Distributed computing = 30 year sentance?
August 1, 2001 4:30 PM Subscribe
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?
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
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
posted by gwyon at 6:21 PM on August 1, 2001
posted by gwyon at 6:28 PM on August 1, 2001
However, a national OC-3 connection, such as the largest universities might have, gives you a 155M bit/sec ATM connection for a mere $65-70,000 a month. At $1.5 million a month, I'm thinking you could buy about 22 OC-3 connections (I have no idea the price beyond OC-3, such as OC-12 or even OC-48)- something on the order of 3.4G bit/sec, or the bandwidth equivalent of about an OC-48, OC-12, and two extra OC-3s just for kicks. By way of comparison, looking at AT&T's network map, I'm finding that AT&T has laid down two OC-48's for all of Seattle, WA (I'm sure Qwest has laid down other connections). That 3.4Gb/sec bandwidth is also about a third of all available bandwidth for Atlanta through AT&T.
Somehow, that seems far more bandwidth than li'l old DeKalb Tech would ever need or use, no... ? Especially considering that it would take over 900 students paying $20,000 a year tuition just to cover their annual bandwidth costs...
posted by hincandenza at 6:54 PM on August 1, 2001
posted by samsara at 9:27 PM on August 1, 2001
"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
posted by rushmc at 12:03 PM on August 2, 2001
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posted by dagnyscott at 5:20 PM on August 1, 2001