Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are practical jokes and pranks meant to prominently demonstrate technical aptitude and cleverness, and/or to commemorate popular culture and historical topics.

[23] 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.

[28] 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.

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.

[29] 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,[30] converting the Great Dome into R2-D2 or a large yellow ring to acknowledge the release of Star Wars Episode I and Lord of the Rings respectively,[31] or placing full-sized replicas of the Wright Flyer and a fire truck to acknowledge the anniversaries of first powered controlled flight and the September 11 attacks respectively.

Some hacks do involve overcoming barriers to physical access (e.g. placing a half-scale Apollo Lunar Module atop the Great Dome),[36] but many other stunts do not require such specialized skills.

[50] Another broad category of hacks contains strong elements of social commentary or street protest (e.g. "Nth Annual Spontaneous Tuition Riot"[51]) 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).

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.

[56] The results of certain hacks (often wall murals[54][57]) have been considered "permanent improvements" to the campus environment, and have been left in place indefinitely, most notably the "Smoot marks" on the Harvard Bridge.

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

[29] Although many traditional college pranks have involved maximizing embarrassment or inconvenience for a victim or target, often with a personal or political point to make versus harassment, such antics are usually disparaged by MIT hackers as "unimaginative" or "boring".

Even when an individual is targeted (e.g. the "disappearing office"[58][59] of newly arrived MIT President Charles Vest), 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".

The Zug pranksters also noted and documented great differences in the reactions of campus police, maintenance workers, and passersby, upon seeing the ironically punned banners.

For example, an MIT undergrad transformed an ordinary grocery shopping cart into a high-performance electric vehicle, and was frequently seen riding around campus in his "LOLrioKart".

[62] The shopping cart had a claimed top speed over 45 miles per hour (72 km/h), and also had a complex steering wheel linkage and a low turning radius for maneuverability in tight spaces.

The student was a strong advocate of the Open Source Hardware philosophy, and incorporated detailed documentation of his projects and a tutorial on building custom wheel hub motors in his blog.

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 was proudly displayed online.

[64] 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", rigging, transportation logistics, gold electroplating, and precision numerical controlled machining, calling on a wide range of technical and management skills.

[71] 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.

[77] In accordance with hacker ethics, great care is taken to ensure that the hacks can be removed without causing permanent damage to Harvard's treasured symbol.

[79] 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.

In September 2011, hackers installed 153 (= 9 × 17) custom-made wirelessly-controlled color-changing high-power LED lights into every window above the first floor of the 295-foot-tall (90 m) tall MIT Green Building.

A very common motif in the MIT Brass Rat (class ring) prior to 2013 was the inclusion of the letters "IHTFP" hidden somewhere within the frame of the bezel.

[96][97] 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.

The edition included a mock weather forecast, referring often to how sunny Pasadena (where Caltech is located) is compared to Boston, as well as other satirical articles.

[96] 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 the early morning of April 26, 2017, recent computer science graduate Nicholas William Paggi died while hacking the Great Dome, when he slipped and fell to his death.