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13 KiB
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4 lines
13 KiB
Plaintext
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The Meaning of ‘Hack’
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The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings , according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of other hacker words, most notably random. Hacking might be characterized as an appropriate application of ingenuity. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it. An important secondary meaning of hack is a creative practical joke. This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures; see the lexicon entries for pseudo and kgbvax. But here are some examples of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit: In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed as a reporter and interviewed the director of the University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out to dinner later. While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves the Fiendish Fourteen) picked a lock and stole a blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the original set. The result was that three of the pictures were totally different. Instead of WASHINGTON, the word CALTECH was flashed. Another stunt showed the word HUSKIES, the Washington nickname, but spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver nature's engineer as a mascot.) After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative said: Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant. The Washington student body president remarked: No hard feelings, but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed. This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the direction sheets constituted a form of programming. Here is another classic hack: On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters MIT appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke. The Boston Globe later reported: If you want to know the truth, MIT won The Game. The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 AM, locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet. This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise, publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off bet
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