[nicholasjarnold]

Funny story from the early days of TheFaceBook, probably around 2005ish:

I was a webmaster of a set of servers on a major university's network. I also had access (enough to run arbitrary programs that had pretty much full ingress/egress to the public internet) to a number of machines across the campus's network. Through some of my coursework and ACM chapter activities I met some other similarly minded technical people with similar levels of access.

We decide that it would be fun to use our superpowers (access + programming abilities + curiosity) to sign up for various accounts on FB and essentially scrape and friend as much as possible. At the time they had some rate limiting, some IP banning (which wasn't terrible because the Uni gave public IPv4 addrs to all machines on campus by default) and then added some early CAPTCHA which we ended up breaking pretty trivially with some python and image recognition code.

Never got sued... :) Never really did much with the scripts or data except test that they worked. Fun times.