You'll love Woods' Edge at Salt Creek Golf Retreat, Brown County, Indiana.
Harvard Rejects Backspacing Applicants
“Don’t backspace on the URL.”
That’s the message that Harvard is sending to it’s business school applicants, who were able to find out before the official announcement date whether or not they were accepted to the school by backspacing.
Harvard calls this hacking.
Philip Greenspun (via OTB) has the scoop.
The ApplyYourself code had a bug such that editing the URL in the “Address” or “Location” field of a Web browser window would result in an applicant being able to find out his admissions status several weeks before the official notification date. This would be equivalent to a 7-year-old being offered a URL of the form http://philip.greenspun.com/images/20030817-utah-air-to-air/ and editing it down to http://philip.greenspun.com/images/ to see what else of interest might be on the server.
Someone figured this out and posted the URL editing idea on the BusinessWeek discussion forum, where all B-school hopefuls hang out and a bunch of curious applicants tried it out.
And he adds:
In the 1960s the term “hacking” meant smart people developing useful and innovative computer software. In the 1990s the term meant smart evil people developing and running programs to break into computer systems and gain shell access to those systems. Thanks to Harvard Business school the term now means “people of average IQ poking around curiously by editing URLs on public servers and seeing what comes back in the form of directory listings, etc.”
http://myopiczeal.blogsome.com/2005/03/09/harvard-rejects-backspacing-applicants/trackback/
