Talk:MIT hack

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Contents 1 Deletion 2 Referee Hack 3 Items dropped from Hack (technology) that could belong in the scope of this article 4 Tetris? 5 Welding the Trolley Car to the tracks at 77 Mass. Avenue

[edit] Deletion

I almost feel like this page shouldn't exist because http://hacks.mit.edu/ does such a good job. There's no point in slowly replicating what an external source can and has done comprehensively. On the other hand, encyclopedias that are relatively free-standing are nice. Thoughts? Janet13 04:03, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Nah - technically everything on wikipedia has been done before... and MIT hacks are very well known, and a pretty notable facet of MIT culture, so I vote it is deserving of existence. Although if someone wanted to merge it into the MIT article, that would be ok with me. --Bmk 03:23, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

I've always wanted to make a MIT hack site that's entirely a wiki so that it stays updated quickly. http://hacks.mit.edu/ is notoriously bad around MIT for not staying updated, they lack pictures and info about many hacks which people have repeatedly submitted to them, and you'll notice that their indexes are incomplete (Hacks by Location doesn't list, by location, every hack that's in the Hacks by Year section, etc.). I wonder if Wikipedia should be the place to establish a full-blown MIT hacks site, but I feel like not. --dheera

Well, considering the hacks.mit.edu page doesn't seem to be updating frequently, responding to people, or adding a wealth of hacks that don't even appear on their page, any objections if I merge the most major/best-appreciated ones from various years onto this page? If not I'll proceed. --dheera

Suggestions:

• you might get someone at MIT to establish a local MediaWiki for hacks via the scripts.mit.edu web sight/portal
• perhaps list the hacks on a separate "List of MIT Hacks" WP article. This is what is usually done for long lists. And just have a "Best of" short list in this article. If you do this, develope the entire article in your sandbox, then create it - short stub articles of this type, can get a lot of flak and are often AfD'ed and Speedy Deleted
• either way, list the hacks in reverse chronological (time) order
• either way, have a sub-section for each year in reverse chronological (time) order - Lentower 15:06, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
• use and cite more sources then both hacks.mit.edu and MIT hack#Further reading - Lentower 15:41, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestions. I am from MIT and willing to set up a local MediaWiki when I get time. I don't want to, however, "invade" hacks.mit.edu's purpose (I have already tried asking them about this specific suggestion with willingness to initiate it though; because if I started a local wiki, my first step I'd want to do is migrate the majority of hacks.mit.edu content as-is and build from there, if I can get permission to do so). I'd really like to see a wikified hack site though, because the quality of hacks.mit.edu is just terrible at the moment with detailed information about recent hacks. I worry though about people actually willing to update it though, as of course hackers themselves don't generally want to claim involvement in anything. But it's worth a try. I also have to think of a good namespace, because hacks.mit.edu is really a nice name. For wikipedia, I'm inclined to just do a subjective "best of" (i.e. things that the world would find cool, funny, or anything that is just plain large-scale) because a lot of inside-joke and small-scale hacks happen all the time at MIT, many of which are not meaningful for an audience like Wikipedia's, but can go on a separate wiki site. I wouldn't people to keep posting their small hacks to keep infiltrating a wikipedia listing, for example. Though I guess, there is always a discussion page, so well, it's worth a try. --dheera

dheera: email me from my user page User:Lentower. Include your MIT email address. Use the link "E-mail this user" in the left hand column. This seems to be no longer a WP issue. - Lentower 23:47, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Referee Hack

While I can't confirm the Referee Hack rumor discussed in the article, I can add that I can confirm a similar prank performed in the US Marines. A company dog was trained in similar fashion to howl whenever a Colonel or higher ranking officer in dress-uniform spoke. The prank was pulled at the commissioning of a new class of graduates from a Marine academy. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.89.50.82 (talk) 06:19, 23 February 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Items dropped from Hack (technology) that could belong in the scope of this article

The following were items on the Hack (technology) as part of history of the term but are being removed to clean up the history. items already on MIT hack were omitted

• Covering the university's signature "Great Dome" (which seems to be something of a magnet for hacks) with tin foil
• Hiding the university president's office by covering its entrance with a fake bulletin board
• Inflating a huge balloon on the playing field during a Harvard-Yale football game
• Turning the MIT Dome into a giant baseball with a Red-Sox logo after the Red-Sox won the World Series
• Making an image of Trogdor[1] out of post-it notes
• Turning the Great Dome (again) into a beanie, complete with forty-foot spinning propeller on top and a detailed removal manual left at the base of the propeller.

[edit] Tetris?

Maybe this is just an urban legend I heard but didn't some MIT students wire the lighting of a building on campus to play a giant game of Tetris from a hill outdoors? Valley2city 22:15, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Welding the Trolley Car to the tracks at 77 Mass. Avenue

Does anyone think that writing up the following hacks would be worthwhile? If so, please contact me at kashi@alaska.net Regards Joe Kashi, BS '72, MS '73, Attorney at Law, Soldotna, AK The following is based solely upon my own personal observation and experience as News Editor of The Tech in the early 1970s.

I was the news editor of The Tech in the early 1970s and Ken Wadleigh, then Dean for Student Affairs, personally confirmed to me the truthfulness of the rumored legendary hack that he had welded a trolley car to the tracks outside of 77 Mass. Avenue with some Thermite bombs in the 1930s. He then told me exactly how he did the hack. Dean Wadleigh first asked me to admit a hack that made the national news and seriously embarrassed the administration, asking me how we pulled it off, and then laughed so hard that he and his wheeled chair fell over. Dean Wadleigh made me promise that I would not tell anyone that he found the incident so funny and then, as a quid pro quo, told me about his own famous undergraduate hack. When Wadleigh was an undergraduate, trolleys ran down the Mass Avenue tracks, stopping at 77 Mass Avenue. In those days, the fare was a nickel. Wadleigh had a confederate get on the trolley and hand the conductor a $10 bill. While the conductor was counting out 199 nickels as change, Wadleigh set off Thermite bombs between several of the wheels and the tracks, which was then a standard procedure for repairing cracked railroad rails. The net result was that the trolley was firmly welded to the tracks, requiring that a large crane be brought in to pick of the trolley car while worked removed and replaced the welded wheel-track assemblages.

FWIW, I had been called on the carpet to account for a (1971?)hack that Pete Peckarsky, later of the Jack Anderson column, and I pulled off that resulted in the Trustees being handed copies of The Tech whose headlines informed the Trustees (CEO of Boeing, Mobil Oil, Dupont, etc.) whom they were ostensibly about to elect as the new President of MIT ( Jerry Wiesner) and the changes in the academic structure (creation of a new post of Provost, appointing Paul Gray).

We thoughtfully informed the Boston TV stations of the news ahead of the scheduled event. In fact, because I was then the stringer for The New York Times, we also got it on the lower left corner of front page of the Times that morning, making sure that the Trustees were doubly informed as to what they were about to do. As their visuals for their store about the MIT election that evening, the local TV stations used the visual of us passing out copies of The Tech to the Trustees as they got out of their limos to enter the supposed deliberations while the President's Assistant and the campus police glared at us from inside the entry to the President's Mansion.

The entire event was "wired" of course. When we saw the MIT PR officer pacing in his office late the evening before, head in hand, we intuitively knew that he was writing the press release and that the next day's event was already wired. Besides, Wiesner was the obvious and appropriate choice anyway, but forms must be preserved, I suppose. (We waited until late at night and hijacked all of the uncollected trash bags in front of the PR office and the President's Office, going through them until we found a carbon paper sheet that someone failed to rip up - held to the light, it was sufficiently readable that we could get all of the main facts and fill in the details about likely changes in academic direction from The Tech's archives, that had past statements by Wiesner and Gray on various academic policies. Overall, we were pretty accurate and even printed the schedules telling the faculty when they were going to be informed about the results of the supposed election, which really rankled the administration.

In 1993 while visiting MIT, I stopped by the office of Captin Oliveri, by thenthe head of the MIT Police. In 1971, He had been the officer glaring at us, but eleven years late, we had a laugh over the prank and he then showed me his "musueum" of hacks that the police had "confiscated" but in fact had preserved. These included the device that inflated the famous MIT weather balloon. It was a beautiful piece of engineering. It seems that Harvard was infuriated and wanted to destroy it but the MIT police obtained and preserved it, ostensibly as evidence to prosecute the culprits, who were lionized at MIT rather than prosecuted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.230.113.14 (talk) 18:59, 3 September 2007 (UTC)