Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

are practical joke

Practical joke

A practical joke is a mischievous trick played on someone, typically causing the victim to experience embarrassment, indignity, or discomfort. Practical jokes differ from confidence tricks in that the victim finds out, or is let in on the joke, rather than being fooled into handing over money or...

s and pranks

Student prank

University students have a long association with pranks and japes. These can often involve petty crime, such as the theft of traffic cones and other public property, or hoaxes...

meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness, or to commemorate popular culture and historical topics. The pranks are anonymously installed at night by hackers, usually, but not exclusively undergraduate students. The actions of hackers are governed by an extensive and informal body of precedent, tradition, and ethics. Hacks can occur anywhere across campus, or occasionally off campus; many make use of the iconic Great Dome, Little Dome, Green Building

Green Building (MIT)

The Cecil and Ida Green Building, also called the Green Building or Building 54, is an academic and research building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It was designed by noted architect I. M. Pei, who received his bachelor's degree from MIT in...

tower, or other prominent architectural features of the MIT campus

Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is located on a tract in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The campus spans approximately one mile of the north side of the Charles River basin directly opposite the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.The campus...

. Well-known hacker alumni include Nobel Laureates Richard P. Feynman

Richard Feynman

Richard Phillips Feynman was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics...

and George F. Smoot

George Smoot

George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and $1 million TV quiz show prize winner . He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on COBE with John C...

. In October 2009, US President Barack Obama

Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...

made a humorous reference to the MIT hacking tradition during an on-campus speech about clean energy.

Although the practice is unsanctioned by the university, and students have sometimes been arraigned on trespassing charges for hacking, hacks have substantial significance to MIT's history and student culture. Student bloggers working for the MIT Admissions Office have often written about MIT hacks, including those occurring during Campus Preview Weekend (CPW), an event welcoming admitted prospective freshman students. Alumni bloggers on the MIT Alumni Association website also report and document some of the more memorable hacks. Since the mid-1970s, the student-written guide How To Get Around MIT (HowToGAMIT) has included a chapter on hacking, and discusses history, hacker groups, ethics, safety tips, and risks of the activity.

For a decade, the MIT Museum

MIT Museum

MIT Museum, founded in 1971, is the museum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It hosts collections of holography, artificial intelligence, robotics, maritime history, and the history of MIT. Its holography collection of 1800 pieces is the largest in...

included a "Hall of Hacks" featuring famous MIT hacks, but the section was closed in 2001, temporarily returning for a 2003 exhibition. In 2011, the display space was reallocated to the MIT 150 Exhibition, a special show commemorating MIT's 150th anniversary, although hacks are not featured in the exhibit, certain student activities, such as the Annual Baker House Piano Drop are featured in the exhibition. The Museum's extensive collection of hacker artifacts and documentation continues to be preserved and expanded, with a selection of larger relics from past hacks plus explanatory panels and plaques semi-permanently displayed inside the Stata Center

Stata Center

The Ray and Maria Stata Center or Building 32 is a academic complex designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Frank Gehry for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . The building opened for initial occupancy on March 16, 2004...

. This mini-exhibit on hacks is located on the ground floor of the Stata Center, near the cafeteria at the southeastern end of the complex, and may be viewed by visitors during normal office hours.

Famous hacks include a weather balloon labeled "MIT" appearing at the 50-yard line at the Harvard/Yale football game in 1982, the placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome, converting the Great Dome into R2-D2

R2-D2

R2-D2 , is a character in the Star Wars universe. An astromech droid, R2-D2 is a major character throughout all six Star Wars films. Along with his droid companion C-3PO, he joins or supports Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Obi-Wan Kenobi in various points in the saga...

or a large yellow ring to acknowledge the release of Star Wars Episode I
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is a 1999 American epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas. It is the fourth film to be released in the Star Wars saga, as the first of a three-part prequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, as well as the first film in the saga in terms...

and Lord of the Rings respectively, or placing full-sized replicas of the Wright Flyer

Wright Flyer

The Wright Flyer was the first powered aircraft, designed and built by the Wright brothers. They flew it four times on December 17, 1903 near the Kill Devil Hills, about four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, U.S.The U.S...

and a firetruck to acknowledge the anniversaries of first powered controlled flight and the September 11th attacks respectively.

Cultural aspects

At MIT, the terms hack and hacker have many shades of meaning, though they are closely linked historically and culturally with computer hacking (in its original non-computer-cracker

Hacker (computer security)

In computer security and everyday language, a hacker is someone who breaks into computers and computer networks. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, including profit, protest, or because of the challenge...

sense), collegiate practical joke

Practical joke

s, and even culture jamming

Culture jamming

Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...

. The origin of this usage is unknown, but it seems to have been widespread at MIT by the 1960s, and the hacker ethic

Hacker ethic

Hacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the moral values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. The early hacker culture and resulting philosophy originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s and 1960s...

has since spread into cyberculture

Cyberculture

Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for communication, entertainment and business. It is also the study of various social phenomena associated with the Internet and other new forms of network communication, such as online communities,...

and beyond. Over time, the term has been generalized to describe anybody who possesses great technical proficiency in any particular skill, usually combined with an offbeat sense of humor. The manifestation of hacker culture in the form of spectacular pranks is the most visible aspect of this culture to the world at large, but many hacker subcultures exist at MIT, and elsewhere. This article focuses mostly on prankish aspects; for a fuller description of hacker culture, see "Hacker (term)".

Roof and tunnel hacking

Roof and tunnel hacking

Roof and tunnel hacking is the unauthorized exploration of roof and utility tunnel spaces. The term carries a strong collegiate connotation, stemming from its use at MIT, where the practice has a long history. It is a form of urban exploration...

, a form of urban exploration

Urban exploration

Urban exploration is the examination of the normally unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas or industrial facilities. Urban exploration is also commonly referred to as infiltration, although some people consider infiltration to be more closely associated with the exploration of active or...

, is also related to but not identical to "hacking" as described in this article. Some hacks do involve overcoming barriers to physical access (e.g. placing a half-scale Apollo Lunar Module

Apollo Lunar Module

The Apollo Lunar Module was the lander portion of the Apollo spacecraft built for the US Apollo program by Grumman to carry a crew of two from lunar orbit to the surface and back...

atop the Great Dome), but many other stunts do not require such specialized skills.

Viewed from an anthropological

Anthropology

Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...

perspective, hacking is a cultural tradition affirming group solidarity

Social cohesion

Social cohesion is a term used in social policy, sociology and political science to describe the bonds or "glue" that bring people together in society, particularly in the context of cultural diversity. Social cohesion is a multi-faceted notion covering many different kinds of social phenomena...

, but some hacks can also be viewed as individualistic creative or artistic expression. For example the "Massachusetts Toolpike" hack was a clear instance of installation art

Installation art

Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...

or environmental art

Environmental art

The term environmental art is used in two different contexts: it can be used generally to refer to art dealing with ecological issues and/or the natural, such as the formal, the political, the historical, or the social context....

. Hacks which involve staged public actions (e.g. a Zombie march

Zombie Walk

A zombie walk is an organized public gathering of people who dress up in zombie costumes...

or the Time Traveler Convention of 2005) are clearly a form of performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

, often combined with body art

Body art

Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping , full body tattoo and body painting.More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation...

and cosplay

Cosplay

, short for "costume play", is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea. Characters are often drawn from popular fiction in Japan, but recent trends have included American cartoons and science fiction...

. Still other hacks have a strong conceptual art

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

flavor, often satirizing other purported works of conceptual art. Sometimes the boundaries have been deliberately blurred, for example when a satirical work of "conceptual art" (No Knife: a study in mixed media earth tones, number three) was surreptitiously added to a "serious" art gallery show at the List Visual Arts Center.

"Tribute", "memorial", or "commemorative" hacks note the arrival, passing, or anniversary of some noteworthy person, tradition, institution, or idea (e.g. the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

). Another broad category of hacks contains strong elements of social commentary

Social commentary

Social commentary is the act of rebelling against an individual, or a group of people by rhetorical means, or commentary on social issues or society...

or street protest

Demonstration (people)

A demonstration or street protest is action by a mass group or collection of groups of people in favor of a political or other cause; it normally consists of walking in a mass march formation and either beginning with or meeting at a designated endpoint, or rally, to hear speakers.Actions such as...

(e.g. "Nth Annual SpontaneousTuition Riot") about events on campus or in the world at large. But the strongest element of many hacks is the sheer joy of conceptualizing something new, and then reifying it with effective engineering, both technical and social (e.g. installing a full-sized mockup solar-powered subway car on the parapet wall around the base of the Great Dome, and then driving it back and forth under remote wireless control from Killian Court, some five stories below, after sundown).

Like most art exhibitions, the great majority of hacks are temporary installations; most are removed within a day or so by MIT Physical Plant, the MIT Confined Space Rescue Team (CSRT), or occasionally by the hackers themselves. It is a traditional courtesy to leave a note or even engineering drawings behind, as an aid to safe de-installation of a hack. Sometimes, the hacks have been de-installed so quickly that members of the MIT community and the general public have had little opportunity to view them. On very rare occasions, community protests have caused the MIT administration to quietly allow a hack to be re-installed and left for a proper viewing interval. The results of certain hacks (often wall murals) have been considered "permanent improvements" to the campus environment, and have been left in place indefinitely, most notably the "Smoot

Smoot

The smoot is a nonstandard unit of length created as part of an MIT fraternity prank. It is named after Oliver R. Smoot, a fraternity pledge to Lambda Chi Alpha, who in October 1958 lay on the Harvard Bridge , and was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the bridge.-Unit...

marks" on the Harvard Bridge

Harvard Bridge

The Harvard Bridge carries Massachusetts Avenue from Back Bay, Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is the longest bridge over the Charles River....

. The MIT Museum

MIT Museum

maintains an extensive collection of original hacker artifacts and documentation, and displays some larger items semi-permanently in the Stata Center

Stata Center

.

Although many traditional college pranks have involved maximizing embarrassment or inconvenience for a victim or target, such antics are usually disparaged by MIT hackers as "unimaginative" or "boring". Often the target of a hack is an abstract concept (e.g. bureaucracy

Bureaucracy

A bureaucracy is an organization of non-elected officials of a governmental or organization who implement the rules, laws, and functions of their institution, and are occasionally characterized by officialism and red tape.-Weberian bureaucracy:...

or "political correctness

Political correctness

Political correctness is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts,...

", or entropy

Entropy

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...

), and the prank may or may not be aimed at any specific individual. Even when an individual is targeted (e.g. the "disappearing office" of newly arrived MIT President Charles Vest

Charles Marstiller Vest

Charles "Chuck" Marstiller Vest is a U.S. educator and engineer. He served as President of MIT from 1990 until December, 2004. He was succeeded as President by Susan Hockfield. On February 6, 2004, he was appointed to the Iraq Intelligence Commission by President George W. Bush...

), the jest is good-natured, often eliciting admiration rather than anger from the "victim".

Writers for the third-party, independent Internet prankster site Zug once compared humorous responses at MIT and Harvard, by posting similar banners over main entrances to their respective campuses which proclaimed "Institute of Nowlege". Regarding Harvard, they concluded, "The question: is the sense of humor still alive in modern-day Harvard students? The answer, it turns out, is no." Regarding MIT, they said, "So it's official: MIT students have a better sense of humor, hands down, than Harvard students. MIT students are more imaginative, more fun-loving, and probably smarter as well. Truly, MIT is the Institute of NOWLEGE." The Zug pranksters also noted and documented great differences in the reactions of campus police

Campus police

Campus Police or University police in the United States and Canada are often sworn police officers employed by a public school district, college or university to protect the campus and surrounding areas and the people who live on, work on and visit it....

, maintenance workers, and passersby, upon seeing the ironically punned

Pun

The pun, also called paronomasia, is a form of word play which suggests two or more meanings, by exploiting multiple meanings of words, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use and abuse of homophonic,...

banners.

MIT hacks can push the limits of technical skill, and sometimes fail in spite of meticulous planning. Even these engineering failures have been acknowledged to have educational value, and sometimes a follow-up attempt succeeds. One hack on the Great Dome is documented as having finally succeeded on the fourth try, after a complete re-engineering of both the installed artifact and the installation method.

Smaller projects that can be completed by an individual student are sometimes accorded the honorific "a great hack" by other students, if they combine technical elegance with a hackish sense of humor. For example, an MIT undergrad transformed an ordinary grocery shopping cart

Shopping cart

A shopping cart is a cart supplied by a shop, especially supermarkets, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter during shopping...

into a high-performance electric vehicle

Electric vehicle

An electric vehicle , also referred to as an electric drive vehicle, uses one or more electric motors or traction motors for propulsion...

, and has been frequently seen riding around campus in his "LOLrioKart". The shopping cart has a claimed top speed over 45 mph, and also has a complex steering wheel linkage and a low turning radius

Steering

Steering is the term applied to the collection of components, linkages, etc. which will allow a vessel or vehicle to follow the desired course...

for maneuverability in tight spaces. The student is a strong advocate of the Open Source Hardware philosophy, and incorporates detailed documentation of his projects and a tutorial on building custom wheel hub motor

Wheel hub motor

The wheel hub motor is an electric motor that is incorporated into a hub of a wheel and drives it directly.-Uses in current and future vehicles:...

s in his blog. The ersatz vehicle has been prominently displayed at many MIT events, as well as the Cambridge Science Festival. As a crowning mark of recognition by the outside world, the LOLrioKart driver once received a traffic ticket from the Cambridge Police, a copy of which is now proudly displayed online.

Some of the best large-scale hacks (e.g. the Caltech cannon heist) have involved multiple teams of hackers working on coordinated but diverse subtasks such as fund-raising, "social engineering

Social engineering (security)

Social engineering is commonly understood to mean the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information...

", rigging, transportation logistics

Logistics

Logistics is the management of the flow of goods between the point of origin and the point of destination in order to meet the requirements of customers or corporations. Logistics involves the integration of information, transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handling, and packaging, and...

, gold electroplating

Electroplating

Electroplating is a plating process in which metal ions in a solution are moved by an electric field to coat an electrode. The process uses electrical current to reduce cations of a desired material from a solution and coat a conductive object with a thin layer of the material, such as a metal...

, and precision numerical controlled machining

Numerical control

Numerical control refers to the automation of machine tools that are operated by abstractly programmed commands encoded on a storage medium, as opposed to controlled manually via handwheels or levers, or mechanically automated via cams alone...

, calling on a wide range of technical and management skills. Not surprisingly, some hacker teams have gone on to found start-up business ventures, though they may be reluctant to reveal their earlier exploits until many years have passed.

Famous hacks

Though hacks are fairly common throughout the year, a few have become classics whose inside stories are oral tradition

Oral tradition

Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...

, retold to generation after generation of freshmen and pre-frosh.

One classic hack involved a police car with its flashing warning lights operating. The unusual aspect of this hack was its position — on top of MIT's Great Dome. The car was found to be a gutted, junked, heavy Chevrolet, painted meticulously to match the MIT Campus Police patrol cars. The car's number was pi

' is a mathematical constant that is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. is approximately equal to 3.14. Many formulae in mathematics, science, and engineering involve , which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants...

. Its license plate read "IHTFP", the abbreviation for MIT's unofficial slogan. A dummy dressed as a campus patrolman was seated inside with mug of coffee and a box of donuts. Some years later, the police car has now been semi-permanently re-installed in the Stata Center

Stata Center

as an all-time classic.

Due to MIT's proximity to Harvard, many hacks involve the annual Harvard-Yale football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

game. Because of the Cambridge rivalry between MIT and Harvard, hackers often are found at the games, and they have come up with some of the most famous hacks in the Institute's history.

One such notable hack attempt targeting the 1948 Harvard-Yale football game involved the use of primer cord

Detonating cord

Detonating cord is a thin, flexible plastic tube filled with PETN . With the PETN exploding at a rate of approximately 4 miles per second, any common length of det cord appears to explode instantaneously...

. One night shortly before the game MIT students snuck into the Harvard stadium and buried primer cord just under the field. The plan was to burn the letters MIT into the middle of the field during the game. However, their work was uncovered by groundskeepers and disabled. During the game the hackers were apprehended while wearing heavy coats on a fair-weather day. The coats were lined with batteries, obviously intended to be used to detonate the primer cord. An apocryphal story is that an MIT dean came to their defense, opening his own battery-lined coat and claiming that "all Tech men carry batteries"; an MIT dean did show up, but he was not wearing batteries. This phrase has since become common among MIT students.

The Harvard-Yale football game was again the target of MIT hacks in 1982 when a weather balloon painted with "MIT" all around was inflated, seemingly from nowhere, in the middle of the field. The next day the Boston Herald
Boston Herald
The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...

ran the headline "MIT 1—Harvard-Yale 0: Tech Pranksters Steal the Show." In 1990 an MIT banner was successfully launched from an end zone using a model rocket engine shortly before Yale attempted a field goal kick. In 1996, the Harvard logos on the scoreboard were hacked from VE-RI-TAS to read HU-GE-EGO instead.

Another traditional hacking target has been the bronze statue of John Harvard

John Harvard (clergyman)

John Harvard was an English minister in America whose deathbed bequest to the Massachusetts Bay Colony's fledgling New College was so gratefully received that the school was renamed Harvard College in his honor.-Biography:Harvard was born and raised in Southwark, England, the fourth of nine...

, the namesake of Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. The statue itself was sculpted by Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French

Daniel Chester French was an American sculptor. His best-known work is the sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.-Life and career:...

, a famous artist who studied at MIT, who is best known for his statue of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln (1920 statue)
Abraham Lincoln is a colossal seated figure of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln sculpted by Daniel Chester French and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. It is situated in the Lincoln Memorial , on the National Mall, Washington, D.C., USA, and was unveiled in 1922...

at the Lincoln Memorial

Lincoln Memorial

The Lincoln Memorial is an American memorial built to honor the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The architect was Henry Bacon, the sculptor of the main statue was Daniel Chester French, and the painter of the interior...

in Washington DC. Because of its visible location in Harvard Yard

Harvard Yard

Harvard Yard is a grassy area of about , adjacent to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that constitutes the oldest part and the center of the campus of Harvard University...

and its symbolic significance, the John Harvard statue has been fitted with an unending sequence of "accessories". MIT hackers are hardly alone; Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

pranksters like to paint the statue green, Yale

YALE

RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...

pranksters prefer blue, and others have dressed the statue in women's underwear. MIT hackers like to go a few steps further, fitting the statue with a plaster leg cast after a crushing football defeat, and disguising the statue as the Unabomber after that infamous Harvard alumnus was arrested. John Harvard has worn a Brass Rat from time to time, and has sported a Halo combat helmet and has donned a Halo assault rifle to mark the release of the Halo 3 first-person shooter

First-person shooter

First-person shooter is a video game genre that centers the gameplay on gun and projectile weapon-based combat through first-person perspective; i.e., the player experiences the action through the eyes of a protagonist. Generally speaking, the first-person shooter shares common traits with other...

computer game. In accordance with hacker ethics, great care is taken to insure that the hacks can be removed without causing permanent damage to Harvard's treasured symbol.

The cleverness of many MIT hacks has even resulted in urban legend

Urban legend

An urban legend, urban myth, urban tale, or contemporary legend, is a form of modern folklore consisting of stories that may or may not have been believed by their tellers to be true...

s about supposed hacks that may not have occurred. One rumored hack involved a certain student's adherence to classical conditioning

Classical conditioning

Classical conditioning is a form of conditioning that was first demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov...

behavior response, as studied by Harvard Professor B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet...

. Throughout the off-season, this supposed student visited the Harvard football stadium during his lunch break. He dressed in a black and white striped shirt and trousers, filled his pockets with bird-seed, then went on the field, blew a whistle, and spread his birdseed on the field. The result of all of this effort, the story goes, is that on opening day as the Harvard football team took the field to face their opponent, the referee blew his whistle to signal the start of the game, and the field was suddenly inundated by a flock of birds looking for their lunch. Despite sounding like a classic MIT hack, this particular prank has never been verified. The author of a 1990 book about pranks pulled by MIT students stated that he had not come across clear documentation of this tale during his years of research.

On the other hand, at least one hack involved a staged event that never occurred, when hackers convinced major news media that they had created an indoor snowstorm in Baker House dormitory.

When MIT replaced older mercury-vapor lamp

Mercury-vapor lamp

A mercury-vapor lamp is a gas discharge lamp that uses an electric arc through vaporized mercury to produce light. The arc discharge is generally confined to a small fused quartz arc tube mounted within a larger borosilicate glass bulb...

s with high-efficiency LED lamp

LED lamp

An LED lamp is a solid-state lamp that uses light-emitting diodes as the source of light. The LEDs involved may be conventional semiconductor light-emitting diodes, organic LEDs , or polymer light-emitting diodes devices, although PLED technologies are not currently commercially available.Since...

s to illuminate the Great Dome, hackers started changing the color of the lights to reflect various occasions — Earth Day

Earth Day

Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. The name and concept of Earth Day was allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. The first Proclamation of Earth Day was by San Francisco, the...

, the Fourth of July

Independence Day (United States)

Independence Day, commonly known as the Fourth of July, is a federal holiday in the United States commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, declaring independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain...

, etc. Although reprogramming the lights is technically straightforward, these Great Dome lighting hacks are very visible from Boston's Back Bay across the Charles River

Charles River

The Charles River is an long river that flows in an overall northeasterly direction in eastern Massachusetts, USA. From its source in Hopkinton, the river travels through 22 cities and towns until reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Boston...

IHTFP

IHTFP is an abbreviation which makes up part of the folklore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

. It originally stood for "I Hate This Fucking Place" but, due to use of profanity, is often euphemized

Euphemism

A euphemism is the substitution of a mild, inoffensive, relatively uncontroversial phrase for another more frank expression that might offend or otherwise suggest something unpleasant to the audience...

with other backronym

Backronym

A backronym or bacronym is a phrase constructed purposely, such that an acronym can be formed to a specific desired word. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology....

s. Some of the more popular meanings include "I Have The Fucking Power" (Hacking), "I Help Tutor Freshman Physics", "It's Hard To Fondle Penguins", "I'm Hankering To Find Paradise", and "Interesting Hacks To Fascinate People", as well as "I Have Truly Found Paradise", "Institute for Hacks TomFoolery and Pranks" and "Institute Has The Finest Professors." MIT leadership has even adapted the acronym, using it to encourage vaccination during the 2009–2010 flu season with a banner in the MIT medical building that read "I Hate This Flu Pandemic". The precise time of origin is unknown, though the term IHTFP was already widely used at MIT by 1960.

The letters "IHTFP" have been featured prominently on some hacks, but are more usually subtly embedded within other hacks as an inside joke. A very common motif in the MIT Brass Rat

MIT class ring

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's class ring, often called the Brass Rat, is redesigned each year by a student committee. The class ring has three main sections: the bezel, containing MIT's mascot, the beaver; the MIT seal ; and the class year . The side surfaces show the Boston and...

(class ring) is the inclusion of the letters "IHTFP" hidden somewhere within the frame of the bezel.

Caltech rivalry

MIT and Caltech

California Institute of Technology

The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

have been occasional prank rivals since Spring 2005, when a group of Caltech students traveled to Cambridge to pull a string of pranks during the prospective new students program at MIT, called "Campus Preview Weekend" (CPW). The stunts included covering up the word "Massachusetts" in the "Massachusetts Institute of Technology" engraving on the main building façade with a banner, so that it read "That Other Institute of Technology". A group of MIT hackers quickly responded by altering the banner so that the inscription read "The Only Institute of Technology".

MIT students retaliated for CPW in April 2006, when students posing as the "Howe & Ser Moving Co." stole the 130 year old, 1.7 ton Fleming House Cannon and moved it to their campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, thus reprising a similar prank performed by Harvey Mudd College

Harvey Mudd College

Harvey Mudd College is a private residential liberal arts college of science, engineering, and mathematics, located in Claremont, California. It is one of the institutions of the contiguous Claremont Colleges, which share adjoining campus grounds....

in 1986. To add a technical flourish, a 24K gold-plated precisely upscaled machined replica of the famed Brass Rat (MIT's graduation ring) was tightly fitted over the barrel of the cannon, which was carefully aimed in the direction of Caltech. Twenty-three members of Caltech Fleming House traveled to MIT to reclaim their cannon on April 10, 2006. They were greeted by a larger group of MIT students, who offered them a BBQ

Barbecue

Barbecue or barbeque , used chiefly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia is a method and apparatus for cooking meat, poultry and occasionally fish with the heat and hot smoke of a fire, smoking wood, or hot coals of...

farewell party. In exchange, the Caltech students offered a small toy cannon, saying that this was "more MIT's size."

During MIT's CPW in 2007, Caltech distributed a complete fake edition of The Tech (MIT's student newspaper) with the headline article reading "MIT Invents the Interweb". Another article announced the discovery, "Infinite Corridor Not Actually Infinite", referring to MIT's iconic main thoroughfare

Infinite Corridor

The Infinite Corridor is the hallway, 251 metres long, that runs through the main buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specifically parts of the buildings numbered 7, 3, 10, 4, and 8...

. The edition included a mock weather forecast, referring often to how sunny Pasadena

Pasadena, California

Pasadena is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although famous for hosting the annual Rose Bowl football game and Tournament of Roses Parade, Pasadena is the home to many scientific and cultural institutions, including the California Institute of Technology , the Jet...

(where Caltech is located) is compared to Boston

Boston

Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, as well as other satirical articles.

In 2008, Caltech students provided a "Puzzle Zero" in the MIT Mystery Hunt

MIT Mystery Hunt

The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzlehunt competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world, it attracts about 1,000 people annually and has inspired similar competitions at Microsoft, Stanford University, Melbourne...

which when solved, told solvers to "CALL 1-626-848-3780 ASAP." When MIT students dialed the number, they heard, "Thank you for calling the Caltech Admissions Office. If you are another MIT student wishing to transfer to Caltech, please download our transfer application form from www.caltech.edu. If you are an MIT student not wishing to transfer to Caltech, we wish you the best of luck, and hope you find happiness someday.... "

Around Thanksgiving weekend in 2009, yet another fake edition of The Tech was released, alleging that MIT had been sold to Caltech and would become "Caltech East: School of Humanities". Students would be required to take a core of literature, history, philosophy, and economics, but science subjects would be eliminated. This prank seemed to be a copy of an earlier 1998 hack done by MIT students, which claimed that MIT had been sold to the Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company is the largest media conglomerate in the world in terms of revenue. Founded on October 16, 1923, by Walt and Roy Disney as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, Walt Disney Productions established itself as a leader in the American animation industry before diversifying into...

.

In the past few years, MIT hackers have tended to ignore Caltech "nuisance" pranks, instead preferring to perform more imaginatively engineered hacks on their own home campus. In particular, the majority of documented hacks occurring during CPW have been perpetrated by MIT students themselves.
MIT hackers have only rarely interfered with Caltech traditions, rituals, or celebrations. But some MIT hackers do occasionally engage in low-level "sniping" back and forth with Caltech pranksters. For example, hackers made a website http://www.mitrejects.com redirect to Caltech's homepage. Caltech then did the same, with http://www.caltechrejects.com redirecting to the MIT homepage.

A possible change in attitude was inaugurated when a TARDIS

TARDIS

The TARDISGenerally, TARDIS is written in all upper case letters—this convention was popularised by the Target novelisations of the 1970s...

, which hackers had placed on the MIT Little Dome (August 25, 2010) and the MIT Great Dome (August 30, 2010), was transported to the roof of Baxter Hall at Caltech (January 4, 2011) by Caltech pranksters, where it remained for several weeks. The traveling time machine subsequently reappeared atop Birge Hall at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

(January 29, 2011), and then rematerialized on the Engineering Building at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

(March 18, 2011). The TARDIS came complete with a helpful note explaining how to disassemble it, and suggesting that it be passed on to other unexplored destinations. It remains to be seen whether this new development in "cooperative hacking inter-campus" continues.

Chronology of selected recent hacks

The MIT IHTFP Hack Gallery website has an extensive but far from complete catalog of past hacks related to MIT, including numerous documentary photos. More-complete coverage, especially of older hacks, is in the books listed under Further Reading, but these printed volumes are published intermittently. The listing here only summarizes a few salient examples from MIT's long tradition of hacking.

2010

April 2010: MIT students suspended an inverted "lounge room" underneath the archway outside the MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

, complete with chairs, illuminated "floor lamp", and a properly set up billiards table, ready for play.

2007

October 2007: MIT students strung a "GO SOX!" banner across the 1,000+ foot (300+ m) span between the MacGregor House Dormitory and Tang Graduate Dormitory towers, to cheer on the Boston Red Sox

Boston Red Sox

The Boston Red Sox are a professional baseball team based in Boston, Massachusetts, and a member of Major League Baseball’s American League Eastern Division. Founded in as one of the American League's eight charter franchises, the Red Sox's home ballpark has been Fenway Park since . The "Red Sox"...

during the 2007 World Series

2007 World Series

-Game 1:Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at Fenway Park in Boston, MassachusettsThe Red Sox cruised to a blowout win in Game 1 behind ALCS MVP Josh Beckett, who struck out nine batters, including the first four he faced, en route to his fourth win of the 2007 postseason...

September 2007: MIT Students adorned the John Harvard

John Harvard (clergyman)

statue in Harvard Yard

Harvard Yard

Harvard Yard is a grassy area of about , adjacent to Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that constitutes the oldest part and the center of the campus of Harvard University...

with a Halo MJOLNIR armor helmet and assault rifle to commemorate the release of Halo 3
Halo 3
Halo 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie for the Xbox 360 console. The third installment in the Halo franchise, the game concludes the story arc begun in Halo: Combat Evolved and continued in Halo 2...

.

July 2007: MIT students put a Dark Mark over MIT's Student Center to celebrate the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

2006

November 2006: MIT Hackers put a huge Triforce on the Great Dome. It was in commemoration of the release of the video game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
is an action-adventure game developed by Nintendo Entertainment Analysis and Development, and published by Nintendo for the GameCube and Wii video game consoles. It is the thirteenth installment in The Legend of Zelda series...

.
September 2006: In Mid-September, part of the side of Simmons Hall was turned into a giant blue LED display

LED display

An LED display is a flat panel display, which uses light-emitting diodes as a video display. An LED panel is a small display, or a component of a larger display. They are typically used outdoors in store signs and billboards, and in recent years have also become commonly used in destination signs...

.
September 11, 2006: An "MIT Fire Department" fire truck was placed on the Great Dome, presumably to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
August 2006: A welcome back poster and a few dozen rubber ducks in the name of Simmons Hall at MIT appeared on the Caltech campus in mid-August. They were accompanied by posters that presented proposed renovations to add Simmons-like architectural elements (particularly the ones often regarded as useless by MIT students) to Caltech dormitories, which were undergoing renovation.
April 6, 2006: A 130 year-old, 1.7 ton cannon was moved from Caltech

California Institute of Technology

to MIT via a fake moving company "Howe & Ser Moving Co." This marked the 20th anniversary of when 11 students from nearby Harvey Mudd College

Harvey Mudd College

removed the cannon from the front of the Fleming House. This time, the cannon was situated in a prominent place on the MIT campus in front of the Green Building

Green Building (MIT)

and was adorned with a unique Brass Rat

MIT class ring

. It was symbolically pointed at its previous owner, Caltech. Twenty to thirty members of Fleming House later traveled to MIT and reclaimed their cannon on April 10, 2006. They left a toy cannon with the note, "Here's something more your size."
February 28, 2006: A giant model Torino 2006 Olympics

2006 Winter Olympics

The 2006 Winter Olympics, officially known as the XX Olympic Winter Games, was a winter multi-sport event which was celebrated in Turin, Italy from February 10, 2006, through February 26, 2006. This marked the second time Italy hosted the Olympic Winter Games, the first being the VII Olympic Winter...

Medal appeared on the Great Dome.

2004

September 15, 2004: A small alcove in the Infinite Corridor

Infinite Corridor

was closed off by a painted wall with a door. Opening the door revealed a "room" inside, full of small shrubs or bushes, plus some painted and framed artwork. An official-looking sign next to the door labeled it the "Vannevar Shrubbery Room", a parody of the nearby larger "Vannevar Bush Room", whose entrance location had recently been moved around the corner due to renovations.

2003

December 17, 2003: A replica of the first Wright brothers

Wright brothers

The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur , were two Americans credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, on December 17, 1903...

airplane was placed on the Great Dome, in honor of the 100th anniversary of their first powered flight.
April 23, 2003: Hundreds of gnome

Gnome

A gnome is a diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature...

s of various shapes and sizes appeared in and around the W20 Student Center Athena

Project Athena

Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991, eight years after it began...

cluster.

Previous hacks

April 1, 1998: As an April Fool's Day

April Fools' Day

April Fools' Day is celebrated in different countries around the world on April 1 every year. Sometimes referred to as All Fools' Day, April 1 is not a national holiday, but is widely recognized and celebrated as a day when many people play all kinds of jokes and foolishness...

prank, the MIT home page was replaced with a page announcing the university had been bought by The Walt Disney Company

The Walt Disney Company

for $

United States dollar

The United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....

6.9 billion. The hacked page showed a picture of Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...

ears atop the Great Dome, and replaced the letter I in MIT with the lower-case "i" from Disney's wordmark

Wordmark

A wordmark, word mark or logotype is a standardized text logo or graphic representation of the name of a company, institution, or product name used for purposes of identification and branding. A wordmark is usually a distinct text-only typographic treatment as can be found in the graphic identities...

. It even contained a fake press release with statements purportedly from Disney and MIT officials, detailing terms of the acquisition.
June 7, 1996: During a speech made by Vice-President Al Gore

Al Gore

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. served as the 45th Vice President of the United States , under President Bill Clinton. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in the 2000 U.S. presidential election....

at the graduation ceremony, the graduates played Buzzword bingo

Buzzword bingo

Buzzword bingo is a bingo-style game where participants prepare bingo cards with buzzwords and tick them off when they are uttered during an event, such as a meeting or speech...

using cards which had been distributed by hackers. The cards featured technical words which students believed were overused by people outside the technical professions, such as "Information Superhighway

Information superhighway

The information superhighway or infobahnwas a popular term used through the 1990s to refer to digital communication systems and the Internet telecommunications network. It is associated with United States Senator and later Vice-President Al Gore....

". Gore, who was informed of the hack, acknowledged it during his speech.
May 9, 1994: A carefully assembled outer frame of a car painted as an MIT Campus Police car appeared on top of the Great Dome. This hack quickly gained recognition on many local news sources and on national television.
December 9, 1991: It has been often said that "Getting an Education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire Hose", inspiring hackers to connect a real fire hose and a concrete-embedded fire hydrant

Fire hydrant

A fire hydrant , is an active fire protection measure, and a source of water provided in most urban, suburban and rural areas with municipal water service to enable firefighters to tap into the municipal water...

to a drinking fountain in Building 16. Years later, the iconic monument has been semi-permanently re-installed in the Stata Center

Stata Center

.
October 1958: Oliver R. Smoot

Oliver R. Smoot

Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. was Chairman of the American National Standards Institute from 2001 to 2002 and President of the International Organization for Standardization from 2003 to 2004...

, a pledge of MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha

Lambda Chi Alpha

Lambda Chi Alpha is one of the largest men's secret general fraternities in North America, having initiated more than 280,000 members and held chapters at more than 300 universities. It is a member of the North-American Interfraternity Conference and was founded by Warren A. Cole, while he was a...

fraternity in 1958, was used to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge

Harvard Bridge

The Harvard Bridge carries Massachusetts Avenue from Back Bay, Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is the longest bridge over the Charles River....

. As he lay on the sidewalk of the bridge that carries Massachusetts Avenue across the Charles River

Charles River

, markings were made at intervals corresponding to his height. The bridge was measured to be 364.4 Smoot

Smoot

s (plus or minus one ear) in length, and the markings remain to this day.

External links

IHTFP Hack Gallery — An extensive but far from complete online documentary archive about MIT hacks. Scanty coverage prior to 1989, indexing is incomplete, updating is sporadic. Features a number of documentary photos.
Howe & Ser Moving Company — Documentation of the Caltech cannon heist
The Great Breast of Knowledge — by Phil Kesten
What is IHTFP? — Short overview
A list of numerous possible meanings for IHTFP
Photographic gallery of recent hacks by an alumnus who is an editorial photographer
A summary of Harvard-Yale Football game hacks
Details of the MIT banner launched at the 1990 Harvard-Yale game
Information on the legend of the Pavlovian "birdseed" hack
MIT Campus Cruiser Hack Summary
Boston Globe picture gallery

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Cultural aspects

Famous hacks

IHTFP

Caltech rivalry

Chronology of selected recent hacks

2010

2007

2006

2004

2003

Previous hacks

See also

Further reading

External links