Cos sharing is caring.
process.php
1/10/2006 9:33:53 AM
CONFIDENTIAL
?php
include “style.php”;
start_page (“Harvard Face Mash | The Process”) ;
print “My mommy told me to take down this page, so it’s down temporarily.”;
: (0);
?
10.28.03
8:13pm. to take
my mind off her.- - > I need to think of something to occupy my mind. Easy enough
now I just need an idea…
9:48pm. I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even
10pm and
it’s a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland facebook is
open on my computer desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook
pics.
I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have
people
vote on which is more attractive. It’s not such a great idea and probably not even
funny, but
Billy comes up with the idea of comparing two people from the facebook, and only
sometimes
putting a farm animal in there. Good call Mr. Olson! I think he’s onto something.
11:09pm. Yea, it’s on. I’m not exactly sure how the farm animals are going
to
fit into this whole thing (you can’t really ever be sure with farm animals…), but I
like the
idea of comparing two people together. It gives the whole thing a very Turing feel,
since
people’s ratings of the pictures will be more implicit than, say, choosing a number to
represent each person’s hotness like they do on hotornot.com. The other thing we’re
going to
need is a lot of pictures. Unfortunately, Harvard doesn’t keep a public centralized
facebook
so I’m going to have to get all the images from the individual houses that people are
in.
And that means no freshman pictures…drats.
12:58pm. Let the hacking begin. First on the list is Kirkland. They keep
everything
open and allow indexes in their Apache configuration, so a little wget magic is all
that’s
necessary to download the entire Kirkland facebook. Child’s play.
1:03am.
Next on the list is Eliot. They’re also open, but with no indexes
in
Apache. I can run an empty search and it returns all of the images in the database in
process.php
1/10/2006 9:33:53 AM
CONFIDENTIAL
asingle page. Then I can save the page and Mozilla will save all the images for me.
Excellent. Moving right along…
1:06am. Lowell has some security. They require a username/password combo
to access the facebook. I’m going to go ahead and say that they don’thave access to the
main fas user database, so they have no way of knowing what people’s passwords are, and
the house isn’t exactly going to ask students for their fas passwords, so it’s got to
be
something else. Maybe there’s a single username/password combo that all of Lowell
knows.
That seems a little hard to manage since it would be impossible for the webmaster to
tell
Lowell residents how to figure out the username and password without giving them away
completely. And you do want people to know what kind of authentication is necessary,
so it’s
probably not that either. So what does each student have that can be used for
authentication
that the house webmaster has access to? Student ids anyone? Suspicions affirmed –
time
to get myself a matching name and student id combo for Lowell and I’m in. But there
are
more problems. The pictures are separated into a bunch of different pages, and I’m
way too
lazy to go through all of them and save each one. Writing a perl script to take care
of that
seems like the right answer. Indeed.
1:31am. Adams has no security, but limits the number of results to 20 a
page.
All I need to do is break out the same script I just used on Lowell and we’re set.
1:42am. Quincy has no online facebook. What a sham. Nothing I can do about
that.
1:43am. Dunster is intense. Not only is there no public directory, but
there’s
no directory at all. You have to do searches, and if your search returns more than 20
matches, nothing gets returned. And once you do get results, they don’t link directly
to
the images; they link to a php that redirects or something. Weird. This may be
difficult.
I’ll come back later.
1:52am. Leverett is a little better. They still make you search, but you
can
do an empty search and get links to pages with every student’s picture. It’s slightly
obnoxious that they only let you view one picture at a time, and there’s no way I’m
going
to go to 500 pages to download pics one at a time, so it’s definitely necessary to
break out
emacs and modify that perl script. This time it’s going to look at the directory and
figure
out what pages it needs to go to by finding links with regexes. Then it’ll just go to
all
of the pages it found links to and jack the images from them. It’s taking a few tries
to
compile the script…another Beck’s is in order.
2:08am. Mather is basically the same as Leverett, except they break their directory down into classes. There aren’t any freshmen in their facebook…how weak. So I
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