Slashdot Mirror
MIT Hackers Appropriate Caltech Cannon
Bob Hearn writes "Some Slashdotters might remember the story Caltech Pranks MIT's Prefrosh Weekend from a year ago. MIT Hackers have gotten even. Sometime in the middle of the night, Caltech's famous cannon appeared at the base of MIT's Green building. A plaque in front of it reads: 'CALTECH CANNON April 6, 2006 MIT hackers posing as the Howe & Ser Moving Company Appropriated this cannon on March 28, 2006. It later appeared on MIT's campus with the addition of a large brass rat made of gold-plated aluminum. In honor of its previous owners, the cannon points towards Padadena, CA.' The brass rat (MIT ring) is really a rather impressive bit of aluminum machining. Harvey Mudd College previously stole the cannon, in 1986, but later had to give it back."
As dean of your University, I have worked with the financial office and the office of the provost to appropriate two grants.
The first will be a large scale grant to beef up our offensive against all other universities by using the rocket and aerodynamic sciences departments to further develop a V3-Schneider program. Remember, we care not about the surrounding buildings of our targets, but only require a half mile 'radius of terror' so that we can effectively instill fear into the hearts of other academic institutions.
The second grant will go to the physics department so that they can develop hilarious Rube Goldberg booby traps around our V3-Schneider platform in an effort to reduce sabotage. Another part of it will go into a free weight old fashion stationary trebuchet aimed at the one lone road into the University. In the event of an invasion, all incoming vehicles will have flying refrigerators to contend with.
Remember people, this is war and we will not waver or falter.
My work here is dung.
Love the rat! A+ pronk on that :-)
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Come on, it's either aluminium or gold plated - there's no brass in there at all.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Ahhh, the one reason why I would have considered going to MIT. So many of their hacks are truely inspirational.
IHTFP : Interesting Hacks To Fascinate People
So who's gonna tell them that 6/7 (7/8, I guess, with Avery house) of the students are unlikely to be put out.
The Flems, on the other hand...
See, It's not really the _Caltech_ cannon, as such.
A. Mole
Looks more like BEAVER to me..
I am going to go hack a few liquor stores tonight. Anyone want to be my driver?
... the social engineering in convincing most people (and silencing the others) that the cannon had not belonged to MIT in the first place, and then been stolen by Caltech. Then it gets really funny when they convince a bunch of MITers to steal it and put it back right where it was in the first place. I mean seriously, who falls for a cannon being native to California? Were we a big part of the civil war?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Now MIT can truly claim more bang for the buck.
What kind of sysadmins are they!?
It's actually a big relief to us to hear that MIT has it. For the last week, we've been wondering where the hell it got off to. The administration thought filed a police report for grand theft. MIT stole it in the early hours masquerading as contractors. Security stopped them, but they social-engineered their way out of it, and security let them go.
See Subject: Howe & Ser Moving Co..
Mr. Universe: "They can't stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal."
For you see, all nerds have inside them at least a little bit of 'cannon envy'...
My work here is dung.
http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~gjs/gjs.html
Subject: Caltech cannon
Date: 28 March 06 19:56:34 PST
To: [HMC internal mailing list]
Howdy,
Did anyone steal the Caltech cannon Monday night/Tuesday
morning? They called and said it was stolen and were hoping it was here.
Chris Sundberg
Associate Dean of Students
Harvey Mudd College
It's a beaver.
MIT server being slashdotted already... way to go MIT.
I can't rtfa because it's slashdotted. Stealing a cannon isn't particularly clever. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, MIT is on the east coast and CalTech is on the west coast. These guys get an 'A' for effort.
My own favorite first year engineering trick: Many years ago people arrived at the main building of the University of Manitoba to find a stump in the middle of the lawn. Everyone was up in arms. Who cut down the stately old pine? It was quite a while before someone realized: "Hey, there was no tree there in the first place."
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Stealing a weapon of mass destruction and transporting it across state lines... throw them all in a detention center immediately! They are obviously a threat to our Freedom and Way of Life.
Seriously, where is the hysterical reaction from Caltech Administrators, FBI, and DHS?
Subject: Caltech cannon Date: 28 March 06 19:56:34 PST To: [HMC internal mailing list] Howdy, Did anyone steal the Caltech cannon Monday night/Tuesday morning? They called and said it was stolen and were hoping it was here. Chris Sundberg Associate Dean of Students Harvey Mudd College (reposting this logged in to get it above default viewing threshold - damned moderation system...)
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
I thought Caltech was in Pasadena Ca.
If you pronounce the "&" as the Latin "et" (from which the & letterform was based) it's "How et Ser Moving Company". And they don't even force Latin on the MIT students any more.
In response, Caltech destroyed MIT's web servers by submitting the story to Slashdot. Caltech: 2, MIT: 1.
Wasn't this, um, rather illegal?
How can stealing something and attaching a metallic rodent be classed as a "hack"? BTW, how much does an MIT education cost?
I note that the http://www.caltechvsmit.com/ seems updated to reflect this hack. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but if not I have a question.
Caltech pulls a number of silly little pranks that, to be quite honest, no one really noticed, and garners 6 points for their "feud" with MIT... MIT students socially engineer themselves into being able to steal and drive Caltech's cannon across the United States, point it back at Caltech and install a large (really well made) brass rat onto the barrel of the cannon and create a plaque commemorating the heist.
All that's worth one point? Pff.
Not that I really care or anything; it's like my attitude towards the Red Sox... it's not until they're in the playoffs or the series that I pay attention.
Humorless sig goes here.
Since you all killed our webserver I put the pics up on our personal server: http://donkeykong.mit.edu/cannon/. It's only an old AlphaServer DS20 so play nice.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
ROBOT HOUSE!!!
Pictures here
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I think that gold plated beaver ate the brass rat!!
Caltech is in Pasadena.
College pranks. LOL. ROTFLOL! Muahaha. Muahahaha.
Humor must involve something unexpected. If this happens quite often it stopped becoming humor.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
we fired the slashdot cannon at their website too.
They seem to have an official site and press release at http://www.howeandser.com.
So... being that the MIT ring has a beaver on it, and since this apparently enlarged MIT ring has what looks like a beaver on it, does this mean that the rat is hiding behind the BEAVER's tail?
They RF'ed our cannon! Those poor, dumb bastards at MIT have no idea what they've done. Now how are all the poor frosh going to know that rotation is over? They'll be left to fend for themselves! We might lose up to 10% in the first wave alone. And finals will never end, so no one will graduate! This is a disaster!
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
...unless my eyes mistake me, it's a brass beaver.
CA has plenty of cannons. The Spanish were big on them, and apparently had some influence on early development in the area.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Did they have the proper permit to transfer munitions across state lines?
;-P
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
So... what's the deal? They say "rat" but it sure looks like a beaver to me. Or is this some inside/school joke that I just don't get?
Nice to see that Wikipedia is already updated to reflect this change of location!
Props to MIT... good show!
The cannon belongs to a particular dorm (Fleming House), not to Caltech. It is not a Caltech cannon, it is the Fleming House cannon. No one outside of Fleming House gives a rats ass about that cannon. (Actually, no one outside of Fleming House gives a rats ass about Fleming House).
At my school there was a fraternity with a large Confederate era cannon on its front lawn. Some friends and I thought it would be hugely funny to sneak over the night before their formal ball and paint the thing pink. Fortunately, someone did some checking and discovered that the cannon was on the national historic register, and that messing with it would be a FEDERAL crime. So instead we painted their front door pink. Windows and all.
"Hey, nice beaver."
"Thanks, I just had it stuffed."
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
- That's awesome!
- That's awesome!
- That's awesome!
- This is an outrage! I can't believe they let this happen! <grumble grumble>
(I give you zero guesses as to which one used to live in the house to which that cannon is most closely identified.)I hope this gets current Caltech students off their collective keister to do something. No notable pranks in recent years, and they're most currently known for hiking up Mt. Wilson without appropriate equipment (come on, even alumni know that it's c-o-o-o-ld up on Mt. Wilson). If this causes an increase in Caltech-MIT prank warfare, then I'm all for it. Let the arms race, um, continue!
As an alum myself (BSEE, 2000) I say let MIT have it. It belongs to Harvey Mudd anyway.
Is it wrong that I really dont get why this is interesting, amusing or otherwise newsworthy? ;o)
Did anyone else remark that the metal tag rivited onto the carriage of the cannon bears the following text:
No. 42
Model of 1896
Rock Island Arsenal
1900
JWB
Of course MIT wanted this cannon. It must obviously shoot forth with great power the answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything!
more pictures
I feel the need to post the link to the original heist: http://people.bu.edu/fmri/somers/cannon.html
Well, I can tell you that 6/7ths of caltech (undergrads) is happy about this (OK actually the caltech majority graduate students don't care, because they've been in lab for the last 24hrs). The cannon belongs only to a single undergraduate house (a mandatory housing system based on dining halls from a Harvard tradition, named for the guys who funded the buildings). That house of Freudian Fame is Fleming, whose denizens are known for walking around in red athletic shirts with Big White "F"s on them (yep, no kidding). They were the jocks when I was there, and retained more of the fraternity look and feel, though Page house may well have out done them in the last year by trying to haze their freshmen in the mountains. It's amazing what the socially inept, and impractical minded will lamely copy from others.
The cannon has been RF'ed (HaXXored) a bunch of times (yes, I served time at the Institute). Mostly this has been done by the other caltech students (shock!, awe?), but it was determined to be one of a very few objects that were un-touchable by the administration to prevent on-going student horse play. It was one of the few things you could be expelled permanently from school for (or simultaneously blow several heads off with large quantities of spaghetti). Instead we bricked in the front of Fleming one night, or changed the Hollywood sign, or flooded and froze the hallways, and we got in trouble, but not big trouble. The cannon has been turned around to face Fleming (on one night before they were set to fire it... they still get 4 times a year?), and everyone (from another house) has wanted to apply more permanent silence by the use of LN2 (use your brain), but it was forbidden by the honor code. Not only you, but your house would be punished. The Flems can go get it for all I care.
The truly sad thing is that the administration seems to have taken a line in the last 10 years against any pranks. Anything interesting has largely been forbidden by the Administration (by which I mean, when the police come after you the Institute attorneys won't be on your side). Unfortunately, caltech isn't big enough for the Administration to trip over its own feet enough, it's a bit too nimble and "all knowing" for the Institutes good. Plausible deniability can be a good thing. As I mentioned to the deans when I left (low these many years ago), I felt it had turned from a school of higher learning, to an Institute of lower liability. (On that topic, has anyone noticed how that guy from Numbers is trying to look just like Gary Lorden?). It's sad to see, but they've tried to stop lock picking, tunneling, bon fires, and every other form of fun... I hope they wake up now, and realize that if the students don't train security regularly, the Institute will be publicly humiliated for it.
p.s. for reference caltech is never capitalized except in formal communications
p.s. the Board of Directors will try to get the LA times not to run any story related to this
Parentheses, braces, brackets, and other standard forms of indicating meta information have ceased to function. Ceasing communication.
As a Caltech student, I feel the need to respond to all the "On noes! Grand theft cannon! Involve the police!" comments. By any measure, this was a good prank. I have nothing but admiration for MIT for doing this. Admiration and the need to get even, of course. But no hard feelings.
Ever since the 1986 theft, Caltech became a bit more vigilant. The cannon was literally locked to the ground. How did they break that lock without drawing attention? And how did they move that cannon around without drawing attention? And finally, when HMC did it, they posed as a cleaning crew that needed to move the cannon for maintenance... if the MIT people used a moving company excuse to deflect any attention that they did draw, I'm surprised that Caltech fell for what amounted to a similar trick.
:P
Anyway, HMC should be ashamed of itself, letting MIT do this.
I wonder if some alumni funded this prank? I can't imagine students paying for the truck rental and materials.
A BRASS rat. whose composition includes neither copper nor zinc.
MIT's materials science program sure has come a long way...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Mudders did it first!
w ww-bcs.mit.edu/~somers/cannon.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010920072708/http://
On an MIT webpage, strangely enough.
HMC '02
Which part of "Thou shalt not steal" are the MIT hackers not quite clear on? Perhaps MIT should offer some ethics classes instead of focusing purely on engineering. (Pranks are all very well and good, but stealing should be called stealing, not euphemistically referred to as "appropriation".)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Its white kids so they call it "appropriating". I say they looted it.
I can tell you that that is not a rat, but a beaver.
Wow, MIT has been reduced to copying a 20-year-old prank by a second rate tech school (Harvey Mudd), and they are actually proud of it?
I see caltech security hasn't changed. And, where were the Flems? That stupid thing has been untouchable for years, due to Flems' griping. Other pranks were ok, but not the Flems' precious cannon.
Good riddance. I only wish they'd thrown it into Boston harbor..then it would have been a mystery for all time...like Jimmy Hoffa.
- A '91 Rudd.
Considering "&" comes from the ligature for "et", this translates to "Howe et Ser" (howitzer). Kudos to the hackers for such excellent choice of names.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
"In honor of its previous owners, the cannon points towards Padadena, CA". Has Caltec moved from Pasadena?
As a former Mudder myself, and a beneficiary of a scholarship given by the alum whose family's construction company provided everything the 1986 team needed to pull off the original heist, I thought it would've been awesome a decade later to steal the cannon again.
Unfortunately, my classmates were uninterested.
That said, two years later we did manage to take some silly life-sized papier mache bull from one of the Caltech dorms, and then invited those nerds to come party at West Dorm, where the bull's head was mounted prominently above the dorm lounge entrance. Only a few of those nerds cared enough to show up.
The moral of the story: everyone sucks.
A better HMC v. Caltech hack (as opposed to theft) was when Mudders added parentheses around "Pasadena City College" on the Caltech / Pasadena City College freeway exit sign.
And the best hack was when Mudders pranked the construction company building the new dorm on campus. Nothing says awesome like costing your school inordinate amounts of money.
Read all about it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Mudd_College
I fail to see how paranoid law officers with guns would be an improvement on that.
Actually, since I'm not there, I should have said "alumi say good riddance". I have some hope, however, for my fellow Scurvy and Mole like brethren (Arrrrrr!). There's also Avery so perhaps it's 7/8ths of the current population... do the profs keep their grad slaves long enough that there are actually more undergraduate alumni than graduate?
No doubt I've offended Badministrators, GradTurkeys, Flems and Page Boys alike, as is my sworn duty.
> I can't imagine students paying for the truck rental and materials.
Every college campus I've ever seen was crowded with students who wear designer clothes, drive late model cars, own the houses they live in off-campus, etc.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I am a current grad student at MIT. I actually learned of this from slashdot.
It is Very impressive. Just think of the shipping cost!
I guess this is what our undergrads do on spring break.
Very, very clever MIT. It JUST struck me. The Fleming cannon is non - RF'able, according to the Interhouse Committee Resolutions at Caltech. That means it's not prankable. The LITERAL definition of RF is "Rat Fuck," when to prank someone, you would catch a rat, dip it in LN2, and then smash it in someone's room. The smell is enough to knock your socks off! And you cannot find all the pieces ever, so it lingers for months. Putting a gigantic brass rat on there is pretty hilarious. You've rat fucked it, and depending on how dirty your mind is, in more than one way. Well played.
Just in case serving up N 2.5 MB pictures to slashdot isn't such a smart idea:
http://donkeykong.mit.edu.nyud.net:8090/cannon/
Surely any weighting must consider that, as the summary mentioned, this prank is a dupe of one pulled by Harvey Mudd twenty years before.
Though they should certainly get credit for moving the cannon across the country, rather than a comparative cross-town.
* a tiny little division of Harvey Mudd
(frosh class prez, class of '93)
A week to get the cannon across the country? Booooooring. Not worthy of MIT. Now, if the cannon had disappeared and reappeared at MIT the same night, that would be quite a hack.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The initials on the nameplate of this Weapon of Mass Destruction seem to be G.W.B.! It's also serial number 42, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything!
Why can't they just collide a whole bunch of little hadrons?
only on /. would somebody think that sending a lot of new visitors to a website is a prank on the same level as liberating a 110 year old cannon and moving it 3,000 miles.
even CalTech kids seem to think MIT is ahead..... http://www.caltechvsmit.com/
the brass rat is a nice touch, iirc there was an old MIT hack where somebody welded one to the hand on the statue of the founder of Harvard? the MIT hacks are well documented online and in a few books.
disclaimer: i did not attend either school.
What prevents them from going to MIT and just taking it back by force?
Sure, but the difference between moving something to the the next town over
and the next ocean over is non-trivial unless you're in Panama.
Were that I say, pancakes?
As a Fleming alum ('01), I admit my initial reaction was outrage. But Fleming House did steal the cannon from a local San Marino military academy in the first place back in the 80's. And for you history buffs, the cannon is from the War of 1812.
So, congratulations, MIT hackers. Your theft also came at an opportune time since Fleming House is currently under a major renovation and the cannon was moved temporarily in front of the MOSH's house, unguarded by the current Flems. Ironically, the MOSH's residence is right across the street from the Security Office.
I hope it eventually makes it back to Caltech. The Orange Walk just won't be the same without it.
It should have been...
Hint: say it
wow
Read carefully.
;-)
When this popped up in my biff I only read the subject and thought
it was a printer or something
Were that I say, pancakes?
No, not the Caltech cannon, the Fleming cannon. Glad someone set the record straight! Maybe this thing will bring the MIT dudes bad karma or something.
What do we want to take it back for? It's right where we want to use it.
Howe & Ser Moving Company.... "Howitzer Moving Company"
Clever bunch of fellows they are.
The "soandso writes" is quite misleading; while I submitted this article I wrote almost none of the words I am credited with at the top of the piece; the entire paragraph was written by someone at Slashdot and any words in common with my submission appear conincidental. In particular, I didn't even submit the CNet story, I submitted the Groklaw story. Not that the Slashdot editor's words are much worse than mine were, but they're very different.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
Looks like a beaver, and since the beaver is MIT's mascot, I'd find that more likely
Beware the fury of a patient man
- John Dryden
I went to university in London, to a college called University College London (UCL.)
The founder of the university, Jeremy Bentham, still sits in a glass
case after having himself stuffed and preserved on his death.
Aparrently, way back in times of yore, arch rivals Kings College London broke in
during the night, hacked of Mr Bethams head and played a game of football with it.
...at least, when I was at MIT mumble years ago, that's what it was called... and I, too, thought the primary job of the Campus Patrol was to make sure we didn't get arrested by the Cambridge Police.
Of course that might have been Campus Patrol propaganda.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
When I was at CalTech, I had the honor of firing the cannon to mark the end of classes each term. This story hit me right in the gut, even though I haven't seen that damn gun in person for like 10 years.
If MIT's objective was to draw CalTech's alumni into the battle, they've succeeded.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
If anything, such "black sheep" terminology would apply to Avery, which wasn't even a real house until recently, as they're the ones who pretty much buck the whole house system. Maybe Blacker Moles should be the black sheep, since they fall in line with the Caltech stereotype so well. Perhaps you mean that by being athletic and well-rounded in addition to brilliant, Flems are true outliers amongst Caltech's herd of geeks. If so, then who am I to disagree? And MIT will pay for their desecration--The Charles will flow red....Fleming red...with food coloring!!!!! -Derek, Fleming '02
Fleming Class of 2002
Proudly PNG'd (declared "persona non grata") from page, Fall 2000
That said, two years later we did manage to take some silly life-sized papier mache bull from one of the Caltech dorms, and then invited those nerds to come party at West Dorm, where the bull's head was mounted prominently above the dorm lounge entrance. Only a few of those nerds cared enough to show up.
They did steal Leathermode (the cow hide hanging in the lounge) in retaliation. I think they tossed it out of their car on the way home when they realized where the terrible smell was coming from.
WIBSTR
Looks like at least somebody still knows how to appreciate a decent prank.
If you pronounce the "&" as the Latin "et" (from which the & letterform was based) it's "How et Ser Moving Company". And they don't even force Latin on the MIT students any more.
Also, 'Howe and Ser' (when ran together) reads a lot like 'How we answer' which is more apparent when you see it as an email address like this shirts@howeandser.com as seen here.
If you can't just be yourself, then be more like me, ok?
Having been a frosh at the time of the disappearance of the cow head, I felt I should clarify that we really didn't care very much about it. It was a papier-mache cow's head left over from a party a few years previous (mmmm, a large viking ship built in the courtyard) which, since it was still in decent shape, got hung up in the (unlocked and easily accessible) dining hall. It was nifty, but there wasn't much attachment to it.
:)
When it did disappear, we weren't all that phased. Yes, we did try to send our Hovse president (who was dating a student at the Claremont colleges at the time, so it wasn't too much out of his way) to try to get it back, but more to make the gesture than because we cared.
As for the party - certainly no one mentioned it to me, and I'm pretty sure most other people didn't know about it either. (also, a pretty substantial subset of the members of the cow head's former Hovse much prefer building parties to attending them, so even if we had known, it's not all that likely that lots of us would have shown up)
On a semi-related note, I am impressed by the parentheses prank. That one's quality.
Watch out for the penguins!
Troll? Who exactly was being trolled? It may have failed to be funny (or no one got the joke, except for whoever decided it would be funny to mod it interesting, and the followups are quite hilarious), but it clearly was not a troll. Get em metamods!
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking