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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."
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
Probably a mistake. Now if it had popped up a page with a goatse picture on the other hand....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Unlikely as it seems, that happens in a 'fast majority' (sic) of /. posts.
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.
Actually (quoth the article "Even Adolf Hitler claimed to have been a prankster in his youth."), my favorite was the invasion of Poland.
no fucking cookie?
...expelling kids who pranked after my physics class turned all the trophy display cases into fish tanks.
Well, there's your problem. You pranked the sports trophy cases. If you would have stayed with the math and spelling trophy cases then everyone would have had a good chuckle. Otherwise, you were making a statement about academics being more important than the school's sports programs. They had no choice but to quash those who had stumbled onto the truth.
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
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?
I'm udderly moo-ved by your comments.
You hit the nail on the hoof.
Bully for you.
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...
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.
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.'
Has nothing on the HMC v. Caltech Cannon heist
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
Unfortunately, we hit a secret Israeli spy satellite instead of the American commercial satellite that we intended to prank (it was broadcasting the Yale-Harvard game). Unfortunately, the Mossad was put on our trail. After we killed 5 Mossad agents in three hours of hand-to-hand combat on the Khumbu glacier, peace was negotiated, and we agreed to launch no more missiles. It was a wild ride.
Has anyone seen Buckaroo lately? Last I heard he was working on some transdimensional teleportation device.
----- There are two kinds of people in this world, my friend; those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Exactly.. life is a sine wave.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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...