Caltech Hacked Again

April 6, 2006 11:41 AM

Howe & Ser Moving Companyhas completed its latest job: moving a Spanish-American War cannon from the pits of Pasadena, CA to sunny Cambridge, MA. The cannon arrived with one addition: a giant Brass Rat, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology class ring. In the past, the cannon graced the front yard of Caltech and took a brief vacation to Harvey Mudd College.
Last year, students from Caltech attempted to start a hacking war with MIT, with little response. This small delivery has drastically changed the score. More pictures.
posted by breath (37 comments total)

Is there an account anywhere of the MIT moving process? I love this kind of stuff.
posted by OmieWise at 11:46 AM on April 6, 2006

High points: the excellent pre-installed commemorative plaque, the giant Brass Rat made out of gold-plated aluminum, the timing, and the punny name of the fake moving company.

The timing is doubly auspicious because the cannon arrived at MIT during Campus Preview Weekend, the event during which Caltech carried out their hacks last year. This is one of the best hacks ever, especially due to its perfect execution.

On preview: not yet, OmieWise, and probably not ever. MIT hackers are notoriously secretive.
posted by breath at 11:48 AM on April 6, 2006

On preview: not yet, OmieWise, and probably not ever. MIT hackers are notoriously secretive.
posted by breath at 11:48 AM PST on April 6 [!]

This is our best idea yet to videotape our crimespree!
posted by rough ashlar at 11:59 AM on April 6, 2006

Excellent. I was wondering how long the challenge would go unanswered.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:10 PM on April 6, 2006

Argh! Comon', CalTech, you can do better then that!
posted by loquacious at 12:12 PM on April 6, 2006

CalTech girls are much more cute, anyway, and have tastier brains.
posted by loquacious at 12:18 PM on April 6, 2006

Incidentally, the cannon was on a short list of non-prankable* objects on the Caltech campus. MIT is clearly not abiding by the Honor Code that binds members of the Caltech community.

*The technical term is RF-proof, where RF stands for e.g. "rat fling", a particularly nasty thing to do to a liquid-nitrogen-frozen rat. All the cell walls burst, and the rat decomposes into a foul-smelling goo.
posted by Aknaton at 12:18 PM on April 6, 2006

From a student at CalTech via IM:

[12:15] they put one over on us. we must be awful stupid. har har.
[12:16] the real kicker there is that there were rumours circulating on campus a week before they took it
[12:16] that someone was gonna come and steal our cannon
[12:16] but we still didn't manage to do anything about it
posted by loquacious at 12:21 PM on April 6, 2006

I went to Mudd for a while, and the cannon was the stuff of (overly hyped) legend. C'mon, West Dorm, you can do better than MIT!
posted by RakDaddy at 12:26 PM on April 6, 2006

They brought an unlicensed firearm* into Massachusetts? Are they nuts? That's a mandatory year in prison. I thought MIT kids were smarter than that. What, do they think they're in New Hampshire or something? We have rules against this sort of thing!

*is a cannon a firearm?
posted by bondcliff at 12:27 PM on April 6, 2006

There are rumors that Mudd was planning on nabbing the cannon¹ again, but MIT beat them to it.

Heh. Wonder who spread those rumors....

[1] "nabbing the cannon" is not innuedo, though it should be.
posted by eriko at 12:35 PM on April 6, 2006

Yeah MIT!! This is a proud day for all alums of the 'tute. A couple other alums passed on the pictures and I went through the morning laughing periodically at the grandness of this hack. I'd love to know how the hell it got pulled off.

loquacious:

CalTech girls are much more cute, anyway, and have tastier brains.

Well, sure. MIT can't admit everyone, can they?
posted by waxbanks at 1:13 PM on April 6, 2006

Well, sure. MIT can't admit everyone, can they?

Oh, they were admitted, even romanced and enticed. But they turned MIT down in favor of CalTech. Even though Dabney eats it.
posted by loquacious at 1:19 PM on April 6, 2006

Some high res pictures of said cannon.
posted by PurplePorpoise at 1:25 PM on April 6, 2006

CalTech girls are much more cute, anyway, and have tastier brains.

but would they pose in bikinis with the cannon when it's about 50 degrees out? (more pictures of the crowd and cannon if you go up).
posted by whatzit at 2:00 PM on April 6, 2006

CalTech girls are much more cute, anyway, and have tastier brains.

I am deeply opposed to eating anyone's brains, even if they are cute.

Ha! Me funny!
posted by UrineSoakedRube at 2:21 PM on April 6, 2006

A Techer friend of mine makes this observation:

"An issue here is house politics. The cannon belongs to Fleming. Nobody likes Fleming. So they won't help. Cross campus pranks on Caltech tend to run into political issues."

So it sounds like this target was particularly well-chosen.
posted by gurple at 2:26 PM on April 6, 2006

The giant Brass Rat is particularly impressive up close [although it was perhaps a little too sunny to get a good shot.] It's incredibly well-done. I'm not entirely sure I agree with the CaltechVsMIT score, since dumping helium balloons in a lobby and putting inflatable palm trees on a roof seem rather less... elegant, but I may be biased.
posted by ubersturm at 2:37 PM on April 6, 2006

I concur. With the exception of the t-shirt hack, which was very clever, they all seemed to just barely meet the minimum requirements of 'hack'. The only interesting thing about them was that they were being done by another school.

An excellent hack, as this one is, appear to be magic. Poof! I wave my hands and this several-ton cannon reappears 3000 miles away, stolen out from under the watchful eyes of a dormful of paranoids.
posted by breath at 3:01 PM on April 6, 2006

I was impressed with the dome ones that CalTech did. That's target #1 for the actual MIT pranksters, which makes outsiders pulling it off even harder. (Even though they didn't put a police car up there or anything else as good as MIT.)
posted by smackfu at 3:07 PM on April 6, 2006

Okay, so they stole the canon and put their ring on it? Is that it?
posted by delmoi at 3:08 PM on April 6, 2006

stolen out from under the watchful eyes of a dormful of paranoids

More like the bleary eyes of a hallwayful of stressed-out nerd jocks, who would rather get an hour of sleep than investigate yet another weird thing happening in the middle of the night...
posted by xil at 3:13 PM on April 6, 2006

A big part of a great MIT hack is the little details. It's not just putting a police car on top of the Dome. It's putting a police car on top of the dome, and then putting a parking ticket on the car, citing it for "No valid parking sticker for this location."

Thus, stealing the cannon and shipping it across country is one thing. The engraved ring and the plaque is what makes it an MIT hack.
posted by eriko at 3:25 PM on April 6, 2006

Official Chicks on Cannon Site. They got all those ladies together in pretty short notice.
posted by breath at 4:19 PM on April 6, 2006

*sigh*...this almost makes me regret going to Reed instead of MIT or Caltech. We had our share of pranks and hacks, but they were all internal. In particular is the now 90-odd year history of theft and re-theft of the Doyle Owl

But mostly we were just too interested in drugs, nudity and hypercritical debate to have rivalries with other schools.

Good on ya MIT.
posted by afflatus at 4:46 PM on April 6, 2006

For what it's worth, smackfu, none of the Caltech pranks were on either of the domes, although there were two in which things were put on the roofs in front of the domes. Certain other things made the roofs [generally not extraordinarily hard to get onto] easy to access that night. Most MIT dome hacks [even the relatively unimpressive ones] are technically far more complex than walking out an open door and dropping something on the edge of a roof... so the fact that they came several thousand miles just to dump a bunch of inflatable trees on a roof ledge was rather a disappointment. The T-shirt thing, on the other hand, was subtle and well-done.
posted by ubersturm at 4:59 PM on April 6, 2006

The HTML source to the collegecannoncoeds.com page sure looks a lot like the source to howeandser.com. I wonder if they were written by the same person.

If somebody with Athena access were to check the created-by tag on the cannoncoeds files, they might perhaps be able to identify one of the culprits, no?
posted by event at 5:01 PM on April 6, 2006

The HTML source to the collegecannoncoeds.com page sure looks a lot like the source to howeandser.com. I wonder if they were written by the same person.

You don't think the collegecannoncoeds people just copied the style of howeandser.com? The source code is pretty different once you read past the initial CSS.
posted by breath at 5:35 PM on April 6, 2006

I was wondering what the deal was when I walked by this thing on the way to the library this morning... kudos to you, hackers, kudos to you.
posted by mowglisambo at 7:09 PM on April 6, 2006

Howitzer Moving Company . . . heh. Well done, old man(s).
posted by Toecutter at 8:16 PM on April 6, 2006

but would they pose in bikinis with the cannon when it's about 50 degrees out?

That's impressive... an impressive demonstration of intelligence and rightminded thinking. Is this typical, this wearing of skimpy bits of cloth in such ridiculously cold weather? Brr. What would their mothers say!? :)

I am actually impressed by the cannon-theft hack and the giant Brass Rat, despite my ribbing. That's some fine tooling. MIT does good hacks, I'll grant that easily. A fine, long, well documented history of great hacks. The accepted inventors of the contemporary definition of the word "hack", to boot.

However, something to remember is that one doesn't often hear much about CalTech's hacks and adventures, as they tend to be quieter, or more kinetic, or of a smaller scale, or even often more illegal and not suitable for broadcast or publication.

They did, after all, make a movie about CalTech. Something about lasers and popcorn or something.

And I still think CalTech's girls are much cuter. If you ever get an elusive invite to their annual "Apache'" party, go. It's a hoot.
posted by loquacious at 8:20 PM on April 6, 2006

MIT's 'The Tech': Hackers Have Blast With Caltech Cannon.
posted by ericb at 8:34 AM on April 7, 2006

Boston Globe: Cannon is fodder in MIT-Caltech rivalry.
posted by ericb at 8:53 AM on April 7, 2006

CalTech Media Relations: CalTech Pranked by MIT Today
posted by ericb at 9:30 AM on April 7, 2006

Just a quick update:

23 Fleming House residents went to MIT over the weekend to retrieve their cannon, enlisting the services of Volpone Towing Service (big-ass JPG link) to bring it back to Pasadena. They left behind a small cannon, and some window decorations. MIT students held a barbecue in honor of its departure, in which the Flems did not partake. Perhaps they didn't think it was funny?

Media coverage has been mostly mocking, which is too bad because they blew $30,000 on the trip, and are reduced to soliciting donations on the internet. Won't you spare a dime for these intrepid 'hackers'?
posted by breath at 1:11 AM on April 12, 2006

That's a lot of money.
posted by smackfu at 6:35 AM on April 12, 2006

For a joke.
posted by OmieWise at 6:40 AM on April 12, 2006