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Four Arrested For Internet 'Theft' At OSU
This raises some of the same questions that Napster, alt.sex.stories and (not long ago) IRC have -- if a university is the ISP, how closely can they control the way customers (students) use the resources it makes available? Legal technicalities aside, it sounds like the students are actually saving OSU money by attaching their own masqueraded computers to unused ports on the network they're already paying for.
Maybe universities should concentrate on providing a 'target-rich' infrastructure (ports, access points, shared servers and newsfeeds), and not spend much money on PCs. Workable, word-processing-and-Internet PCs can be had for a few hundred dollars. (And high-powered workstations or servers aren't really at issue in this case.) PCs -- at least those that need to run MS operating systems -- grow obsolete at a pretty amazing clip; networking standards and equipment have a more punctuated evolution, even if it's just as exciting to look at in the long term.
Anytime computer crime happens it's good? Anytime a computer criminal gets arrested it's bad.
Looks like they barely had the 306 ft. or so barrier. Looks like they just lucked out.
Damn you to hell!!!!
Moral of the story: Just because the university does not supply enough rooms with ethernet (for any reason), it does not justify their actions.
How should I know what it cost? This wasn't any sort of off the shelf hardware. It was a custom hack. I just borrowed the 30mW IR laser from the materials science dept. Me and some of the EE guys set up the laser/detector pairs at the 9th floor astro tower (top of the building) and at the dorm room (which had an ethernet port). An RS6000 running AIX acted as the gateway to the hardware at each end. The link itself looked like just another serial port to the OS. The protocol was plain ol' SLIP (PPP wasn't around yet). Aiming was the trickiest part. The slightest bump would hose the connection, and require re-aiming. But it worked! We put a hub in the dorm and shared the net connection to neighboring rooms. The dorm RA didn't seem to mind the net cables running down the hallway (we gave him a connection too!). I guess times have changed.
First, the reason they didn't connect to a port in there rooms wasn't because they didn't pay for it, it was because there room wasn't wired for it.
Second, there may be some of you who are saying "why didn't they get a room with a port, Gees a 24$ isn't that much....", at the collage closest to me (Oregon Institute of Technology), there is a waiting list for ANY dorm room. I would amagine that a collage that didn't have ports in all the rooms would have the connected rooms dissaper pretty quickly....
Third, if the collage was really haveing a problem with it why didn't they ask them to stop useing it. Even if it was a fire or safty danger, cut the cord then talk to them, Don't call the cops though, it gives your collage a bad name.
Okay stepping off my soap box now........
This was waaaay before the dorms were even wired. I set up 0.5km link from the top of the engineering building to my dorm room window, which was direct line of site. Did the full 10 megabit speed! It even got an article in the local campus engineering mag. I was called 'clever'. Guess now, I'd be called a thief. What happened?
Still, if they parked their car in a parking lot without a permit (permits cost over $24/year at OSU), would they be jailed for 'thest of parking spaces'?
I think not.
Two Stout Hall residents were arrested Monday for stealing access to the Oklahoma State University computer network.
"CIS reported that someone had rerouted a computer cable from a storage room in Stout Hall into private residential rooms in Stout Hall, allowing the residents of those rooms access to the university's network," Altman said.
Travis Wolcott does not understand why he cannot access the campus computer network when he is an Oklahoma State University student who pays technology fees.
Apparently whoever posted this story to /. didn't graduate!
Campus network != internet. They aren't being charged for theft of services where services = internet, but for the theft of services where services = campus network. (which you can likely access the internet from)
I have to agree with the objectivity and reputation bit, if only on the stories they run. Perhaps slashdot should pick a couple articles where it's likley the slashdot community would agree with the court's (they have to be right SOME time) Anonymous Coward, who waits for the day he can respond to a slashdot article with 'GO US GOVERNMENT!'
Well you are right about the hub(s). OSU uses ATM Fibers to each main building and thins dorm iss no exception. Stout Hall The Basement has an ATM Fiber connecting to a nice 3-com 100Mbit TX Switch. This switch has two links into a large 10Mbit switch (48+ ports). The link went into one of these ports. For the record, the building has about 5 systems like card readers and te fromt desk PC that are in use. The computer lab has shitty 386's and one or 2 486's ans Travis is right (read the article) They take a long time to boot much less log in. At the time of the charges getting issued leading to the 4 arrests, only 4 systems were connected. Why? Because I helped them set it up and take it down. I am an OSU student. I agree that there was a law violated under the vague terms of an obsecure Oklahoma Statute passed a couple years ago, however it is also illegal according to the Oklahoma State Constitution (the longest and most corrupt one in the 50 state nation) that states you may not have intercourse except in the missionary position. (Fellatio and cunnilingus is outlawed here too!) Point: If a law exists, is it really necessary to enforce it. To answer your question, OSU CIS knew about the network for about 2 1/2 months. The 133Mbit/sec ATM fiber connection was hardly tapped with less than a dozen used 10Mbit connections. DNS and DHCP servers could have NOT allowed the conenctions, but they did. The real drive to this arrest issue is that the OSU PD has a score to settle. The feds (the FBI for you lamers) busted about 1 dozen students for trading warez, porn, and MP3's on their Kerr Hall ethernet (each room has two 10/100Mbit ports per room installed by OSU). This is mud on their face and they overreacted when the hall director in Stout called the police about this "non-authorized" network. OSU is NOT student-centric, and I suggest not sending you childern here for school. I wonder if it is legal to connecct to any of the THOUSANDS of 10/100 thernet RJ-45 jacks all over campus? THey are in the hallways of the new buildings and even in the nre student union. I guess you must get permission to use them or get arrested. I know these things about OSU because I am here and I have to see my friends drug into the path of the machiene. Two of then werre forced to resign from campus jobs or be fired (one of the students was an Resident Advisor) and they are using loss of computer access as part of the reasoning. This place sucks even though it has ethernet everywhere. -Coward PS remember: The Peter Principle was invented and patented here at OSU.
There I was, just poking around Slashdot, trying to look for cool stories. It was March 2nd, and it was late at night. I knew I was supposed to be working, but what can I say? I'm a Slashdot addict.
After an hour or so of reloading the main page, my prayers were answered! Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus, and this time, he gave a fresh story! Eagerly, I clicked `Reply', knowing that in a few seconds, my dream would come to fruitation! I, too, would have a First Post!
Filling out the Subject line with an appropriately attention-grabbing quip, I proceded to create the Ultimate Post: one that is Interesting, yet Informative; Funny, but still Insightful, and highly Underrated. Yessir, Natalie would turn over in her tub of hot grits if she had seen what I had written. I was poised for greatness!
With much haste, I furiously clicked on `Submit'. Nothing. Again. Still nothing. I quickly loaded Mozilla, to see if Open Source really would work better. Still, no connection could be made. I was so downtrodden. My great work, my magnum trollus was meaningless. In a fit of depression, I threw my iMac against the wall, shattering it beyond repair.
The time, my friend, was 2:15. Those bastards stole my Internet. May they fry in Hell.
What goes with these public area net connections is the fact that they'll go idle much of the day, thus only transferring a few megs of the university's bandwidth. If you have no life and want to sit in the Union all day with your laptop, go for it. Or if you have to drag your computer downstairs to the lab, the University's banking that there aren't too many of those sort of people. Thus they are little drain on their available transfer limits. As we have seen with the napster bans, universities don't have unlimited bandwidth.
But, when you connect these public ports to your private room, you will certainly download tons more. Before the university wires a dorm, they gather their statistics on how much is used and must be able to financially support those more heavily used connections. Plus, as others have said, that's one less port for someone who actually drags their computer to the lab. I know at my university, around finals time the labs always filled up. If their CAT5 is in a port, and they are out getting a pizza or ice cream, is that fair that there is a line of students waiting to plug in their computers into ports while they just come home, turn on, and go?
You ever think they may just be addicted to the mild electricity passing through the CAT5, sitting in their rooms sucking on it like there's no tomorrow? Hey, if kids are stupid enough to go around sniffing glue/paint/anything-they-can, there's gotta be similar morons.
When I first went down to my university, I plugged the provided coax into my TV and found they had all the HBO, Showtime, etc channels. I though "cool" and watched away. A year later (or so) I go down on opening day, and there's only plain cable. After asking around, I come to find out someone like five years earlier had went on the roof and removed a filter from the cable connection. I found it a pretty funny college prank, giving the entire dorm full access for free for so long. But, nonetheless it is theft, just they could only prosecute those who actually did it, if they knew.
That musta been back in the days of risks, and accepting the consequences. Not anymore, everyone's a victim. These students need to claim Internet addiction, and that they need to get treatment. Cry on television a few times, and they'll be set.
Of course, it started with some crazies hiring lawyers to cover their own lunacy, now all schools, workplaces, etc have to take a proactive stance on all these "no tolerance" issues.
Ah yes, I forgot, all network traffic originating from a lab gets compressed automatically, therefore saving bandwidth.
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I personally think the price is good. It is a very fast connection (I was doing 790kB/sec to other systems in Silicon Valley yesterday since it's spring break... but 300kB/sec at night during the quarters in not uncommon.) That is, even if I could use the Univ. dialup lines from my residence for free, I would still want the ultra-fast connection for $80/yr (which is less than what I used to pay a year for dialup before coming here).
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I fail to see any real disadvantage to having fast internet access in your room.
For example, by using it in their room, they could download porn, warez, and mp3s every hour of the day, instead of just two or three.
Or they could check their email in their own room, instead of going somewhere else.
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To quote Rik from the British TV comedy "The Young Ones":
"Fascist!"
;P
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
>Dumb move, the ignorant and fearful will often arrest you for
>"Hacking" if you point out vunrabilities in there systems. It's a
>really sad fact of life. You can be branded a FELON, and convicted too
>easily. After that you may get a probation that limits you freedom to
>use computers and thus your job options, plus you may become a
>convicted felon and not have a right to vote about that or do a lot of
>other things.
>Gotta love america.
Shrug. Think of it as natural selection at work. This this nature's way of weeding out losers like yourself who would've gotten killed while provoking a wild animal or doing something equally stupid.
>I don't see why we're all crying a river over this. They took
>electricity that they weren't paying for. That's called stealing. I
>hope they get the electric chair. And yes, i see the irony.
Shrug. Think of it as natural selection at work. This is nature's
way of weeding out losers who would've gotten killed
while provoking a wild animal or doing something equally stupid.
..and they didn't steal an ethernet connection from anyone. They just made use of an available one, which they supposedly have the right to use.
/mill
The descrambler analogy is therefore not suitable. They are btw not illegal in Sweden. Only selling them is.
It is like paying the "masturbation fee" and opting out from paying for the "masturbation room" and then getting caught masturbating somewhere else.
These students have the paid for using the networks and they have (supposedly) several officially condoned ways to access the network.
Instead of paying for an ethernet connection in their dorm room they used one of those ways combined with some know-how and ended up with one for them acceptable solution. The university haven't been forced to fund this 'extension' and therefore I don't see what they are complaining about. Except that they want a monopoly.
All this sounds an awful lot like Microsoft forcing people to pay for Win* even though they won't be using it or the RIAA wanting to stop non-approved DVD drivers for Linux.
That 24 dollars would be paying for the cost of getting the actual connection into your room (and related services [ip #, dns, ..]). They didn't require any of that. They just used what they had paid for, which was access to the network and access to the computer lab downstairs. As long as no other student in the dorm is complaining about not being able to use the downstairs computerlab I don't see the problem.
/mill
People doing things by themselves - the horror. What's next? Someone writing their own operating system instead of paying someone to ship one with the computer hardware.. oh wait.. nevermind.
If you normally have access to the university president's office or are allowed to login directly on that alpha server - why not?
/mill
A more accurate analogy would be if I had access to the alpha server in the president's office and can't access it sitting in my homemade ergonomic chair instead of the plain wood ones available for everyone. A chair which looks almost like the official ergonomic chairs one can rent for $24.
Nope. When I pay for cable access I pay for the right to view the content. If I also need them to install a cable then that is a one time cost (except for any insurance that they will fix anything if it stops working). At home we did the digging ourselves to draw the cable. We only paid for the right to view the content.
/mill
So these students had a problem which they solved, but I guess the university wants to have a monopoly on solving things.
No, that would be violating the terms of use. That applies to everyone even the ones paying the extra $24.
/mill
The same with the meal hall.
The meal hall analogy would suitable if you said this: You have paid to eat in the meal hall. If you pay an extra $24 you can eat at any time. Now, you go to the meal hall within hours you are allowed to eat there and instead of eating there you bring the food home and eat it at 4:30AM. Shouldn't you be allowed to do that?
They had access to the computer lab. They had access to the network. They could pay to get a room where there was a ethernet connection installed. They didn't and instead got a cable of their own and plugged it in down in the computer lab, which they had access to, and voila! they had fixed access in their dorm room.
What stops them from using all that bandwidth from a computer lab? Especially when the lab is located in the same building.
/mill
I don't claim that the buying your own AC analogy is suitable independant of what I said. I believe this has nothing to do with increased consumtion of bandwidth. The university just wants to have control and these students did something on their own which diminish that control. Which was why I wondered if they would be allowed to get their own AC.
We have 5578 student rooms/apartments connected currently (aside from all other apartments that are hooked up) and then we are talking 10Mbit ethernet and not cable modems or xDSL or similar half assed solutions. I have never heard anyone in administration talking about bandwidth problems just about how to get all students online. Different mindset I guess.
Coming from a Coward I take that as a compliment :-).
/mill
No, I think you read that wrong. Their rooms were cheaper because they didn't pay a network access fee (and thus had no access in their rooms). They circumvented that by running cable to a room that had an active port.
It's akin to me running a wire next door to my neighbor's house to get free cable tv.
Actually, some universities require you to register your mac address in order to get an IP from the university DHCP server. There would be ways around this, but it makes the majority of network traffic traceable to a person. My university (Iowa State) has no such policy, but I know University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign does.
Just a minute. They had rightful access to the OSU ethernet from a computer on another floor. So what service were they actually stealing?
The rooms they were in are probably cheaper because they have no ethernet cables. These students got the cables (they probably had to buy them) and did the work of actually running them from their room to the hub.
I don't understand where the problem is.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
They are tuition paying students with accounts on OSU's computers. No?
This to me sounds like they had the perfect right to use the network.
Consider that the $24 price difference is not a fee but a discount for having a room without an ethernet connection.
So, they paid tuition, they had every right to use the network. What was the crime again?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
AFAIK, you have to be an IEEE member to read their standards docs. I don't like that too much, since it kind of goes in the face of open standards. At least membership is cheap, and there aren't requirements other than paying your money. (I think so. I'm not a member.) If you are a member, you already know where to go on standards.ieee.org.
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I thought it was funnier that it was non-anonymous, because then you _knew_ it was the same guy. Part of the reason it's funny is exactly the fact that he just posted them all himself. He was also partly serious, I think. He basically lampooned 3/4 of the posts on this story. (Which are even more repetitive than the threads on the Napster articles, except for the two guys who actually go to OSU, and can say something useful.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
They might have had better luck if they'd asked before running the cable. I've been learning (the hard way :), that asking first usually makes admins happier. I guess if you're stuck with a dumb or lazy admin who won't help you, then you try to get away with it anyway :)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
I'm wondering if these people ended up there because they picked it, or because they were shoved into it for lack of space elsewhere? The website is being horribly unuseful for finding this out.
If they went there through not having other choices, then the University had a responsibility to give them the sort of access the other dorms have (not necessarily legally, but morally). If the students had to go get it themselves, the reaction by the University is clearly wrong. Unfortunatly, unless it was legally wrong, that doesn't make a damn.
A somewhat similar situation is going on here at Brandeis regarding cable TV theft. No one has been arrested or even accused of stealing cable, but it is known that lots of it occurs. The proposed solution is to tack on a "cable TV" fee to housing costs and just turn on everyone's cable, rather than try to find people breaking into cable boxes and turning on cable illegitimately. I'm not sure what they'd do if they found someone doing that, but it wouldn't involve jail (though it might involve Brandeis cops).
Brynn, who finds Brandeis policies rather sane, with the exception of things requiring much more bureucracy than necessary
"Any sufficiently advanced form of Magic is indistinguishable from Technology." - Gnomish Technomancer
Have you ever talked to a Stoutie? Stout is the Ash-Haightbury of OSU, and they are proud of it. Due to the renovation of Stout, they get first pick of rooms pretty much anywhere on campus next semester, and they are pissed about being forced to move out of Stout.
Anyway, what do you expect the college to do about it? Force everyone to move out of Stout right now so they can do the renovations? Out of every old dorm on campus? Where do you expect them to come up with the money and living space for displaced students?
It's rather unbelievable. At NSU, a smaller regional public school in Oklahoma, we had practically every dorm room, class room, and office wired to the net as early as '94.
I can remember staring in amazement as I could download shareware from the Simtel repository at Norman at 70KB/s. I downloaded the kernel through my cable modem last night at 270KB/s!
This is pretty lame. When I was a student at the University of New Mexico, I did the same thing to get ethernet into my dorm. Nobody ever noticed and nothing was ever done about it. Technically, it *is* wrong but it seems like a more appropriate punishment would be a visit to the Dean of Student Affairs' office or something like that. My suggestion to the four students: find another school. Schools with ethernet are a dime a dozen. University of New Mexico has ethernet pretty much everywhere now. I think you might even be able to get in-state tuition if you lived close to the New Mexico side of Oklahoma. If you have a 2.5 GPA, I think you can get in-state tuition with their Amigo scholarship, if they still offer it. Anyway, pack your stuff up and leave OSU. They don't deserve your tuition.
well, the provider IS paying for each ip address that they have. giving you extra means they either have less available for new customers, or have to request additional ips be allocated to them (and this costs a decent chunk of change). it's not unreasonable to charge you extra for additional ip addresses.
it is questionable to prohibit proxies or ipmasqing, but that is not at all the same thing.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
i would look at more like this (using the cable analogy):
it's akin to them paying for basic cable (the technology fee, which gives them network priviledges), and then tapping their neighbor's line to get the premium channels (network access in their room).
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
how would there be no physical evidence? the base station would be plugged into the port.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
Claims that (X) is too expensive in a place like the US are laughable. If you think you can run a University more cheaply and efficiently, go ahead and do it. The fact is though that most Universities are non-profit, and the private Universities have to compete with non-profit state Universities to justify their prices.
Classes are "expensive" because running a University is also "expensive". Dorms are more "expensive" than other housing because their operating costs are also more "expensive". If you can't handle dorm fees, live in an apartment. If you insist on living in a dorm, I guess it's not such a bad deal after all, huh ?
If you have an overfilled run-down classroom and the degrees are worthless, I'd advise you to switch to a real University.
Because funding is going down and costs are going up.
Half of them are there because they couldn't make it in the real world
The university is very much "real-world". I don't know which crappy school you go to, but at the good schools, professors publish cutting-edge research in cutting-edge journals. They're hardly a bunch of deadbeats.
You're forgetting that the Universities function is not just as an educational institution -- it's also a research institution. If what you're saying is true, then why is it that the best research institutions also happen to be the schools that are perceived as the best places to get an education ?
No, moron. The school won't give them a wired room, and won't wire their room.
It's like me buying phone service, but the phone company refusing to let me purchase an 'internal services' contract where they do the wiring for me, and making me use the jack at the gray box outside my house. I then wire the house myself, and get arrested.
You know, I'm getting sick of reading all the stupid comments on this article. This will probably wreck my karma and get modded as framebait, but I'm sick of people NOT READING THE ARTICLES.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Now, no one is arguing, in this case, that they used school resources for non-school use...because a) They used it exactly like other students had, and b) That's not against the rules, anyway.
Also, in their case, they had paid a specific fee to have access to the various on-campus networks, called the 'technology fee', which you more then likely didn't do with your fridge. They just hadn't been allowed by the school to pay for a connection in their room, even though they had legal access to any general purpose jack on campus.
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
But this one was actually much cooler. About two years at University of Florida a CIS student who had access to one of the CIRCA labs decided he no longer wanted to pay for net access. He built a computer inside a cardboard box with a modem and NIC inside and hid it in a ceiling crawlspace inside the lab. He swiped a phoneline and an ethernet port from a room upstairs and built himself a dial up. He claimed to have been using it for almost a year befor the CIRCA boys caught on and had a call traced to his apartment.
Last I heard of the incident they threw him out of school and he did not graduate. They did file criminal charges but I dont think they went anywhere.
The thing is from what the article says there are two rent types You don't have to have network access and by the sounds of it these students decided to not get it but then ran the cable down to an unused port. That would by all real definition be stealing
They were sent to jail over $24/semester fee for something the university claims they can't access because they can't afford to run the cables? So, the students ran the cables themselves and on top of that offered the services free of charge to other students who wanted to check their email and such. How much would it have cost the university to pay technicians to run the cable? Sounds like $100 was a pretty good bargain to me. If the university was smart they'd make the students wire the all the dorm rooms in that building without being paid for their labor and then drop it. Everyone would have what they wanted.
In college the apartment complex we students stayed at had really bad phone switches so that only a small portion of the people living there could use their phones at once so Internet was rather a pain. Often we received a signal that the switches were full for hours. It made calling a friend or ordering a pizza impossible, I can't imagine what would happen if you needed to call 911. Anyway we decided to fix the problem by putting ethernet in all the apartments. We ran the lines all without permission, including drilling holes in walls. We went together to get a T1 and shared and the phone lines were fianlly usable. Sure it was probably illegal but by the same merit it cleared up the problems with the phone lines and added a valuable addition to the apartment complex.
Working as a computer tech for a university later on I would have loved to see students take such responsibility for wiring their own rooms. Often the university just can't afford the man hours to wire all the rooms as fast as they'd like to and having student help would be a wonderful way to speed the process up and save money.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
DSL and other forms of high-speed connections are diferent than dial-up IMO.. they are connected all the time and have a single connection point so the whole thing about using up all the modems is moot. It could be said that allowing a LAN or multiple users raises the amount of bandwidth used but this is nonsense. I'm sure I use more bandwidth than any 10 normal users, even those who play lots of online games. Besides it is a high-speed high-bandwidth connection and use of that bandwidth should be expected. The way you use your connection is none of the ISP's business as long as you stay within the limits of the connection they sell you. If I pay for 1Mb/sec transfer rate then it should be expected that I'll use this to it's most 24 hours a day unless my contract says otherwise. If I want to connect a LAN, host my web site, play net games, whatever it is none of the ISP's business regardless of what they put in their TOS contract. Since more often than not this service is provided as something you can't buy from any competitor they are a monopoly (or cartel in the better cases) and anything you are forced to sign to get the service you need is not valid. Oh sure if you don't like our agreement you can use smoke signals to connect to the Internet doesn't cut it. It is no better than forcing someone to sign a contract against their will for your own profit margins. What next, I have to pay a per-viewer license for people to watch my tv because I hook to your cable company? When I pay for an unlimited Internet account I leave it connected 24/7 and let it do background downloading/uploading while it's idle. ISP's are mostly dead anyway. GTE, AOL, etc bought them all out. Until we evolve the net to be completely peer to peer we'll be stuck with such big boys. One of my favorites was a few years ago when they arrested some teenager for knocking the phone service out for a few hours supposedly costing them millions of dollars in lost income from services.. and then soon after were trying to get the government to tax modem users to fund increasing the bandwidth they could support. Wow maybe I can't count but that seems twisted by greed. :P
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
First off, if schools aren't making a profit with the cost that most of them run the students then they must be majorly mismanaged. Possibly this is as much because of the way things have been changing in the past twenty years or so towards vastly more compressed schedules and trying to handle the fact that everyone and their dog is now told to go to college despite the profession they hope to go into. Science/technology classes especially must be a challenge to handle as they change so quickly. Hopefully more colleges will learn to handle this gracefully but right now I think most of them kludge it. Trying to grow and scale to handle the increased demand has doubtlessly made classes and dorms tend to be overpacked and costs higher than they should be. Hopefully the change towards more Internet-centric teaching will help this situation. I think it is important for professors to balance research (and keeping up to date) with their students. Many of my professors have been so badly out of date that their classes were useless to me. If I am teaching my professor it is hardly worth my money to take the class. On the other hand a professor that is so into their own research can ignore students. I've had a couple professors that were really great at balancing the two but not many. Possibly universities could make an effort to help the professors balance things better. I don't mind if dorms are expensive, but I do mind if they are expensive and the university forces students to live there. Also I mind secondary services such as the university phone co and university stamped credit cards being given to all new students. A lot of students are on their own for their first time. If they are going to give them long distance and credit cards they should take the time to offer free classes to teach the students how to use them responsibly. Sure a lot of it is common sense but a lot of the time people just don't realize the amount of debt they can rack up. Also limits should be low on such services to keep students from getting in trouble. If they ask to raise the limit then that is cool but make them ask so they have to stop and consider their actions a little. IMO college is more useful as a way to learn to handle being an adult than for a degree. Lets not take advantage of young people in the process. They are smart but often unfamiliar with the way these things work. :)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
At our university two years ago when the dorms were in the process of being wired, a student could go to the Information Services department and request the supplies, and the IS department would allow the student free access to the network for that year if the student ran his own wire. This is the way it should have been handled IMHO.
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I'd have to say that this campus is probably running the same thing Rowan is running, that is to say a ROLM phone network that was installed long long ago in a galaxy far, far away: the 70's. The primary way to attach to the network (before we got wired two years ago) was to utilize a conneciton defined as a "dataphone" that connected at 19200 bps to the "network." It was a standard phone like any other at the school, but it had an RS-232 interface on the back, an extra power cable, and a $60/semester charge. You were required to have one of two things: an Elvis account (IRIX box, Computer Science majors only) or a Jupiter account (meaning you were a general student with the patience to learn Irix on another box). There was a very limited number of these phones, and you could be wait-listed for months to get one. There were two ways around this system, and one invloved a dataphone.
.INF file for it, and it worked like a charm. Just like surfing from home.
The first was simply to buy a digital/analog converter as mentioned above. It also invloved taking the phone off the hook, hitting Do Not Disturb to remove call waiting, and dialing it your own damn self.
The second was to get a dataphone, hook it up, and utilize it as a dial-up networking adapter. Someone somewhere (I don't remember where) wrote a DUN
Of course, we're all wired now, so we don't have to hassle ourselves with this anymore.
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And, since the campus is so small, it's not hard to get a good .caltech.edu domain for your desktop server :-)
Yes, they did. he $24/semester is for the hardware use to their room. Did you not read the article? They were allowed to use the network. Why? Because they paid for it.
In all honesty, this isn't a matter of theft, this is a matter of the university administrators being 'pissy' because a couple of kids can do for free what they can't pay money and have done.
Nathan Brazil?
Hello? They don't pay $24/semester for net access. The students already have net access paid for. Read the article(s). The $24/semester is for the cable to their room. They did not have that option.
What they did was simply use the network resources that WERE available to them, legally, in an un-anticipated way.
Nathan Brazil?
Not a modem. They will use a modem, and since their phone service is digital (How can the university afford that sort of stuff but not a cheap hub and some ethernet cable?) they will then have to have a digital-to-analog converter.
Their data transmissions will look like one of these:
[computer]---(analog)---[phone converter]---(digital)---(converter)--{exit university}--(analog)---[telco]
or
[computer]---(analog)---[phone converter]---(digital)--{exit university}--[telco]
Or basically the same thing with one or more conversions between the university and the telco.
Nathan Brazil?
They did not steal internet access.
They had already paid for internet access.
Internet access was not offered at their location, but was offered 300 feet away. They used their internet access there, and ran a cable to their room. No problem.
Also: They couldn't just 'buy a damn modem and deal with 56k' Didn't you read this stuff? They have to:
#1: Buy a modem.
#2: Buy additional access through an ISP.
#3: But a digital-to-analog phone converter (NOT a modem, you stupid {deleted}.)
#4: Only use it after business hours.
Nathan Brazil?
They did not have the option to pay $24 a semester and have access there. NO access was possible in that dorm. In order to get (legal) access, they would have to move.
What is interesting is that they did for free what the university can't afford. And now the university is punishing them for it.
Nathan Brazil?
The article also says that there were other ways for them to get access in their room through outside ISPs...
But only AFTER business hours, *AND* they had to purchase a digital-to-analog converter for their phones. AND have to pay for an ISP.
Nathan Brazil?
The issue was raised that some dorms have rooms with ethernet jacks while others (and presumably this hall) doesn't. Now, although it wasn't directly stated I'll assume that these students would have been easily willing to pay the extra $24 to get rooms with ethernet jacks. If the school was smart they'd simply start running these rigs themselves and charging the students $24 each to connect into it. Sure it's a kludge, but it works.
The problem is that the school doesn't have enough money to provide adequate housing to the students and consequently some of the students will be stuck with inferior housing. They decide to do something about it to make up for this and the school gets angry because they aren't making money off the inferior facilities. Somewhere a solution is possible, either wire up all the dorms or start taking the student's money and let them do it themselves.
The entire situation is kinda irritating, I spent only 2yrs and 6 months at college and never got anywhere in a degree due to the lack of guidance in the system. I never got a grant/loan broke my ass to pay all costs out of pocket. And was given the same bullshit found in why these 4 are being railroaded. WE CAN'T AFFORD TO JUST LET EVERYONE DO IT !!! Lemme see the main guy in the group was connecting via a nominally used access point already in the building (which he has appearently paid to use in form of lab access card); He is using his equipment which is at a greater risk of being damaged due to the length of connection. ; the claim is that access was not provided for required programs (wordprocessing) and limited access would greatly decrease grade achivement in my view.
... yep don't ya come to here yonder OSU cause even tho' the world might be connected we ain'tz....
So what does this mean
Holy backwoods batman leave me a line to climb outta this place and enter a world where the college appreciates the advancement of study and use of non-costr to campus tools.
"If there's a new way I'll be the first in line.... But It better work this time." Vic Rattlehead
These students did in fact have a right to use the university network. They used it every day, in their various labs and study facilities. Says right there in the news articles that were linked in the /. post. So they can use the network, just not where it would actually useful for them.
I really can't agree with 'but they HAD legal access, they just used a long cable' stuff. OK, they had access in a lab. That's entirely different from having access in your room. Which of the two will use more bandwith?This to me sounds like they had the perfect right to use the network.
Yes, only not in their room. I'll repeat this; where do you think more bandwith (and thus money!) is burnt:That is where the $24 is for. It's not just about having access or not, it's about having more access vs less access.
They chose to not pay the $24 but still wanted that extra access. Their fault. (But arresting goes a bit far, I definately agree with that).
What are you talking about?
It's still agin' the law here in OK to run a tattoo parlor AFAIK. There was a guy busted recently in Tulsa for simply setting up an appointment for someone *at his legal tattoo parlor in Missouri (or KS)*
You don't know what you're talking about.
Blech. Signatures.
However, by using the bandwidth in one's dorm room rather than in the allegedly useless computer lab, no harm is done to the computer lab and no bandwidth beyond what would be used had the students had their own machines in the basement would be consumed. Granted the students may use it more when it's in their rooms, but that doesn't differ significantly from having to 'live' in computer labs as many of us did in college.
end of line
These students were paying their tuition, which includes fees for things like electricity. Who benefits when these kids have to go all the way to the basement just to plug in a radio?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
READ THE ARTICLE!!! The rooms with electricity cost $24 more than the rooms without. These kids CHOSE to live in a hall that didn't have electricity. They MADE that decision. For them to take electricity without paying for it, well, that's exactly the same as breaking into the school's vault and stealing $24 worth of gold bullion. STEALING is a crime.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
He posted his message first.
:) I'm glad someone saw it. At the low rating it's at. Moderators, i'm looking in your direction. :)
But mine is funnier.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I know you're joking, but just in case anyone wants to know what would really happen, it's all about depreciation. If i borrow your socks and go running in them and return them all worn out and smelly, they're the same socks but worth less. Electrons at a low potential are worth less than electrons at high potential.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Exactly.. This isn't a case of deciding NOT to pay the fee, left the port in your room unactivated, and 'borrow' connection from someone elses room. This is a case of limited number of rooms having connections, and some dorms having no connections, except for computer labs.
They obviously have the right to use the connection, the article even said people would take thier computers down to the connection. They didn't steal anything.
If the university is haveing that much of a problem paying for wiring dorms, charge a little extra. My god, the 'normal' cost for a drop is $200 (industry norm). Bump up the dorm fee by $50 per semester, and you have it paying for itself in a couple years.. Some colleges just don't give a shit enough yet.
A university I am doing some work for up here in Michigan has the right idea. They worked out a deal with AT&T becuase they couldn't afford to wire the dorms. AT&T is putting in new cable system with Cable Modem availabilty. University get's access in the dorms without a cost. AT&T get's the higher fees of digital cable for some people, and Cable Modem fees (You got to figure they will have a 50% or higher rental rate in the dorms) and the kids get the high speed access, without having the university contolling what they have.
Everyone wins.
--knick
These people went into a networking closet, jacked a connection, and routed into their rooms. Think about that one for a second. EVERY university in the U.S. has a policy towards unauthorized use of the network. This one falls into that place. This not a Napster, GNUtella, whatever, this is just plain theft that people got caught trying. For goodness sake's its a 300 FT PIECE OF CABLE!
I agree with the post about bad publicity, and having gone on a tour of OSU, I ended up here at Baylor =) (Fast Ethernet every dorm), OSU dorms are gettoland (except maybe for the Honors dorm).
Thepost talking about per semester fees. Its either $40 or $60 here at Baylor per semester. That ain't bad for Ethernet access. Also having been part of a bid out process for networking its about $300 a port to cover costs. Two ports per room roughly $600 per room (includes man power, cabling, testing, building updating and work, etc.) You can do the math from there but the charges per semester are essentially to take care of support.
But *why*? It's not that big a deal.
Personally I would have run some traffic shaping on their port limiting them to 10kb and then seen if they where still using it after a couple of weeks. Re-routing their traffic could also have its amusement value.
No. THey didn't.
actually in our lab we throw you out if your not a student...you don't have a right to use the computers here unless you are one, sorry (note:not my policy, the schools)
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
Nope, check out Quazi's article somewhere below. Seems that the university is not providing "normal" phone-lines but indeed something you have to buy an adaptor for.
Being published is exactly why universities are going downhill. I have 3 professors right now. Two of them are published and one of those two is so busy with her "research" that she's distracted during class and wouln't give a damn if you died in your seat, much less learn something.
Now, you're just being angry to hear yourself scream.
Let's set some priorities. Oklahoma is hot. I know, I grew up and went to college there. I spent a summer at OSU for an NSF research. It's hot, and some of the dorms don't have air conditioning. And, you're screaming for ethernet access. Give the kids some AC, first.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I say the guys should have just made a friend who had access in their room and masqueraded out.
Also, this is too good to pass up. Through the course of your rant, I think you made yourself puke:
First you say, "... raking in the financial benefits of their talent."
Then you say, "If anyone tries to tell me that NCAA basketball generates much-needed revenue for the university, I think I'll puke."
Ehhehe. Baaarf.
Preach on, brother! I agree... no harm done... and that 'steal the car at 2am and bring it back at 6am' example above qualifies as possibly the worst analogy I have ever seen/heard. Whenever technology is involved, the non-technical tend to over-react, in this case calling the police, when a simple "Get the hell off my Ethernet jack!" would have sufficed.
What a big deal to make out of nothing? If anything, the University should have congratulated the students for finding a way to have ethernet connections in their room, and then asked them to pay the nominal 24 dollar fee, just to go by the rules. Maybe the administration is just being pissy for not thinking of it first. :)
Then they could have better used the time being spent investigating the students to investigate how to cover up what a backwards school they are not to provide ethernet access and/or to find the most economical way to do so...
speaking as an employee housing at the university of illinois, most schools do ban wireless networking because it allows for ridiculously easy packet sniffing. wireless ethernet traffic is unencrypted as it is now (we're awaiting an new ieee spec to fix that), and until there's an encryption scheme built in, it will not be allowed for use in our buildings. i suspect other schools have similar policies.
Akron U are you listening?
(That was in regard to the toilet paper.... no joke there was a little issue at my friends dorm a month ago, they ended up stealing it from a public restroom)
The problem here is that these guys didn't do it well enough. My freshman year, me and a junior decided to steal the cable TV that only ran to the first floor lounges. We got up at 6am every morning, and spent about an hour a day for 2 weeks wiring coaxial cable down 3 stories through the walls. Then we ran wire under carpets and through bathrooms. The splice happened in a place where you would need to knock down a wall to find it. Of course, for extra safety, we only ran the cable to the suite tv, so that they could never pin it on us.
It is not hard to steal from a university, you just have to put some thought into it.
The problem with this analogy is that they aren't paying for content, they're paying for a service. It's like (YACA: Yet Another Cable Analogy) paying for cable and a single box, then buying a second box and hooking it up yourself in secret. The cable and first box is legit, but the second is illegal. (IMO, this is stupid, but that's the way it is.)
I pay $80 per year for a 100BT in-room connection on Stanford's network. The fact is, if you're not explicitly paying the school for the hook-up, then the bill is discreetly placed in your tuition somewhere. $80 is far less than what a 100 megabit connection would cost me for a year, so I'm not going to argue.
Maybe they didn't use plenum cable, and the University (actually, the semi-private company that runs the dorms, most likely...) may really be concerned about the fire hazard (supposedly) posed by cable in airspaces. That would justify their cracking down on the case. What they should do now, (IMNOHO) drag it to court, get a LOT of buzz, and then drop it, turning the kids loose quietly.
(What'll probably happen is the kids copping a plea to a violation and paying a fine, call it $500.00...)
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
AUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG! From now on I heed the warnings of Anonymous Cowards! I'll never get this image out of my mind. Damn it!
dfjsdklfj klsdj l;aksjef l;askdjf klsdj fklasdj f
d fksdjf lasdkj fklasdj flasdkj f
*beats head repeatidly against wall until he passes out*
What's the difference between stealing Cable TV and stealing net access? Stealing net access will become more and more common as faster connections be come easier to afford and more available.
If you get caught stealing cable, you're in trouble. I don't see any difference between that and stealing net access.
Shawn
In fact this [sitting on classes and not paying] is quite possible @ my college. But don't expect to get a degree. or any certification that you've been there.
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
Giving them the benefit of the doubt, might they be on a PBX phone system or the like? Or they could just be stupid. Yup. Stupid.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Okay, okay. This is about as bad as feeding the trolls. this is in respone to a bit o' spam that's dirtying /. Best yet, it's got email addresses. Ugh-huh. rocwithu@prodigy.net, spierce@netzero.net
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Not physical evidence, but virtual evidence: a quick look at the dhcp server logs will reveal any unauthorized usage.
They may have something like this for the students.
Or it may be a modem.
IANAL, but I play one on
OK State's administration will pay for this later when they try to recruit students. I would love to be a fly on the wall watching their admissions people try to explain to high school seniors and parents why their administration chose to turn these students over to the sherrif for what was essentially a harmless prank.
I wouldn't recommend that any intelligent student go to or any parent send his/her children to an institution that demonstrated such an unwillingness to handle this kind of matter internally--without involving police, judges, criminal records, and destroying these students' futures.
This isn't a direct analogy, but imagine if CMU gave up their students to the RIAA and didn't <wink, wink> discipline <nudge, nudge> them for the RIAA to sue and/or prosecute as they liked.
That sure does sound like a mitigating fact for the administration's action, and if I were the one who ordered this, I'd make sure that it was known far and wide these students had already been given a chance.
While it doesn't fix the problem that led the students to do this in the first place, the fact that they'd been warned pretty much kills my reason for ranting on the subject. Screwing up, getting caught once and repenting is one thing--screwing up once, getting caught once, thumbing one's nose at authority, then doing it again is stupidity.
Well, I probally wouldn't have ever considered OSU, much less go there, but I definitly won't now. I want a college where I'm guarenteed a broadband network in the dorms. Anything else just isn't acceptable anymore.
Now that's easy: the student who comes along takes that infamous blue cable, disconnects it, and connects his instead. 10 minutes later, the guy from his dorm room comes down to check why his network connection no longer works. Here he finds half a dozen guys who try to explain him that those connections are not really meant for dorm rooms but rather for those who come to the lab. Case closed.
The fact that this didn't happen either proves that:
- Most students at OSU are really well educated, and don't disconnect cables like that
- The network ports weren't really that scarce, and this problem simply didn't arise
Personally, I think it was 2.Electricity is a consumable resource which has a real cost to produce. Network access is not "consumed" and generates almost no incremental costs to university.
At least in México, The Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey already provides its students with network connections to use internet and the school's intranet. All students must buy a laptop and then they use the school connectors (they are everywhere in the school) to connect.
- Commodore Lives!
What is really bad for the school is that they actually admitted that some of the dorms do not have AIR CONDITIONING?!? Ah, this is Oklahoma here guys I live next to OU in Norman, Oklahoma and let me tell you it gets DAMN HOT around here. I turned on the AC today for about an hour or so (hit 79 in the house). No cable TVV, No A/C, and now no ethernet. Send out the peasents with torches.... -kensail
The University should have just billed them for the lousy $24 bucks, but NO..
They have to act like a pack of jackbooted thugs, and get an arrest on the kids' records.
I hope the grand jury tells the administration to get fucked.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Correct me if I'm wrong but Okey State is a PUBLIC college funded from the state's tax dollars. They ALSO had the right to use the network because they were given OSU email accounts and also server space. So it's not one of those too things.
What they didn't have the permission to do was to use the service from their dorm room. And that's the difference. Even though it's on campus, and it's a part of the university, it's not an "approved" access point on the network.
The University's claim gets pretty thin when you live in college supplied housing. It gets even thinner when the access port is in the same building where you live.
When was the last time you used an air-conditioner or Bobcat Godthwait's Big Ass Show to research your term-paper?
When was the last time you were in Oklahoma during September? Oklahoma has got to be the most boring and the hottest place to be during during early fall. And if you go there, you need entertainment and air conditioning.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anyone coming there from major cities.
Actually, you're wrong about that. Any criminal offense might need to be discussed with future employers. Also, any arrests might prevent an them from obtaining a job from one of the big 3 defense contractors, since many of those jobs require security clearances.
I also don't think it hurts the college very much either. Even before this incident I would have rated Okey State right around last for Computer Science / Engineering degrees.
And depending upon the school and depending upon the criminal offense, the offense may have to go through the conduct system. They might pay the school a fine, might get kicked out, or be suspended for a semester.
Who you can really thank for this atrocity is America's Cable companies for the laws on signal theft. Because without them, we wouldn't have such strict laws on the books in the first place. And instead the students may have gotten a slap on the wrist, rather than a trip to the judge.
I imagine it was *logged* at 2:15.
Cheers,
Rick Kirkland
This is the same thing as if I were to run a big ext. cord up from the utility room of my apt. building so i wouldn't have to take elec. from my own outlets. Its illegal. duh. And people seem to be assuming that if they had taken their computer downstairs to the lab they would have been allowed to plug into the network there. Well at least at my school (U of Iowa) thats a big no no and i'm guessing its the same at most other schools.
At the same time, if i were to try pulling this at my school i would just get put on probation with the school and that would be the end of it. i seriously doubt that the police would have ever gotten involved. and as such i think the students actualy getting charged with theft is more than a little overkill.
The grocery store analogy doesn't fit because at the store, you purchase a specific product one time. This deals with different services sold by the university avaialable over a period of time.
But they didn't pay for the service they took. They paid for a service, but that doesn't entitle them to any service.
Daniel
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This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Does your school call the police whenever someone's been caught cheating?
Well, one could look at stealing cars as being young and taking risks.
Doesn't change what you are - a thief.
I agree.
What the fuck is up with Slashdot these days? Everything has a sensationalistic Weekly World News angle to it.
I can just imagine CmdrTaco or Hemos riding down the street on a horse, yelling, "The Man is coming! The Man is coming!"
If you reprogram your digital watch to store answers to a Calculus test, that's a very ingenius hack. But it's still cheating, and when you get tossed out of university for cheating, I won't have much sympathy for you.
Oh no!
They would have had to pay!
I can't believe this. So, that's what it comes down to... just taking what you want, whenever you want it, because you can.
I had the opportunity to mount the electrical engineering department's server via NFS when I was in college.
Did I do it?
Nope.
I sent a message to admin and told him that it was possible for someone to do it and detailed exactly how I found out about it.
Just because you're under 25 doesn't mean you have to act like a jackass. If someone stole my car at 2am, because I wasn't using it, then returned it at 6am, because that's when I needed it again... I'd be PISSED OFF. I don't care if there was no harm done.
I'm sure this is the sentiment expressed by most slashdot readers, arresting these students is entirely unecessary. A conviction goes on your record permanantly, so what that its only a misdemeanor. It is still entirely unecessary. The proper thing for the school to have done was to inform them that they could not "steal" the net access and tell them to remove the cable, and possibly disable whatever ports they were connecting too. Arrests should follow reasonable attempts to inform the students of the problem, yet no mention was made of this in either article.
On a side note, when selecting the college I was too attend two years ago, one of my top priorities was ethernet in the residence halls. It doesn't look good for a school, first, to not have sufficient access, and not be willing to to extend it, and second, to prosecute some creative students for trying to get it anyway.
Spyky
A network connection is not property. It's a service. It's not personal either, since it's a public institution, however that's something completely different. It seems this issue has been divided fairly well down a line in Slashdotdom. The hacker types, who feel it's a great thing to put something to use in a manner not originally intended, and the admin types who feel that nothing should be allowed unless explicitly stated. All I have seen for them being wrong is that the "stole" the connection. Actually, it's not that. The connection was loaned to them by their neighbors downstairs. It's just the university being a bit pissy, if you ask me. The $24 cabling fee was paid by the students whose room it was connected to, and the other students paid for their own cabling. No harm, no foul, too much sensationalism. Rae
Blah I can't get my sig to work, it won't fit.
Doesn't hold water.
Ok, you've got J Random GasCompany. They will provide pipelines to anywhere for $RandomPrice. You ask them to build the pipe to your door, but they refuse, telling you it's ok to haul your 55 gallon drum down to the nearest waystation to fill up on all the gas you could use. Being that a 55 gallon drum of gas is kinda heavy, you decide to build the pipeline yourself. While you're at it, you build it to your neighbors, supplying them with the same service. (The gas is still free, the only thing you are paying for is building the pipe, which the university did not do, you did. You had permission to take gas from that pipe.) Now, true, everyone gets a little bit less gas at a time from the pipe, but the other students didn't seem to mind terribly...
Moral of the story: Bad analogies muddle up even the most determined arguements, and yes, if the uni doesn't supply them with personal ethernet ports, but tells them they can share this one, it does justify sharing it in a way unexpected by the uni.
Blah I can't get my sig to work, it won't fit.
OK, if we assume that the letter posted a ways above (saying that this was a repeat offense, they had been warned before) isn't true, then I don't see the problem. The article seems to say that the U essential said:
"Thanks for giving us $24 for your network connection. Oh, by the way, the room you have been assigned hasn't been wired yet. We can't afford it. Tough cookies--you can drag your machine downstairs."
If the room next to them had ethernet and they ip-masqed on its connection, would there be a problem? Probably not, unless they drilled holes in the wall. At what point does the cable get too long?
True, the concerns about running cables that aren't up to code are valid.
If the letter posted a ways above is in fact true, then the students were rather stupid for attempting a 'kludge' that had been ix-nayed before.
No...not really a modem as you know it. Most likely they're connected to a PBX which is usually a proprietary digital phone system. Older PBX's could pass data at speeds around 19200 (some were even slower) with tons of latency. I've never understood how they could do digital voice so well but suck so bad at data.
Based on the state of the dorm I'm sure they had a pretty old PBX in that building. A "modem" like this would be useless out in the real world unless you happened to come across a phone system that was compatable and you only wanted to go a little faster than a 14.4 modem. Besides they couldn't even use the damn thing during business hours which would be pretty irritating to say the least.
Maybe they were somewhat out of line but this "incident" should have been handled internally IMHO. I wonder if they were ever warned to stop it.
Anyway my kids won't be going there.. of course I really wasn't thinking about OSU since we live in the lovely "There's more than corn in Indana but not much" state.
G
The University couldn't afford not to have a PBX. They either run one phone line from the telco to each room (big monthly bill), have party lines (anyone here besides me remeber these? god they sucked), or use a handful of lines from the telco and a butlload of extensions, one for each room thereby lowering their monthly telco costs dramatically.
G
Let's pretend that there's a big problem at OSU with students not paying the $24 per semester for net access and they're going to "by God make an example" of these four students. Let's say there are 1000 students stealing net access. OSU has lost out on a possible $24,000 per semester. Now I don't know how much it costs to goto a state college anymore but based on the prices in my day I'd guess it costs at least $6,000 per semester. So if this action makes 4 people choose not to go to OSU then the college has broken even. I can think of 4 people right now who might be putting in those transfer papers right as I type and I seriously doubt my 3 kids will be attending a non-airconditioned, netless throw little Billy in jail and cable-impaired school. Talk about bad PR :)
G
Don't you understand? They're only making thousands of dollars a year from each of these students. They're way too cheap to pay for the cat-5, even if the labor was free. Don't get me wrong, we just rewired the whole friggin' campus at the company where I work and I know how much it costs.But this same college will probably have the cojones to call them after graduation and ask for donations to the sam good ol' alma mater that prosecuted them.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
What's worse, getting drunk and stupid or hooking yourself up to the network that your own tuition pays for and you have a legitimate account on? I guess things have changed a lot in only a few years. Seems like nowadays when a young person enrolls in a university he gives away his rights and dignity. When I was a freshman in 1991, one of my roomate's frat buddies was drunkenly tossing beer cans out the window. Naturally the RA couldn't help but notice the pile on the lawn and we both had visits with the dean. But I never got tangled up with anything like that again and never got arrested. Although I wasn't drinking, just being in the room is enough to get arrested for when you are under age.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
.. because frankly, the Internet makes a pretty good library these days. At least it's open 24-7. And people aren't shushing you ;-)
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
> It's akin to me running a wire next door to my neighbor's house to get free cable tv.
BAD analogy. You forget that they had good accounts, and were authorized to access the school's machines.
It's akin to you running a wire next door to your neighbor's house to get your paid-for cable TV with a legally sold and authorized descrambler, because the cable company is too cheap to run a cable to your own house.
The article said that the lab was unused, IIRC.
It's a day later and I don't remember =P
To everyone who keeps stating over and over that these students were stealing their access, blah, blah, blah, let me, very clearly, state some facts for you. Now, please pay attention because obviously you haven't so far!
.. did you read it that time? Here's another
..
.. here's where it gets really tricky and I'm sure this is what is confusing a lot of you, so pay real close attention and we'll get through this together ...
.. and some of them are moderated up pretty high, so there's not really any excuse for blindly posting the same tired questions/opinion/rants, etc. when they have already been validated or defeated 100 times over. Yet, if you look at the posts, you will see people posting the same bad analogies, the same mal formed opinions, and the same pointless comments over and over. Slashdot even asks that you not be repetative and pointless at the bottom of every "post" screen .. but I guess no one reads that either.
1. They didn't steal anything!
2. They didn't steal anything!
3. They didn't steal anything!
OK
1. They were already paying for their internet connection in the form of Technology Fees!
2. They were already paying for their internet connection in the form of Technology Fees!
3. They were already paying for their internet connection in the form of Technology Fees!
Moving along
1. The $24 was just to pay for the convenience of having an Ethernet port in their dorm room. This is not a fee you HAVE to pay to have access to the network!
2. The $24 was just to pay for the convenience of having an Ethernet port in their dorm room. This is not a fee you HAVE to pay to have access to the network!
3. The $24 was just to pay for the convenience of having an Ethernet port in their dorm room. This is not a fee you HAVE to pay to have access to the network!
Now
1. All they did was use a service, that they were ALREADY PAYING FOR (read that again so there are no misunderstandings), in an unconventional way.
2. All they did was use a service, that they were ALREADY PAYING FOR (read that again so there are no misunderstandings), in an unconventional way.
3. All they did was use a service, that they were ALREADY PAYING FOR (read that again so there are no misunderstandings), in an unconventional way.
I really don't see how hard this is to understand. All you have to do is read the articles (and I mean READ them). Also it might be helpful if you bothered reading the posts of your fellow slashdotter. There are about 500 posts above this one that explain the exact same things that I just did
Now I'm sure people will get pissed at this and bitch at me and flame me and moderate me straight down to hell, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm right.
Come on people. Think before you speak, please.
Let's have a meaningful discussion and not just a page full of mental sewage.
----- I was not elected to watch my IP packets fragment and collide while you discuss this routing policy in a committe
The difference between this and 'sharing' your neighbors (TV) cable is that you aren't paying for your neighbors cable. You can't use his cable, even if you take your TV outside and plug it into his cable box.
These students pay fees for network access. Quote: "he and other students regularly take their own computers downstairs and connect to the ethernet with 20-foot cables." The students were allowed to access the network. The $24/semester fee is clearly NOT for access, then. It is for the convenience of having a jack installed in your room. These students installed their own 'jack' and merely obtained what they had already paid for. Unless the cable violates some building code, there is nothing wrong with what they did.
My best friend (who will remain nameless after this story) did the same thing at Northland University Wisconsin. 300ft of cat-3 out the basement lab in his dorm, between the brick on the outside of the dorm, up 3 stories and in his window. All in a night's work with rubber cement and a little carpet pulling. Some kid got jealous and busted him but all he had to do was write letters of apologies to the campus admins and the school's president. Sounds a lot more reasonable than getting charged, fined and hot grits poured down your pants. If any of you have similar experiences, I'd encourage you to write the university a 'nice' note like I plan on with details of precedence set at other universities. May not help but after a few more beers, I won't care.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
But aren't they students paying for the use of the network ?
Interesting and funny.
Nice job.
Not a bad price at all, when you look at it... it was free last year, but I couldn't expect it to stay that way forever. It's great - high-speed access, Napster... oops. Maybe not. ;)
Not necessarily. The article clearly states that not all rooms have ethernet available because they can't afford it. It's quite possible they applied for rooms with ethernet and did not get them, so they took it into their own hands.
Is that wrong? Well, maybe. They avoid paying the $24/mo fee, but on the other hand, if the university can't provide it, it's only to be expected.
Can you say you wouldn't do the same thing in the same situation?
I hear ya!
Maybe their $ went into waste disposal costs for those labs? Would they like access to that?
Theives.
this is just a norm (unwritten rule).
-motardo
And what makes you think they fall under UK law? This is a case in Oklahoma. Oh, wait, there's that DeCSS case with the Norwegian being prosecuted under US law...
Hmmm, now what jurisdiction do I fall into?
-J
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
For publicity purposes, I will not disclose the name of the University I was a Police Officer, but one night we got the same call re: stealing internet access. It wasn't stealing access per se, but some students were running Napster with another University that happened to be our provider. The students had subnetted a few floors and *everyone* was running napster. We figured that 80~95% of the university's bandwidth was being used by this illegal connection, and it was really jamming our outside connections. We had a few issues - one - it's not stealing because it's free, there is no compensation for internet access. Two, we had to prove willfull intent. Subsequent questioning of the guy subnetting out indicated that he was more guilty of Criminal Idiocity, willful neglect, gross negligence, and imcompetence (The code section hasn't been updated to include these as criminal crimes, but in the IT world, he is pretty much dead in the water). I had recently made precident within our State courts regarding Internet crime, but we felt that this was damn silly and had to find a good solution. What did we do? I took a Spydeco serrated knife and cut the dorm's network which had been laid out my years of students. You wanna see a white man rise to riot? Cut his network to shreds. The students were up in arms. I could hear people yelling as Quake connections dropped. Don't get me wrong, I'm not only a Police Officer, I have a BSCs, and I can appreciate the network laid out as I helped lay some of the cable when I lived in that dorm.. But to deny the whole uni access was out of the question. It was a fun call.
Ya know, I would have to agree with your point. All of my friends that are in college are in fairly poor financial shape right now. Why? The colleges they attend literally milk them dry. You pay for your room, you pay for your books, you pay for your supplies. This is all reasonable. But when you start charging students for additional little things like ethernet, it's getting a tad ridiculous. I mean, shouldn't phone lines and ethernet be included in the cost of the room? I also hear via my sister that OSU's cafeteria situation is in pretty bad shape, screwing-students-wise.
But what of me, you might ask? Well I joined the military. I don't plan on staying in, because I am going to college fulltime after I get out. I had no one to pay my way through college, and I could think of no other way to get my education without being TENS of THOUSANDS of dollars in debt before I even got the chance to set foot in the real world. No thanks, I'll let the US gov foot the bill on that one.
I worked at the Cornell university campus network department for 3 years and one of my duties was to compare our ethernet price/performance with that of other Ivy group schools (Ivy+duke,stanford,mit,caltech,u.chicago, and some others.)
At Cornell, we charged 82.50 a semester for a single unlimited access 10Base-T connection. This was probably the highest payment of any schools in the group that went straight to the network department. Most other schools charged a similar amount that was either absorbed into housing fees, student activity fees, or suplimented by other university departments.
Many schools didn't "charge" their students directly for the service and hid the cost in housing payments (not an entirely unreasonable thing to do, over 85% of the 6500 ports were subscribed to people in dorms). In all though, the costs ranged between $50 and $120 per student if you ask the net admin of those schools.
At Dartmouth though, up until recently, you were pretty much forced to use a mac, and everyone knows exactly which school you went to when you say "blitzmail" =)
The fact that they paid technology fees doesn't mean that they paid for the service that they took. It doesn't mean the technology fees weren't for the services they helped themselves to either. If I go to a grocery store, I can't take whatever I want even though I've paid them for food. The grocery store analogy doesn't fit because at the store, you purchase a specific product one time. This deals with different services sold by the university avaialable over a period of time.
They're paying fees. Is that some sort of donation or does something come from that?
Plus what's wrong if the student would rather pay $150 for the fucking cable given the school refuses to wire rooms.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
How about getting work done?
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
It wasn't the bandwidth read the article.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
$25 a year for Ethernet....not that bad, consider they have to pay techs. Of course, I don't use them, but some other people do. Bring in an old 486 and a no-name Ethernet card with no drivers. Then call and wonder why the network doesn't work because they can't get to Hotmail.
Of course, cable TV and a phone line is free. We don't have AC in the guys dorms, and my room usually gets to 80 degrees. Up to 90 at the beginning of the year.
Why, electrons of course! Over the course of the month during which the unauthorized line was connected, something on the order of 10^10^490 electrons were outright stolen by these students and stored in their computers or elsewhere in their room!
I think a deal could be struck if the students agreed to return the kidnapped electrons in exchange for dropped charges or at least a reduced sentence.
kugano
The electric outlet is also a great way to get the phone line replaced, if they're noisy, but wouldnt you hate to burn down a building or something? BTW- all ethernet card output circuits include a really cool thing that protects against such malfeasance. The (usually the biggest on the pcb) big black box on the ethernet card is a isolation/power supply device. it has a minimum isolation voltage in the thousands of volts.So the output is protected against 110/220 volt 'accidents'. But, In the original article, Everyone contends for bandwidth on an ethernet. colliding packets delay for a time, then try to retransmit. two quake servers on a 10Mbps ethernet is terribly congested; If these guys played online,there could be nothing left for the university to operate on.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Hmm.. there is nothing in the article that says they are paying to have ethernet in their rooms. It just says that the diffrence in cost between two totaly diffrent dorms, one with ethernet, is 24 dolars. They however do not live in one with ethernet in the rooms. How is it that leaching etherenet access from a computerlab down stairs when you arn't paying to have it in your room is ok in the real world? This *is* basicaly stealing. Not very severe theft but it is theft none the less.
And as for a technology fee, if it is anything like my school, you pay a fee for access to the computers acrost campus. That fee does not, however, entitle you to access in your room. To get that privilge you must pay to live in one of the wired dorms.
-----
Can I Play With Madness?
This is news but I think most of the /. community is taking this the wrong way. These guys stole internet access. Same as someone leaching cable off the house next to them. These guys probably could have gotten their internet access by making some noise in the local media about it, if this was a university oversight and they should have gotten access. Instead they took it to themselfs to leach ethernet off of the school. They commited a crime. Get over with it.
And 300 ft??? Jeeze buy a damn modem and deal with 56k.
-----
Can I Play With Madness?
I also agree with others that this was probably the WORST possible move for any university, even more so for a major state university. I'm sure that the authorities involved didn't have the slightest clue that anyone would care that not all dorms are wired or that students are charged for the privilige of dorm room access.
Of course, at the University of Oklahoma, all the dorms are wired ;)
---
"It looks just like a Telefunken U47"
It's a bit more like you sublet and you leave beers in your landlord's fridge. Actually, unless they were doing some massive fileserving or downloading pirated DvD's, I'd reckon the damage is far *less* than the amount of space a 12 pack would take up in a fridge. The second article seems a little slanted but I'll play along here- Apparently they were allowing students to use their computers to check email, do internet searches, etc. This seems like a win-win situation, as it keeps those students out of the campus labs, reduces wear/tear on their lab computers and makes the students happier as they don't have to walk from building to building. Something I'm curious about also. The articles mention that they were using an abandoned(?) computer lab to plug these into, and that they were previously allowed to take their computers down to there to use. I could understand a visit from some of the network admin's cronies telling them to stop if the school was so upset about this, but arrest seems a little over the top.
mcrandello@my-deja.com
rschaar{at}pegasus.cc.ucf.edu if it's important.
Assuming the computers are grounded, there's not much danger of injury -- the ethernet card would short out, destroying the computer and breaking or fusing the circuit. You'd be in more danger of grounding the whole building, and blowing out all of your circuit breakers (probably fuses in a building that old).
One more point -- they had it for a month or two before anyone noticed? Bravo, bravo. Sigh
AetiusI'll address these one at a time.
Having lived in a residence over the summer term, and being on the top floor, I can attest that it gets *DAMN* hot, especially when you don't have any A/C (I didn't). Why would you need A/C to get your work done? Simple. It prevents your ink from running.
That's right. When people get hot, their body's reaction it to sweat. The sweat forms into globules and drips down onto paper, and makes ink smear. I for one would refuse to sign my name at the top of a paper that is totally unreadable due to sweat stains.
And if you're thinking: "But most papers nowadays are written on computer." I have news for you, the danger increases. Just think about it: Computers use electricity, sweat is a good conductor, sweat on computer makes nasty shocks. It would be a health hazard to use a computer when you're sweating.
I'll rip my example straight from a video game. Ever played The Sims? Well, if you didn't, I'll tell you what happens. You take a person and send them to work everyday without any time to unwind or relax. Eventually they just crash and can't do anything.
Same thing happens to students. We need distractions to prevent nervous breakdowns, suicides, and switching into Arts programs. I just can't imagine myself going on for a whole term doing nothing but studying because my dorm doesn't allow me to do anything *BUT* study.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
dear anonymous coward,
i love you, you are the only one who seems to see whats going on here. simple put, THEY WERE NOT IN THE SAME ROOM AS THE PLUG, and have gone to jail for it. does anybody see how rediculous that is? i hope so. i think that the university should be disenrolled from its self for being run by morons.
I can see this being a problem. What if your cable company has multi-user modems and prohibits the setting up of your own proxy?
I have MediaOne/RR cable and they charge $15 more per IP# yet don't give any more bandwidth to go along with it. If they really wanted to they could officially outlaw proxies.
To use other Internet service providers, a student has to purchase a digital-to-analog phone converter and can only use the connection after business hours.
What's the odds that the reported who wrote this knows that a "digital-to-analog phone converter" is also called a modem?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I don't see what the big deal about this is. They *were* stealing access. Other students had to pay for it, but these students decided not to. Its analogous to stealing cable. Admitedly, its not the same as swipping hardware from the IT labs. But its still theft. Of course, this brings up the horrible state of OSU's Internet service for its students. I think thats an equally large crime.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The article said very clearly that they could use the connection. They were basically just using it in a way different than the university intended. It could be the case that there are good reasons to not let students run their on cable to connect up their rooms. Why didn't the university just handle it themselves? no reason to call the cops and arrest the kids.
I go to UGA and tuition is 100% paid for (if you're in-state) by all those lottery-ticket-buying folk, so all we pay is $1000 for the dorms or whatever
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
As a few readers have pointed out, these students did commit theft of service, and that is what they will be tried for. Since /. is frequented by SysAdmin types, I would think that you folks would understand this.
My college, UB, has a ResNet jack in every room of every dorm and apartment. But some of us want more than one. If we plug a hub into the wall, it is illegal according to the contract we signed. But if we set up a box doing IP Masq and then put a hub behind it, it is not illegal. (And no one can detect it) It is a fine distinction, but one worth taking note of if you want to stay out of trouble.
It is time people stopped looking at these things like college pranks, and started looking at them like real ToS, just the same as "borrowing" your neighbor's electricity or cable.
_sig_ is away
I've been selling school bandwidth with wireless networking hardware for almost a year now to people in the immediate vicinity to some of the dorms. I can see that as being internet theft but using a cable within a building is silly to be called theft. What I'm doing is definitely theft but based on my tracking of traffic the people that pay me for a 24/7 connection don't use much at all. None operate servers and they are all aware of the rules that I lay down for them.
... and how is taking something that's not yours and that you're not paying for not theft?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Actually I most likely *WOULD* do the exact same thing... but that still doesn't make it any more legal.
Just because it's the logical thing to do doesn't mean that they shouldn't get in trouble for it...
The article also says that there were other ways for them to get access in their room through outside ISPs...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
But what you are not understanding is that it *IS* theirs, and they *DID* pay for it.
How exactly is that? They didn't get a room with access... they're *NOT* paying the $24/semester...
-- Dr. Eldarion --
No, you're wrong.
The University provided these students access to the ethernet jacks on limited terms. Specifically, those terms were, "You can use our ethernet jacks while you're in our labs. You can get a room with ethernet for $24 per semester."
These kids wanted ethernet in their room, but they didn't want to pay the fee. That violates the contract.
Let's get away from the religious zealotry of "Free the network for everyone!" for a moment. What if it were another shared, public resource? For example, library reference books. My college library had certain books which you could not take out of the library. There was no option to take the book straight home, do all your research, and bring it straight back. The library's terms of service required that you use the book on their premises. So that's what we did. Nobody goes around shouting "communication must be free!" when it's library books... But these kids needed to read email in their room, so that makes it okay? No.
A service contract is committed to by all parties under certain terms and conditions. In this case, most of us agree that the conditions were unreasonable and antiquated, but that doesn't grant the right to violate said conditions.
-JTB
Actually, this case clearly points out, one should not assume that a university provides high-speed network access to every dorm room. It's very common in private institutions, where the number of students (and, therefore, dorm rooms) is comparitively low. Large state universities still face a huge capital expenditure to provide that service. And fast network access in the dorm room is not a top priority among the target audience of state universities.
There are several OSU's out there. I guess it's OK State U., but still. I was thinking that was a college that a lot of people I know go to (OR SU). It kinda defeats the purpose of reading brief news headlines if I have to dig through it to clarify something.
anyone know of a good 802.11 PCI card with both MacOS and Linux drivers?
PCI? no. ISA, and PCMCIA, yes, at 2Mb/sec - fast enough for printers and internet.
Webgear has some decent wireless cards. The ISA is little but an adapter for the PCMCIA cards, and there's a difference between the "2.4" line and the PRO line. It seems that due to some foulup, 2.4's are 802.11 "compatible" while the Pro line are "compliant." In other words, if you need to mix brands, go with PRO, but otherwise save your money. There is the 2.4 networking kit, that for way less than $200US gives you 2 PCMCIA cards and ISA adapters.
If you're interested, the cheapest place that I've found them is PCNation.
And thanks to Jean Tourrilhes here are the drivers.
TangoChaz
"It's not enough to be on the right track -- you have to be moving faster than the train." -- Rod Davis, Editor of Seahorse Mag.
TangoChaz
--------------------
Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
I think that the school should just have these students wire in network connections to the upstairs room as "punishment" for the "crime". The school would feel like it was "paid back" and the students would be happy to have solved the problem. The only problem with this is it seems most colleges can only hire union labor that charges ungodly rates and thats why nothing can get done. Not to mention that it takes at least 3 tries for these union employees to get the damned thing right, but I digress.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
so is it me.. or does everything seem funny when you have not slept in 30 hours?
Okay Okay, these bums were stealing some bandwidth. Slashdot found it and sensationalized it.. a couple of "omg they are out to get us" posts pop up, the group mindset kicks in. After about the 100th post the moderators start moderating up the real comments. *yawn* what the hell im laughing my ass off. I guess I should sleep.
heh heh
JA
You have some pretty interesting points but your reasons to "Crucify" OSU are alltogether poorly stated. Let's crucify OSU because it had a HUGE crime rate compared to other schools. Let's crucify OSU because, from what i've been reading about this dorm, it was a pretty shitty place to live...internet access aside.
The point is that OSU is coming down WAY too hard on these guys for a little college ingenuity. Most colleges have a mandatory "technology" fee as well as more fees than you can shake a stick at just to live in a dorm (not to mention a shitty one at that). All arguments aside, what these guys did was wrong...but this shouldn't have ever become a national media outcry (or at least a slashdot news item). They should perhaps be fined by the school for the access "taken" without consent or something very minor. This just seems to be another example of a largely non-technical group of individuals persecuting someone(s) because they don't really understand the seriousness (or laughability) of what's going on.
talk about crucifiction...Here's a question...just about every other college i know of provides free ethernet access to most, if not all, of its students. OSU isn't.
Now here's a slashdot poll - because of this news item, who wants to get their CS degree from OSU???
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
If my buddies a floor down want to let me on their hub, they're pooling network access with me. How is pooling illegal?
Pool your net access and go toWill I retire or break 10K?
Welcome to Columbus, Ohio...Home of the extremely anal-retentive police force. Yes, what they did was obviously illegal. But speaking from the dismal experience of living here 21 years, the closer you get to campus...The more ridiculous the *penalty* is. I think if there's one thing Ohioans love is a good scandal. OSU has an ongoing crisis with its priorities. But read on...In the "Students await arraignment in Internet theft case" article the accused even admit:
"The computers in the basement cannot run the programs we need to run (for class assignments)," Wolcott said. "They don't have enough memory. Most of them don't even have word processors."
So it comes down to ethics. What would you do? It's easy for us to play the patron saints and say that it's wrong and that we'd never do it. We know it's wrong and that there's the possibility of severe criminal implications if we're caught. But again think of the situation. What if...the only computers you were faced with had very little memory, and were bought from Crazy Kenny's 90 percent off sale. Placing one of these machines next to an E-machine might make it (The E-machine) look pretty darn good. And when you have the same 5 goons in the computer lab playing Quake 24 hours a day, what else are you going to do? The situations that OSU students face with their bare bones computer labs, almost make it an appetizing option...to "steal the internet". Not like the Administrators that caught them have to worry about it, it can be safely assumed where the 'up to par' computers/network access went. There is no empathy, there is no "Hmm, maybe we should look into why our students are doing this" It is not available where and when it is needed. And of course the precious Stout hall director Jackie Bolin...cannot comment on what has happened...She hasn't been told what to say yet. Kind of sad that those college students couldn't get what they were paying their tuition for...isn't it?
Hmm....actually, at least in California, it would in fact be called theft, probably "theft of services". Though it is a massive overreaction to charge them with a misdmeanor, which results in a criminal record. At most, this should call for some kind of campus discipline.
Ah....but who will Moderate the Meta Moderators?
Jeesh, this country has trillions of dollars to spend on things like sending Chelsea Clinton around the world and this poor place calling itself a university can't afford to wire its students. To add insult to injury they prosecute these kids for taking initiative and bypassing the BS so they can check their email and hey maybe even spend some time on napster..... Damn shame.
> It's akin to piggybacking a phone line from a neighboor
No, it's akin to piggybacking a phone line for a payphone
-- I Beowulfed my left and right brains!
In legal terms Theft must be tangible. So they can not be charged with Theft. They did steal it is just not theft. Network services is not something you can hold in your hand. This is similar to most fraud cases. The first poster was just making a legal point.
Try a legal dictionary yourself. Theft does NOT apply only to an item you can hold or touch. Try electronic currency theft, for example. Those criminals get theft as well as computer-related charges.
theft
n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale). In many states, if the value of the property taken is low (for example, less than $500) the crime is "petty theft," but it is "grand theft" for larger amounts, designated misdemeanor or felony, respectively. Theft is synonymous with "larceny." Although robbery (taking by force), burglary (taken by entering unlawfully) and embezzlement (stealing from an employer) are all commonly thought of as theft, they are distinguished by the means and methods used and are separately designated as those types of crimes in criminal charges and statutory punishments.
See also: burglary embezzlement larceny robbery
Don't try to KNOW everything, just know how to FIND it.
I've been to many a university that had shitty access for students, and insisted on charging them $50-$100 at the least for a "technology fee." Many universities have no forethought at all when it comes to technology, an excellent example of which is the University of Southern Mississippi. They spent millions remodelling a building two years ago, and didn't have the clue to wire it for ethernet. Many profs have to DIAL UP while on campus to use resources, and dealing with the tech group is like eating glass. If you pay, you should receive.
I have dealt with this problem before, customers were connecting hubs to their connections, and would have 2-8 computers running off one paid connection. Our policy was just to shut off the port, until the problem was corrected...if it happened again...well...modems suck!
perl -e "print(pack('H37','4d65726b7572795a40676e7572642e6e6574'))"
While I wholeheartedly agree with the ends to which these folks were striving it appears that they did transgress a few moral 'firewalls'. Personally I hope that the engineering student actually did this within his first couple of weeks in the dorm - I would expect no less. The university's solution of calling in law enforcement officials is an incredibly dumb move of purely academic proportions. It sounds like some network admin staffer is covering up a serious lack of physical administration and log surfing.
The way I read it, the students are paying a per smester tech access fee, they had physical access to the ports, and the only real crime is one of mere linear footage. True - they could have caused damage and/or exposed the building to fire or electrical malfunction, but instead of criminal charges, why not just make the 'offenders' take a network cabling certification course and spend a little time wiring up some of the dorms?
one better than mcleodeight
So yes, all schools do charge. I mean they have to, it costs money to maintain the network infarstructure and to get the connections to the internet. Some have explicit fees, others do not, but they all charge in some way or another.
IP addressing in the dorms is done through DHCP. How for the first couple of weeks the DHCP server will give an IP to any computer that asks for that one. However, if you want to be able to access the network after that time you must go to a webpage and give it your name, student id, pin, and MAC address. It will then authorise that mac address to get an IP. The routers are tied to the DHCP server so they will refuse to route packets to or from you unless you have authorised with it.
This way, it is insured that each student has only one computer using the network. Which eithernet jack you use is irrelevant, since it is computer based. It also makes moving dorm rooms simple, and locating a student in the event of network abuse.
At any rate, if something like this happened at U of A, it just wouldn't be an issue. The most that would have happened is the hall director of the residence hall would have made them get rid of the cable if it was causing problems (not that they'd need to do this, there are 2 jacks in each room), there is no worry of unauthorised network access, since you have to register your comptuer, and you need a student ID to do that (you can only register one per person). It really works quite well.
IU is one of the largest schools in the nation, and is in the top ten for most connected (not just my bragging, actual rankings have said that).
We pay $25,000/month for our connection. Which may be lower than some other schools, simply because IU has always been active in increasing the backbone and bandwidth in the state.
So most likely, the most any school pays is three or four hundred thousand dollars.
Ryan Stultz
Four people (or 24!) on one connection is likely going to generate more traffic than one person on one connection.
Unless that one person was running Napster... oops, now that is illegal on campuses too...
Have they banned FTP yet? You can download MP3s over FTP...
Is it just me or are the American businesses and authorities getting dumber by the minute?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
I better watch what length ethernet cable I use for my @home service. I wouldn't want to make them mad by adding a longer cable because I was too lazy to lug my computer, monitor and speakers down the hall to the family room.
Actually they do have business using that line. The reason the University is angry is that they charge 24$ a semester for internet access in the rooms and now the students have to get up and walk 280 feet less to get downstairs to plug in. Wonder what they would have been able to say if the students hooked up a wireless Anypoint network...the physical connection to the hub/switch would still be less than 20 feet.
If I had the opportunity to do this I wouldn't even blink. My Uni (Surrey, in the UK) has recently got ntl to cable up all the student rooms on campus.
I now have a phone in my room and a RJ45 socket. The cable runs as far as where the hub should be but the Uni apparently doesn't have enough money to put the backbone infrastructure in for a couple more years. Next year will be the cable modem though :-)
But they do manufacture their own satellites, 'cos obviously that's pretty cheap to do ;-(
wrighty.
"I am Jack's smirking revenge"
Actually, many universities allow the auditing of classes. You just can't get a degree if you don't pay for it, but you can get the knowledge for free.
-- nolesrule
Yhea, no telling what kind of damage they could have done. Who knows, they might have lost the Token Ring in the Ethernet and put the computer diagnostics in endless loop. It might take sys admins months to recover the lost Token Ring! ;-) Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out alive :-)
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Put that creativity to good use. If the university has extra ports and cable it should be put to use. This solution works for both. The students get internet, and the university gets it installed for free.
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
>Not physical evidence, but virtual evidence: a quick look at the dhcp server logs will reveal any unauthorized usage.
:-)
Yeah... and I'm sure the students will have their Ethernet Addresses pasted on their door...
"Look sheriff... some evidence. The criminals left some car paint on the pole they smashed into. Now all we have to do is look for BLACK cars!"
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Isn't this pretty straightforward? You have to pay a nominal fee to have access to the Ethernet in the dorms. Rather than pay the nominal fee these folks simply took it upon themselves to install their own connection to their rooms.
/. and its supporters generally believe that anytime geeks are inconvenienced they're warranted in breaking rules and laws. I work at a university which has some really stupid rules re: Internet access, but the solution is not just to say "F--- you and the rules" which seems to be the /. approved methodology.
Uhhh... Well... how can they get it again? By paying for it? If you had read the article and used your cognitive reasoning you would have known that they COULDN'T pay for it, and that 300 ft. of CAT5 costs WAY more than $24.
>Seems like the university's case is pretty straightforward.
Sure it is. They just have to admit in court that they are lazy bastards and didn't want to put the cable in themselves.
They already pay for the access (they could get it in a lab). They just wanted to access their stuff elsewhere. Should my ISP also put me in jail because I telnet into their shell server from and internet connection that ISN'T over a phone line?
>Apparently
What is the solution? Most schools have IDIOTS for Sysadmins... they aren't likely to say "Ok... Here is a solution that would work". They will instead say "Here are the rules. No, you can't do it. No we have no suggestions.". That is the diplomatic way of saying F--- You. So the students said it back to them (diplomatically).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>There's lots of benifits to ethernet, but it's not really neccecery to study (no really, just ask anyone else in the country who doesn't go to college)
Want to bet? I get assigments all the time in College that require me to access websites and read what is on them. I then have to write assigments based on this information... Seems required to me.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>If these people wanted a port in their rooms, he could have paid the extra $24/semester.
$24 is a lot cheaper than 300 feet of CAT5. Need I say more? The students did it because they COULDN'T pay for it...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Take me to jail.
Ok. You are breaking the law. You didn't pay for the access.
>I am using a stolen acct right now. It is not my faulth that the school board (N.O.) here is stupid enough to have the user id the same as the passwd. If they didn't want them to use it so bad they would have protected that port or passwd better.
Did you pay for that access (no you didn't, in fact you said you didn't)? The students at that University did... Your argument is sh*t.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>If you reprogram your digital watch to store answers to a Calculus test, that's a very ingenius hack. But it's still cheating, and when you get tossed out of university for cheating, I won't have much sympathy for you.
Read the article.
That isn't ANYTHING like what they did. They did NOT use the network to steal answers to tests and assignments. They did it so they could _complete_ assignments. They did NOTHING illegal with the network, EXCEPT connecting to it. If they brought a university pen (that they borrowed from a teacher and never gave back) into a test and wrote it with that, I'm sure you would feel very differently.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>They avoid paying the $24/mo fee, but on the other hand, if the university can't provide it, it's only to be expected.
Very right.
If you can't buy it because the people selling it are idiots, and there is a lot of it, and you take some, is it illegal?
If the oil companies decided to stockpile gas, and simply decided they would no longer sell any... would you be mad at someone who stole it?
If the paper companies decided to stockpile paper, and refused to sell any of it, would you feel it illegal for a university student to steal a little of it for themselves, and their freinds, so they could get their work done?
The article clearly states they took the network connection because they had to get their work done. The other options were quite obviously unacceptable... Equivalent to writing assigments with a wood burning tool, or to writing assigments with a $1000 pen-to-fake-paper adapter, that has a rental cost of $20 a month.
I don't think they should be going to jail. And I think the University is DAMN sorry they got all this bad press.
Yeah, I think people should have to pay for things. But I _ALSO_ think it should be illegal for companies not to offer products to consumers out of lazyness. And I feel NO sympathy for a company when someone steals something from them that the company wouldn't sell to them (that they WOULD sell to others).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>>These guys went out and bought the cable and hooked it up. Now tell me again, what was it they were stealing?
>The right to access the network
They already have that right or else they wouldn't be allowed in the computer lab.
>What if all the students decided not to pay, but rather to steal access?
They pay for their NETWORK (they got internet as a SIDE BONUS) access via school fees and taxes. This is a REQUIREMENT, not an option (the network access). That makes it something the University MUST support. No options. They (the University) decided to violate that. So the students took it into their own hands.
>What if instead of paying for classes, they just went and sat in without paying? According to you, they aren't stealing. But if everyone did it, no one would get paid. Do you want that?
They are paying for classes. What if teachers started charging for telling students about assigments? Would you say it is illegal for other students to question each other as to what is due to avoid paying for assignments? Well.. the students CLEARLY needed the network connection, just as they CLEARLY need to know what assigments are due.
>According to you, they aren't stealing. But if everyone did it, no one would get paid.
Taxes and student fees are for that. And are you saying that $24 is going to break the University? Huh?
>Do you want that?
No. I don't want students to be unable to finish assigments simply due to the slackoffs in computer services either. I say the students win, they ARE the customer!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Can you imagine the mess if everyone got a spool of bulk cat5 utp and a box of rj45 connectors and a crimer and just had at it?
Sure, the University would start physically stopping students from getting at the HUBS/Switches. Isn't that what people usually do with a valuable resource? Lock it up? Would there be ANY computers left in the University if they weren't locked up? Well... time for sysadminds to buy a clue.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
You think they CHOSE to live in a dorm to save $24? (which, IIRC, is MUCH LESS than the cost of 300 feet of CAT 5).
Doesn't compute. Even if the cable was free, it is still only $24. Cheaper than a textbook for sure.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>That's the real question tho - if they could have legally taken a laptop downstairs and plugged into the same backbone, the theft of service charge probably won't stick.
:-)
What if they used the laptop as a router... the laptop would be plugged into the cable in the computer lab, and THEIR cable would go from THEIR laptop to THEIR room. IIRC, you CANNOT stop someone from using THEIR OWN PERSONAL equipment...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>I can split MY cable all I want for MY personal use
But you cannot own something you are leasing. If you look at the Cable TV cable, you will clearly see "Property of CableCo" written on it. You are leasing that connection, and would be giving service to someone not paying.
All the students who were accessing this illegal network hookup were already paying for it (school fees). This is like cabling yourself to someone else's house because the CableCo is too lazy to put a cable to your house. They would also be sending checks to the cable company for the cost of the service. Is that stealing?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Ok you say public money pays for it? Does that give the public the right to tap in and host a mp3/warez/pr0n site?
I have the right, RIGHT NOW, to walk into my local public university. I might have trouble using the network, being that it needs passwords/user ids. If I had a password/user id, there is nothing stopping me from using the computers, just as there is nothing stopping me from sitting on the University furniture. Of course, a lock on the door would prevent me from using the computers...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Yeah well then you pay for the server where all the university transcripts are kept.
These are copyrighted/personal/private material. They are not public record (although in some states they can be). That is different from university resources. I can walk into a public university and sit on the furniture, because that isn't private student equipment. I cannot read other people's mail because that is private. Transcripts == private, computer == public.
>Better still, maybe you can enter your own marks?
Uhhh... I don't think I would find a teacher to sign my new marks. Sure I could enter them... but they would be worth nothing. There is nothing illegal with me using marking software, just that I cannot pretend I am a professor (that would be illegal).
>Maybe you can run a d.net client on this server since it's a public resource?
That would require ILLEGAL hacking into the server. That is like B&E. Try harder...
I could not use the computers if they required a key to get into the lab door because that would be B&E (If I could not get the key). See the difference? Front doors unlocked, public resource (no this doesn't count for private homes/business). Inside locked up, private resource...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>Question : Does every single student at your university live in a residence room, have a computer, and have an ethernet connection?
No. They all do have computers though. The computer labs at my collge have PII-300's with 64 Mb RAM and therefore are usable. They include ZIP Drives on the computers so internet stuff can be taken home. The lab at this University was a POS (in the article). They COULDN'T spend hours waiting for web browsers to open, etc... or they would never get their work done.
>You *don't* need an ethernet connection in your room/apartment/house/whatever and you don't have a constitutional right to have one.
You do if the school's computers are not up to the job, but yours is. Denying you one IS denying you your education, which you PAID for. If you are denied something you have paid for, someone is breaking the law (the University). Not a constitutional right, but the right of a customer to what they have paid for.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>>$24 is a lot cheaper than 300 feet of CAT5. Need I say more? The students did it because they COULDN'T pay for it...
:-)
>What? That makes absolutely no sense!
Ok. English isn't your language... Try this:
$24 Are you saying they couldn't afford to pay the $24 a semester surcharge for a port with a room, so instead, they buy 300 feet of Cat5, which is, as you admit, a lot more expensive that $24?
My God man... read what I said, don't read INTO what I said. I said they couldn't pay for it. What is confusing in that? They COULDN'T PAY FOR IT because the University wouldn't offer them it.
>Why would I want to pay $24 to the school when I could pay X amount of dollars more for the same service...
Because you didn't read the article...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Yeah, you can run that cable, just don't violate any laws doing it...
Like: Building codes, etc...
If you used a wireless ethernet adapter I will bet you wouldn't violate any laws.
Of course, you didn't mean what you said, right?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
>the universities PRIVATELY owned network
'Scuse me... SINCE WHEN DID PUBLIC MONEY (MY TAXES) PAY FOR A PRIVATE NETWORK? (I decided to write that in caps BECAUSE you LIKE them SO MUCH!).
>it's not a public right, you know..
And you know what... it certainly isn't my public right to inspect the local planning office (not). If I PAY FOR IT I CAN USE IT. I PAY TAXES. I CAN USE WHATEVER PUBLIC SERVICE I WANT. A STATE UNIVERSITY IS A PUBLIC SERVICE. AND WILL WILL NOW stop typing in caps.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The U overreacted, as Us often do. Many people posting talking about THEFT and STEALING seem to be as well. From what I've read of this, the students did not have ethernet in their room and were allowed & encouraged to use the port... It's just that the port was downstairs. So this was not a matter of avoiding a fee. A 300 foot Ethernet Cable cost them more than $24
This is just a misuse of a dorm privilage and should have been handled as such: the same as filling up the floor fridge with all of your food, staying on the hall phone for 6 hours, or some such nonsense. The RAs or Dorm Manager should have given them a stern talking to, with no publicity, no black mark on records, etc... It would be different, perhaps, if they had been forbidden to use the port entirely, but they were not..
This should have been handled by the dorm, but was mostly likely blown out of proportion because everything that has to do with the internet is blown out of proportion lately.
Josh Sisk
So, if you took one of those books, and opened it up to the page you were interested in, and put it back on the shelf (open) so that it could face the window, and then you used a telescope from your home to read it, would you expect the cops to come and arrest you?
That is basically what those kids did.
--
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
actually just my handle, AAArg ink, if you want to see it:
0 /colorpictjustus.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Byte/535
wasn't anything offensive, just pissed him off that a recently repainted (white) wall was so thoroughly nailed.
Pranks/Vandalism/Thefts like this go on in college campuses all over. For example, I spray painted at 10 feet by 30 feet wall over spring break a couple years ago. The prof found out who it was (me) and could have fucked me over, but he only asked me to repaint it. He even gave me a deadline a couple weeks after he found out so I could finish the current project before I repainted it.
Next time I spray paint a wall I won't be so public about it but...
If school officials acted reasonably (ie tell the students to stop). I'd be surprised if the student's wouldn't cut off thier own access...(yada yada redundant shit). School discipline should be more than enough even if they didn't comply.
Random note: Personally I think the bigger problem is the that mp3/napster issues. At least at Cal, its was really FUCKING up the entire school network, (not just dorm networks)...ie the Architecture Computer labs at Cal.
I am amazed that any university is able to house its students under living conditions that would not be acceptable in the "real world": no electricity, water "privileges"? OSU should be more concerned about students tumbling down the basement stairs in search of the only available electricity; or being attacked on their way to a building with electricity in order to complete the coursework for which they are paying. Maybe a better story than these students being arrest for using - excuse me - stealing electricity, would be: "Building (OSU) condemned for substandard living conditions."
A mind is a terrible thing to waste on some people.
I was at PSU at the time that happened, it was quite chaotic. They were ripping LIGHT POLES out of the ground. I was all the way across campus when it started, asleep. The best thing was, it happened on my birthday. I felt honored :)
Personally, I doubt that these kids were given the option of paying the $24/semester. The university admits that they would wire all dorms and presumably charge everybody $24/semester more if they could afford to run the cable. Really, would you rather pay $48/year or buy 300 feet of Cat. 5 cable and perform a service for your school by offering your time (let's say $20/hr.) to run a drop to your dorm. If you do not offer all students the opportunity to access the Ethernet connection, then they are creating a priviledged class of people with faster access. Sure, not everybody NEEDS an ethernet connection to study, but then people do not need laptops or even computers (You have to pencil C++ code for the AP CS exam)--however, it is a luxury that should be available to all who want it. Speaking as somebody who has applications out to seven universities, I made sure that every dorm at each of the schools was wired with Ethernet. I may create an online blacklist of all schools that do not offer adequate Ethernet connections so that students can make informed decisions and force schools like OSU to make Ethernet connections a priority to remain competitive.
I "stole" ethernet at UMBC by running a wire from a dorm with Ethernet to my dorm, and even provided access to others via a linux box with ip masquerading.
When UCS (university computing services) found out, they laughed about it, but Res Life didnt. UMBC is not the greatest, but I think that OSU needs to lighten up a bit. All I had to do was some community service, there wasn't even police involvement when I was cought.
Yes there are other people out there doing this (or have done this). I'm known around campus as "that guy that ran the wire". It sends the message to the university that they need to get with the times. UMBC attempts to boast its "image" by saying it is advanced in technical areas... but didn't even have the dorms wired, and yes we had a crappy PBX system too.
Fortunately, the dorms and some appartments are wired now. I didn't want to have to set up a wireless adapter and hide it in the library. I think OSU seems to be a little harsh on the whole subject.
Next year UBC will start charging for bandwidth for laptop users in libraries-- apparently they're unhappy with the people in the dorms who're using Napster, so the people who connect in the libraries (me) get to pay for bandwidth for checking email. They haven't set the fees yet.
It's a good thing I have plenty of bandwidth on my cable connection at home!
That's essentially asking if illegal parking would be illegal. Call it whatever you want. If they parked their cars without a permit, they most likely would not be jailed, but their vehicle could be towed and they could face a fine. I think most people are missing the point here.
If I live next door to you and I go over and watch cable TV there is nothing wrong with that. However if I run a cable from your house to my house (a 20 ft cable or a 300 ft cable -- doesn't matter) to get free cable TV, that is theft of services. It should be obvious to anyone that this is wrong.
My guess is that the students probably knew that what they were doing wasn't something they should be doing and now they have to pay. Granted, the punishment seems a bit harsh but they broke the rules and there are consequences to be faced. When you get into trouble, sometimes there will be mercy, and sometimes their won't. The proper approach is to be thankful for the times there is mercy instead of angry at the times when there isn't.
I have read the story -- You are still missing the point I am trying to make. It seems as if some people are using the length of the cable to justify their actions. My comment about the cable length in the cable TV example was to explain that it wasn't the length of the cable that made it a crime, it had more to do with the location.
This also holds true for what the OSU students did-- the cable length had nothing to do with it, it had more to do with the location. The downstairs area vs. their dorm rooms.
If I can use a 20 ft cable to reach from my house to yours, is it still ok for me to watch your cable TV?
Please do the same thing that you request of me -- read my post and give things a bit of thought before responding quickly with unintelligent obscenities.
First let me say that OSU is not that bad. In fact OSU was named 'most wired' University at one point in time. OSU had network before most other State Universities. And they are building new 'on campus' apartments that will have full network access.
That being said, I think OSU has taken this way too far. They could have, and should have, taken care of this issue 'in house'.
Every OSU Instructor I've talked to about this just laughs and thinks its ridiculous. I have to wonder who actually made the decision to bring the police in on this. Can you say DUMB?
Anyway, if you have not figured it out, I am a student at OSU. Not only that I am the one that supplied the 300' cable to the students in Stout. They were friends and they needed cable; I had a spool collecting dust and gave it to them. I didn't see anything wrong with what they wanted if for (and still don't).
They made their own cable and plugged it into an outlet that was available for their use. What's wrong with that?
This is just -stupid- on the part of OSU. This does not mean that OSU sucks or is not a good University. All Universities make mistakes, this one just happened to get our attention because we could see ourselves doing the same thing.
Just my thoughts.
Let me first start by saying that I'm not a regular /. poster. I follow /. occasionally, but I might be able to shed some light on this topic. See, I know all of the students involved. Actually, I can go further, I looked over the list of equipment and proposed wiring before it was even put into place. Maybe, just maybe, I can answer some of the questions posted in this forum.
/. is the first technical source to cover the incident. Interesting enough, channel 5's coverage included speaking with the assistant D.A., who stated the cable was a lightning hazard. The TV station ran a live feed, during a thunderstorm, and panned the cable, which was still in place after 3 weeks of the initial discovery. The next day, in a downpour, physical plant workers were under orders to 'remove the cable before anymore media coverage'.
1.) The Install:
The initial run was an estimated 260' of Cat-5 to an Ethernet port jack in an abandoned computer lab. (The lab was abandoned because a 'new' lab was installed this past fall. A lab with 8 'new' 486 based and P90 machines, of which only 3 are operable. The cable was run from the ceiling of the public access room, out a window, up to a second floor window and into a DUMB HUB (Linksys 10/100 hub series EFAH08W if you really must know) and sent out to all points from there. Additional 10/100 Linksys DUMB HUBS were used to distribute it. If you must know, the current wiring in the hall, runs from the Ethernet jack, into a 3Com router, which is uplinked to a 3com switch, that sits on a fiber. (It's pretty bad when a phone call to the right people gets the infrastructure...says something about internal security.)
2.) Fees and additional charges:
A technology fee is assessed to ALL students. It grants them access to ANY general computing lab, AND allows them to jack into any open Ethernet port on campus. (There are open ports around the tables in the new commons areas of the Student Union and in the renovated Classroom building.) The $24 fee argument in the O'Colly article isn't valid. The $24 difference between Willham and Kerr-Drummond hall WILL NOT BE CHARGED next year. In ENGLISH: That charge is NOT for Ethernet access.
3.) Who Turned Them in? :
Officially, nobody will comment, but her own staff has ratted her out. Hall Director, Jackie Bolin phoned high level officials about the 'violations', violating her chain of command. Staff members said a warning was issued, by officials, to Bolin to have the cable removed and students warned, but she specifically informed members of her staff to NOT relay the message to the students. So, none of the students were EVER warned about the infraction, as the police report stated. As it stands, Bolin has denied the students access to the hall judiciary process known as 'J-Board', and has been attempting to apply disciplinary actions, before the guilt of the parties charged is assessed. Bolin also forced Wolcott and Pyeatt out of their jobs as hall desk clerks. Bolin's conduct in general and in this situation has led students in her residence hall to circulate a petition to ask for her removal. You might notice that it was not CIS that discovered the new node on the network.
4.) Network Usage:
Two of the students were MIS majors, the remaining two were Grad students. The connection was primarily used for research, email, and homework. At one time over 13 people were connected to the 'illegal' network. NO SERVERS were running. No 'hacking' or 'illegal' activity was taking place. Over 20 different residents used computers attached to the 'illegal' network to access email, homework, and research as well.
5.) The Investigation:
Can you imagine a computer-oriented investigation in Oklahoma? It was a joke. The first day, Sean Ensz, the investigator, asked a lot of REALLY DUMB questions and confiscated the 8-port hub without a warrant (Leaving the network cards and the cables). This guy didn't have a CLUE, from the start the university was looking for a hacker case. They're really into this. Several weeks prior to this incident, they arrested a group of students for illegal Mp3 distribution and running an illegal server. They're trying to be cyber-crime fighters, I guess. Anyway, a couple days later Ensz brings over some CIS guy who doesn't have a clue, and they proceed, to turn on the student's computers and run winipcfg for the MAC address and IP numbers. (A little more O-State network info, an IP number is checked out from the DHCP server to a MAC address for a set number of days.) This guy had a list of suspected IP numbers he's trying to match. When he couldn't find a match, he gets a number that's close, scratches out the last two unit numbers and pencils in one of the student's. GUILTY. Now this Ensz guy starts calling students, trying to figure out who wired the connection. (Even I don't know who did the work) By now the student's realize that the university is out to prove something, on the advice of a lawyer, they quit cooperating. Then the shit hits the fan. Within days, a search warrant it served on all four students, and the university confiscates all but one of the network cards. Days later they get the rude wake up call. An interesting fact about the arrest was that the officers only tried to arrest 2 of the students. The 3 male students were within 4 doors of each other.
6.) The arrests:
8:00A.M. Officers woke up Wolcott and Voss. They told them to get dressed, and handcuffed them. They took them to the county courthouse where they were strip searched and dressed in orange coveralls. They placed them in a holding cell with 2 other offenders for 5 hours. They were charged with "Unauthorized Access of A University Network" and released on P.R. bond. The other two students turned themselves in and were processed that day.
7.) Media Coverage:
You might remember from the Wired article in '97 that OSU was named one of the most WIRED campuses in the nation. This has attracted SOME attention. The local media has covered the incident, but to date only channel 5 TV out of Oklahoma City (who ran a live remote) and The Stillwater NewsPress, have spoken with the students. Everyone else just runs the same police notes.
8.) Today:
CIS has cancelled access to university accounts of the students being charged. This includes Email and NetWare Login (required to use computer labs). Pyeatt couldn't even take a quiz in one of his classes, because he could not log in. Students have to go off campus to a friend's house, who has DSL, to do homework and research. Students are incurring legal fees, and ongoing troubles associated with the case.
From: "Martin G. McCormick" (martin@dc.cis.okstate.edu)
You are right. From what little you know about the situation, it does sound totally rediculous. Now, for the facts. I work for our Data Communications department, the ones who started all this. We found out what had happened because we had gotten a repair request from a person whose network port had quit working. It quit because these students who are being so picked on had removed that person's cable and spliced in their own. They also ran their own cable along a pipe chase up in the ceiling where there is asbestos insulation and fire sprinkler plumbing. Ya' don't mess with either of those things without getting in to a _LOT_ of serious trouble in most public buildings, not just here.
These same poor souls had done the exact same sort of thing last Fall and had been severely reprimanded, but not charged with any crimes. They basically got their hands slapped, but nothing serious.
We did not file the charges on these guys. The problem is that too many other people found out about the unauthorized activity and the Campus Police decided to really crack down. I think most of us thought it was extreme, but it kind of got out of our hands when the safety issues came up. That building was built in 1939 or 1949 or so and there is a lot of stuff that nobody would dare do today that was commonplace back then. Unless your school was built within the last 25 or so years, it probably has areas in some buildings that require special clearance for maintenance work since asbestos was so common until the sixties or seventies.
There are at least 5 dorms on campus that have jacks in every room and the one where the students ran their own network is scheduled to be closed down and renovated next year or so, but it isn't like they can't get access. If it was up to us, again, we probably would have just ripped out their cables, had Student Housing slap their hands again, maybe even not let them live there any more, and that would have been it. It sure didn't help matters, however, that they had all done this same thing 4 months ago and that they broke a working network connection and that they got in to asbestos, etc, but that is precisely how it all started. I imagine that your university is also a nice place to work and go to school, but I am sure they don't put up with this kind of activity and I am also sure that there comes a point in which the wheels of the gods start to grind at a level that any one person or department can not stop.
You now have the facts. I am sure I am wasting my time, but you probably didn't expect to get an answer. By the way, nobody even mentioned the fact that our network works very well because we build it to support the number of ports that are connected at any given time. When somebody puts their own hub on a port, it doesn't hurt anything, much, but if half of the students and staff did that, our network would just quit for everybody and so would yours. I assume it is Ethernet technology. Ethernet technology can not work properly above about 30% traffic level because of the asynchronous nature of the packets. We didn't even address this matter, but it is a fact and has nothing to do with rules or policies except that that is the way Ethernets work.
I hate it when one side of a story gets a life of its own so that's why I wasted my time to respond.
Sincerely,
Martin McCormick
"Paying" for it means different things. The tiny, un-dorm-connected university I attended had a "technology fee" which only let you use the labs. I just found it insulting the highest technology they had in these labs was 486 dx/33's. When I left in '96, they replaced one lab with pentium/133's. Still, what do I expect for twenty-some dollars. But, with an ethernet port in the dorm room, the university has to pay more for the total bandwidth used every month. No doubt having your personal connection, those student will download more content, likely more than that $4/month. So, they limit student's access by giving them stupid rules like no irc, email, giving them 486s, etc in the labs. It keeps their costs down, plain and simple.
And the buy-your-own-AC-unit analogy doesn't really work, as that would mean they pay for it themselves. A better analogy would be to tap an air duct and re-route cold air into their room from the AC dorms. If they subscribe with a local ISP, that would be more like buying their own AC unit. Tough titties that they don't want to pay $4/month for the net-connected dorms.
Actually it's a great setup for trapping somebody else. Just spoof your MAC address, go to a public network tap and do something flagrantly and stupidly illegal. Now just sit back and watch the innocent get in trouble.
----------------------------
Dude, what are you doing posting meaningful stuff on Slashdot for?
Yes, a university which respected its student body would refer a situation such as this to its academic judiciary. It seems from the facts presented that this isn't the case here -- the school doesn't respect its students enough to supply what's rapidly becoming base-level essentials. They're going ballistic for creative appropriation of what is already freely available. Excellent suggestion, snowball's chance in hell.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I got a semester of fast internet and some good admin experience. Fuck the meek.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
On the other hand...
a) I have one of those "we were nuts in college" stories (we apparently cross the building power main when we ran the cable, thus risking the coroner needing a dustbuster to pick us up)
b) I learned a lot about networking and routing with Linux.
I'm not trying to say it was wrong to do it, but IMHO this sort of thing doesn't warrant getting tossed into jail. The dorms routinely handle minor infractions (underage drinking, etc) "in-house", applying their own penalties instead of bothering the police. This seems like a more appropriate way to handle this one.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
They weren't paying? And who did pay? AFAIK, in most universities students pay for studying? Or in US universities pay to students?
:) and could be punished for that. But that's nothing to do with theft!
If students paid, why they can't use facilities? Other question is that they should have violated usage rules (same as I'd try to use computer of my TA and peek onto some interesting files
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
This is like getting pulled over and telling the cop that you pay their salaries.
You pay for access to everything that the college offers. They didn't offer a jack into that dorm room. Period.
I suppose that, by your logic, *anyone* could have done this. Now image several hundred dorm rooms stringing cable down to the computer lab. What's next, a lawsuit becouse they didn;t have enough open ports?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
They had a right to use the network. You are correct in that statement. But they had a fair and equal right along with everyone else there. Since you simply can't have thousands of rooms stringing their own ethernet cables around for access, you can't simply use the argument that they had the right. They had a right to the resources provided. An ethernet jack wasn't provided. Period.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
--
Interesting thought: Though Apple's base stations are a bit pricey, similar solutions based on the same set of protocols (someone link the IEEE doc for me, will ya'? It's 802.11 Thank'ee) for lower prices and higher capacity.
Strange; the Apple solutions are actually the cheapest I've seen. A remarkably unusual move for Apple, I'll admit. But nonetheless, I have yet to find anything which runs at that speed and capacity which is cheaper.
Of course, part of that might have to do with the fact that the AirPort cards are proprietary (from what I've read on the subject, they've actually got it running on a modified IDE bus, of all things). The antennas are built into the cases, but an antenna can't possibly be that costly. Certainly the PCMCIA-based solutions are a hell of a lot more expensive ($150 is the lowest I've seen, vs. $99 for the AirPort card), and add in the cost of a PCI or Ethernet adapter and it gets prohibitive (another $150 for PCI, and $200-250 for Ethernet).
Speaking of which, anyone know of a good 802.11 PCI card with both MacOS and Linux drivers? A tall order to fill, I know, but I can't find any 802.11 PCI cards with even MacOS drivers. The best I can find is an obscenely expensive PCMCIA card/PCI adapter combo from Lucent, and I'd really rather not go that route if possible.
These guys went out and bought the cable and hooked it up. Now tell me again, what was it they were stealing?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
They should have figured that out *before* moving into the dorm. Or are we to do away with laws entirely for college students? Nothing like moral relativism to instill a little respect for society, eh?
They should have? You don't know shit about their situation. Maybe the other dorms with connectivity are twice as expensive. Maybe the other dorms were already full so they could'nt get there. Maybe those dorms were full because the campus authorities reserved them for their friends & family. What do you know? The fact is, for all we know, those kids are being criminally prosecuted, put under much stress, for an act that is, at most, benign, and that, as far as we know so far, has not caused any kind of damages. I guess that, had their hacked caused a week long outage on the campus network, they would have mentioned it in the article, would'nt they? Now stop being overlegalist, and get a bit rational.
Actually, the real party in the "pushing it" column isn't the length of the cable, but the university itself.
1. The U says it doesn't have the money
to hook up ethernet, so the students
hook up the ethernet, without charging
the U, and then the U comes and
prosecute them for THEFT !
The students should have CHARGED the U
for what they have done - at least, in
that manner, they are NOT stealing
anything - all they did was participating
in a REWIRING PROJECT !!
2. The dormitory the students were staying
are WITHIN the campus of OSU. In other
words, the OSU is the landlord.
So, how can you charge people of STEALING
things when they never even MOVE ANYTHING
OFF YOUR PROPERTY?
Geeeesh... this whole deal stinks to high heaven.
But then, what do you expect, it's Oklahoma, the state that is only famous for oil rush and nothing else.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The students were allowed to carry their computers downstairs and to connect them to the network with 20ft cables. Instead, they chose to leave their computers upstairs, and connect them to the network with 300ft cables. To the same exact hubs. They were charged with theft.
--
That's the real question tho - if they could have legally taken a laptop downstairs and plugged into the same backbone, the theft of service charge probably won't stick.
However, what could definately stick is if they had to pull breaking & entering to connect the cable. and if the school is pissed off enough . . .
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Has anyone ever bought a 300ft ethernet cable? It almost surely costs more than $24.
Also I must agree that they already had access to the network so they could hardly be stealing access. This reminds me of the stupid companies that will sell you DSL or whatever other type of connection but they consider it theft if you hook your connection to a LAN and hook the rest of your homes computers to the network. Small-minded people shouldn't be allowed to hand out the keys to the Internet. It is my opinion that communication with fellow man is a right we are born with and that includes Internet access. In this case they were even paying for it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Actually, several schools have already banned use of the AirPort base station on residence networks, but for different reasons.
The default settings for the base station are to connect with NAT and use DHCP to farm out IP numbers to computers on the internal network. In revision 1.1 of the software, you can toggle whether DHCP is active just on the wireless network or also on the ethernet port. However, in the original software, DHCP always served both connections when turned on. Since a lot of schools use DHCP to assign IPs in their residence hall networks, the presence of two DHCP servers caused problems. I heard it created some rather spectacular network shitstorms. The base station can have NAT and DHCP turned off and simply function as a transparent bridge, but that takes extra work by the user.
With the latest revision, that's no longer a problem, but I would guess that a few schools out there still ban them. I doubt they'd be able to detect a properly-configured one in any case, but still....
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Enh. I don't buy it. Let's say you own an apartment building which is fully wired, and operate a little ISP for the tenants. The fee for this service is included in the bill, but if someone doesn't want to make use of it, they can take a deduction on their rent instead. If you find out that someone has run a patch cable into another apartment to steal the access there... well, shame on you for having left the port connected, but it still seems pretty clear that the guy is willfully taking something he should've paid for.
Also consider that the right to use campus computing resources doesn't extend to all of those resources. Students aren't allowed administrative access to billing records, for example. Likewise, OSU had offered a service as part of their housing package, with a discount for individuals who didn't want to / couldn't take advantage of it. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
That said, OSU is going to have its hands full explaining why other students who did the same thing (by bringing laptops computers to the port, instead of running long cables) aren't guilty of the same charge, or why the computer labs in the residence hall are in such poor shape.
Is true BOFH style. This is definately the appropriate response in this situation.
`Altman said Computer and Information Services reported the theft of ethernet March 2 at 2:15 a.m.`
2:15 AM? I guess the question might be what were they doing that made someone come in at 2:15AM and look into it?
Oh well, I guess it could of be worst, they could of been running Token Ring. I hear theft of token is punishable by 10 lashes with a cane.
-eddy
I dunno, when I read it, sounded more like not all the rooms are even wired. Not "would you like Ethernet, Cable TV and Air Cond? $24.95 please". They may not have had a choice in getting a room with a hookup, they may have been willing to pay the fee, but no rooms were available? So they did a little creative wiring to correct the situation.
I guess I don't blame the university for cracking down. To look the other way or just quietly unhook them and ask them not to do it again probably just invites others to do the same. Can you imagine the mess if everyone got a spool of bulk cat5 utp and a box of rj45 connectors and a crimer and just had at it?
Not sure where/why the exaggeration of the seriousness of this is happening. I wouldn't be suprised if some cub reporter blew this ll out of proportion on a slow news day, Feh!
If I remember my ethernet a cable of this length could result in out of domain collisions between packets. This would could decrease network proformance.
I don't hink this is a criminal matter, just a good time to have the students take out the cable and don't do it again. (If they then did it again well then....)
The people involved in this case apparently didn't want to pay the $24 a month to get access in their room -- they thought they would just freeload by running a cable up to their room.
Not necessarily. As one of the two articles mentions, the univeristy is fairly strapped for cash. Though I do not know the situation at the university in question, it isn't unreasonable to presume that they also face a housing shortage--seniors and undergrad students stuck in what sounds (no internet, cable, air conditioning, etc.) like a ghetto-dorm leads me to believe that they were placed there out of necessity, not out of will.
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
SID Link
The story from the networking guys. It sounds as tho this was not the first time these parties did this. They'd already received a slap-on-the-wrist for the same thing last fall.
Moderators: Moderate the post at that link up a bit, okay? It really deserves a +4 informative at the very least :-) Don't waste your points on me! Get that post!
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
From what it sounds like, they were plugging into a plain-old 10 BaseT drop, not into a 100 BaseT line which would elevate the "offense" to another level. Yeah, I can see where it's probably wrong--letting one group of students get by with it puts you on a slippery slope. Next thing you know everyone will be doing it. (Yeah, that's a bit from the heap as well.) they need to be told, "don't do that" and the campus IT department needs to view it as a sign that they are ludditely-fucked-up when it comes to technology.
It's 2000 for gawd's sakes: not providing 24/7, high-speed internet access would be like asking students bring their own toilet paper to school. It is something that one assumes a school provides in all the residence halls. On the toiler paper analogy, would the campus authorities get pissed (no pun intended, really) if I stole a few rolls from a public bathroom? Likely not....
Summary: Yeah, they did a not-good thing. But they did it out of utter necessity and, on a not necessarily conscience level, social protest.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Interesting thought: Though Apple's base stations are a bit pricey, similar solutions based on the same set of protocols (someone link the IEEE doc for me, will ya'? It's 802.11 Thank'ee) for lower prices and higher capacity. Most wireless networking products act like a mini-router, letting more-than-one (varies depending on the product) machines use the single base station. They could easily multiply their available connections several times over this way. (Yeah, the speed would drop -- but for basic web surfing, email, etc., it should be bearable and certainly better than none.)
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
[quote]Does anyone know how to contact these guys 'n' gal to tell them how we at Slashdot support them, and about this legal argument? Seems to me that if they get a really sympathetic judge, their attorney(s) might be able to get an immediate dismissal.[/quote]
The students? No. They had their internet access revoked and student at OK State aren't allowed to use the public labs to check their email anyway. *smirk*
But these people might be a might interesting to bog down:
Registrant:
Oklahoma State University (OKSTATE-DOM)
113 Math Sciences
Stillwater, OK 74078-1050
US
Domain Name: OKSTATE.EDU
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
McCormick, Martin (MM129) martin@DC.CIS.OKSTATE.EDU
Oklahoma State University Computer Center
Data Communications Group
Stillwater, OK 74078
(405) 744-6301
Billing Contact:
Accounting, CIS (AC6894-ORG) cisbilling@DC.CIS.OKSTATE.EDU
Oklahoma State University
113 Math Sciences
Stillwater , OK 74078-1050
US
405 744 6301
Fax- 405 744 7861
Record last updated on 08-Nov-1999.
Record created on 03-Mar-1986.
Database last updated on 24-Mar-2000 15:20:21 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS.CIS.OKSTATE.EDU 139.78.100.1
NS2.CIS.OKSTATE.EDU 139.78.200.1
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
UMR charges for ehternet access, but doesn't charge for the dialup. If I remember correctly, they will also only support the card that the "official" bookstore sells. So, if you're a new student, want "fast" access to the Internet, you're looking to loose about $100 for everything. That is if you go their way. Back my freshman year, some friends of mine, in an unwired dorm decided to network all of their computers together. They kept things out of the way until one night, one of the guys who wasn't part of the little net decided to get drunk and pull everything down. Of cource, this was right in front of the RA. If memmory severs correctly, the school was pretty pissed because one of the computer was constantly dialed in, thus providing an "alternative" to UMR's connection. All in all, it was pretty silly. But not as slilly as the two different times that cops showed up to take away the illegally gotten fake street signs. :)
a quick and easy check of the okstate.edu site reveals that students pay anywhere from $5 to $15 per credit hour for "Technology Fees" Some paying $100 dollar hours for computer fees.
The fact that they paid technology fees doesn't mean that they paid for the service that they took. If I go to a grocery store, I can't take whatever I want even though I've paid them for food.
They're only making thousands of dollars a year from each of these students.
Actually, this is in general untrue. Almost every college is a non-profit organization. Most students (like me) are on substantial financial aid packages, making the actual revenue stream smaller than you might think. Furthermore, the cost of providing education is quite high, and is thus subsidized to a large extent either by the state or by the donors to the institutions. At Harvey Mudd, for instance, the revenue line item for money from the endowment is about equal to that for the student revenue. Now, for a place like Harvard with an endowment approaching US$1B, it's a different story.
To get back on topic a bit, it's silly for colleges not to have wired rooms at this point. I realize that net access is expensive (cabling is the least of it, think millions of dollars a year for bandwidth), but so is hot water. When my grandfather went to college, they didn't have hot showers, but now it's expected. So shall net access be. All waiting and prosecuting the pioneers does is chase those who might have an original thought or be techinically inclined away from your school.
Walt
I wonder if any of these "hardened criminals" chose bandwidth as the "most important thing in [their] life" on the last slashdot poll....- ----
---------------------------------------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
That's it, penalty time, no posting to Slashdot for a week on the grounds of being too lazy to read the goddamn article.
The students in that dorm were authorized and even told to bring their machines down and hook it into that jack to connect to the Internet. They decided, instead of hauling heavy ass computers up and down stairs to connect via Ethernet, to make the cable longer to reach up and down the stairs. Same connection, same authorization, only this time it's illegal for some reason.
I don't think slashdot is whining about this. I think, for myself, at least, this is pretty funny.
The students pay the technology fee.
In one room they are allowed to hook up their personal computers and use the network.
In another room they are not.
This is a non-issue. The administration should be feeling pretty sheepish about the whole thing, in my opinion.
I hope you are not serious about routing their cable into an outlet. That could very easily kill somebody, and I'd like to advise everyone reading against that.
However, routing all their traffic to the Barney website, now that's funny!
www.eFax.com are spammers
It depends if these authorities are the same as the ones who are unable to make the distinction between copyright violation (illegal duplication) and playback rights (unencrypt to watch purchased movies) in the DeCSS case.
Just a little food for thought.
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
...to the OSU students who live elsewhere than in the un-cabled, un-air-conditioned dorms (do they have indoor plumbing?), that even at a state university, paid for by all the citizens of Oklahoma in common, the administration maintains specially-made student slums, so the nobler classes can have someone near at hand to look down upon... Why should up-and-coming yuppies, those privileged sh*ts, have to wait until after graduation to enjoy the pleasures of economic class stratification?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Many have brought up the incorrect point that these students were not paying for their access. However,a quick and easy check of the okstate.edu site reveals that students pay anywhere from $5 to $15 per credit hour for "Technology Fees" Some paying $100 dollar hours for computer fees. Also fees abound for mainframes.
a r/coursecat.nsf/502fdbbfb33c19e4862564e2 007729d4/7425ebe1a112e480862564d80078091a?OpenDocu ment">Link here</a>
<a href="http://home.okstate.edu/okstate/evp/registr
They probably won't get dinged too hard for this, but if I were them I'd pack up and go somewhere else immediately, costing the University a hell of a lot more money than the bandwidth they were paying for whether anyone was using it or not.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Isn't this pretty straightforward? You have to pay a nominal fee to have access to the Ethernet in the dorms. Rather than pay the nominal fee these folks simply took it upon themselves to install their own connection to their rooms.
/. and its supporters generally believe that anytime geeks are inconvenienced they're warranted in breaking rules and laws. I work at a university which has some really stupid rules re: Internet access, but the solution is not just to say "F--- you and the rules" which seems to be the /. approved methodology.
Seems like the university's case is pretty straightforward.
Apparently
From the second article:
To use other Internet service providers, a student has to purchase a digital-to-analog phone converter...
Otherwise known as a MODEM?
------
> It should be obvious to anyone that this is
:)
> wrong.
Yet it is not obvious. Perhaps that means you
are making a fundamental error of assumption
pretty common actually.
Of course whether it is right or wrong doesn't
matter too much...least not once the armed
enforcers come to cart you away.
Anyway...when I was at school a few years back,
the people I knew were talking about doing
something very similar. Actually...they were
planning to have 1 of them get ethernet...then
claim he had multiple machines and get IPs for
them all ($5 each for extra IPs once you get the
ethernet service).
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This is certainly one of the funnier posts I have
read in a while. It does make a good point.
Tho...I never did understand the whole problem.
Afterall...its just sex...nothing to get all
worked up about.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
> If you reprogram your digital watch to store
> answers to a Calculus test, that's a very
> ingenius hack. But it's still cheating, and
> when you get tossed out of university
> for cheating, I won't have much sympathy for you
Actually...studnets should be commended for such
things. Its called Applying Knowledge to a real
world situation. Simple proper use of a tool.
A definite real life skill.
Besdies...as Einsein Said...never memorize
anything that you can look up.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The people involved in this case apparently didn't want to pay the $24 a month to get access in their room -- they thought they would just freeload by running a cable up to their room.
Why, then, is their reaction so insane? What's the difference between this and, say, running your neighbors cable into your own house? Both are examples of people taking a service that they aren't paying for, which, if I recall correctly, is theft... and illegal.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
We networked the upstairs rooms and ran a cable down the trash chute to the first floor, then above the drop ceiling into the cage and into a hub (breaking into the cage was the hardest part). We had fast internet for about a semester before the dorm electrician noticed and yanked the cables.
Of course, we just unhooked it and pulled down the wires in our rooms when we noticed them snooping around. They knew *someone* on our floor did it, but couldn't prove a thing...
Anyhow, what kind of insanity is it to look at this as "criminal activity" versus "harmless college mischief". Christ, maybe we should just go back to getting drunk and wizzing on the Dean's front porch.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
That said, we seem to have moved into an era of overreaction. Kids hook up ethernet, get arrested. Woman protests president, gets arrested. Girl says she's going to bring *gum* to school, gets suspended. A boy can't even have a pocket knife at school anymore...what has our world come to?
No one has a sense of humor anymore, or a sense of proportionality. What has happened to us?
New XFMail home page
/bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.
You don't have to have network access and by the sounds of it these students decided to not get it but then ran the cable
I have observed that in general, wired dorms are in demand, and that many students who WANT a wired dorm are turned down because they are already filled. The School indicated that they would like to get all of the dorms wired, but didn't have the funds and time to do it all at once. From that perspective, perhaps the students did them a favor by wiring at least one room for free? Especially considering that they apparently WERE allowed to take their computer into the lab and connect to the net.
It would seem to me that the real solution would be to let the 300ft cable stay (make sure it is installed to code etc.), and bill the students $24 for a wired dorm room. I think that a $500 bond on a $24 'theft' is just plain silly in this case.
Umm, but what service are the other dorms paying for? Is it the installed ethernet connections in each room or is it access to the network?
/mill - who enjoys his firewall free 10Mbit
It seems it is the former and therefore what they have done is to make use of the network to the fullest. So instead of moving around their computers they did the sensible thing and got a longer cable.
Would they be charged if they installed air conditioning in their rooms too?
IMO they didn't steal/misused anything. They used what they had available (and paid for) to it fullest.
Sounds more like the students in this particular dorm aren't be allowed to better their situation because that would devalue the other dorms that have paid the university for it. Overpaid, too, if it works like the Netware 5 network described.
I am sure here the university would be happy if as many students as possible could get access without it having to provide it. After all it is a way to attract students.
I mentioned that the Student Technology Fee covers internet access in the computer labs, and Residential Life covers access in the dorms, you might ask who covers access in classrooms or other buildings?
;)
Well, there is another entity on campus -- Computing Information Services. These guys (plus Data Communications) pretty much run the entire campus network. They are in charge of all the labs and divide the funding into Student Tech Fee, and CIS Funding. Their own labs have slightly different policies: for example, they double as classrooms and whoever is is one of these labs when a class is about to start is asked to go to another lab or provide proof that they are enrolled in the scheduled class.
One thing that makes me wonder is that the ResLife servers go through CIS before they go to the rest of the world! So, do the CIS "Terms of Use" override those of ResLife? (Yeah, I've been a student here for FIVE years, and have worked for CIS for three, so I ought to know this.. but..
Ever since they remodeled the Classroom Building and added another wing to the Student Union, I have noticed at least one RJ45 port on every wall in those buildings! What will happen if the friend of mine who currently lives in Stout brings a laptop to the food court in the Union and hooks it up to the internet? Will he get arrested because he's not paying for that internet access with his room rent, or is he safe from ResLife because he's simply not in any dorm? Is it then covered by the Student Tech Fee or CIS Funding?
So, why weren't the guys who were arrested not charged with carrying their computers downstairs and connecting them in the lab? This is a private lab (as opposed to the public labs all over campus), so I'd assume it is run by Reslife. But the students weren't busted for using them, so who owns those jacks?
I see either some inconsistency or a just a simple lack of communication.
BTW, I don't even consider that room as a computer lab -- it's practically part of the laundry room. It only has eight computers, and has no lab monitor to watch them. (Then again, the other labs have at least 50 computers.) These are some of the old Pentium-90 systems (w/16MB RAM) that we had in the public labs from Fall '95 to Spring '98 before we upgraded. Half of them don't work well enough to use: at any given time, one cannot see the network, another has a bad keyboard, and another will be missing Windows entirely! The only things that really work are the network jacks! And these students just wanted to put them to good use -- just like they would have if the jacks were in another building.
-Quazi
Honestly, OSU is an expensive college. Everyone I know who is or has attended it either is on a free ride thanks to mommy and daddy or because of a very nice scholarship. Of course, I know there are a lot of people who have busted their ass to afford tuition or earn the 'free ride' -- so I don't want to put everyone in the 'luck-dog' category. Still, Anyone attending there should be able to divy up the extra quarter per day if their internet connection is that much of a need for them. And last I checked, a 300 foot ethernet cable is going to run you a whole lot more than the $48 bucks per year you're saving by not having a network drop in your room.
I'd rather see a drop in every room and every possible point throughout the campus than see a school who's already bilking their students out of $15k or $25k per year trying to nickel and dime them to death on the vitally useful internet connection. But that's a moot point. I'm not saying that this isn't petty and the university is being a bunch of tight-asses about it, but a fee is a fee and they'd have to present a very impressive excuse for me to side with the students on this one.
Granted, there are a couple statements that seem a bit silly here:
Denman said the reason not all residence halls have ethernet is because OSU does not have enough money.
They sure seem to run a lot of advertisements state-wide on television, they have a well-catered -to football and basketball team and their tuition sure as hell isn't cheap -- maybe they need to drop someone's million-dollar salary by $100k and put in another 10 T1's?
"It's financial," he said. "There's not air conditioning in all the halls. There's not cable TV in all the halls.
When was the last time you used an air-conditioner or Bobcat Godthwait's Big Ass Show to research your term-paper? The university is saying that because they supposedly lack the funding for certain physical comforts and entertainment amenities, they can't afford certain things that are almost educational necessities. And the fact that they say "well, we don't have these two items -- so how could we be expected to have drops everywhere?" almost sounds like they're putting the value and need of an air-conditioner (it's warm there, but it ain't California -- come on folks) and a cable connection above internet and network access.
But then again, what the hell do I know.
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icq:2057699
seumas.com
Your right this makes the school look bad, it could have been handled differently. Some low level BOFH want-a-be did the only thing he could think of and called the police. The student will get about the same punishment as they would have had this been handeled by the school in house as with the police.
Now because of a slow thinking burreauract OSU has a black mark that may make some potental new student choose another school. It will blow over and be forgotten by everyone but the britest who consider the Network "The tool".
Who owns your data?
When I was an undergrad, there wasn't much networking to speak of. Then I went to grad school at Dartmouth. The entire campus was networked. We had network ports in the privately-owned fraternaties, even. In that case, the fraternaties did pay for the hookup, but only to cover the physical connection, not a per-port fee.
Of course, at Dartmouth, everyone is required to have a computer, and professors expect to be able to use email for class assignments (even in the humanities), turning in papers, and such.
It's been like that for over ten years.
Now I'm surprised to hear about schools charging for Internet access. You would think they would be doing everything they could to encourage computer use as a basic part of the education, not treating it like some luxury.
Just reply to this post, but change the subject line to something like "Cheap State U charges $50/semester" or "Forward Thinking College; free." Then in the comment, you can elaborate if there's more to say. (Maybe this should be a poll.)
I don't see why we're all crying a river over this. They took electricity that they weren't paying for. That's called stealing. I hope they get the electric chair. And yes, i see the irony.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Actually they don't have a right to use the university network based on your claim that they paid for it.
I tracked down where these particular student's lab fees and tuition went that paid to the school.
In fact they only have a right to 2 urinals, 3 desks in the chem labs, 8 days of doughnuts for the Sunday Alumni gatherings, 12 promotional OSU mouse pads sent to possible students, roughly 24 acres of lawn mowed on July 19th 1999, and about 34 stall doors in the men's bathrooms in several buildings. Maybe they can use those resources how and when they want?
Oddly I did find that some of my tax dollars went into a grant that paid for the renovation of 3 old buildings there. I plan to go collect on that by removing the foundation of 1 of the buildings, but I guess I can't.
Personally I was expecting I paid for the U's network, so I could hook up, but unfortunately I hear you can't pick where your money goes . . . because it's not yours after you give it to them regardless what you would like to get back from it.
Okay, this is the third time in this thread that I've come across this guy. He simply keeps saying things like THEFT and STEALING in big capital letters. The moderators need an "uninformed" option.
/. post. So they can use the network, just not where it would actually useful for them. Somewhere it mentioned that students pay for some sort of technology fee that goes directly to the campus network. So they DO pay for it. Hard to steal something you pay for and are already allowed to use, eh?
If you've read the story and the accompanying links you'll find that while it happens to nicely fit the university's technical definition of "theft", it doesn't really pan out too well with some rather well-known facts of the real world.
These students did in fact have a right to use the university network. They used it every day, in their various labs and study facilities. Says right there in the news articles that were linked in the
they should be kicked out of school. i mean, it makes sense that they should be aressted for using 280 feet more ethernet cable than they usuall do, especially if they are paying for the service! not only this, but they were suppling other people on the floor a valuable service without the university's consent, and for those of us who do go, or have gone to universities, know that there are rules against things that may be convenient. for example, eastern michigan university (my uni) knocked out the elevator service to walton hall after they discovered that it was more conveninant for the smokers on the top floor to use it then to go down 5 flights of stairs. but the fact that these people would have the nerve to help out the people in their hall and to attempt to raise their quality of life, without braking any laws is unexcusable! OSU should fry these fuckers.
or they could let them go and owe them a HUGE apology....
Folks, as it says, they were paying the "technology fees". The technology fees pay for purchase and upkeep of the campus computer infrastructure; therefore, they were entitled to use that infrastructure. As the first article clearly states, there is a $24/semester difference in rates for rooms with ethernet/withour ethernet--however, since they're paying the technology fees anyway, the extra $24/semester is merely a surcharge for the *added convenience* of having a room with Ethernet connection pre-installed. Furthermore, as the guy quoted in the first article said, the college would like to have all the rooms wired for network connections but doesn't merely because of the costs involved.
:-)
Seems to me that the attorney(s) for the students should argue that the students had every legal right to access a network which they were paying for, and that the $24/semester extra for a pre-wired room is for defraying the costs of physically wiring the rooms in question. Again I repeat: all students are defraying the network upkeep costs, and those who pay the $24/semester extra are defraying the cost of physically wiring their rooms.
I sincerely hope that they and their attorney(s) use this argument, since it is very valid in legal terms. Furthermore, if this argument stands at court, the students could quite legally piss off the asshole admins who turned them in by immediately going back to their dorms and re-wiring the connection in question.
Does anyone know how to contact these guys 'n' gal to tell them how we at Slashdot support them, and about this legal argument? Seems to me that if they get a really sympathetic judge, their attorney(s) might be able to get an immediate dismissal.
On an even more important note, students at OSU ought to protest, and hard. Surely someone knows a high-placed administrator or, better yet, director/regent who can get all outraged over the affair. Someone ought to get a sever tongue-lashing (mmm, that doesn't sound so bad after all...) at least for this, as it is a very poor public relations move. If the students push the angle I stated above, then it should garner them 99% of the sympathy, and it's all a matter of spin. Many here have been jumping to the conclusion that what they did *was* theft, but the facts state otherwise. It's this spin that the students need to use, and if they do then media all across the state will run stories which lambaste OSU, and that's what these students need. End of lesson!
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
It's not so much the internet theft, it's the potential for property damage and liability.
Sure, these guys did it OK, but if they don't get punished it'll be open season on dorm wiring. Then some idiot fumbling around the wiring will get zapped to death with 120V AC across the temples. The university gets sued for millions.
The guys who install professionally are licensed, bonded, etc.
Did they use plenum grade ethernet cable? What if a fire broke out? Did they mark these cables? After they graduate, who's going to maintain and troubleshoot this system?
No, it isn't rape or murder, but it *is* a crime. If convicted, I'd probably give them $100 find and a misdemeanor blot on their records but that's about it. OTOH, if the punishment is more severe I'll understand why--the university will be trying to set an example. Sometimes you have to do that to maintain discipline.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There was a time when some college students were charged with theft of computer cycles, since they made unauthorized access to the university's mainframe.
The courts found that since the university login screen included phrasing similar to "Welcome to our computer, enjoy using it", that the authorization to use it was implied.
Ever notice how all login messages now say "Unauthorized use, copying, distribution, or public showing will result in FBI activity"? Or is it just my Betamax video tape?
So, these guys were authorized access, since they had an account on the network. That account was not limited in any way in terms of port, access point, machine, day/date or time. In fact, they were able to, and capable of, connecting to the network in an unrestricted manner.
Every reasonably secure system includes the capability to limit access based upon specific combinations of time and location. None of these were in place.
If you don't post a no-trespassing sign, then people can walk across your property to reach their own. They are supposed to ask permission, but they don't absolutely have to. What's most significant is that unless you provide some obstruction that INTENTIONALLY prevents unauthorized access to either property or equipment, then the authorization to use it is implied.
Want to keep people off you property? Build a fence. Don't want to build a fence? Post a sign.
Want to get people off your network? Tell them so at login.
Want to prevent people who otherwise have access from gaining access surreptitiously? Lock the account in specific ways. Easy.
But the university did none of this. Instead, they leave each student's account wide open and then beat their breasts and tear at their hair when some enterprising students take it upon themselves to SLIGHTLY improve their living conditions at their own expense.
Let me get this straight.
1. These students ran a cable from their room to a computer lab to which they NORMALLY had access and which they regularly used.
2. They connected to an active, open, unlocked and unsecured ethernet port that was not used for any other purpose, but which would have been available to them to use if they were standing in close proximity.
3. They shared their improvements with their fellow students, thus reducing the onerous difficulty of accessing network resources.
4. This effort worked to narrow the "digital divide" experienced by students of low cost housing.
When compared with more affluent students who could afford higher cost housing, the difference in network access is alarming!
And for all of this, these generous, intelligent, innovative and mildy inventive students went to jail??????????
And we have the nerve to call this theft??????
Unbelievable!
We should reward them for their community improvement efforts.
Oh. wait. let's see now.
Maybe there's something to this. After all, if other students became accustomed to convenient access to the network, then they would begin demanding it more strenuously in all low cost dorms.
Ok.
And then the school would either have to ante up, or admit to a prejudice based upon economic status. Affluent students are given the tools to improve their grades, less affluent students are forced to waste precious time simply to connect to the network.
Obviously, the cost of network access is much HIGHER than 24.00US per semester. How do you measure the lost time in travel, concentration, queuing up in line?????
For those students with tight budgetary constraints, the school in question seems determined to make it difficult for them to operate on a par with affluent students.
But hold on now. One last point.
My tax dollars help support that school (I refuse to believe that OSU receives NO federal monies.).
My investments in the private sector probably do as well, to some extent.
So, OSU.......use my tax bucks and string a few hubs and routers!
Or, if you're serious, then restrict access of all students to specific ports, (which you are able to do), and face the public outcry with your heads held high. After all, you will have shown the struggling student that is of little use to improve themselves, since they will never catch up to the levels of productivity that more wealthy students enjoy. And just to make sure, you'll throw them in jail if they try.
Where's that ACLU web site? They should read this article.
whew,
theBitBucket.
That'd be funny if I hadn't live for a number of years in Hebrew University of Jerusalem dorms, where you had to obtain permission for having basically any electrical device. I don't think they have those rules now, but they did once. Also, they had prohibited electrical heaters - and having the fact that said dorms had absolutely no thermo-isolation except 5cm solid concrete walls, there was real problem to live there at winter. Jerusalem temperatures get below zero (Celsius) at winter, so try and live in non-isolated concrete barrack (with no wind protection either, and that's first floor, mind you) at -1 and strong wind outside. Only solution dorms provided were gas heaters, which smelled like gas station after massive leak and provided you with industrial-strength headache after 5 minutes of being hear you. And if you try and get you normal electiral heater, you risk it to be confiscated and you fined and even removed from dorms. And, mind you, dorm supervisors had right to check you room for prohibited devices when you are out! Just enter and dig your stuff, at their will.
So the guys there, with Ehernet access at dorms, are having top-grade conditions compared to me and my fellows had when studying.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
So they weren't paying for the access; that's service theft. Technically, the university has the right to arrest them.
But *why*? It's not that big a deal.
Just chop their cable, or feed it into an outlet or something. That'd be a lot funnier, they'd learn their lesson, and nobody'd have to deal with the police. Not to mention the deterrence factor... every kid who came into that hall thenceforth would hear the tale of the illicit cat-5 that got rerouted into an electrical socket.
I always figured it was just my school, but apparently all college administrators are insane.
PLEASE get this right. They'll be charged with
(if under UK law) "obtaining services by
deception", NOT with theft. Their local legal
system will make a similar distinction. The
only people looking silly for calling it
theft are those repeating and trumpeting
the allegations; the authorities will use the
right wording and not sound idiotic when it
actually comes to charging/arraigning these
people.
To Whom It May Concern:
I recently read of an incident on the OSU grounds, where students were arrested for 'theft of ethernet'. As a concerned outsider, I must say that this decision makes OSU appear foolish and frighteningly overreactionary.
I fully understand that there are rules which always must be followed, however I am quoting from your own 'Appropriate Computer Usage' guidelines Section 1.02 paragraph A when I note that:
This sentence strongly implies that all students are granted access to the networks at OSU.
The sentence after this notes a requirement to take into account various obligations before allowing access to 'University information resources', and it would seem that you are defining this rule to have been infringed upon. It is unlikely that this is true, as in the previous sentence you have used the terms 'networks' and 'information technology resources' as seperate entities. Seeing as your policy does not clearly define any of these terms, it seems clear that all students are allowed unconditional access of the OSU network, so long as they are not allowing improper access to OSU servers.
Section 1.02 Paragraph D states the possible repercussions for breaking the OSU Appropriate Computer Usage agreement. It notes:
This sentence mentions nowhere the possibility of punishment outside of University channels, even assuming that what these students had done was truly a punishable crime.
Section 1.03 Paragraph C states that users may use only their own computer accounts, however it makes no rule against the sharing of network access.
Section 2.01 Paragraph C Sub-Paragraph 9 has a statement regarding unauthorized access of networks. This paragraph which reads:
This paragraph does not apply to the students in question as Section 1.02 Paragraph A clearly states they had the right to access the network. Beyond that, the proposed penalty for this infraction would seem to be a possible revocation of OSU computing privileges, not arrest.
Section 4.01 of the Appropriate Computer Usage agreement states the Consequences of Misuse of Computing Privileges. There is no privision in this agreement for external law enforcement. none.I hope the attention which this case has attracted will make school administrative officials take notice of this obvious massive oversight on their part. The only crime which is clear to me is a case of wrongful arrest.
I hope that the school will realize that any legal action against these students will produce only two things, a student who will face unjust future bias in their career, and a university which shows that it is willing to not only discipline it's students unjustly, but to do it in a manner which leaves legal questions for future employers.
In my opinion, even if these students have done something which is against the spirit of the school's usage agreement, is to clear all charges against the students and have any record of the occurances expunged from their records. Additionally, the University should reconsider the ability of whomever decided that arrests were warranted to competently perform their job function.
This is a matter which should've been handled internally, and without fuss.
Sincerely,
Kevin Way
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WOW! A friend of mine lives literally *TWO* doors down from one of the guys mentioned! And the cable had been there (a blue RJ45 cable coming down from the ceiling into the fella's room) for a good month before anyone ever did anything about anything! My passive self never wanted to ask him what the cable was all about -- maybe his friends had a personal network going and most of his friends lived above him on the second floor. But now that I've read the article on the front page of the O'Colly and the front page of Slashdot (I'm still amazed it made it!), I realize that something was up!
. htm
As for the fact that they were paying for internet access in the first place, they were paying the "Student Technology Fee" which is an automatic fee that's charged for every hour that a student is enrolled in on campus. This fee covers the cost of the STF-funded computer labs only. (I used to work in one of these labs for three years, and my managers used to remind me that that was where my paycheck originated..) On the other hand, Residential Life (http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/main.htm) charges their own rates and runs their own servers to support dorm ethernet access. The dorm these guys live in is the "old/cheap" 50-year-old dorm "Stout Hall" -- the one with no air conditioning, no cable TV, no in-room carpeting, and no internet access (just a sink that spits out filthy water and lead pipes insulated in asbestos that rattle during the night).. Students can't even get modem access because the campus is using a propretary digital phone system! And these guys just let the little renegade inside them take over, protest and steal some internet access.
ResLife has been proposing to refurbish this building for years, but they didn't have a place to put 400+ students. Until..
http://www.reslife.okstate.edu/pictures/new/new
..ResLife decided to put up new apartment-style housing, demolish the high-rises, and decommission Stout Hall. The students currently in Stout have first dibs to signup for the apartments. They will be quite nice -- two or four bedrooms, with an ethernet jack in each room and at least one extra jack in the living room!
..the guys just couldn't wait to move I guess..
Hell, we just got Southwestern Bell ADSL off-campus all over town here in Stillwater, and it is a hell of a lot cheaper and more reliable than living on campus with ethernet access!
-Quazi
So what if someone installed wireless networking, such as the Apple AirPort? This would do the same thing, but it wouldn't leave any physical evidence. And unless the school specifically bans it, it would seem to fall under a presumption of fair use, assuming that it's also being used for laptop connections by the people in the room where it is connected.
So these kids were violating University policy. At most schools, there's a school-run judicial system. The school issues a fine, and it then proceeds through that system; in most cases, students just pay the fine. For more serious issues, penalties may include prohibitions from campus social events or suspension.
I assume OSU has such a system; correct me if this is wrong.
So why was that system not used? Usually colleges do all they can to keep their discipline issues in their own system, avoiding the added publicity and buerocracy that police involvement brings. Why not just issue a fine to the students to recover the unpaid access fees (and possibly a penalty fee)? Is this consistent with how OSU handles other discipline issues, or are they trying to make some sort of example here? If the latter, could that unfair application of the law be a defense in court?
Two Stout Hall residents were arrested Monday for stealing access to the Oklahoma State University electricity network.
"CIS reported that someone had attached an extension cord to an unused outlet in the basement of Stout Hall into private residential rooms in the building, allowing the residents of those rooms access to the university's electricity," Altman said.
An OSU staff member told police about some of the same people stealing electricity connections before CIS reported the offense, Altman said.
Eddie Denman, assistant director of Residential Life, said there is a slight difference in rent rates for residence hall rooms with and without electricity.
"It's not a lot of money. The difference is $24 (per semester)," he said, comparing Willham Complex and Kerr-Drummond Hall, two halls equal in all ways except electric connection.
Denman said the reason not all residence halls have electricity is because OSU does not have enough money.
"It's financial," he said. "There's not running water in all the halls. There's not ethernet in all the halls.
"There's a lot of things at the university that we'd like to do, but we just don't have the money."
Travis Wolcott does not understand why he cannot access the campus electricity network when he is an Oklahoma State University student who pays technology fees.
Wolcott said he and other students regularly take their own appliances downstairs and connect to the electric outlet with 20-foot cables.
"They (police) have yet to tell us what is the difference between plugging in our lamps downstairs with a 20-foot cable and plugging in our lamps upstairs with a 300-foot cable," Wolcott said.
He said he and the other students wired their lamps in their rooms from an old beauty parlor in Stout Hall.
"It was unused, and it had been unused for (about) three years," Wolcott said.
Wolcott said he did not tap lines into the OSU system.
Other options for connection include other electricity providers and campus fireplaces.
To use other electricity, a student has to purchase a gasoline-to-electricity power converter and can only use the connection after business hours.
Wolcott said that option also doesn't provide enough current.
"The lights in the basement are not bright enough for us to read (class assignments) by," Wolcott said. "They don't have enough filaments. Most of them don't even have dimmers."
Having the electricity connection strung up to his room gave him immediate electricity access, along with other students.
"More people came down to our room to dry their hair or to read stuff" instead of walking through the rain to the Mathematical Sciences Building, Wolcott said.
Now, the four students have been barred from using the campus fireplaces, and their OSU water connection has been canceled.
Jackie Bolin, Stout Hall director, said she could not comment on the situation because of the ongoing investigation.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Hmm. Let's see.
a) They apparently had NO contract or other written or verbal agreement giving them the right ot use the universities PRIVATELY owned network (it's not a public right, you know..). So.. instead of paying the appropriate fees to the university, they used a connection they had no business using. What's the problem here? They WERE stealing.
Now... as for the punishment.. the U should go lightly on them. This is rather similar to other college type pranks.
This is just a minor offense for the students, I can't imagine it ever being a big deal for them in the future. Who this is really bad for is the University. Here's a little free publicity telling the world that your school doesn't offer standard internet access, which is quickly becoming a commodity, especially on college campuses. It just speaks very poorly for this school, especially to prospective students that are growing up in a completely technologically soaked world. Even the nongeeks want to be able to check their email from their dorm room. A school that won't put out the money for a little information infrasturcture is going to quickly fall behind.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I am an OSU student, and although I like the whole free access vibe of the Slashdot community, this is one time I am not going to say "damn the man, let em go". There are several things that people should know about this situation. First of all OSU provides internet access to most of the dorms. The one these students lived in is a dorm that is used for low cost housing, most of the services provided in other dorms, such as cable, air conditioning, and internet access. Basically its place to hang your hat and a phone, and without air conditioning, its damned miserable to live in from April till October. If they wanted internet access so bad, they have a choice of almost any other dorm on campus to live in, many with low cost options like the dorm they lived in. Basically they have the option to get the access legitimately. Sure it may cost them a little more a month to get a room with access, but ethernet connections to a fiber backbone aren't cheap. On top of that, there is a computer lab with full access for them to reach the net in the dorm, and several sizable labs all across campus. Its not like they were completely locked out of the net. Basically they were using a service they hadn't paid for, and were reasonably priced and available. Its also important to remember that they were charged with misdemeanors, not felonies. They'll pay a small fine, maybe some community service and go home. If your looking for a reason to crucify OSU, this isn't it. Crucify OSU for its poorly run netware 5 network that goes down more than a drunken sorority girl.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett