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Two things that should be noted in the record before the flames get too high:

1. Despite the conspiracy theories, neither MIT's administration nor its students desired the existence of the article in question. The Glob is.

2. It is unwise for non-MIT-students to attempt to explore MIT's campus. The note about student IDs at the beginning of the article derives from the severe exception the campus police take to any not carrying them.

Many people here probably already have this bookmarked, but I'm astonished this link wasn't in the story:

Mit Hacks Archive [mit.edu]

(Strange... very slow to answer.... Has it been pre-slashdotted?)

(Ah, there it is. I was afraid for a minute this was lost in the Land of Broken Links.)

Gosh that article took me back (to constantly coming with a hairs breadth of flunking out because of the nights spent roof and tunnel hacking -- I never said no if anybody wanted to go).

I believe roof hacking (also called acrophilia in other places) predates MIT by centuries. It's just better at MIT than just about any place else could be.

The main part of campus is essentially one humungous interconnected network. "Buildings" are really just part of a room numbering scheme -- numbers increase as you go away from the Charles River and all even numbered buildings are east of the Great Dome, odd to the east. Thus if I mention room 26-100 you'd have a pretty good idea of where the room is, even if you didn't know it was a major lecture hall. This system makes tremendously more sense than naming everything after some rich old fart. In the old core of the campus, as you pass from "building" to "building", mainly what changes is the room number prefixes.

What is the upshot of this? Well if you are roof hacking, you get really good "air time", because everything in the central part of the campus is just one humungous, complex building of roughly uniform height, with enough barriers and height changes between to make it interesting. The western part of the campus is across Mass Ave are off network, as it were; the middling-old buildings at the east and north of the main campus area break the height uniformity. They're still worth investigating because the roofs frequently have interesting instruments or equipment on them.

Many of the buildings that can't be travelled to along a roof are still interconnected by basement corridoors which are full of interesting detritus like mineral samples and curious old machines waiting to be carted off, or stuff that just wouldn't fit into somebody's lab. It used to be you could always find a thermos full of liquid nitrogen if you looked hard enough, although maybe the safety office is doing a better job these days.

Furthermore, it is pretty clear that even the new outlying buildings on campus must be linked by a network of utility tunnels for things like telephone networks, power and steam ducts. Like the mythical primeval North American squirrel, who could travel from Atlantic to Pacific without touching the ground once, you <i>could</i> in principle get from any point on campus to any other point without traveling through a single space you are <i>supposed</i> to be in. Furthermore, it is all laid out to the logic of convenience -- which is to say in apparently incomprehensible fashion. The tomb of the unknown hacker(at least what <i>we</i> used to call the tomb of the unknown hacker) was an apparently arbitrary set of walls (perhaps some are load bearing?) that form a useless little space about the size of a small dorm room under one of the buildings.

This underground network is complex and utterly user non-friendly and in places dangerous. It is not <i>meant</i> to be to be navigated, which is why it absolutely <i>must</i> be navigated. The more so because the newer buildings clearly break with the old architectural vision for the campus, that it would be a single, integrated organic whole and not a motley collection of independent fiefdoms. To the tunnel hacker, the break is only skin deep -- down underneath, the original vision still holds true.

(Score:0)

Hey, am I the only one who recognizes this scenario from The Lurking Horror? The eerie underground tunnels, the Tomb of the Unknown Tool, all that stuff. (Not to mention the computer lab hacker who had keys on his belt to every door in the building.)

Of course, in the Lurking Horror the building hacking was necessary to:

1. Save the world from Eldritch Horrors.

2. And retrieve a misplaced paper.

Anyone, I think anyone who is into hacker culture at MIT would get a charge out of playing this old Infocom game.
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=3.

Hmm, seems some moderator I offended a while back had it in for me on this post. So, I'll re-post it with my plus two bonus. (You know, I'm trying hard to get my karma score down to a negative number. ^_^) Yes, I still like Ranma 1/2 [tripod.com]

One of the traditions used to be unbolting the static display aircraft from their mountings in the cadet area, and rolling the planes to a new, more creative location. There were 2 incidents that sort of put a halt to that particular trick though. First, an F-4 Phantom "got away" from the cadets as they rolled it down the big ramp, and it almost made it all the way across a parking lot to a 60 ft drop onto the parade ground. They finally got it back under control, but it was a close thing.

The event that finally caused the leadership to forbid messing with the planes was a classic though. The dorms at the Academy are organized in a series of open center "quads", with the rooms arranged around an open square. The quads are 6 stories high, some quads have grass inside, some have volley ball courts, etc. The cadets managed to squeeze an F-16 past the dorm support columns into the center of the quad.

The next day however, nobody could figure out how to get the plane back out. The engineering department went out and measured everything, and the dimensions were simply impossible. To this day, according to cadet lore nobody really knows how they managed to get the plane inside the quad. The result was that a very large construction crane was brought in and the F-16 was lifted straight up out of the quad back onto the terrazo where the static displays are.

Although the planes are still occasionally used as a backdrop or location for current pranks, actually moving them is now verboten. The consequences (potentially getting disenrolled thereby aborting any potential military career before it even starts) aren't worth any possible benefits from moving the planes anymore. Your kinder, gentler military at work.

The article (when I read it in the globe) was full of misinformation and inaccuracies. The Globe has been very anti-MIT for the past few years. This has largely focused on the fraternities (as a fraternity brother, I'm biased) but they have been extremely critical of the administration and the student body.

Under sever harassment from the administration, they promised to present a more balanced image, and this is what they came up with.

Hacking at MIT is part real, part imaginary. Hackers wandering through building late at night are real, although I haven't joined them since the Orange Tours (where they take freshmen around, including on top of the dome), they are a known portion of our campus. However, the impressive feats being common is quite exaggerated, although they may be slowly making a come back (R2D2 last year, for example).

However, the Boston Globe article was the latest in a concerted effort by the Globe's editorial staff to paint MIT students as a group running amok. They are also trying to paint MIT as ineffectual in dealing with the students. They have been one of the forces behind demanding local governments take over the governing of undergraduates. (When a smoke bomb misfired in a classroom to advertise a fundraising Halloween Party at one of the fraternities, they were part of the media that misrepresented the story and called for Cambridge to press charges.)

The situation with hacking, the campus police, and administration is an awkward one. MIT cannot acknowledge that they know what is going on, and this recent Globe article is putting MIT in a very bad light. Also, the comment about "I'm on my way to Baker House" is NOT part of hacking. During the Orange Tours, when, as freshman, you're relatively new, they want to make it seem more risky. As a result, they tell you that if CPs show up, they'll disappear, and you're supposed to act like a confused freshman and say "I'm on my way to Baker House."

However, the Globe tried to present this as MIT students mocking the administration that is powerless to prevent it.

I'm sorry to interupt this discussion of the MIT legend with a rant on the Globe, but I just want to put things in perspective.

Alex Hochberger
MIT CS '01

Moscow Inst. of Physics and Technology (MIPT) is pretty much the Russian analogue of MIT and have done pretty cool April 1 pranks in the past. I don't remember too many, but the few I do remember are pretty cool:

- The amount of coordination required was amazing, but they did it! On the night of March 31 they added a new station "PhysTech" to the Moscow subway map. It was done extremely well, with exactly the same fonts, colors, and style. The task was enormous - each subway train has 8 or more cars with 3 or more maps per car ( and there are a LOT of trains), plus maps on train stations, etc., but this was done so well that the next day tons of Muscovites started calling the newspapers and radio stations and asking about this new stop. Moreover, at some later point a pocket-size map was produced by some publisher and it had this station...

- Also on the night of March 31 (though very long ago) they went to a nearby railroad and covered one (!) of the rails with coal. Now imagine a train operator in his train seeing only one rail in front of him.... Obviously, he panics, tries to stop the train, etc.

Pretty extreme - MIT doesn't even come close :)

I'll add more if I remember more....

Too bad the article didn't include any links to the Hacks page [mit.edu] or any pictures [mit.edu].

MIT students are notorious for this kind of thing. They're very good at April Fool's jokes especially. I can't wait to see what they do this year. A few years ago, they turned the clocktower into a giant beenie cap, complete with rotating propeller, overnight! That was probably the best one.

At another school (Please tell me if you know which one...), the students rigged the electrical lines on one dorm so they could play Tetris: using the room lights as blocks.

People interested in this, may also be amused by some of the stuff at Infiltration.org [infiltration.org].

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