Kara Swisher writes about how a court rejected Mark Zuckerberg’s recent attempt to squash some public documents that were submitted in the court case between the Facebook founder and the trio of Harvard types who claim he stole the idea (and some code) for the social-networking site from them — a story that is detailed in a recent magazine piece in a publication called 02138, which is aimed at Harvard alumni.
The documents Zuckerberg was concerned about are all available on the magazine’s website (most in the form of PDFs) and they include the Facebook co-founder’s application to Harvard — one of the ones he wanted removed, since it contains his parents’ home address in Dobbs Ferry, New York, among other things — as well as excerpts from Zuckerberg’s online journal, two statements he made in the case, an email he sent to Harvard about the dispute, and Facebook’s financial statements from 2005.
The online journal excerpts are particularly hilarious — they detail how Zuckerberg decided (after breaking up with a girlfriend, apparently) to whip together something that would pull people’s pictures from their online Harvard profiles and then post two of them side by side so people could vote on who was more attractive:
“I’m a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it’s not even 10 pm 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.”
That’s at 9:30 in the evening. Over the next five hours or so, Zuckerberg whips up a script that will hack into the various residence houses at Harvard and pull the photos out, using holes in the Apache server settings. It makes for pretty funny reading (according to the magazine piece, he was reprimanded for his exploits and briefly suspended).
Mark Zuckerberg, Harvard-trained hacker. In case you’re interested, his Harvard application also notes that he was the MVP on his fencing team at Exeter Academy in 2000; a finalist for the New York Regional Fencing championships; got gold medals at the Science Olympiad in Practical Data Gathering, Astronomy and Physics; and was the high scorer at the American Regional Math League in 2001.