Free Folding Rigs for me...

[Svenn]

Eheh, so at the library here at school, there's no way to tell who installed a program, and so they just put a note that says "All data will be erased every morning." on the computers... Well, I decided, hey, why not use this to my advantage... so here I am at school, installing f@h on the comp... Eheh, maybe I can hit a few up... I'm in here all the time between classes anyway, so if I install it everytime I come in, free folding :)

[Tweaked!]

Just be very careful about that, there's the possibilty of getting into big trouble for that.

Here's some dirt I dug up on the issue:
And now distributed computing can get you indicted?
Posted 07/17/2001 - 10:53pm EDT [Discussion] Updated
Here in the Land of the Free, the madness continues. Salon is running a story that I'm not quite sure I understand all the angles of, but on the face of it at least it looks like something else to write your congressperson about.

When McOwen, a computer administrator at DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, installed a screensaver from an outfit known as Distributed.net on his school's computers in June 1999, he thought he was doing something that would make the world a better place.... But while McOwen may know his way around a computer network, he appears to have been less savvy about how to negotiate with the DeKalb bureaucracy. Because DeKalb's administrators didn't agree with McOwen's assessment of the wonders of distributed computing. Six months after the Distributed.net screensaver began quietly churning away on the DeKalb computers, McOwen was pulled into an office and handed a letter that said he was going to be facing criminal charges. According to McOwen, the DeKalb administrators were equating the screensaver with a hacking tool.

...The penalty could be stiff: McOwen could face 15 years in prison, plus a fine of more than $415,000 -- calculated on the basis of charges for "$.59 per second" for use of 500 computers, including the cost of bandwidth, backbone, networking and frame relay.

I'm actually mystified by this to the point where I'm afraid I may be misreporting it. On the one hand, I can understand the college being upset about some software that they obviously don't know anything about being installed on their machines without proper bureaucratic procedure being followed, but on the other hand his subsequent treatment by the college seems outrageous and malicious. This smells to me like there's some other angle here that's missing, like maybe someone at the company seriously had it in for him on a personal level. (Not that a vendetta would excuse such a thing, but at least it wouldn't appear like random and irrational malice). Does anyone else have any thoughts on why McOwen's employers would seemingly overreact to such an extent? Anyway, at the very least this should serve as a warning to the DC teams out there to watch their backs when installing a client on company networks.

Update: In reading through the discussion thread, I've come across a few more links that relate to this story. McOwen was apparently a member of Anandtech's RC5 team, and there's a writeup on the story on their page. These guys have also put up an online petition objecting to McOwen's treatment. Next, there are two discussion threads about this incident in our DC forum, here and here. Finally, we had a similar story here on Ars a while back, when a high school student who was an admin and installed SETI@Home on his school's machines was reprimanded and billed for damages. In this case as well, the student was punished as harshly as possible. -Hannibal



Copied and pasted from here:

http://www.arstechnica.com/archive/2001/0701-1.html

The copied article is down towards the bottom of the page.

There are many other articles on the subject, but this will get the point across. Basically, it's not worth risking your neck for...