The Hack-order of the Nerds.

How does a toilet, cow or cell phone to the Uni-roof? The secret known only to the students of Boston. They commit to their elite university regularly pranks of the most absurd kind - and create it by special cleverness almost always to remain undetected.

 

What has a toilet on a roof to look for? Who in early October 2008, the Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, entlangschlenderte, could admire, including Klopapierhalter and a replacement part. The house with a fully functioning Freiluftklo stands on the grounds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

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MIT students: Nothing in the head as Flausen

The action is just one of many pranks, the students of MIT each year permit. The toilet installation was a reminiscence of a consequence of the TV series "Scrubs" in which people with a toilet on a roof and then use the solution to their problems.

The MIT is in Cambridge, right on the Charles River, on the other side of the river you can see the skyline of Boston. On the large campus study does not average people: 16 Nobel laureates, the university has produced, only Harvard and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) can refer more award winners.

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To get from studying hard to recover, have the MIT students to the tradition, pranks. 15-20 are each year. They call it "hacking", but with computer viruses and cracking it has nothing to do (that is, at MIT "cracking").

Students have telephone handset radio receiver rebuilt so that music sounded as soon as one of the listeners took the fork. Others have an emergency for zombie attacks in the lobby of the Neurosciences placed so inconspicuously that it looked as they belong to the inventory. All have one thing in common pranks: they make about their own activities, the engineering and the academic life funny. But you never know who this man owes to jokes.

"A little bit of steam"

"Sometimes someone claimed that he had joined in a hack, but there is no way the whole thing to check," says Daniel Kamalic, a former student of MIT, the Internet hacks collection IHTFP (Interesting Hacks To Fascinate People) looks. "The speculation about the perpetrators of a string contributes to the formation of legend."

Brian Leibowitz, the legends on their veracity examined. Even he himself was once a student at MIT and has written a book about hacking written. Leibowitz searched photos, newspaper articles and even myself to hackers. "Most people do hacks to drain a little steam," he says. "Hacks are a creative way, from the Uni-stress and relax a little distance to win."

The story of the hacking begins at the end of the 19th Century with a rather harmless fun: You trickling in small quantities Stickstoffiodid, the explosive is easy on the floor of the chemistry room. Arranged the furniture in the new public areas. Steals the flags of the other vintages.

But on a spring day in 1928, the grotesque joke. The local newspaper "Boston Herald reported:" Police found cow on the roof of a five-MIT-student dormitory. " A group called "Dorm Goblin (Wohnheim Kobold) is committed to the string. Who is behind it, remains secret.

"Today is such a thing would not do more, because the hackers have their own code of conduct imposed, including, inter alia, nothing and no damage or danger," says Leibowitz. The thrill is not caught and anonymity to become a legend.

One year after the cow string students create a car in the cellar of a dormitory, because they find the car had been parked improperly. It takes 16 workers and a tractor, to put it out there again.

Entertainment dancer becomes professor

Not all the hacks have a technical background. Some emerge from the old rivalry to Harvard University, which only a few hundred meters up the road has its campus. In the forties, you go through this, people umzulotsen, there will occur at events. In May 1941, there is a MIT student as emissary from Harvard and fetches Sally Rand, a singer and dancer from. It aims at the Freshman Welcome Ceremony at Harvard occur. Instead, they will again at MIT, where her the title of Associate Professor for entertainment and engineering "to be given - before they will still bring to Harvard. "The performance of hacks were very popular until the sixties into it," says Leibowitz.

Thereafter, the pranks technically sophisticated. In the eighties ship a phone hacking cell functioning interior light on the great dome. When the campus police building discovered the rings apparatus.

"Since the turn of the Millennium refers to himself in his movies hacks like to," says Leibowitz. Over night there is suddenly a Jurrassic Park Research Building. About another house appears the characters from "Harry Potter". The great dome gets in a few colorful scarves the face of the robot R2D2 of "Star Wars".

Hackers often try the impossible, and in order to achieve this, one needs a lot of expertise and skill. One must note details and everything from the beginning exactly to plan.

It is a little as if you have a small engineering project coordination. With the additional difficulty that the cheap hacks in the production must be fast to install and easy to remove.

The thing with the XXL nipple did not

"The police car of the campus police, in 1994 at the Dome, was not a car," says Kamalic. "It was only the body of a wagon, but the individual parts were mounted on a wooden frame." There are certainly 15 to 20 people needed to organize these spreads, he estimates - we need the parts so paint on the roof and then assemble there.

The hackers observed particularly on details: They made a life-sized puppet police a pack of donuts in the womb. On the bumper of the car emblazoned a sticker: "I brake for donuts." This hack was a sideswipe at the campus police, who had thwarted a few tricks - for example, those 1978, when a group tried a large nipple on cardboard on the dome of the library to place.

The university administration is ambivalent towards the hacks. Have fun on the hacks and is pleased that her students learned knowledge in their spare time to apply. On the other hand, we are concerned about safety on campus and discussed liability issues. "If someone is caught, then the Uni-regulated internally," says Kamalic. The students usually have to pay a fine or a few hours without pay.

Presumably, they will curse you and say: IHTFP - "I Hate This Fucking Place".