Distributed computing = 30 year sentance?

August 1, 2001 4:30 PM

Distributed computing = 30 year sentance?
DeKalb Technical College in Georgia seeks a grand jury indictment against a former admin who installed Distributed.net software on school computers without permisson.

While he may not have had permisson and that in itself may have been wrong, does that really warrant the threat of 30 years in prison for "computer theft and trespassing"? Not only does that seem needlessly extreme, but there seems to be a witch-hunt like atmosphere these days about computer crimes in general, no matter how small. What gives?
posted by Hackworth (10 comments total)

People are paranoid about computers and the Internet in general. I was just looking at something in USA Today at work about software pirating (which may prove a "blight on the economy." That's a pretty big word for USA Today.) and made some comment, thinking "Hah! They're watching my boyfriend!" and this girl was like "Yeah! I have a virus on my computer!" it's all equivalent to people.
posted by dagnyscott at 5:20 PM on August 1, 2001

What's the real damage in cost to the University? How much did they lose? Did they have network slowdowns? (Doubtful because of the way it works). Did they have computer slowdowns? (Again, doubtful because of the way the programs work). Did they pay extra bandwidth? (Doubtful because of the way Unis have their agreements set up)...

What was the actual damage other than the fact that he did something on his own, which had the potential to damage security in some way (if a security bug was found in the software for instance).

30 years is ridiculous and any judge will see that. My guess is that he'll get his wrist slapped and get probation which an appropriate response... Well, no. An appropriate response is to keep this out of the courtroom, but since it's already there....
posted by fooljay at 5:29 PM on August 1, 2001

This is the best article I've read about it, to date.

It was an on-the-job mistake, and at worst, the guy could be fired for it, but it is far from a crime to run a program that crunches security numbers for a non-profit academic competition.

(btw, a couple years back, when I worked for a computer lab at a major university, the head linux admin ran distributed.net clients at night on all the lab computers (probably 300 P2 400's), but I don't think we ever squeked farther than the top 500 teams)
posted by mathowie at 5:41 PM on August 1, 2001

Whatever its real cost, the school wants $415,000. They''re charging him 59 cents/second for using the school computers as accused.
posted by gwyon at 6:21 PM on August 1, 2001

Here's the story about the civil claim with the specific page's URL.
posted by gwyon at 6:28 PM on August 1, 2001

Not to mention that distributed clients like dnetc, seti, entropia, etc... download sets of data that it crunches on for quite some time. Even though I doubt most computers were left on 24/7, I wonder how many would you need to pull that kind of bandwith if they only transferred, let's say on a very high end, 1mb per hour?
posted by samsara at 9:27 PM on August 1, 2001

(actually, I'm banking on 1mb per day)
posted by samsara at 9:37 PM on August 1, 2001

(My favorite/bogus part is this)

"In addition, he could have to pay restitution equal to the amount of money paid to state workers hired to uninstall the programs from 500 PCs."

So you're the new guy eh? Guess I'll have to show you the ropes...This here's the 4-line login script that will automatically delete the dnetc client off of every PC on campus. You say a word about this to *anyone* and I'll see to it that you'll end up like that McOwe'n guy (it's a good thing they never found out the real bandwith usage came from us downloading mp3's and streaming porn). So, ever played Quake?
posted by samsara at 7:09 AM on August 2, 2001

Weak and frightened people always seek to control (read curtail) that which they do not understand.
posted by rushmc at 12:03 PM on August 2, 2001