Barber 70 Scavenger Hunt
Location: |
Campus-wide
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Date: |
November 8, 2021 |
MIT campus awoke on November 8th, 2021 to barber poles everywhere, and fliers reading as follows:
70 years ago on November 8th, a couple of hackers purchased a barber pole. Walking with it through the streets of Boston, they raised the suspicions of many policemen, who all called the barber to confirm that the purchase was legitimate. The beleaguered barber eventually grew annoyed and asked the police to stop calling, and so a notice went out to not bother college students carrying barber poles. The next morning, MIT awoke to a multitude of barber poles covering Killian Court.
This story is dear to the hacking community, but theft goes against our set of hacking ethics today. So in the spirit of today's hacking culture -- innovation, creativity, and fun -- and to commemorate the 70th anniversary of this hack, we have constructed 70 of our own barber poles around campus. If you get any good pictures of the barber poles, post them with #MITbarber70. Can you find them all?
A website was also circulated: barber70.mit.edu, which parodied the design of whereis.mit.edu, the online wayfinder website.
Locations of poles included (but were not limited to):
- Atop the Little Dome of Building 7
- The smokestacks of Building 68
-
Aesop's Fables II in Hockfield Court
- Killian Court (the flagpole, a pillar of Lobby 10, and across the lawn)
- Every undergraduate dormitory
- At the 70th Smoot marker on the Harvard bridge, also repainted to a barber pole theme.
The hack was covered on the front page of The Tech, and received a shoutout by the @MITStudents Twitter account.
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