's Gate Bridge across the Vancouver harbor. Two I've heard about were suspending a car from the underside and setting the marker lights to flash out a message in Morse code.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Interesting stuff
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
The best one I've heard was when someone left three (harmless) snakes in a student's room. The real killer was the note left prominently on the bed: 'There are four snakes in your room.'
The gange at Myth Busters has material for a few years now. I'm looking forward to seeing how many they can bust.
zenray
... can be found at http://hacks.mit.edu/
My favorite prank thus far took place earlier this year. The local McDonalds was near another building with a spot light. I simply moved the spot light closer to the McDonalds, and changed the board to read "Now Serving beer" (I can't remember what it read before I changed it.
Needless to say, a McDonalds serving beer in a college town was quite a hit. Until people just left with cheeseburgers and disapointments.
I did my thesis research at Bell Labs. There was a postdoc in our group who was just learning to use computers. One day, two of us hacked his account. We arranged for him to be immediately transferred to another machine. Then we changed all of the standard commands so that they did one of two things: either they printed their normal output but with every printing character replaced with an s or they printed the error message "s-inode overflow" followed by screenful after screenfull of s's. We did this one night and came in early the next morning so as to be sure to be there when he logged in.
We waited and waited but no outburst came. We hung around all day, wondering when he would log in, but nothing happened. We were terribly disappointed. Finally, the next day, around noon, we found him huddled with a technician. It turned out that the previous day he had logged in, noticed the weird behavior, decided that it was just one of those days, and logged out, figuring it would probably clear up! He was so mild-mannered and so inexperienced with computers that he had not reacted as we expected him to.
The other hack we did that year went better. One of the statisticians had a Monroe calculator in his office. For the younger generation, a Monroe calculation was a large electromechanical calculator, like an adding machine, but able to multiply and divide, and able to handle more digits, 16 I think. We used to go up to his office at night and play with it. It made a lot of noise as it calculated: kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-kachunk-ching! Different calculations would make it play different "tunes".
One night we lugged the thing down to the speech lab, set it up to play a particularly nice tune, and recorded it. We then modified the C compiler so that when invoked itwould play the Monroe calculator sound over the loudspeakers. People were surprised at the new auditory indication of how their compile was going.
This prank is fairly easy to pull off, and is cheap to boot.
Buy some tylenol or other medicine with a separable halves dissolving gel coating.
Unscrew halves, dispose of medicine.
Fill halves with red (cherry) coolaid powder. Rescrew halves.
If you have the patience, make some double sealed by squeezing the resulting pill inside of another set of gel halves.
Take approximately 6 single walled and 4 double walled coolaid pills, and a wrench to your female neighbor's apartment (prank designed for on campus college living situations). Keep wrench and pills hidden. Ask to use the restroom after a sufficient time has passed to make the request non suspicious.
Quietly use wrench to remove showerhead. You may want to practice doing this to your own showerhead a couple of times to make sure the wrench you have selected will work. Put pills in shower pipe, and re-attach shower head.
Hilarity ensues when next person to take shower gets spattered by blood red water as the pills dissolve in warm water. Works better if you have the patience to make the double insulated pills to increase the odds the pills will take long enough to dissolve to actually lure the person into the shower.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Hacking at MIT was dealt a serious blow when the trespassing fine was increased to $500 from a more tolerable $50. Many of the more famous hacks involved placing large objects or decorations on MIT's iconic domes. The main motivation according to MIT's authorities is "safety".
When I was a student at the University of Texas in the 90s, we pulled a prank on a student in the dorm like this:
The "mark" was a pain in the backside who kept pulling stupid pranks like jamming our doors shut with coins and putting Nair hair remover on people's hair when he found them passed out drunk. Said student was known to smoke a certain illegal herb regularly, and had transported it in his car. When he was passed out one night, his roomate gave us his car keys which we copied. We then used the keys to move his car to the other side of the HUGE parking lot a Jester dorm. We hacked the e-mail system (telnetted to the sendmail server that was open) and sent him a fake message from the provost stating that his car had been impounded since the drug dogs detected pot in it. The message gave him a meeting time to come to the campus police chief's office to discuss his future at the university. We also left him a phony answering machine message about the supposed car impoundment and meeting. He got the messages, found his car missing, and spent the morning sweating about all of the trouble he was in. When he left for the "appointment" with the police that afternoon, we moved his car back. The police chief wouldn't see him since he didn't have a real appointment so he came back to the dorm to later find out that the whole thing was an elaborate prank by his "friends".
Of course this set off a whole new series of pranks....
"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
...was with a pal back around 1990 - "The Christian Crusade to Stamp Out Science Fiction". My pal and I wrote up this completely ridiculous loaded flyer - how SF was ruining our children's lives, causing teenage pregnancies and bad grades, and instructing people to get together with community and church leaders and "stamp out science fiction!" We put a bogus name on it with a real P.O. box, and dropped them off at a couple of SF cons in the southeast.
:)
We got tons of letters from all over the country over the next few months, and a couple from the UK even. Most all of them were in support - "A friend of mine is into science fiction and I worry about him" and in that vein.
The following year we put out the "it was all a hoax" flyer, explaining that it was all BS and what we'd learned ("people are sheep"). That caused a whole new influx of letters, most of which basically said "I knew it was fake to start with, you bastards!".
Good times.
"People" using "unnecessary" quotes should be "shot".
At work, a friend of mine took his co-workers car keys while the co-worker was at lunch. He made a copy of the car key and then returned the keys to where he had found them. Then for weeks, he would go outside and move his co-workers car a few spaces over - or back it in to the same space it had been in - or change radio presets. The prank eventually had to stop when his co-worker took the car to a mechanic because of his "faulty radio".
I went to a small college so everyone knew everyone else. The semester after I graduated, a friend made a plaque saying "David Steinberg Memorial Room" and put it up in a classroom. When I returned for the first time, a lot of people thought I was dead. It stayed up there for months.
Dubya winning a "real" first term (after, uh, "liberating" the true first term.)
And he did it with only a C average......
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
A decade later I still lived in Blacksburg (and still do today). I happened to get into a conversation on the bus with a freshman who lived in Pritchard. He told me the same story about the Coke machine, including the fact that it was "a couple years ago".
I'm fascinated with the story's persistence. A coworker who went lived in Pritchard in the mid 1970's told me that he had heard the same story at that time. Some kids in my church who live in Pritchard this year have heard the same story (including the "couple years ago" part). The legend has lasted thirty years now.
A couple years ago my friend Tom Angleberger, a columnist for the Roanoke Times, asked his readers for help on tracking down the legend. He got some reliable appearing (but not fully verifiable) evidence that the incident happened in the early 1970's. He even tracked down the alleged culprit (who, supposedly, was expelled for the prank), but the guy wouldn't return Tom's phone calls. Can't say I blame him, really.
So... it's not like it was a very good prank, but somehow it's survived the test of time.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
...the Economist article also includes a great photo of what I'd always believed to be an urban legend - students at Cambridge University, UK hoisting a car onto the roof of the most important building in the University, which is also (a) quite historic and (b) in the middle of the City. They, of course, did it without damaging the building or the car; and in vastly less time than it took the authorities to remove. Like the students mentioned at MIT, they were duly praised by their masters for work well done. The other Cambridge corker I know of was in the early days of students using word processors to do their final dissertations. Just hours before the dissertations were due in; one student did "search and replace" on someone else's dissertation - changing every instance of "the " to "the f**king ". When the diligent dissertation writer sat down to print his work... [of course, easily undone with another search and replace - but the distress in the mean time was awesome]
I am proud of any nation that is better at providing paid vacation, civil services, and public transportation than fighting wars. Perhaps it would be comforting to know that the United States placed more value upon keeping its own population comfortable, happy, and healthy than upon killing the population of other nations.
The number of bloodbaths achieved is not the final determination of national merit. In fact, it is a detriment. In terms of violent war against years in existence, the United States could be considered to be the worst nation ever founded. When we can truly say that racism and ignorance are behind us, then we may have earned the right to mitigate our version of justice to the world. The evidence of your comment shows that that time is not now.
Being conquered by Hitler does not show that your nation is useless, it merely demonstrates that your military is not the largest project on your budget. In this way, France was superior to Hitler and continues to be superior to the United States.
I can't believe you quoted Marge Simpson and Rush Limbaugh as reliable sources.
The sky is blue, and Slashdot is offering subscriptions.
One word: Lafayette.
#!
Reading some of these stories makes me think than noone has ever been caught. That there are no consequences. If you don't feel like reading my post it can be summed up as: Don't do pranks on the computer. Do something physical and do it intoxicated.
I've been booted, I have to say that it's disrupted my entire life. It hasn't been a fun experience. I went to a small engineering college in Indiana. My sophomore year was the year that the Olsen twins were choosing where to go. At this time the fake CNN news generator was out.
We recieved an e-mail from admissions that the Olsen twins thing was a joke (apparently they had a huge issue with alumni believing this.) On the way home from dinner my roomates and I sketched "Welcome Olsens" into the snow on the lake in 30' letters. Then I thought it would be a funny prank if I photoshopped the Olsen twins in front of one of our buildings. It was a quick and dirty job. I never intended for anyone to believe it. Not to mention the best photo I had found had them in the wrong age frame.
Our school had a "allstudents" e-mail address, however it could only be accessed by a few people. In addition it required a *.instudent.*.edu address. I did some scanning and found some computers that were turned off at night. I spoofed my MAC address and sent out the e-mail from the person that had originally sent the "it's not true" e-mail.
Nothing. No e-mail recieved. Nothing. A week later the dean of students called me into his office. They suspected me of sending the e-mail. What happened was the attachment was too big and bounced back to the woman I spoofed. She freaked out and contacted computer services. I guess how they caught me was my computer requested an old IP address in the DHCP negotiation. The dean forwarded the case onto the "Computer Use Policy", their ruling was that I had committed a felony: identity theft
I put up a fake news story on my away message to relay what had happened to my friends. At this point I wasn't suspended, but I was on probation.
One day the DHCP servers went down, so I did what any intelligent person would do: I set everything up on manual. The way I had done it a year before when the SAME THING happened. I got a call from the dean again. I had violated my probation, I was stealing IP addresses. This has elevated my case, and I was suspended by the Dean. I appealed, but on my appeal there were a few more 'charges' than a fake e-mail and a stolen IP address. Somehow someone forwarded on the fake news story on to the dean; in addition a year before I was running BitchX on my shell account. I eventually went before all of the faculty to beg (literally) not to kick me out. Explain to a room full of very intelligent Ph D engineers that know very little about computers (other than the CS/CO teachers) how 'BitchX' is nothing more than a chat client, how manually assigning an IP address is not stealing it, etc.
However as some people have posted, anything alcohol related is overlooked. Indiana Excise Police busted a party 3 weeks before I was suspended, however nothing was ever in the papers about it. My sophomore year someone, drunk, used an entire fire exinguisher in our dorm. It set off the fire alarms and everyone was evactuated at 3 am. Nothing ever came of it than a slap on the wrist. Someone 'stole' a fork lift that had its keys left in it and rammed it into one of the monuments on campus. Again. Nothing happened. People fear computers.
It's still upsets me when I think about what I was kicked out of school for: An e-mail prank, a fake news story among friends, a stolen IP addresses, and an IRC client.
It has disrupted my entire life. My ex girlfriend and I had a hard time with the distance. I lost quite a few credits and had to repeat course
Not a prank of our time but has to be one of the best pranks of all times: the Dreadnought Hoax. It involved some friends, one of them being Virginia Woolf and also Duncan Grant, tricking the Royal Navy into showing them their latest battleship, the Dreadnought, by disguising themselves as foreign royalties.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Instead of moving the locks to different lockers, I simply turned them around backwards. To make my own key, I bought a spare lock and took it apart, then made a key to fit it. I made mine out of a piece of 3mm steel welding rod. I flattened and cut one end for the key and I curved the other end so it fit nicely behind my ear.
It worked well. People said that locks just popped open when I pulled, like magic.
Of course the "Dean of Students" eventually had to summon me. He had assumed that I had stolen a key, until he saw the thing. When he demanded that I give it to him, I pushed the end of the key into the edge of his desk and broke the tip off, then handed him the pieces. I said, "If I'm not allowed to have this key, then I'm probably not allowed to give it to anyone else."
Later, I made another key the same way and wrote up several pages of HOWTO instructions for my friends. Ain't I a stinker?
We had a prank when I was an undergrad at a relatively uptight, moralistic, conservative, religious school (keep this in mind...).
The main student area, with the library, cafeteria etc. was named "Hagen Center". Late one night, before Parent's Weekend, some enterprising souls changed the "H" to a "P" and the "E" to an "A" by placing cut-outs over the letters. Needless to say, some parents were not pleased to see "Pagan Center" as where their children went to eat and study...
I cant believe you have no sense of humor.
Your Gallic-flavored idealism did little to save the lives of millions of civilians slaughtered by the third Reich.
Racism and ignorance have been with us for all of recorded history and will always be with us because of the hatred and greed in men's hearts. If you wait until evil flees before you take action, you won't be around.
Plus de choses changent, plus qu'ils restent la même chose.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
CalTech is so well known for pranks, that there are two books, Legends of CalTech and More Legends of CalTech about them. One of my favorites comes from the '30s, I think. In those days, on the rare occasions CalTech won a football game, the students would build bonfires in intersections. Needless to state, the Pasadena Fire Department took a dim view of this and put them out. Once, some pranksters put some asbestos sheeting down on the pavement, put some blocks of Calcium Carbide on it and built the bonfire on top of that. No problem, until the FD started hosing it down. The water hit the carbide and released acetylene. The resulting flames were enough to melt the insulation on the power-lines going overhead!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
have no sense of humor
Should fit into US "culture" well then...
Better than having no sense of honour though.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
It's too bad you can't see the moderation history of my post. It instantly spiked at "+5: Beam me up!" where it stayed for a few hours. Then, as the server began to come back online, a few people realized what I'd done and started to mod my post down. The True Believers, though, kept applying upward pressure on the score until someone cracked the "april fools!" code - at which point it bottomed out at "-1: I'm going to kill you". It eventually came back up to "+2: OK, you got me" after a few days, and there it stayed.
I felt kind of bad afterward. Sort of. For a little bit.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The parent posting links to a great story. What the prank lacks in engineering genius it makes up in hootzpah. It takes some serious nerve to steal a huge cannon in broad daylight in an operation taking several hours.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
..of recent years anyway, has got to be "Intelligent Design".
I used to work over at a hotel near Disneyland in my early college days.
Long shifts, slow business days, late nights and weekends with no "real" managers around, and a handful of relatively smart and creative people with root access to the computer network working with stupid coworkers & mean guests all day long creates a recipe for good times.
Depending on who was working each shift, we would usually spend every single minute of our spare time engineering pranks, crank calls, and ways to seek revenge on mean customers.
Most were small... like rearranging all the keys on the front desk keyboards or the managers' keyboards. Half the people couldn't type without the old hunt-and-peck so they'd freak out.
Occasionally we'd put a walkie-talkie in a trashcan near where the customers would walk by, then make "meowing" sounds. Then laugh as people dig through the trash to rescue the kitten.
Each front desk clerk would have our own cash drawer that we were responsible for. We would remove the cash drawers and replace them with an empty one and watch people freak out when they think their money had been stolen.
We'd play a stupid game where we would try to dump paperclips into other people's cash drawers. This evolved into elaborate booby traps that would sweep dozens of paperclips into your drawer as you opened it. Hmmm, come to think of it that's not very funny. I guess you had to be there.
We'd crank call other local business... a lot. We became masters of the art. We had consierge guide books full of restarurants, hotels, attractions, and tour guides. We would relentlessly crank call the same poor people at the same places over and over again.
One of the crank calls was calling up 6 different Denny's restaurants at the same time and conferencing them all together. We'd put our end on a one-way speaker phone so we could hear them but they couldn't hear us. They'd all answer at about the same time and freak out. Then we'd try to do it over and over again all night, but it's really hard to get 6 people to answer the phone at the same time.
We'd call up a Pakistani restaurant and some Indian food deli type place and conference them together... then laugh as the two guys answer at the same time then begin to yell and scream at each other as each denies making the phone call. Then do it again 5 minutes later and laugh even harder as the two guys threaten to kill each other.
We'd really give new co-workers a hard time. The hotel was pretty big and had several buildings so it took a while to get the hang of where all the different room numbers were located. We'd hide the luggage carts, then send new people off to make deliveries with heavy objects to rooms that didn't exist.
We'd wait until night, then send an employee up to an empty room. That employee would remove all the light bulbs, close the curtains hide the TV remote control, then go hide into the closet. Then we would tell the new employee, "Room 333 says their TV remote control is broken. Just go up to empty Room 666 and grab that remote control to give to the people in Room 333." The new person goes into the empty room, turns on the lights then gets frustrated that the lights are out. They feel around to where the TV remote should be then get frustrated because they can't find it. Then the person hiding in the closet, in the dark, jumps out and scares the hell out of the poor unsuspecting new person. Oh yeah, and we'd leave the phone off the hook in the room so the rest of us down at the front desk could listen to the screams.
If a guest was really mean or rude when they checked in and made a big deal out of getting a non-smoking room, we would of course check them into a smoking room, or into a room that was empty, but hadn't been cleaned by the maids yet. So the guys drags all of their stuff to the room and goes insane with anger. We politely offer to switch them to another room, but of course the only rooms available are all the way over on the other side of t
At Sierra College, they used to run w/ Windows 98 workstations and windows NT4 servers. On Win98, you could log in as any user if you selected an invalid domain (by typing it in). I did so, and printed out the screen showing the start menu opened up (the famous Log Off Administrator...).
I printed it using my own account and pinned it up on the bulliten board outside the main entrance. You should have seen the new admin (first day on the job) freak.
One word - Racism
Mention the Lord of the Rings one more time and I'll more than likely kill you.
The only serious prank I ever did ended up as a one-liner in Time magazine. I has set up an elaborate system of personalities on all the "What it IT?" type websites (people trying to figure out what the segway was before it was revealed). It was full of secret insiders posting information, other "real" insiders negating what was said and posting the slightly more believable "truth", fake PR people from Dean Kamen's companies playing down the hype, invisible agents from major industrialists and venture capitalists offering bribes for more information, with cryptic responses, janitors who happened to "see something", bitter recriminations flying back and forth between both sides of my "regulars" and "hoaxers"... Man, it was great fun. In the end I had thousands, if not more, convinced it was a kind of flying surfboard looking thing that used very little power and would alter EVERYTHING.
Even in the wee hours of the morning, after Time and Newsweek had published thier international copy on the web, people were still convinced that it was all part of a HUGE elaborate conspiracy to keep the true nature of IT concealed until the very last second.
Sigh, good times.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I've had my share of pranks, some planned others spontaneous. Sometimes it's the little pranks that derive the most pleasure:
In high school I wrote a Turbo Pascal program to generate a tone from the PC speaker. I couldn't get the tone to play long enough and ended up with an annoying "chirp" sound that I eventually debugged. My friend came along and criticized my work and the annoying sound then had a brilliant idea. He took my "chirp" program and modified it to run as a TSR (terminate and stay ready) under DOS (that's all we had back then) and loaded it on all the computer lab computers. Imagine a computer lab full of computers randomly generating a semi-quiet "chirp" sound with no identifable way of turning it off. Eventually it drove the computer science teacher nuts and he just went around the room and disconnected the PC speakers.
My favorite prank also occured during high school and it involved a short wave radio my mother gave me for my birthday. It had a microphone and small amplifier suitable for a small room, but the sound was tinny and horrible. My friend's dad commented that the sound was atrocious and it made people sound like were talking at the drive thru. *Ding!* We bundled the radio and ourselves and drove to the local Burger King and hid the the radio and ourselves behind the drive thru menu board. We chose Burger King because there were some nice sized bushes obscuring either side of the menu board, otherwise this prank would not have been possible. After several false starts, we found our stride and eventually were able to confuse enough customers and enough orders to the breaking point. The jig was up when my friend (on the microphone) managed to confuse both the drive thru operator and drive thru customer to the point that both were screaming at each other. The customer got out of his truck and kicked the drive thru sign in frustration. The restaurant manager came running out and discovered us hiding behind the sign. I almost couldn't make a run for it as I was laughing so hard and tears were running down my face so I couldn't see. Ah, such juvenile pursuits.
One regular prank we liked to pull was swapping napkins from the Taco Time dispenser and moving them to the dispensers at a near by McDonalds. The napkins are indentical in size and fit perfectly. It's hilarious to see the expressions on customer's faces as they go to grab a napkin from the dispenser and see "Taco Time" in huge letters on the napkins, then pull out a handful in disgust as they realize it's a prank only to discover that we've filled the entire dispenser from top to bottom with stolen Taco Time napkins.
I know I going to hell for the prank I played on some very nice Mormons a few years ago. I came home from work to discover a message on my answering machine for "Kirby" (not my name) and if I received the informative video I requested. I deleted it without a second's thought only to hear the phone ring with a call from, you guessed it, the same Mormon fellow asking for "Kirby" again. Feeling mischievious I said, "Yes, Kirby speaking". The pleasant fellow on the line then went into his spiel and asked when would it be a good time to call on me to learn more about his faith. He asked for an address and while I was tempted to offer a friend's address I simply left the incorrect address he had as the "correct" one. He then asked what time he could come around. I was insistent that being an "early riser" that he should come as early as possible, "Six o'clock in the morning" I said. After a palpable pause I heard his hesitant voice reply, "That's...that's a bit early, but ok". I retired to bed that evening already feeling the flames of Hell nipping my covers. The next morning I rose and went to work without a second's thought to the fact that the very nice Mormon fellow was knocking incessantly on someone's door at six in the morning. He called back that afternoon and left another message to the effect that he was, "Sorry about the mixup" or somesuch. My room mate got the message before I did and tol
Clever prank - I was in a high school typing class in the late 80's. The class used monochrome PC's that booted DOS from a floppy. Normally, the PC would already be running WordPerfect when you came into class. WordPerfect at the time was just an empty screen with numbers in the upper left corner signifying page, row, and character. I wrote a Basic program to emulate the look of WordPerfect... until you had typed more than 100 or so characters. After that point no matter what key you hit, the next letter in the phrase "This is Satan. I have taken control of this computer. You will obey me." would appear. I left this program running for the next class. The next day I had to promise not to ever screw around with the PCs anymore or I would be charged for the copy of WordPerfect they threw away thinking it was corrupt.
Crass prank - I had noticed that some of the women in the factory I worked at would buy their tampons from the machine in the bathroom. Apparently buying them for a dime a piece was cheaper than getting a box at the store. I printed out a fake memo in the style of the company stating that the price of tampons was going to be raised to $.25, and posted it at the time clock. When everyone was lining up to clock out, a huge brou-ha-ha had broken out. They were enraged that the price was more than doubling, and already preparing to call the union representative. I had included a line in the memo that said, "As usual, if you need change you can buy a package of Twinkies from the snack machine" thinking this would clue them in that it was a joke. Instead, I had to quickly take the memo down and apologize to everyone that I made them think their cheap source of tampons had been taken away from them.
Lots of pranks are done at Chalmers too. My favorite is when a couple of chalmerists went to the city public parking dept and asked to buy a park bench. The answer, of course, was no. But after some nagging, ultimately, the students got to buy a bench. They got a receipt and all.
The students started to carry the bench all over the city. Of course, the suspicious behavior made the police stop them. Multiple times... Finally, there was a broadcast on the police radio "there are two chalmerists carrying a park bench. DO NOT stop them - they have bought it and have a receipt". Of course, the radio amateur students were listening to the police radio at the time, and all the park benches in the city were carried by two students each (not the original ones) and all put on Götaplatsen...
There are many other good pranks from Chalmers though, like welding a tram to its track (if that hadn't cost really lots of money as the tram broke catastrofically it would have been great), or exchanging the messages of the speed radar notifications (mere notification, no speed cameras) outside town in the eighties for references to Woody Woodpecker, the mascot of the newly started computer engineering programme. And there probably is a whole bunch of them that I totally forgot, too.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
How about "room temperature superconductors"? Even if that wasn't supposed to be a hack, it couldn't have been done better if it were.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Someone didn't take kindly to the proselytizing religious groups, so printed up and posted flyers that said something like:
Jump For Jesus!
10AM Tuesday, Stork Tower
Stork Tower is a tall tower with a carillon in it. Simple, direct, plausible, a great prank.
Oracle and unix guy.
A group of students broke into the local high-security prison. Left the governor a box of chocolates. This was apparently well-received until several prisoners managed to escape a few days later using the same method the students had used to enter. I believe it led to the home secretary getting involved.
When I was a freshman at UMR, the campus health department in conjunction with the American Heart Association had put up a health-awareness computer display at the front desk of our dormitory, near the mailboxes, a high-traffic area. 'Find Out Your Life Expectancy'. It was an Apple II running a program that would give you your life expectancy after answering about 20 lifestyle-related questions regarding diet, excercise, smoking/drinking, etc. After it told you how long you would live, it would offer tips on how to increase your life expectancy -- "YOU SHOULD STOP SMOKING, SMOKING IS A RISK FACTOR FOR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE." or "YOU SHOULD EAT LESS PIZZA, HIGH CHOLESTEROL CAUSES HEART DISEASE.", etc.
The life expectancy program was loaded from disk and ran in memory, and the 5.25" floppy disk had been left in the drive. I removed the floppy, took it up to my room where my Apple IIe was, copied the disk and proceeded to modify my copied version of the program which had been written in BASIC. I quickly located the list of questions and scoring instructions, then the function for computing expected lifespan. I simply subtracted 30 years from the would-be answer "YOU WILL LIVE TO BE $AGE YEARS OLD", then replaced the follow-up suggestion string so that regardless of how the questions had been answered, it always gave the same message.
I took both disks back downstairs, loaded my version of the program into RAM and ran it, then put the original disk back in the drive. No harm done.
Then I sat from a distance and observed a series of co-eds curiously and playfully check to learn their future according to the American Heart Association's mysterious and all-knowing computer-thingy... Their lighthearted and wondering looks as they answered the questions quickly turned to jaw-dropping shock and wide-eyed fear as their destiny appeared on the screen:
"YOU WILL LIVE TO BE 28 YEARS OLD. YOU WILL DIE A HORRIBLE DEATH!"
Several girls became very distraught. I found it odd that people could actually believe a computer when it told them something far-out like that -- as if a computer was capable of fortune-telling -- but apparently, they did! Personal computers were new at the time and little-understood by most people, if they had even seen one before. Taking advantage of people who didn't understand them, especially illogical girls who would never give me the time of day, made me feel superior and gained me a few laughs at their expense. After a while, though, the reactions grew severe enough that I began to worry someone might become so convinced of their computer-generated fate as to somehow cause it to happen... I rebooted the computer, prank over.
VATS (vehicular anti-theft system) consisted of a system in which some GM keys had a resistance wafer in them. Later generations were called PASS-Key and PASS-Key 2. It's no longer in use. So, you had to have the correct key (to turn it), and one of the correct 15 (actually 16) resistance wafers inside the key for the computer to allow the engine to crank. Using the wrong resistance value led to a time delay, and you had to wait a few minutes before trying again. The time was cumulative.
Back in the day when VATS was new, some locksmith showed up at a conference in his new car, which happened to have VATS installed. One of the other locksmiths went into the parking lot, and (using one of a number of methods for cutting a first key) created a key that would turn in the ignition. He then proceeded to turn the key enough times to disable the engine for several hours. Hilarity ensued when the owner went to leave, and the car wouldn't start.
A cruel bunch, locksmiths.
Bob went to Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. Even in the early Seventies, when so many of the nation's college campuses were in turmoil, this was a quiet, Catholic Jesuit college. The most famous alumnus of Gonzaga is Bing Crosby, and he made many donations to his alma mater, including a substantial collection of memorabilia. The crown jewel of this collection was his 1944 Oscar for "Going my Way".
Even this serene campus in Washington had malcontents though, one of which was Bob's roommate. The powers that be had done something to offend him, and so they hatched a plan to get even. They would steal Bing's Oscar.
Having seen too many episodes of "It Takes a Thief", they had an elaborate scheme for getting into the case where the Oscar was housed involving ventilation ducts, suction cups, and ropes and pulleys. In the process of casing the museum, one of them leaned against the case and it simply slid open. Astonished, they looked around and saw they were alone in the room, and then looked back at each other. Without a word, Bob stuffed the statue into his jacket and they walked out fore-and-aft with the statue between them, past all the folks at the student center in broad daylight.
They then went back to their room, which faced the building where museum was, and waited. Not too long afterward they heard sirens, and when the police cars showed up, the old lady in charge of the museum came running out with her hand to her head and collapsed dramatically in a way that women don't do much anymore. Soon it was all over the campus, the Oscar was gone.
After a couple of days, the pair released a "hostage photo" to the school paper, making a set of ridiculous demands. This only intensified the search for the guilty, and when the heat got to be too much, they dropped the Oscar into the mailbox, ending the "Great Oscar Scandal of 1972."
Not quite ending, as it turns out. Several weeks later, Bob was called into the college president's office. Knowing what was coming, he swallowed hard and just went in. He got the expected lecture about, "I know it was you", "stealing is a sin", and "respecting the rights of others". Then at the end, the President made a confession: When he had been a student at Gonzaga, he resented the ass-kissing that the college gave the old crooner, and had always wanted to steal the statue. "How did you do it", he asked. Bob tells the story, and the old man just chuckled and sent Bob away with a stern warning.
Months later, when Bob goes to the Registrar to pay for the next semester, he realized that there had been some kind of mistake involving the tution check from his parents, and started scrambling to come up with the money. The registrar stops him: His tuition had been paid in full, as he was the recipient of a full presidential scholarship.
I know my old econ prof doesn't read slashdot, so he's unlikely to post his own story. I've called him "Bob", to protect the guilty. A quick Google search appears to confirm that the prank happened. Whether or not it was really my prof that did it, I can't say. The proceeding is my butchered recollection of his tale as told to me in his backyard many years ago, that almost certainly contains errors of fact and leaves out crucial details.
At the time though, it was hands down, no bullshit, the God damned funniest story I had ever heard.
Both were courtesy of Jim Mallon and Leon Varjian, leaders of the Pail and Shovel party at the University of Wisconsin. During their 1978 campaign they promised to raise enough money to buy the Statue of Liberty and fly it to Madison. During transit via helicopter the tow cable cable broke and Lady Liberty plunged into the lake.
Support SETI@home
Ah, the time-honored concept of senior pranks. Here are some I've either done or saw firsthand:
1) Stealing handicapped parking signs from parking lots and relocating them to school parking lots. In the same vein, creating a stencil of the handicapped-parking symbol and tagging random parking spaces in public lots.
2) Writing "Class of {Insert graudation year here}" in Round-Up on the school lawn.
3) Zip-tie all double doors in the school
4) Black-out windshields of teachers/principals with black shoe polish
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein
When I was in college I worked at Blockbuster Video. Well, our local area had a "campus cash" coupon book that was distributed to something like 50,000 or so. Our regional office decided to take out an ad and put coupons in there. Well, they didn't run it by their legal department and thus didn't think to put any sort of disclaimer or limits on it etc.
Well, we had people who had stacks of these things and would come in several times a week to get free videos (the coupon was for 1 free older DVD). Management tried to tell these people they were abusing the coupons but since there were no limits or fine print, BB would be in violation of "bait/switch" laws if they didn't honor the coupons. There was nothing we could do about it.
I loved it because it made an ass of whoever wrote/designed the coupon. Needless to say, the following semester when the coupon book was printed again, the same mistake was not made!
Libertas in infinitum
I told this one before, but I'm getting old and repeating myself is something I get to do now.
Back in my college days I went to a small private university in southern California. It fancied itself as a west coast version of an ivy league institution, and it had the money, clientele, and professors to back up the claim. The students who went there (aside from the token scholarship saps, like me) were the sons and daughters of Fortune 500 CEOs, company founders with hundreds of millions of dollars, etc. If you flipped through the student roster it'd read like "The Sons and Daughters of the Insanely Rich".
In any event, all of this wealth and prestige required that the college keep up a certain reputation, especially during treasured events like Alumni Day. But some of us, especially the token scholarship boys and girls, saw such events as an opportunity of a, well, different sort.
In the middle of campus there was a clock tower, in a plaza. The damned thing never worked when I was there but it was a point of pride for reasons I can't recall, and the president of the college always escorted the uber-rich alumni through the plaza and made a point of showing off the tower as he went about milking these folks for more money in the coming year.
Only on that particular Alumni Day all those years ago, as said alumni were following the president on his tour into the plaza, they discovered that the tower had grown a very large paper mache penis, artfully mounted on the tower so as to appear to be standing 'at attention'. The shocked silence and looks of horror on the faces of all that blue blood were absolutely priceless.
Nobody was ever fingered for the crime. Nobody ever figured out how the huge paper mache tool had been made, in secret, nor how it had been transported to the site, nor reconstructed on the side of the tower. No one could ever figure out how it was even mounted since it wasn't possible to enter the tower itself. Nobody saw the monstrosity being attached to the tower, or admitted to it if they did. It had simply appeared, as if by magic.
I've always wondered why this never made it into at least urban legendry. Perhaps it's because the student newspaper was a tool of the administration and they made no mention of it whatsoever, despite the fact that every student on campus saw the thing (and took plenty of pictures). Perhaps someday some former student-turned-alumnus will see fit to post the pictures on the net.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Plus de choses changent, plus qu'ils restent la même chose.
In case anyone was wondering, it means "the more things change, the more they stay the same."
Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions. It's the only way to mak
Wait... are you implying that there are people who don't bring their accordian when they hunt deer? But doesn't that make render the zydeco rather ineffective?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
One word: Bolshevik.
Nobody mentioned Goatse? You people are slippin'
Table-ized A.I.
Books you'll likely NOT find in the Bob Jones University Library!
First up, Legends of Caltech and More Legends of Caltech.
These two 80 page volumes chronic(WHAT?)le technopranking at Caltech from the 1920s to the late 1980s. Learn about the classic Rose Bowl card section prank that was broadcast live on NBC, See the HOLLYWOOD sign become the CALTECH sign before your very eyes. Vicariously enjoy the revenge of Caltech students upon a greedy police department.
These books MUST be ordered from the Caltech bookstore, as they are privately published by the Caltech Alumni Association. Ordering info is at the bottom of this page.
Ah, but what of MIT? For their history we must turn to a trio of books.
The Journal of the Institute for Hacks, TomFoolery & Pranks at MIT. Published by the MIT Museum, this is a 158 page book with lots of photos and text concerning the hacks pulled by MIT men and women over the decades. See The Great Breast of Knowledge, The Great Pumpkin, the legendary Smoot Marks on the Harvard Bridge. Read about the chronic humiliation suffered by the inmates at Harvard as MIT has its way with the statue of John Harvard and the Harvard Stadium.
"Is This The Way To Baker House?" - A Compendium of HackingLore. 165 pages of legends, essays, photographs and stories of and about hacking at MIT. This book, published in 1996, continues where the Journal leaves off. The MIT Campus Police car on the Great Dome, arguably one the greatest hacks in MIT history, graces the cover and several inside pages. Regrettably, only black and white photographs are used in the body of the book, as there are several hacks, most notably, the Cathedral of Our Lady of The All Night Tool (The "stained glass" panels in Lobby 7) that really should be seen in full color. That minor gripe aside, this is a fine companion volume to The Journal and shares the same binding dimensions as The Journal, making them a handsome pair of books to grace the shelves of any creative malcontent. (The title refers to the canonical reply to an MIT Campus cop when one is discovered in a spectacularly inappropriate location, such as the apex of the Great Dome at 4:00AM.)
NIGHTWORK: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT, by Institute Historian T. F. Peterson.
This is a semi-compendium of hacks detailed in the previous two volumes, as well as detailing some hacks that occured after the publication of the second volume, "Is The The Way To Baker House?". It also includes details of pranks and goings-on at MIT in it's early years.
One difference from the previous books is that it includes a section of color photographs, something sorely lacking in the previous books. Some of the color pictures are of the "stained glass windows" of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the All Night Tool.
On the other hand, some of the black and white images in the book are very poorly processed and are lacking in detail.
One surprise is that the binding does not match the previous books. It's rather smaller in height.
The specifics: 8 x 9, 208 pp., 125 illus., 16 color $19.95/13.50 (PAPER)
Our final book is published by St. Martin's Press.
If At All Possible, Involve A Cow - The Book Of College Pranks, is a 240 page history of collegiate pranking in America, beginning with the earliest colleges in America, and even taking note of some hijinx taking place in Canada.
This is an excellent companion volume to the preceeding four books, as it covers collegiate pranking in general, as well as detailing some events that are NOT covered in either the Caltech or MIT books.
If I were sending a son or daughter off to college, I would certainly include all six of these books in their "books to bring to school" box.Sta
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Well, most of the quotes seem to along the lines of "Well the French are cowards and wouldn't even help us out when we took back their country from the Germans during WW2."
;-)
Now I get annoyed by some French mentality as much as anyone but that's just US revisionist history. It's really a quite offensive thing to say. You can still see the scars that the two world wars have left. Anyone who claims that people weren't trying to fight back during the German invasions just don't know what the hell they are talking about.
It's not like the US came charging to the rescue neither. They were dragged kick and screaming into the war (though there were many who joined voluntarily).
Furthermore it could be noteworthy to see how none of these witty people comment that France (and other nations) were actually correct. The US and UK didn't have any solid evidence that Irak was producing WMD. They just made it up and when the French called them on it they were called cowardly bastards.
Well, they are still bastards, but for other reasons.
Google seemed to like "Hootzpah" so I went with it. The information age is ruining my spelling. :-)
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Cambridge University (UK) doesn't have that many pranks to its name*, but those that do exist are doozies. My favourite one is where one of the big stone balls that line one of the bridges was removed for cleaning. A bunch of students got a big chunk of polystyrene, shaped and painted it appropriately, and placed it in the ball's position. When a punt went underneath, they all got into position and slooooooowly pushed it off.
I'm told that the people who jumped out of the punt were slightly annoyed by this.
Then there was the time that pink panther footprints appeared going up a College belltower. The master of the college decided that this was unacceptable so sent out a note saying that the pawprints had to come down. The next day, there were a set of pawprints coming down the tower too...
* Anyone in cambridge who wants to rectify this situation, get in touch!
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I enjoyed watching that. I would love to be in that class just to see this guy.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's a small excerpt from my book "Possibility Thinking: Explorations in Logic and Thought", the rough draft of which is available for anyone to look at for free online @ http://livejournal.com/~justincoslor