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Comment by Dove | Hacker News Reader

That's very cool and playful, but "Holy grail of hacks" seems a bit overwrought. I don't want to be a naysaying jerk, and the whole thing is cool, but . . . is this harder than it looks?

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The Caltech Rose Bowl prank of 1984 seems much harder and had a greater audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rose_Bowl#Scoreboard_prank

They had to break in to the Rose Bowl stadium, design and build special boards to take over the scoreboard lights, and break back in to install the boards. The control of the board during the halftime break in the Rose Bowl game was done by RF link. This was in 1984, when hardware was much more finicky and expensive.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/04/sports/sports-people-prank...

Or the 1961 Great Rose Bowl Hoax that inspired it, which might not be as high-tech, but is to me even more satisfying because they tricked an entire crowd of UW fans into unwittingly cheering for their nerdy and ignored school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Rose_Bowl_Hoax

They even made the first few compromised banners subtle enough that the crowd kept going with it until the finale where they wrote "CALTECH," an unmistakable prank.

Another note about the 1984 prank. The Pasadena police and the Rose Bowl organization, which is a fusty old group, were not amused with the surreptitious entry of the Rose Bowl building. They threatened to charge the pranksters. One of the senior Caltech faculty (Carver Mead?) offered to pay for legal defense if required.

A more detailed story is here: http://today.caltech.edu/today/story-display?story_id=11464

I was a student at MIT in the early 90s and Tetris on the Green Building was considered the "holy grail of hacks" back then. Definitely a major accomplishment, particularly with color and also lots of props to Brown for getting there first!

I still don't quite get it. Presumably the story is more interesting than "we got permission and used lots of wire", but the first couple of pages of google results don't really explain how.

IF they got permission, well, it makes it a whole lot easier. The hard part would be covertly entering every room of a building and leaving your control system and hoping not to get caught.

Yes.

haha, great response. This whole dialogue reminds me of a Louis CK line: "Everything is amazing, and no one is happy."

Could you explain? I've seen MIT do similar 'hacks' in the past with various patterns in the windows ('SOX' for the 2004 World Series is the only one I remember off the top of my head). Nothing was this elaborate, but I imagine that the hard part is actually setting up the system to coordinate the actual lights turning off/on.... and it seems like they've had that for a while.

I've seen one of the modules. There seems to be wirelessly controlled custom PCBs in each window.

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