Registered: Nov 1999
Location: New York, New York
Posts: 560

Distributing computing: Go to jail?

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2...aver/index.html

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Felipe Garcia
Happy Treo 600 user, so far. Thanx Cingular for having an unlocked phone.

My Treo 600 is my phone, my PDA, my watch, and my MP3 player. Oh yeah, I take a picture once in a while with it. Convergence is such a great thing.

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Out of my skull, back in five minutes
Posts: 1435

Geez! That's not nice.

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Registered: Sep 1999
Location: Sydney Australia
Posts: 1883

what a bunch of idiots are running that school...
Given that I think he could have better chosen for a different distubuted network application (like the cancer research)

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: Midwest
Posts: 232

Frankly it doesn't surprise me. The whole world is whacky these days. The faculty handbook of the university I teach at has hundreds of pages, mostly descibing what you can't do followed by what will happen to you if you do do (or should that be "do dodo"?).

I suspect, though, that someone simply filed a complaint. Probably the chief network administrator who saw the suspicious net activity coming from the screen saved PCs and reported it as "hacker like". Of course as soon as you report anything, some administrator will want you to thoroughly document your findings with conclusions about what (if any) detriment to the university the activity caused. It's not too hard to calculate (or make up) the cost per second a university pays to maintain it's internet access. They have a yearly budget, ya know, and can easily divide it by the number of seconds in a year. At .59 per second I get a yearly budget of $9,303,120. Sounds a little high, but they might have simply calculated their costs to pursue a claim against the "hacker", and divided it by the total seconds his screen savers used up to come up with .59/sec.

I was in charge of a college computing lab for a few years. Miserable thankless job. It doesn't surprise me the accused gladly accepted the offer to quit his job. Now I make my students buy their own computers and bring them to school. They figure out quickly how to maintain them themselves (it's called a warranty, and includes an 800 number they can call on their cell phones). And it eliminates the school's responsibility for what may be installed on those PCs.

Dave

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