IIT Madras BS · Tools in Data Science · Bridge Module 3
Debug Paradox
One night on campus. Twelve broken systems. One ghost. Your Chrome DevTools.
11:30 PM, the night before Paradox. Thousands of BS students are on trains to Chennai. Then every Paradox system goes dark: gate passes, hostel allotments, mess coupons, the stage screens.
Behind it: GHOST-TA, an AI agent from an old TDS project that nobody switched off. It hides everything where only DevTools can see it, and it taunts you in response headers, HTML comments and console logs.
Kavya from the Paradox web team just messaged you: "Everyone's offline. You did GA0 properly, right? Get us live by 9 AM."
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📋 Workshop guide (read before you start)
Self-paced, about 2 hours. Use desktop Chrome or Edge. Some levels need a terminal with curl (macOS/Linux terminal, Git Bash or WSL on Windows).
| Act | Time | You'll learn |
|---|---|---|
| 🚪 Main Gate | 20 min | Elements, Network Fetch/XHR, curl methods, headers, JSON, status codes |
| 🛏️ Hostel Zone | 20 min | Cookies (incl. HttpOnly), localStorage, base64 in the Console |
| 🦉 Library & CLT | 25 min | Local overrides (content & headers), DOM breakpoints, debugger |
| 🎛️ Open Air Theatre | 30 min | Device toolbar, custom devices, DPR, touch, rotation, Sensors, node screenshots |
| 📡 Campus Network | 15 min | Throttling, disable cache, Preserve log, Initiator, response headers |
| 🎆 Opening Ceremony | 10 min | Copy as cURL, editing a real request |
Rules. Every fragment is different for every student, so sharing answers doesn't work. Share techniques on Discourse, never your token or a copied cURL (it contains your session cookie). Using AI is fine. Understanding what it did is the point.
When you finish, add three lines to notes/http.txt: the DevTools feature that surprised you most, one thing that only changed in your browser, and one thing the server actually enforced.