<p>I just composed an essay from scratch and typed it into the space given on myMIT, and clicked save. Rather than saving it, myMIT simply logged me off. I guess I had waited too long to click the button. I logged back in and my essay was gone, which could have resulted in my turning into The Incredible Hulk and slamming my awesome green fists through the screen, had I not conveniently stored the essay in the clipboard for word-count purposes.</p>
<p>Just letting everyone know that the MIT website is not perfect and to back up your stuff somewhere other than the form they give you. Forgive me if this has already been posted to death.</p>
<p>ahh wow! The same thing happened to me, rather than be an intelligent person and just get the essay from my cache, I took I rather more complicated approach. </p>
<p>What I did is I relogged in in a different browser window (one window still had all my submit info in the cache), from that I took my new VALID SessionId, and (using an HTTPS middle-man proxy) changed the SessionId on the browser window with my info in it en-route. It was tres cool, and tres geeky.
It took about ten minutes, just retyping the stuff would have taken five, but it makes a good story!</p>
<p>Oh also the form fields on myMIT (like the awards for example) they have a MAXLENGTH tag(limiting the number of charchters you can type), but this is only enforced on the client side, so if you send the server something longer it doesn't care, and because MIT software is smart, it shrinks the text to make it fit in the PDF. It was great because I mentioned giving a lecture on web application security in the awards section and then submitted something longer then their web application intended to allow. They probably never noticed... but once again, it makes a good story! :-)</p>
<p>Wow, glad you found a way around losing your stuff. That website can be treacherous. Here's a tip: If you get an unusual security warning when you click "save and continue," it's about to delete your stuff. Click "no."</p>
<p>Oh wow, I hadn't read the maxlength thing you did very carefully, but that is REALLY funny. If they notice that you did that right next to mentioning application security, you're getting in for sure, on sheer cleverness.</p>
<p>He apparently sent that part of his info directly to the server through some means other than the normal one, by bypassing the application form page. The server didn't notice this, and as a result he got around the maxlength limit.</p>
<p>exactly! its your web client (IE, firefox, netscape) thats restricting you.<br>
Conquer your client and you can conquer all!
Oh and hamburger, I was accepted EA, so either it worked, or they didn't notice. :-P</p>