Hacks at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Famous Hacks

Famous Hacks

Though hacks are fairly common throughout the year, a few have become classics whose inside stories are oral tradition, 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. 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 as an all-time classic.

Due to MIT's proximity to Harvard, many hacks involve the annual Harvard-Yale football 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. 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 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, the namesake of Harvard University. The statue itself was sculpted by Daniel Chester French, a famous artist who studied at MIT, who is best known for his statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Because of its visible location in Harvard Yard and its symbolic significance, the John Harvard statue has been fitted with an unending sequence of "accessories". MIT hackers are hardly alone; Dartmouth College pranksters like to paint the statue green, Yale 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 donned a Halo combat helmet and brandished a Halo assault rifle to mark the release of the Halo 3 first-person shooter video 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 legends about supposed hacks that may not have occurred. One rumored hack involved a certain student's adherence to classical conditioning behavior response, as studied by Harvard Professor B. F. Skinner. 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 lamps with high-efficiency LED lamps to illuminate the Great Dome, hackers started changing the color of the lights to reflect various occasions — Earth Day, the Fourth of July, etc. Although reprogramming the lights is technically straightforward, these Great Dome lighting hacks are very visible from Boston's Back Bay district, across the Charles River.

In September 2011, hackers installed 153 (= 9 x 17) custom-made wirelessly-controlled color-changing high-power LED lights into every window above the first floor of the 295-foot (90 m) tall MIT Green Building. They displayed a waving American flag throughout the evening of September 11, 2011 in remembrance of the September 11 attacks of 2001. For a short time in the early morning of September 12, the lights displayed a Tetris game, thus realizing a long-standing hack proposal, the "Holy Grail" of hacks. The display hardware had occasional glitches, and was removed as of September 13. The hardware and software designs were further developed and refined for better reliability. On April 20, 2012, MIT hackers successfully turned the Green Building into a huge playable Tetris game, operated from a wireless control podium at a comfortable viewing distance in front of the building. Visitors to Campus Preview Weekend (a gathering for admitted prospective freshman students) were invited to play the game on the colossal display grid (80 ft. wide x 250 ft. high), which was claimed to be the second-largest full-color video display in the US.

Instead of a one-shot temporary installation, the hackers have designed and built a permanent facility that can be re-used repeatedly by the MIT community. An understanding has been reached with the EAPS Department, which is headquartered in the Green Building, to allow the light display hardware to remain installed in each window. To avoid annoying the occupants and to allow late-working staff to "opt out", each light display is equipped with a manual override button, which will disable the pixel lighting for that window for several hours after it is pressed. In addition, the hackers have released Open Source software tools used to develop new display patterns, so that others can design and deploy new stationary or animated images, in cooperation with the hacker engineers.