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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."
... 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.
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