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Comment by hardik988 | Hacker News Reader

Attaching the MIT brand name to cheating doesn't make it hacking. Most, if not all of the techniques described in the post are pretty well known.

Dropbox initiated the Space Race as a gesture of goodwill to students, and it's hard to fathom how or why people won't receive it in the same vein.

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it is amazing you think of it as cheating. if these guys really wanted to cheat we would just max out the extra 25 gigs and get it. We had already gotten 15 gigs legitimately. We aren't insulting the goodwill of Dropbox, we just think its fun to be atop the list despite having a student body of a 5th of what the other universities have. It is also classic tongue in cheek that Ben Bitdiddle and Alyssa Hacker were atop the list. This was a benign prank and was done mostly to amuse. More than the hack itself it was just the timing that makes this hack memorable. It was hardly a non-trivial hack. MIT was leading the space race a few days ago, and then we exhausted our student body and i find it more amusing than desperate to come back in the lead like this. And you know what, somewhere in the offices of dropbox drew and arash are probably smiling profusely and proud of their alma mater.

yes we are :)

haha nice :D

Well then- no harm no foul. Guess I took the post too seriously..

This is hacking in the old jargon file sense (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hack.html) or the MIT IHTFP sense (http://hacks.mit.edu/).

Automation, spoofing and security breaking tools are improving all the time. It's important that it's security researchers (and students) who are driving the arms race, not the criminal element.

I used hacking in the exact same sense. I applaud their initiative and hacker mentality.

But, it still doesn't change my opinion that it's cheating, and as user nthitz said, it's just a case of students being sore losers.

Is it cheating? I'd imagine so, but I'd need to see the rules to make sure. Is it a hack? By my standards, it definitely has hack value [1].

I'm representing another school in the Space Race, but I smiled when I visited dropbox.com/spacerace and saw MIT back at the top of the leaderboard (with less space racers than the previous leader). I couldn't wait to read how they did it. With a smaller student body, they needed to be clever to "win".

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_(programmer_subculture)#...

This is clever in the same way that spammers are clever to spam millions of people without getting caught.

In my opinion, when something is less ethical (or unethical) it doesn't detract from its cleverness.

I tend to think the space race as a very smart viral campaign. The space is not free; it lasts only for two years, and then you have to start paying for it.

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