>> A dean, who had been informed about the hack after the arrest, went down to bail the students out. He pointed out to the detective that the battery-lined coats were only circumstantial evidence. At this point the dean opened his own battery-lined coat and declared that “all Tech men carry batteries.”

Unfortunately, these times where MIT officials will protect students seem to be gone by now.

You don't think if an MIT frat was planning a harmless(ish) prank of the Harvard–Yale game today, and some Harvard students learned of it and tried to get the MIT students arrested, that the MIT deans would be looking to help their students out of trouble?

Definitely. There was a case a couple of years ago. Search "Star Simpson" for more info.

Edit: the case was not about hacking "oficially"

HTML version: http://jottit.com/qd874/

"View source" renders it with wraparound.

this is the final precept, obfuscate your knowledge...

It would be neat to see some of these places (tomb of the forbidden ladder, bricked in showers at the library, etc), if anyone knows where to find pictures.

I can't help with pictures of MIT, but there are a few pictures of some interesting places in the Caltech steam tunnels in this essay:

http://pandora.caltech.edu/~antognini/tunnels.pdf

As a final project for a photography class a year ago, I wandered across town and took many photos of the MIT tunnels. None are online (maybe I’ll put some up someday, but since these pictures worked much better as 16"x16" prints, I’m not sure how well they’d work at a few hundred pixels on a side on a screen), unfortunately. In any case, I recommend everyone who spends any substantial amount of time in the area wander around down there sometime. It’s an interesting eerie mood (especially at 3 AM) found in few other places.

My school has 5km of (heated!) tunnels connecting all the buildings on campus, but since they're open to the public they don't feel eerie at all.

I'd like to see your pictures if you ever put them online. =)

And for CMU, a hypercard (!) stack with a map of the steam tunnels: http://www.city-net.com/~dmm/tunnels.html

Here are a few images of UCLA's underground "bridge," mentioned in the PDF above.

http://www.fortunecity.com/lavendar/hitchcock/333/

Here's an LA times article on the bridge; apparently, it used to be an above-ground bridge and then the ravine it went over was filled in and made part of the utility tunnel system: http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jul/13/local/me-then13

Wicked cool replies, thanks. =)

I like this one http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/2010/upside_down_lounge/

Great piece! I love the hacking ethos of the MIT hacks / hackers. One of my recent favorites was their Harvard Master Chief / Halo 3 hack: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/09/25/the-best-thing-youll-see-t...

This brings back many happy memories of crawling through filthy ductwork in search of hidden spaces. I still have a box with rolls and rolls of B/W negatives that I shot in '83 to document some of the secret places at MIT. All I need is about 40 hours of free time and I'll scan them all...

One of my favorite google easter eggs is support for smoots (the unit mentioned in the article, equivalent to the length of a Mr. Oliver Smoot when lying down).

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=convert+1+smoot+to+feet

For more on urban exploration check out http://www.infiltration.org/ and the handy dandy companion book "Access All Areas" ( http://www.infiltration.org/aaa.html )

For a guide to hacking, the author knows surprisingly little about HTML formatting.

Hint: Not everything on the world wide web is a HTML page.