I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.
The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.
About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!
Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)
Slashdot Mirror
... except that nobody found out.
I was admitted to the University of Helsinki law school (see fancy up-to-date web site in Finnish or the really crappy obsolete site in English) in 2001. The entrance exam is highly competitive and people pay insane amounts of money to attend preparatory courses to increase their chances of being admitted. I, for one, spent three months holed up in my apartment, studying non-stop to make sure I would get in. A lot of people would do anything to find out in advance whether they have been admitted or not.
The list of persons admitted to the law school was supposed to be posted on the web on July 20th, 2001 on the admissions 2001 home page (which was, at the time, part of a buggy frameset). If you were "clever" enough to strip the last part of the URL away (like I was), you ended up with a directory listing. This could be used to access the file that included the list of students admitted to the law school - two days before the results were made public, on July 18th, 2001. (The direct URL to the file was more or less un-guessable until the results were released.) Two days may not sound like much, but when you're talking about the display of insanity that is the Helsinki law school exam, it's a lot. More than a few people would undoubtedly have paid serious cash to know their results in advance.
About one year later, the list was "removed" from the web for privacy reasons. However, they simply changed the file extension to ".old", and the list of students admitted to the law school in 2001 is still accessible through the directory listing URL!
Of course, they never found out that the list could be accessed in advance. The lack of computer savviness among the law school faculty and staff never ceases to amaze me. At one point, they had a web page with the latest updates to the law school program for Fall 2004 - without doubt the most popular page on their web site. The file included about 20kB of text, but for some unfathomable reason, the HTML file was about 2,3MB! It's been fixed now, but the problem persisted for several months. (When I looked at the HTML, they had one million extra CR+LFs at the beginning of the file, adding over 2MB of 'bloat'.)
Idiots.