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Georgia Sues RC5 User For $415,000
jeroenb writes: "David McOwen posted a message to the Anandtech forums saying the State of Georgia is prosecuting him for using their computers for RC5 while he was configurator of the computers at a school system 2 years ago. Apparantly they want him in jail for 15 years and have him pay almost half a million dollars! According to the State of Georgia, one single Distributed.net client costs 59 cents per second in datatraffic. "
When drunk drivers who put *lives* at risk don't get that sort of time, much less financial penalty, (especially on a first offense!), this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
My cousin was killed by a drunk driver. Our families were VERY close. He and a friend were riding home on their bikes one night and the got hit from behind. He got dragged over 200 feet, and the driver just kept on going. The friend was knocked clear but suffered numerous injuries. They were following all the laws including reflective clothing and headlamps for the bikes.
At the sentencing hearing, the defendants lawyer convinced the judge that he would lose his job if he was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. Why this mattered I have no idea. The judge gave this murderer 6 months in the county jail. Nights and weekends only. He got to continue working his job during the daytime. It later came out his employer and the owner of the company he worked for was also his uncle, so there was NO chance he would have lost his job. Six months PART TIME for murder, or vehicular manslaughter if you prefer.
Kind of puts the potential penalties in this case into perspective, doesn't it?
59 cents per second in data trafic? First, what does a distributed client do for traffic like 5,000 bytes/hour? If you installed on 1000 machines, you're looking at perhaps 5mb/day tops? If it's a state/school institution, they're likely on a T1. So figure they can xfer 5mb in about 30 seconds maybe?
And realistic cost? A T1 should be about $850/month (commercial cost, perhaps cheaper for educational institution).
That is:
+360gb top transfer each month.
+143kb each second.
+423mb for one dollar.
+$0.01 for each 29 seconds.
So this comes out to 1/59th of the cost they claim. But let's assume it's 59 cents per second. At 5mb per day and 143kb per second, that's 34 seconds and $20/day. Or $7300/year.
So at the price they claim, 1,000 machines would have to be running dnet for at least 56 years to come out to $415k. Or alternately, he'd have to have been running dnet on 18,000 machines for three years. I find that highly unlikely.
Now, at the more likely cost basis of 1 cent per second for the T1, and the amount of time/bandwidth he'd have been using, it would actually be more like 1,000 machines running dnet for 3304 years or 18,000 machines running dnet for 1100 years or 1,000,000 machines running it for the last three years.
It's the prosecutions job to prove that the operating systems involved are poorly designed, with schedulers that allow idle priority processes to use so much CPU as to be noticeable to the user.
Even so, almost all computers today are overpowered for 99.9% of the tasks for which they're called upon. A usage study could easily show that a horrid scheduling algorithm that allows idle priority processes to suck CPU would have negligable effect on the users who were using the machine. If the time difference to say... spell-check a document in word, or render a web page, is unmeasurable, or under .1sec, it becomes very difficult to prove damages. Hell, with the right lawyer it might even be possible to prove malicious prosecution and get compensated for this horrible event.
--
First thing to do, find out how much bandwidth a dnet client uses to crack N keys, and deduce how much bandwidth was actually used. Then you can show what the actual bandwidth cost was, this will be a much smaller number than $400k. Then you need to find out what kind of contract they have to pay for the bandwidth. If it's unmetered, you can probably show that the effective cost of the usage was $0.00, as it certainly didn't use enough bandwidth to require a connection upgrade.
Secondly, you'll need an expert witness familiar with process scheduling to explain why the dnet client doesn't reduce the computing power of the machines, and thus there was no cost incurred by diminishing the value of the machines for their intended use.
Lastly, beg, borrow and steal enough money to pay for a truly talented lawyer. Hopefully with some luck, the prosecutor on this case will be making coffee for the rest of his life.
--
It looks like the lawyer and the law firm exist according to anywho.com
n e= 564-1600&btnsubmit.x=42&btnsubmit.y=6
r &f irstname=David+Atty&street=&city=&state=GA&zip=&bt nsubmit.x=36&btnsubmit.y=10
For the goatse scared, here are the links..
A reverse search on the phone number 770-564-1600:
http://www.anywho.com/qry/wp_rl?npa=770&telepho
A search for Joyner, David Atty:
http://www.anywho.com/qry/wp_fap?lastname=Joyne
Make sure you delete the spaces slashdot puts in...
For a nonviolent crime from which the perpetrator did not gain financially, yes.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That's backwards. Try tracking down his terms of employment and seeing if there's anything allowing personal use of corporate assets. This could be a written manual (highly unlikely), or custom (possible, perhaps likely in many environments). At that point, he would e seafe. Without it, his position is at best awkward, and he very likely was stealing.
hawk, esq.
When you are charged with a crime, you are charged with the crime, not the crime and a proposed penalty. You can look in the statutes, judicial manuals, or common law for the maximium penalty (probably the first iin this case).
Also, in some jurisdictions, the defendant is advised of the maximum penalty at arraignment.
Generally, it wouldn't even be *possible* to charge him with this without the 15 year maximum being out there . . .
hawk
I work for the State. The three of us that support the network and servers had cel phones, paid for by the state - $45 a month for 450minutes. Never once did any of us go over that. We even had a cool app we wrote where we could dial in and press 1 to do this sorta thing.
.10 a minute, even though I'd probably stay under my usage. And due to the paperwork involved, I just wouldn't answer any work calls on it.
Some state idiot was using his cel phone a LOT for personal calls, and the local paper (Atlanta Urinal and Constipation...er Journal and Constitution) ran an article on it - typical "Your Tax Dollars at work" sorta shit.
Well, before long, if you were not the head of an institution/organization, no cel phone. We now have palm pilots with the wireless internet service...a decent, but not as good substitute.
HOWEVER, as I mentioned, even with a "Do we need milk?" call once in a while, there was $0.00 cost to the state. I guess part of their justification was "perhaps the employee didn't need one for their job function".
Okay, well, I had a second phone line to my house to dial into work and do stuff from home...never seen any reimbursement for that, nor for the power I use at my house while working on something remotely.
Though, I can get my own personal cel phone and have the state reimburse me for any minutes used for work. 450 minutes for $45, works out to
So, all in all, the state now has an unhappy employee who is less productive. All because of one poorly-written one sided article in the paper.
> Reprimanded, shreprimanded. It should achieve their own felony prosecution.
I'd be more than happy with a simple reprimand. It's a matter of fairness after all -- we think the charges against Mr. McOwen are excessive; it would behoove us not to levy similar charges against the prosecuter's office.
In both circumstances, there are quite a few others who are much more deserving of investigation.
--Dan
Consider this example:
You hire me to pick stocks. I pick bad stocks -- you fire me.
I didn't steal from you.
I didn't intentionally seek to defraud your company.
I didn't hide the stocks I purchased.
I was more aggressive than normal, but not unusually so.
I simply bought the wrong stocks, and got canned for it.
Should I go to prison for losing you money?
Now imagine I didn't actually even lose you anything -- you were merely concerned that at some point in the future, the stocks I picked might possibly expose the company negatively.
Should I have even been fired?
Possibly--but possibly not. If it's not even obvious if I should be fired, how could it be obvious that I should be imprisoned?
Something to think about.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
The trouble is that he was not mandated to do it, and it is not obvious that he had the leeway to do it. This gives him no ass-covering material. There's no piece of paper that unambiguously says he was permitted to do what he did. He can only argue about vague general principles.
I actually think the "vague general principals" are surprisingly supportive of the RC5 client, as I laid out in my second point. Here's a document that explicitly states what he can and cannot do, and he quite oddly follows it well.
I mean, seriously. There's alot of mileage to be gotten out of the fact that this document:
1) Says sysadmins are effectively autonomous
2) Lays out restrictions that are almost entirely followed to the letter(including WRT CPU usage).
Sigwinch, read the supporting documentation I provided earlier. Those are their policies. His actions are not even clearly a violation of them!
Never take a risky action in a corporation without considering how it will sound in front of a Federal jury or Congressional committee. "So, Mr. McOwen, are you're telling us that you were converting these computers to your own use to win a $1000 prize?"
http://www.theonion.com/onion3723/nobel_fever.h
Seriously though, the Nobel Prize is a much richer purse than RC5 will ever have; you don't see people being hauled off to jail for discovering the top quark!
To a jury of bums, rednecks, and career Taco Bell cooks, that $1000 prize will be damning. Ditto for newspapers and blood-n-depravity TV news shows.
Americans love two things:
1) Seeing criminals shot down by the public.
2) Seeing Goliath shot down by David.
The problem with McOwen is that it transcends the criminal-citizen barrier: Quite a few of us could imagine doing something unique and productive at work that some bureaucrat might not agree with. This self-identification means that the criminal prosecution becomes a personal threat that we'll pay (through advertising dollars) to watch allieviated.
"Piss your boss off, go to jail." The hacker/citizen barrier is *nothing* against this.
So? The humorless gentlemen in the dark polished cars, wearing nice suits and ray ban sunglasses don't give a flying fuck that the situation is bad. All they care about is the documentary evidence that *you* made it measureably worse.
Consider the opposite situation--suppose McOwen was in a tightly controlled secure environment, with all software change controlled and all decisions made through three levels of bureaucracy. Clearly McOwen would be much worse off -- not only would he be obviously and knowingly violating the decision making policies of his organization, but he'd be doing so in a manner in stark contrast to standard operating procedure.
He'd be screwed.
But that's not how it went. There was no strong top down organizational structure; it was all UGA could do to keep their sysadmins from maliciously harassing users! There was no "line in the sand" that McOwen crossed; his job was to maximizing the value of university computing resources and he did so. If he added minutely to system insecurity, the fact that he was hired to do things in an insecure manner(telnet blah) is at least a strongly mitigating factor.
Security is a process, as Bruce says. With little process in place, there was little for him to violate.
You do if you're a career state-employed academic bureaucrat. Any one of 'career', 'state-employed', 'academic', or 'bureaucrat' would be bad news. Put them all together and it's a deadly situation. The person carrying out this campaign against McOwen is certainly clueless, likely vindictive, likely monomaniacal, and *committed*. Once a person like that starts a campaign, they'll push it as far as possible. They won't know when to give up.
Couldn't have said it better myself--this is where my reluctance to entirely blame the prosecuter's office comes from.
It would arguably have been better to continue with 40-bit DES, and let the electronic pearl harbor force Congress to clean house at the NSA.
An interesting historical what-if. An electronic Pearl Harbor would plant a pernicious seed of doubt in the validity of all electronic records though, significantly destabilizing our entire system of indentured servitude / credit card debt. Given the personal profitability of being able to legitimately challenge the veracity of your entire debt history, I'm unconvinced any quality of crypto would ever be able to save an economy thrown into a tailspin by an EPH.
"Cracking DES" had the best possible effect, I think: It destroyed political opposition while leaving public trust unsullied.
Offtopic, but... WEP is an impressive accomplishment. They actually managed to design a cryptosystem that has cipher- and key-exchange-independent insecurity (the 24-bit initialization vector).
My favorite independent vulnerability right now involved keystroke password analysis in SSH1. Effectively, you monitor the timing variations between characters in a user's password as they're sent on the network and use hidden markov chains to determine the most likely keys that are being entered. It turns out that we take longer to transition between certain keys than certain other keys, and this transition distance can be indepedently analyzed.
If they really did just make up this numbers, the case could blow up in their faces.
Well, I made up the numbers WRT $200,000/yearly for a single T1--the difference is I was showing ballpark figures, whereas they're seeking felony conviction.
Big difference
During the day, the truck is *HIS*. He can pick his own routes, make a detour for a customer who is in a huge hurry, bend the traffic regulations, and generally do whatever it takes to get the job done. He job is a big one, and he therefore has a lot of leeway to make autonomous decisions. Suppose he wants to take the truck home at the end of the day to move a sofa. If he takes 10 seconds to get the boss's permission, taking the truck is perfectly OK.
Bad example--the equivalent circumstance is McOwen physically transporting the servers to his home to run some work for him there. You can't get around that -- you mention grand theft later; the reason it's grand theft is because the trucks were supposed to be there but instead disappeared!
It's not arguable that the movement of the sofa is at all within the mission of the trucking company; however it is extremely arguable that academic research and collaborative mathematical analysis is directly within the mission of a university. It does not matter if you would have made the same choice; you merely need to accept that it was a reasonable conclusion to reach for this to be an issue of internal policy disagreement and nothing more.
If it's your job to use them that way, you just do it. However, if there is a person who could say no, and you don't ask, you have done something wrong.
I'm reminded of the history of the HP Deskjet; which was fought tooth and nail by the laser printer heirarchy at HP.
There's *always* a person who could say no to something. The question is whether the general consensus is that something is not to be done -- no human organization can operate unanimously; it creates too many absolutes of power. Mr. McOwen may have known some might have disagreed with his use of the software, but there's always someone who disagrees. The question is: Who else knew of his actions, who else approved, and how does legitimate access to company hardware turn into the equivalent of a foreign hacker maliciously breaking in and subverting computer resources?
In a criminal case it is not necessary to prove substantial monetary damages, it is merely necessary to prove that the person did something they had not been given permission to do.
"Did you have passwords to these machines?"
"Yes."
"Did you steal them?"
"No."
"Who gave them to you?"
"My employer."
"To do what with?"
"Configure the machines."
"How so?"
"In a manner that maximized their usefulness."
"Any specifics?"
"Just what's in the guide."
"Did you violate the restrictions in the guide?"
"No."
If you allow fear to govern your actions, you are letting the enemy dictate your actions.
At the point of criminal prosecution, your hope for a peaceful ending (unless you wish to plea) is over.
It's funny, but I am also being serious. The Internet search engines are already starting to correlate information with specific people.
Thus why I've told a couple girls to never do porn. We're only a scant few years away from large scale eigenvector based face searches through large image databases, and the code is almost certainly going be trained against porn--there's no larger source of stock human photography!
The prosecutor is actually a good point of approach, if you can get him in touch with a clueful expert.
A guy can hope
Anyway, I understand what you're saying
Ditto.
I just think it's McOwen's fault for not establishing a paper trail showing permission.
My hope is that McOwen saved a few emails from coworkers higher than him expressing approval for the project...
"The Young Male Sysadmin's Guide To Not Going To Prison"
I feel like I'm looking at the title of one of those "World's Thinnest Books". Of course, considering the state of the economy, a chapter on how to successfully steal bread so you don't starve to death might be useful...
--Dan
Security is having confidence that every bit on the hardware comes from a known, approved source. You lose that when you install an untrusted program, and the only way to regain it is to delete everything and start from scratch.
Except he isn't accused of attempting to backdoor the systems. He isn't accused of attempting to hack them at all.
He's accused of running undesired software.
That's a major difference. This isn't a situation where an untrusted user got trusted access. This isn't even realistically a case where a trusted user gave untrusted users access(in the sense of others being able to do anything they wanted using the computational power of the university). A trusted user did something that others disapproved of. As long as there's no belief that he hacked the machines as well as used them for undesired tasks, simply killing the tasks is sufficient.
He wasn't even running a password cracker.
A better analogy would be if you hired a mechanic to change the oil in your street-legal drag racing car with a $30,000 racing engine, telling him to only use Mobil synthetic oil, and he used olive oil instead.
Yes, the moment I see an exact catalog of specifically what McOwen was supposed to install, and in what order, I will agree that he had no discretion to install any more or any less.
I do not expect such a list to be forthcoming.
OTOH, if you installed S@H on a live banking server 'just because', they'd beat you to death with CAT5, even if you have admin privileges.
Again, university environment, not big multibillion dollar conglomerate with a stock price to keep up. Downtime is not disaster for *any* system in most universities.
By contrast, more than a few companies have hot spare buildings. You heard that right: If, one day, the office should cease to exist, everyone may go to another.
--Dan
False analogy. A good analogy would be if I hired you to clean the dog shit off my yard, and you instead dumped a truckload of dog shit on it. If you did that, you'd pay and pay and pay.
He was hired to install software. He didn't remove vast chunks of software, which would be the analogous argument. He also didn't attack the security of the systems he was using("removing the lock from the door") or attempt to view other people's information("pulled the mail from the mailbox") He did too much -- he installed extra code that wasn't actually desired.
A better example is that he was hired to clean up the dog shit, and he decided to clean up the cat shit too.
He did extra work within the constraints of his legitimate access and his job. It's that simple.
Not for security it doesn't. Security is a matter of knowing where every program on the machine came from, and knowing that no uncertified programs have even been run on the machine. It is solely a matter of trust, a matter of having a known chain of control. That trust is easy to throw away and expensive to regain.
The trust never existed.
Let me repeat that, with emphasis:
The trust that you describe, with full chain of evidence and absolute knowledge as to the source of every last byte on every last system, did not exist in this environment.
You cannot accuse somebody of losing for you what you didn't actually have!
The fact that not only did he not lose this trust, but he isn't even being accused of attempting to gain more trust than he was legitimately entitled to(via *actual* hacking) does alot to make me extraordinarily annoyed with this case.
I've seen at least one rumor that these were lab machines. Security begins with the physical, and with the vast number of people using these machines, it's literally impossible for them to have been considered anywhere even remotely within the same galactic vicinity as a "trusted base".
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky, CISSP
I am not a lawyer. I may once have thought to become one, but I have since been a technologist and a cryptographer. But I do not appreciate what Mr. McOwen is being accused of, and here are my thoughts on the matter:
====
To state that this case deserves to get thrown out of court -- with the prosecuting attorneys being reprimanded for falsifying financial figures to achieve a felony prosecution -- is not only a reasonable statement, it's possibly an obvious one. I have five arguments from which I draw these conclusions:
First, Mr. McOwen's terms of employment were easily open ended enough to consider this a valid use of network resources.
Second, University policy clearly granted Mr. McOwen permission to administer the machines as he saw fit, as long as he did so "fairly and in accordance with University policy."
Third, Mr. McOwen was acting in due diligence against billions of dollars in yearly national liability from a weak computer security environment.
Fourth, the Prosecution's numbers cannot be justified in any way, shape, or form.
Fifth, the very prosecution of this case creates a grave chilling effect against the ability for computer administrators to successfully maintain the systems they are charged with.
1) The exact job specifications of Mr. McOwen's employment were not and literally could not be set in stone; his basic task was to administer the systems according to the precepts of the site they were deployed. In this case, the site was an educational institution. Educational institutions, as opposed to even corporate workplaces, exist as nodes of "basic research" and "collaborative and non-profit volunteerism". Surely, it is not inconcievable that given the extraordinarily high degree of public works that universities are known for, that he might have come to the reasonable conclusion that installation of software that contributed to a public good (the global improvement of cryptographic quality) would be a fair extension of the mission of the university.
2) The University of Georgia's computer security policies, available at http://www.uga.edu/compsec/summary.html , clearly give Mr. McOwen wide latitude to administer systems however he saw fit. It states, "Those who administer computers and network facilities shall perform their duties fairly, in accordance with University policies." As this is the primary document describing University policies with respect to computer security, it stands by itself as a sufficient source of guidance for Mr. McOwen. Users are admonished that they "...shall take full responsibility for messages that they transmit through the University's computers and network facilities"; such responsibility refers specifically to "fraud, harassment, obscenity, and the like." Surely the analysis of simple numbers does not rise to the level of obscenity! There are admonitions against Trojan Horses and computer virii, yet both tools exist to procure access where none existed before--Mr. McOwen was granted his access legitimately. Indeed, the university specifically defines Trojan Horses in a detailed guide available at available at http://www.uga.edu/compsec/use.html : "A Trojan horse is a program with a hidden, destructive function, or a program designed to trick users into revealing confidential information such as passwords." There was nothing hidden about the RC5 code, and as for destructiveness, few would argue it is destructive to a computer to ask it to compute! Though there is a mention against "cracking", it is specifically in reference to the cracking of computers--Mr. McOwen was analyzing a code specifically authorized and designed to be analyzed. Even if he had been running a genuine system cracking utility, the detailed rules specifically authorize system administrators to do so. Mr. McOwen even actively complied with the requirement to give higher priority to users with more important work by running software that immediately yielded resources requested to any other software that requested them. Given the degree to which Mr. McOwen explicitly complied with university regulations, it is difficult to see the validity of this case.
3) Statistics have shown a multi billion dollar a year loss to the country from insufficient encryption and computer security systems. Such damage is often either concentrated or traced from machines with inadequate network security. University machines, almost always under-administered and very often forced to be publically accessable due to the academic requirements of students (one could not expect a place of higher learning to be as firewalled as the FBI!), often either directly experience financial damage or indirectly contribute to theoretical litigation expenses from being used as "jumping off points" for larger attacks. By contributing to the global awareness of the dangers of insufficient security, David expressed a degree of "due diligence" towards solving a problem the university was contributing to. Such due diligence constitutes a legitimate usage of system resources as a mitigating factor in any future litigation, much as active and genuine safety research mitigates against gross negligence in product liability circumstances.
4) No actual damage can be substantiated by the prosecution. The RC5 software, far from being heavy on network traffic, is a class of code known as "embarassingly parallelizable". In other words, the system consumes extraordinarily little network traffic for the amount of processing it does. Such processing is often done on systems with only intermittent modem connectivity; the university posessed a network connection several hundred times faster with permanent connectivity. It is beyond even the pale of conception that any communication from the RC5 system did, could have, or might have been predicted to cause any form of lesser service to any other network service. Indeed:
Suppose the school spent $200,000 on their internet connection yearly, for a single T1 interface capable of transfering one million, five hundred and fifty four thousand bits per second. Suppose the "damage" lasted over two years. This would place an upper cap of damages still at but $400K, and this would be presuming that the attack consumed the entire sum total of network resources. No such claim is being made. Lets assume that each transmission consisted of sixteen thousand bits every two days, and there were a hundred machines participating. These remain ballpark figures, but they're useful for illustrating the utter lack of direct damage. Over two years, those one hundred machines would exchange 584,000,000 bits.
This seems significant, until one realizes that the network as described posessed capacity to carry approximately 97,130,880,000,000 bits. The RC5 system, as it were, used up all of 0.0006% of the network capacity.
0.0006% of $400,000, incidentally, comes out to about $2.40.
5) Prosecution of Mr. McOwen would have a drastic chilling effect on the ability of computer administrators to do their work. When something as trivial as a pocket change's worth of network bandwidth can lead to felony prosecution, it becomes too risky to do much of anything. Mr. McOwen's judgement on the matter was trusted, and even if--in retrospect--management would have made separate selections, it's a questionable matter whether he could have fairly predicted that. His actions were questionable even as a offense worthy of termination, given the wide berth that system administrators require to be effective and the vast freedoms inherent in the academic environment. They'd be laughed out of any civil court in the country, and the fact that they've reached criminal court--at the felony level, which would deprive Mr. McOwen of his freedom, his voting rights, and even his ability to simply procure employment--is a grave insult.
This case should be thrown out of court, and the defendant's legal fees covered in full. Nobody should be allowed to abuse the power of the court in this manner.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
Certified Information Systems Security Professional
For the support of the organization, not for his own personal amusement, and most assuredly *not* for an effort to win him a prize.
:-)
It is my contention that his personal goals and the mission of his company were not in conflict, and furthermore the odds of him actually winning the prize, remote enough(even with whatever rank he managed to achieve), the prize small enough, and the actual distribution of that profit distributed enough that for all intents and purposes the value of that prize goes to zero.
In terms of the prize itself, his probabilistic share probably didn't add up to the price of a can of Mountain Dew. That's a Red Herring and you know it.
That a university is publicly oriented does not give its employees license to do whatever they think is in the public interest. A university is a corporation, just like any other, and the use of its resources must be approved by management.
First of all, you're wrong. A university is not a standard corporation any more than a political party is, particularly not a university established as a branch of the government! The explicitly avowed dedication to academic freedom means a hell of alot.
Second, I haven't seen a single shred of evidence to state that he himself didn't have the discretionary authority to decide to run this software. Administrators were exhorted to behave in a manner compatible with the values of the university; as I noted, the RC5 system was extraordinarily compatible with the values as they were laid down, down to relinquishing CPU upon request.
In fact, if one examines the documents linked in the previous post in depth, one finds an extraordinary amount of power given to system administrators -- so much, in fact, that "management" sees the need to specifically warn administrators not to be overly or overtly malicious towards students. This seems to me an implication that sysadmins had an extraordinary amount of autonomy over the systems they deployed.
Whether or not you feel this is a good thing for management or even a professional thing for Mr. McOwen, the implication that the systems were under his discretionary control is quite clearly there.
He wasn't a consultant, sigwinch. He was one of the operators.
Incidentally -- these machines were going for some time, with no complaints being rendered for quite some time. This means a couple things:
1) Other admins who noticed either approved, yielded to McOwen's discretionary authority, or were able to remove it themselves. Any way you slice it, the time he was granted helps, not hurts his position. (By contrast, a genuine attack usually *hurts* a network, causing reasonably quick corrections.)
2) Management either approved, or itself issued little low-level discretionary authority. In other words, management ordered the sysadmins to keep things running. If the sysadmins extracted more value from the sunk costs, and it was (reasonably) within the mission of the university -- so be it.
Unreviewed, untested, warranty-less binaries that engage in continuous communication with remote servers are a serious security threat, as well as a threat to the integrity of the machines.
Yeah, welcome to Winamp, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows itself.
Give be a break. The majority of university networks are so riddled with out of date daemons and unfirewalled ports it's ludicrous to suggest a single daemon with no known polling vulnerabilities is going to outweigh it. (By contrast, simply spoofing Winamp's update page is enough to destroy it.)
And what the fuck does that have to do with this discussion? The question is whether he had permission, not whether he would have had a good justification if he had asked for permission.
The question is if he had to ask. My point is that the burden is on the university to show he actually did need to ask, because he was clearly acting within the bounds laid out in the rules the school made public in a position that demands a large amount of autonomy.
Remember, that you would have made a different choice is irrelevant; the question is whether he had the right to make such a choice. In my mind, the fact that so much time passed between his use of university resources and his eventual shutdown means that quite a few people knew of this incident and one person elected to express discretionary priveledge and can him. That's fine--it happens--but you don't send someone to jail for it.
And even if that was our discussion, brute-force cracking RC5 is a stunt. It doesn't do a damn thing for security.
Silly. You have no idea how much Cracking DES did, do you? Do you have any idea how significant the EFF's DES Cracking book was in making sure AES happened, and in forcing 3DES to be the standard of the day?
Do you understand how recent it was that the federal government was saying it would take a foreign government inordinate and unrealistic amounts of time and money to crack even one DES key?
Do you realize how many algorithms, *today*, still depend on 40 bit RC4? Most SSL sites -- that travesty that is 802.11 WEP -- the garbage is everywhere.
Are you an idiot? Do you know nothing about computers?
Ask this again two weeks from now.
Diligent recovery from this compromise would involve...
a lot of things that didn't happen. At all. Even in the slightest.
You can't charge for damages that didn't occur. It's like filing a suit for your own wrongful death because somebody coughed next to you and they might have had TB--first of all, you ain't dead, second of all, they didn't have it!
Competent professionals help the client accomplish their mission. If they have ideas for new mission objectives, or even for cool charitable projects that don't really accomplish much, they discuss it with the boss. They *don't* run off and reconfigure hundreds of pieces of high tech equipment for their own whimsy.
I claim this did help with the mission, and that it was reasonable for McOwen to believe this was within his assigned powers. If his interpretation was at odds with that of the administration, perhaps he deserved to lose his job -- but this doesn't even pass the giggle test for felony hacking. They were HIS BOXES. He had a legitimate accounts, probably even root accounts and did things that were *arguably* legitimate.
Sysadmins *never* have the right to turn hundreds of the institution's machines into zombies for their own pet projects.
Oddly enough, who do you go to if you have a project that could really use a few hundred machines? You go to management, they look at you funny and tell you to go to the guru to decide whether or not to do it.
In most places with vast amounts of computing resources, there's usually a sysadmin at the top of the pile choosing what goes where--and if there's nobody on top of everything, like there aren't at most understaffed universities, everyone who has legitimate acccess is expected to legitimately use it--however they see fit, as long as they follow the rules.
Hardly. It's vandalism, plain and simple. The alterations he performed obviously had no relevance to the organization's mission, they had a potential serious deleterious impact on the mission, and he deliberately chose not to ask permission when doing so would have required little time or effort.
I provided extensive documentation showing the compatibility of this project to the university mission. I don't need to show it's absolutely correct -- merely that it's plausible.
Whatever deleterious effect you mention *didn't happen*, and as far as I can tell hasn't *ever* happened. Complete lack of precedent for a deleterious effect has an effect in a courtroom, you know.
The law is the least of his problems. Not only did he recklessly fuck over hundreds of his client's machines, he whined about the client's consternation on the Internet.
If the prospect of a decade of prison rape wouldn't make you run screaming like a horror movie prom queen into whatever abandoned warehouse of an online forum you could find -- you're a stronger man than I.
For the rest of his life, any time a prospective employer does a web search on him this story will show up in all its tawdry glory.
Oh, this is much better than a felony conviction. It don't say, "Have you ever been mentioned on Slashdot" on the employment forms, you know
I propose a new phrase for the Internet lexicon: "Pulling a David McOwen". It will be the Darwin Award of Career Limiting Moves.
Heh. Doctors play God, admins play BOFH. Both make mistakes, but the latter almost never kills anyone. Strip root, maybe. Strip down, though? For "hacking" his own machines?
He ran rc5, not rm -rf. He used computers to compute, not to destroy. He yielded processor when needed, rather than hog it to the exclusion of all others.
Felony hacking my ass, and *everybody* knows it.
I do feel for the prosecutor, though. I don't think he realizes how badly he's being used.
--Dan
www.doxpara.com
However, part of the subpoena restricts us from commenting on the details of pending litigation. Especially since we do not know the details or circumstances of the alleged activity, we do not want to do anything which would endanger either party's position in this case. We trust that the community understands our position in this matter.
In the more general sense, not commenting at all on the specifics of this case, it is never a good idea to run the distributed.net client software on computers you don't own or administrate. In the four years or so that we've been in operation we've been dragged in to a handful of situations where people have lost their jobs, positions, and scholarships by thinking that forgiveness would be easier to obtain than permission. Nobody, especially distributed.net, wants to see this happen.
It's important to keep in mind that the literal resource consumption of the client (which is as close to "zero" as can be) is often not the only factor important to a business. The existence of prize money with the RC5-64 project is discomforting to many organizations. One tactic which has proven to be very effective is to provide an affidavit that you will donate any winnings to a charity if a client you installed on a company or university machine finds the winning key. In many cases, this has been key to a participant receiving permission to run the client on non-owned resources.
Another frequent stumbling block is with service and support contracts which prohibit non-certified software running on workstations or servers. Your university or employer may risk losing support on their equipment if software is installed that hasn't been explicitly mentioned in the support agreements.
The bottom line is, always get permission first. It might not be as difficult to get permission as you think. And if you can't get permission, don't install the client.
We hope for a speedy and just resolution to this case, whatever that outcome should be, and that we never have to be involved in another one.
Depends on the OS. Most modernish OSes on a single processor execute a HALT rather then spin in an idle loop. Not as many do that on multiple CPUs because getting the wakeup code right is harder.
CPUs in the halt state generally use less power, and generate less heat. It may wear the CPU out a bit slower too. A box with a thermal controlled fan will use less cooling power, and in the summer less AC will be used.
Those effects should be pretty small though. The heat generated by a CPU may be the same as two office lights, and a halted CPU won't put off no heat, just a bit less. Similar for the power used. So as far as heat and power goes it would be like suing a janitor for a half mil for leaving the lights on in a bunch of offices (for a few years).
Beats me on bandwidth, but I expect that is pretty low too.
Even if damages are called for these seem totally out of line. As far as damages go, I figure this would be the kind of thing worth a stern warning, or maybe a firing, but not a lawsuit. Apparently I'm not the Stare of Georgia.
Because they suck in general, or because they don't halt rather then having an idle loop (plus sucking in general as an OS)?
Alternators do not produce excess power, at least not if they're operating properly, and if they go bad and do produce excess power, that excess power burns out a fusible link, which makes you have to fix the problem.
Alternators have voltage regulators that keep the voltage right around 13.8, or whatever voltage the manufacturer has designed for, despite fluctuations in the load. It does this by increasing or decreasing the magnetic field of the rotor. This rotating field induces a current in the stator that, after rectification, is the output of the alternator. When load increases it draws more current. This will cause the alternator output voltage (the pressure that forces current through the load) to drop unless the alternator is caused to produce a higher current, which results in the voltage not going down. In order to produce that higher current, the strength of that rotating magnetic field is increased. Rotating an armature in a stronger field or rotating a stronger field with the "armature" held fixed is electrically the same--you have relative movement. If the magnetic field strength increases it takes more energy to move one relative to the other. That increased energy has to come from the engine, which means it uses more gasoline.
Radios, or any other electrical load, draw current. Some draw a little, some draw a lot, but none of them run on "free" power. The more current you have to supply to all the loads on the system, the more energy you have to use to generate that current.
I'm not trying to flame you, but until you have a better understanding of how electricity works you might want to avoid endangering yourself and your equipment by not opening your system and messing with the insides. Of course I learned a lot of what I know about how electricity works by opening up stuff and messing with the insides, but fortunately I was lucky enough (not smart, lucky) to not have severely damaged myself or started a fire.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Not to mention that moderators who replied to the post they moderated would undo that moderation.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Generally when radio stations fire you they aren't that nice about it.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
If I were the State of Georgia, I'd be more concerned about the power consumption and decreased hardware lifetimes (due to temperature from constant processor use than I would a few hundred Kb of data a day. Try feeling your CPU heatsink after a day of running the dnet client and you'll see what I mean.
--
True... I have no idea what those Georgia machines are but the machines we used when I was in high school were mass-produced low-end boxes. I doubt that they had more than the most basic CPU fan, if they had any at all.
--
The penalty *IS* the point. This proposed penalty is not just "a little steep". At face value, this easily appears to be cruel and unusual punishment. 15 years in jail? Give me a break. When drunk drivers who put *lives* at risk don't get that sort of time, much less financial penalty, (especially on a first offense!), this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
Because this is a sufficiently ambiguous case to suggest the need for a contractual restriction. Perhaps he signed one--I don't know. Either way, the car analogies REALLY need to stop: running RC5 is NOT stealing a car and never will be. Was it bad? Maybe. Was it REALLY REALLY REALLY bad?
1. How can this be a felony, this is a civil matter. They should be sueing for damages.
2. If he was in charge of the project, he could put any software on the computers. He had full disgression on the software installed.
3. Did he agree or sign documents agreeing not to install this type of software?
4. Did he hide the Dnet software on the computers? When someone asked about the program, did he say "Oh thats the Distributed.net RC5 Program, etc..."
5. How long did it take before someone complained about the program? Why didnt they just send out an email asking them to remove the software?
6. What was the actual damages?
When working a project, as a large computer rollout, you come up with a list of common software that the end user will need. What web browser, Email client, Ftp cilent, Bookmarks preinstalled, etc.. Now I hand this project over to the IT folks to do the actual work. They want to add thier own standard troubleshooting tools, maybe PC Anywhere, Software logging, Time sync software, SSH, etc.. Did they break the companies policy by adding Time sync software? The IT department had the "implied" authority to alter the install.
The abuse of the power for both State and Federal juristiction is in the news media daily, and here is just another example. Trying to put a person away for 15 years for installing software, un- fck'ing believable.
-- A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul. George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
Are you an idiot? Do you know nothing about computers? Diligent recovery from this compromise would involve 1) backing up all data on the compromised hard drives, 2) formatting them, 3) reinstalling them from scratch, 4) sanitizing all the backed-up data, 5) and reinstalling all the backed-up data. Assuming a $150/hour sysadmin, three labor hours per machine, and 200 machines, that's a direct recovery cost of $90k.
(Im assuming Windows since its 200+ pcs)
1. Click on the little cow icon in tooltray.
2. Click configure.
3. Click Help. Whoa look at that, URL and Name of program...
4. Close program.
5. Delete directory.
I just saved the company 679K (your quote) and sued your ass for fraud.
If I hired a mechanic to check out my engine, and he sayed I used the wrong brand of oil, and I must replace my engine, Thats fraud.
Common sense people, Any Sys-Admin, IT/IS person would know how to check out a program and figure how to uninstall it.
BTW we use seti@home to burn in our Sun servers, even our big 10K clusters. Great way to burn in the million dollar hardware complexes before we go live with customers.
--
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Sun cpus if bad, crash during the first couple of weeks, (most likely) with cache or parity errors, thats why you burn them in...
We never run seti@home on live production machines, just burn them in on pre-production machines, read the post again.
Exactly, the guy didnt install software on banking machines, he used uni desktop boxen. And if he did install S@H on production boxes he would be fired, not thrown in jail.
And, speaking as an ex-State o' GA employee working at a university... boy is he screwed. But, it could be worse. He could have tried to buy supplies that weren't under state contract, or done something else that is outlawed under the state's antediluvian purchasing policies for computer equipment.
--
Never knock on Death's door.
Ring the doorbell and run
(He hates that).
Dump the IRS - http://www.fairtax.org
I live in one of many areas (small town, central IL) where both residential and business lines are charged a per minute rate as well as a per/connect rate. In the city I used to live in (Urbana, only about 1 hour East of my present abode), the business line only paid per connect. That's how my dedicated dial-up connection was so affordable - it was online almost 24x7, but it only made 15-20 calls in a month. It made me feel good to be abusing the phone company, but made me feel bad to get calls at 8AM (college student, sleep until 10 normally) asking to talk to the "owner of the business". The tradeoff was acceptable.
BTW, I had a whole bunch of computers runing dnetc at the college that used to employ me. I didn't get sued. Know how? I asked permission. Then I installed the clients anyway. ;)
The text of the finger (so people can stop /.'ing dnet :D) ->
/home/nugget
::
0 6 for details
nugget@distributed.net
[distributed.net]
Login: nugget
Name: David McNett
Directory:
:: 09-Jul-2001 00:15 (Monday)
Well, since it's hit slashdot and I'm getting lots of mails asking if
we're aware of the situation, I thought I'd post a plan explaining
distributed.net's perspective on David McOwen and the State of Georgia.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/08/21532
distributed.net can confirm that at least some part of what's being reported
is accurate. We were subpoenaed for information relating to Mr. McOwen's
participation in the RC5-64 project and supplied that information as
requested. We also spoke at length with representatives of the prosecution
to make sure they understood the actual impact of the dnetc software on
the machines and networks in question.
However, part of the subpoena restricts us from commenting on the details
of pending litigation. Especially since we do not know the details or
circumstances of the alleged activity, we do not want to do anything which
would endanger either party's position in this case. We trust that the
community understands our position in this matter.
In the more general sense, not commenting at all on the specifics of this
case, it is never a good idea to run the distributed.net client software
on computers you don't own or administrate. In the four years or so that
we've been in operation we've been dragged in to a handful of situations
where people have lost their jobs, positions, and scholarships by thinking
that forgiveness would be easier to obtain than permission. Nobody,
especially distributed.net, wants to see this happen.
It's important to keep in mind that the literal resource consumption of
the client (which is as close to "zero" as can be) is often not the only
factor important to a business. The existence of prize money with the
RC5-64 project is discomforting to many organizations. One tactic which
has proven to be very effective is to provide an affidavit that you will
donate any winnings to a charity if a client you installed on a company
or university machine finds the winning key. In many cases, this has been
key to a participant receiving permission to run the client on non-owned
resources.
Another frequent stumbling block is with service and support contracts
which prohibit non-certified software running on workstations or servers.
Your university or employer may risk losing support on their equipment if
software is installed that hasn't been explicitly mentioned in the support
agreements.
The bottom line is, always get permission first. It might not be as
difficult to get permission as you think. And if you can't get permission,
don't install the client.
We hope for a speedy and just resolution to this case, whatever that
outcome should be, and that we never have to be involved in another one.
--
Delphis
Delphis
Even at 5 cents a second, that would be how many computation units to use $415,000 worth of bandwidth? This is RC4, not SETI. SETI is more of a bandwidth hog (I know, I run 2 SETI processes at home connected via the same 28.8k I browse slashdot with). RC4 hardly uses any since all it needs to return is the work unit start, number of keys, the result, and any ID information. Then it gets a new work unit of about the same complexity and goes to work.
I could see how they can say the CPU time might cost that. But I sense they are twisting the facts to posture for some kind of bigger settlement or plea agreement. It could also just be gross incompetence on the part of the lawyer(s) there (and we know that never happens, right).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Bob: "Hello, this is Bob over in the State Attorney's office. Is this the state internet network accountant?"
Tom: "Yes it is. How can I help you?"
Bob: "I'm doing investigations on a case here, and I need to know how much the internet costs. Do you have this information?"
Tom: "Do you need the cost of a specific circuit?"
Bob: "I don't know what you mean by circuit. I'm only interested in the cost of the internet."
Tom: "Well, there are a lot of cost factors involved. For example there are costs for leases and depreciations for the routers and the servers. Then there are the circuit costs for the state network. And the costs for connecting into the actual internet itself, like our OC-192 core connections."
Bob: "So are these connections what makes the internet work?"
Tom: "Yes, they are. Is that what you are interested in?"
Bob: "I think so. What are we paying for that?"
Tom: "Do you need the exact amount? I'd have to get all the paperwork together and figure it up and get back to you tomorrow."
Bob: "Just an estimate for now. A ballpark figure is good enough. We'll ask for copies of the paperwork when we're ready to go to court on this."
Tom: "OK, well last month we budgeted somewhere around 1.53 million dollars for the internet connections."
Bob: "Great! Thanks! That's exactly what I need to know."
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sadly true. In Anderson, IN a couple years ago, the media got ahold of a tidbit about a man who had been busted for DWI, and had just received his six hundred and twenty-something conviction for that crime. Seems that the harshest penalty laid down for this guy was loss of his license.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Assuming they find it, and want to come after you for stealing processor time, your fscked.
If you fess up, then there is every chance they will go after you anyway.
If you do nothing and they find it, they go after you...
Your only real option would be to break in and remove the software, or hack in and do it remotely.
Good luck.
Reality has a liberal bias
Actually, YOUR analogy isn't quite right; more like You hired Me to pick up your car and on the way I listened to the radio. This consumed power unnecessarily; since the power comes from gasoline, I cost you money.
It's like people at work that think they have a "right" to not have their email or web usage monitored. You're using someone elses resources, you have to follow their rules. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Hmmm....a little cut, a little paste, and voila!
It's like people at work that that they have a
"right" not to have their bathroom breaks webcast. You're using someone elses toilet, you have to follow their rules. If you don't like it, don't use it.
So...having made my point (I hope) that employers DON'T have carte blanche to do what they like to employees simply because the employees are on their property, the question then becomes where to draw the line. That I leave as an exercise for the reader
Why in the fuck is this a bad thing? For chrissakes people, you are paid to do a fucking job, NOT run dnet clients on every possible fucking machine you've been given charge over.
What really pisses me off is that most of the posts here are from people bitching and whining that it doesn't really do any harm to the machines. Sure it eats up a bit of proc even at the nicest level. Sure it takes bandwidth to download new keys but not that much. YOU'RE MISSING THE FUCKING POINT. THEY WEREN'T HIS MACHINES. HE WASN'T PAID TO RUN dnet clients ON THEM.
The sad part about this whole thing is that many of the /. crowd are showing how old they really are. Grow the fuck up and just do your job.
I know I'll get modded down but not for any justifiable reason. Mostly cause I hurt the feelings of some 13 yr old kids trapped in 35 yr old bodies who never learned the difference between work and personal life.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Actually.. they can ignore it for up to SEVEN years and then do what they want. :)
It's called the statute of limitations.
Magnwa
he was using a full T1's worth of bandwith
Urm. Say AGAIN? Or is somebody confusing megakeys per second with kilobits per second?
I don't call that getting off scott free.
Heck, even when my users do something like that, against policy, I don't request to have the fired.. perhaps I would if they repeatedly and blatantly ignored me and did it, and were jerks about it.
Yes, they aren't his computers; that's obvious. Yes, he should have know better. And as you and everyone else agrees, 15 years in prison and a million bucks (or whatever) is friggin rediculous.
Remember,though, it has to go to court, where it won't be hard in this day and age to make them show how this cost them so much.
determine that from? That he didn't care?
He made a MISTAKE, as MANY young people do.
And he's not saying he didn't do anything wrong.
He's saying that having a felony charge on his record, paying a half million in fines and doing 15 years is NOT right. And I have to agree.
You attitude seems to be strange: If you break the law, any law, you should be thrown in prison for 15 years and not whine about it?
Ok, I'm a GA resident, and I'm also a student at a GA university. I am also the head of a student organization, and was recently on several faculty committees that dealt directly with state funds for the university. One thing that I have learned in the past year, is that you don't do squat with university computers or technology without clearing it with the proper authorities first.
This past year, the IT dept. learned that several faculty and staff members had Napster installed on their computers. They learned of this when professors brought in their computers complaining of lack of disk space, and they found out that the grad assistants had installed Napster and proceeded to fill up the hard drives with MP3's. While that in of itself cost money and time for the IT tech's to get rid of the software and "repair" the computer, the bandwidth used to download those files also came from a very limited connection. So between the illegality of the music, and the cost of the download, IT announced that all computers with Napster must have the software uninstalled within 2 weeks of the notice.
In any case, IT argued that these are state computers, not the property of the faculty or staff that use them. So basically, this guy IS screwed if he did not get permission. That's all there is to it.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
The difference is the average employment contract says "You will not misuse company resources, the penalty for which is disciplinary action (such as termination)".
On the other hand, the average University computer policy is "Misuse of computer equipment may make you liable for prosecution". At least that's what I remember all the uni computer systems saying on login when I was at uni.
I assume they wouldn't be suing him if he'd asked whether he could install this and use their bandwidth. So he's got no one to blame but himself.
It's like people at work that think they have a "right" to not have their email or web usage monitored. You're using someone elses resources, you have to follow their rules. If you don't like it, don't use it.
I really hope you work in manual labour, because if you work with computers you're running a huge scam on any employers.
Some basics.
1) If they determined the computers who untrustworthy now they'd pay one junior tech to install Windows, that's 20 minutes. They'd do one install of any needed application, maybe 40 minutes, if we assume a lot of programs. Then they'd ghost it, burn the image, and ghost it onto the other terminals. Figure 10 minutes per station, but it's parallizable, burn multiple copies, have multiple techs working. At ~12 minutes (rolling in some overhead to make the math pretty) per terminal, that's 5/hour, for maybe $4 each at a junior tech's likely wage. Multiply that by 200 and you've repaired all the machines for $800...
2) If you did hire a security consultant, he'd only need to look at one machine to determine if there was a problem. He'd then pass it off to the junior techs mentioned in #1.
3) The university isn't selling bandwidth, they're claiming it was stolen. That means they can only claim their cost. As shown in many posts, this cost is just a few dollars.
4) The RC5 client isn't any more likely to become a security hole than Scandisk. It doesn't listen for an outside connection so it's a whole lot different than the type of thing you're thinking of.
5) The dnet client doesn't slow down the machines it's running on, that's the whole point in running it at IDLE priority, it only runs when the machine isn't doing anything, and it consumes about 2.5MB of memory, all of which is easily swapped out for a higher-priority process. (I saw benchmarks that showed the computer performing exactly the same with and without the RC5 client running.)
Sheesh.
As I said, I really hope you don't represent yourself as a computer expert.
You don't download keys, you download key blocks. Each key block is like 1k or something and has enough keys to keep a computer going for several hours.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I wonder if Georgia thinks "k" means "kilobytes".
I don't see in the FAQ any mention of how much network bandwidth an RC5 client can use, particularly with the speed of processors two years ago.
Oops. Down on page four of that Forum is a comment from Distributed.Net that Georgia did subpoena them and Georgia was informed of the resources used by Distributed.Net. So Georgia should have the proper technical information.
59 cents per *second* in data traffic? for RC5? WHOA..
.25/hour, .004/minute, and even less per SECOND. And I get a lot of use out of my machine, other than cracking RC5.
I run RC5. It runs 24/7. Let's figure it out:
1500 for the system (homebuilt)(let's say 3 year lifespan, that's 500/year, or about $42/month.. I paid cash for the components)
my *total* electicity bill: 80/month
ISP + cable TV: 60/month
So, that's $182/month, a bit over $6/day in a 30 day month,
Anyone remember when the h(cr)acker stole some AT&T documents (was that Mitnick?) and AT&T priced the documents at something like half a million bucks (although it was listed in their document catalog for like $30)?
So, basically, the "cost" they incurred is bullshit, the jail time is fucking ridiculous (we can't even keep murderers in jail that long), god I'm sick of shit like this.
Yes, they weren't his computers. He should be fired. However, the fine and proposed sentence time is a gross misrepresentation of justice. Can't the State of Georgia go arrest some of them child pornographers the Government keeps talking about instead?
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
That way, more people would read it, and that way there'd be a large drop in the RC5 and OGR rates on Tuesday with everyone madly uninstalling their DNet clients from all the machines they've installed it on at work.
I'm betting that the RC5 rate drops noticably this week.
Neato. So companies should prosecute users for using unaproved backgrounds, or screensavers as well. What if a user sets their screensaver to 3d pipes instead of blank? Tell me is this a felony or just a misdaemenor? How do we calculate $$/CPU cycles again? Ohh don't forget time on the graphics card. And lets not just have companies fire people they don't like, lets make it possible to prosecute every former employee for something as nebulous as "stealing computer time", that way they can be blackmailed long after they leave the employer.
add a , sorry...
I'm suspecting that:
bandwidth in kbytes/sec
is being confused with:
keyrate in kkeys/sec
as shown on this graph.
Does anyone have any idea how keys translate into messages?
Otherwise law enforcement turns into a for-profit business where the goal isn't to deter crime or protect society.
Welcome to the new world.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/lawful-arrest/
http://www.aclunc.org/opinion/001027-seizure.ht
http://www.libertarianworld.com/Property-Seizur
3. Under the Kansas Asset Seizure and Forfeiture Act, the seizing authority is not required to prove that the money seized was a result of conduct which gave rise to the forfeiture.
This quote was found here: http://www.kscourts.org/kscases/ctapp/2000/200007
Once you get through some of this material, you'll see where this is going.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
this becomes an abuse of the law and of law enforcement.
No, you missed the point. This is all about a proscecutor for the State of Georgia justifying 18 months of his time and his waste of State resources. He must recoup these costs for the State or else it's his carreer and life that will be on the line.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
So where do I go to sue the fuckers that spam me and cost *me* money. I am not a state, I'm a frickin' person. There's probably millions of dollars used in downloading spam (at least in Ireland with pay per minute Internet which is your only option really). A win in this case could be dangerous precedent for Universities that have large bandwidth with SETI clients and so on. Sort of like Napster as well (can't remember the links though when those Unviersities banned it).
Anyway I've lost track.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
I originally thought they did some combination of handwaving and fudging with substituting average costs for marginal costs -- but then I did the math.
$0.59/second is $2124/hour.
I mean, there is prosecutorial zeal and all that, but really this would be an absurd figure to put even to an inexperienced jury. You could pay somebody to set fire to a fairly nice computer every hour at that rate, or pay for the equivalent of a T1 of bandwith in under half an hour.
Also, note that this amounts to a claim of 195 hours "stolen", which seems pretty small if this guy was in charge of configuring a large number of computers.
Perhaps the figure being asserted was 0.59 CENTS/hour, and 19,500 hours "stolen". Assuming a a hundred machines working the eighteen off hours every day, this works out to about ten or eleven days operation; or perhaps it was ten machines for a hundred days.
0.59 cents per hour is $21.24/hour, which also seems like a more presentable figure, although still quite high. This might be a standard rate for an hour of computer time quoted on grants, assuming that normally this is dominated by operator costs, and throwing in an indirect cost rate of 25-30%. I know this is unfair in this situation but I assume this wouldn't matter much to a sufficiently unscrupulous prosecutor, whereas being laughed out of court would.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One night, I was taking care of some e-mail using Pine at around 12:30 AM. I closed my e-mail client, dinked around for a little in the shell, logged out, and went to bed at around 12:40 AM. (It was an early night for me.) The following morning, I checked my e-mail. I had in my inbox, eleven times, the following note. I paraphrase, but the tone is the same.
The messages had all been sent right before I logged out and took my dnetc instances with me. However, I quickly put an end to that script right then and there. My roommate and I got a pretty good laugh out of it, too.
For more information, click here.
Throw a hundred random poor but innocent black people into the legal system and see how many of them come out the other side free. I bet maybe 40% if the judges were awake during the trials. Accuse them of drug dealing and I bet you could lock up 70% without even trying.
Our legal system is broken and useless unless you are rich or a republican.
War is necrophilia.
The cases are not similar. Fabricating evidence in a criminal prosecution (the original premise was that the prosecutors would deserve a reprimand for "falsifying financial figures to achieve a felony prosecution") is a far more serious crime than anything McOwen is accused of doing.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Reprimanded, shreprimanded. It should achieve their own felony prosecution.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I was about to post a followup to my own followup, saying that my tone may have (upon retrospect) been a bit sharp. But then I saw your post, so this post now bears double duty...
Sweet! IBM is sounding cooler and cooler all the time. I distinctly recall the Apple TV advertisement that ran once during the '84 Olympics, announcing Macintosh, and portraying IBM as the Big Brother (1984, get it?). I guess IBM has been undergoing some revamping of their corporate culture.
And at the same time, SGI -- who was one of the neatest places to work at -- says they're killing off their employee's website. Bummer.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You know, actually, that doesn't strike me as so bad...
*straight face*
Well, mostly. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Okay, so maybe the penalty is a little steep, but how many times are we going to rehash the same damn story on slashdot? (Oh yeah, I forgot that the collective attention span here lasts abou- hey, look, shiny things.)
It's very simple, folks:
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
First Law of Slashdot: Every extreme example must be countered by an equally-extreme counterexample.
*sigh* Of course not. Clearly every employer who doesn't have their heads shoved up their own arse -- and even some that do -- recognize that some company time/resources will be lost for purposes of morale. Reading slashdot is like setting aside part of an unused cubicle for a small fridge and a coffee machine, or getting a phone call from the SO to remind you to pick up milk on the way home. No, they aren't strictly work activites, and no, they don't bring in immediate revenue (or whatever).
(The number of people who like to point this out every time the topic comes up disturbs me. What's required is good judgement. My boss doesn't care if I use the web to look up movie times for that evening, but running my own MP3 streaming radio station from my office would be out of line.)
And I repeat: yes, I agree the penalty is too steep. I just don't think the guy should get off scot-free in the name of science.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
In a University? give me a break!
Sorry, but the action shout be in some proportion to the case in question, meaning:
Those were probably machines, most networked together and accessible for any student who wishes to log in and has some networkwide account (i'm assuming from other Universities). In these circumstances it's near impossible to have high security projects on those machines. All in all, in university networks availability is more important than security.
The process you describe is hence inappropriate to the case. The RC5 client doesn't even have known security holes, so the additional security risk due to the running clients is very low, regarding the environment (students that access the machines without getting some lecture about security, for one). So if you consider risk due to running an application with no known security holes high enough to make all that sanitizing necessary, most universities should probably sanitize their computers on a weekly basis.
The most sensible course of action (and what probably happened) was simply deinstalling the client on the machines and be done with it.
I don't know, how much of a 'worst case' scenario you want to make out of it, i simply think you're taking it a bit far there. Anyone could make that bill even higher by saying, that all Work done on those Computers in the past two years is to be considered compromised, all of it has to be done from scratch, and billing wor all that worktime and the costs of delayed projects (like you seemed to hint at with that accountant example in another post). Noone will do that, it's simply not realistic, but it can be used to calculate arbitrarily high damages.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I could see billing the guy for the difference in electrical use between a sleeping machine and a machine running RC5. In CA, nowadays, that's probably not an insignificant amount. Perhaps his employer was budgeting for the Energy*Star savings on those computers?
A $500K fine is ridiculous, and 15 years has *GOT* to be unconstitutional under the 8th amendment.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
It's akin to a government office being budgeted too much money to build a highway, so they use the remainder on strippers. (Okay, so it's an over-the-top analogy; work with me here.)
What makes you think that's over the top? Government agencies will spend money on ANYTHING at the end of the fiscal year just to make sure their budget doesn't get cut.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
I work for the state of Ga too, and we'd probably end up having to patch up some kind of certif for all of the SCO servers... Of course, all of our MS stuff is compliant, so There! >:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Clearly, you must be one of the brain-fscking dead HS school students with no concept of history or law. You must have grown up in the "if I think it so...it must be so" world. Let's pray you're sterile. If not, grab a pair of sissors and do it yourself.
Learn the law, asshole. As soon as you start using company resources against policy, you are potentially violating the law. When it is unauthorized and costs them money (as is a network connection to the internet) its theft. Plain and simple.
The point is, there has to be a policy in effect. Employees are responsible for understanding the applicable policies (e-mail, network usage, etc.) These are promulgated via an employee manual, by law, at corporations. If there is no acceptable usage policy, then they guy has a fighting chance. But, I'd venture that there is a catch-all clause that covers theft of services or something like that. In the end, he will most likely lose.
If they (MIS) installed it on your computer, then there it should be okay to run it provided you are doing so lawfully and it wasn't put there by mistake. Thus, most screen savers aren't considered a threat (unless you run them on an NT server where they consume 100% CPU time and drag your systems to a crawl...seen it..it sucks).
Thinks like RC5 and Seti@home have alternative configurations that would allow them to run all the time, when idle, or as a screen saver.
Next, then consume bandwidth. This is minor in most cases.
Finally, they potentially expose the network to the outside. You have to worry about rouge versions of the program (or even improperly designed programs), theft of passwords from the remote system and a slew of other security related concerns that could compromise your network.
Having seen the havoc a simple napster client caused by telling the whole world about our IP, I've seen thousands of attempts to garner access to our systems via telnet and ftp. Not just port scans, mind you, but real attacks. The activity increased exponentially when Napster was first responding to the legal order.
I view Napster as one of the biggest security concerns for a business because it turns the client into a server. It is now an employment terminating event (via acceptable usage policy) to run unauthorized network endabled programs on our systems. Our employees now check with the authorized use of software or obtain permission from MIS before installing anything new.
If they want to run something unauthorized, they can run it at home on non-company owned systems. Until their compromised system affects my systems, I don't really care what they do on their personally owned systems.
... finding any qualified personnel with that kind of attitude. You know, there are too many great career opportunities outside of the banking world, and no self-respecting geek will put up with your microsofto-sadistic tendencies for too long. One day, you'll be stuck with an entire staff of VB programmers, all incapable of designing a secure system... and eventually your sorry bank will be ass-raped by a bunch of thirteen year old script kiddies.
Say no to software patents.
That's pretty insulting. The slashdot crowd is not nearly so bad as yo... hey, check this out, sweet!!
Seriously, the problem is the fact that the punishment is about the equivalent of executing someone for smoking in a no-smoking section.
Do you want to go to jail the next time you check out a non-work-related website while at work, or any similar infraction? Because, that is what this amounts to.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Well... my rc5 output isnt even visible on my mrtg of course... only 3 puters cracking at home ;)
Not even the keymaster would use enough bandwidth to even lag anything above modem afaik...
Has anyone considered that this is likely just a hoax? Doesn't it seem a little odd to just see this pop up on a message board?
/. crew have probably fallen for a random, stupid net hoax.
I think the
Correct me if I'm wrong but, I cannot imagine ANY means of connecting to the internet being THAT expensive.
Even if you'd use a dialup, and dial long-distance with that to boost, the costs would not be even close to 59 cents per second. (which is 59x60x60=$2124 per hour!!!)
How did they come up with those figures ?!?
Unless you put your machine to sleep or are using a transmeta, mobile pentium, or some other chip and OS that supports lowering the CPU's clock rate while idle (i.e no procceses need CPU time), your CPU stays on at full power running an idle thread waiting for your OS to give it something to do. In this case, there is little to no power savings having your machine sit idling compared to having it do heavy number crunching.
Sig goes here
Was there anything in the terms of service (to borrow and AOL term) that prohibited using such a client? Is not, then f them.
I mean serious...if they gave you access to the computers (meaning you didn't hack into a bunch of University servers and install the client, which I suppose you could have done) then they have no business charging you for transfer fees. You have to agree to something before you owe a bill. If they told you "shut down the client or pay X per MB transferred" that would be a legal contract. They can't retroactively apply charges that you never agreed to pay.
Not to mention, a single warez dood trading ISOs or VCDs will chew up a years worth of RC5 traffic. I do hear about any of them getting slammed with this kind of ludicrous charge, although plenty lose their connections.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
In a University or other state-run institution, the primary purpose is to maximize taxpayer value.
He did not have permission to install RC5, and doing so did nothing for the University or the taxpapers- thus it was wrong. As it turns out, it was also illegal.
You say that you dismiss 'my Admin Staff' for installing 'unapproved software on systems regardless of reason'. I find it difficult to take advice from a manager who consistently misspells 'professional'.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Remember, these are TAXPAYER DOLLARS that an audit will be burning through. Just because there are a few nutsacks in government doesn't mean that you should penalize the taxpayers.
anyone got proof of this one?
this is where your 'traditional' media outlet - hegemonic or not - has the leg up on slashdot - they would have called the AG's office for confirmation before running an item like this.
-renard
This is a facetious lawsuit. Any lawsuit launched by a big corporate (and US universities are some of the worst) will destroy the life of any normal human being who is targeted - even if they win. OTOH, they won't see a penny in damages, because the lawyer's bills alone will be enough to bankrupt the guy.
So why are they doing it ? There's no real reason why anyone can complain about an RC5 client, and in the vast noise of shop-at-work and corporate pr0n surfing, it's invisible. Secondly, it's an admin's to install RC5 and VirtuaGirl clients (on a sacrificial machine), because you can guarantee that a user somewhere will do it, and it's best to be forewarned about it.
I don't understand this at all, and I can only assume (with my paranoid hat on) that there's more to it than we're hearing.
...and of course, any admin's real power comes from the web proxy logs, and his boss' visits to farmsex.net (Hi Mike ! Still attending church regularly ? Still have that .25 IP address ? Still being a total bastard to your staff ?)
Track down a copy of the acceptable use policies from the time you worked there and see if they prohibit the installation of unauthorized software. Also, did anyone help you do this and was your supervisor aware of this? You need to start tracking down other employees that you may have told about this. You need to show that it wasn't against their internal policies or that it wasn't kept a secret from the rest of the organization.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
This client doesn't download the keys, it downloads parameters to a block of keys. It then iterates through the keys within that block. The difference is me typing "All the numbers between 1 and 1 trillion" and me typing all the numbers between 1 and 1 trillion.
-no broken link
1. Did he have permission to install/run the client on the computers? We don't have a solid answer to this one, but I would suspect a court would find the answer was yes. The school employed him to administer the computer. In liu of giving him explicit instructions, they were relying on him to A) Stay within the bounds of the law (eg, no illegal copies of software) and B) use his best profesional judgement on the best way to admin the machine. So, assuming they didn't place some more restrictive guidelines on him I don't see how they can complain much about him installing / running the software, from a permission point of view.
2. Did he have the right to use the network resources that he did? Clearly, these cost the university money, and so there is an issue here. Again, I suspect the problem will come down to guidelines. A univeristy that provides students access in the dorms and doesn't prohibit (not prevent, prohibit) things like, oh viewing porn, playing online games, accessing stock quotes (unless in a finance class) etc etc etc would have a hard time complaining about someone running rc5.
Bottom line, they cannot apply selective standards, even more so when they are government sponsored. If there was something in writing that applied to all that covered this, or if there were specific instructions given to him, then he's screwed. If, on the other hand they simply have the general "don't do anything illegal" clause, they are going to have to try and fall back to the "using the computers for something other than learning", and that's a dangerous path for them to walk down. If they go down that road with this guy fairness would demand they crack down on many other activities by many other people (including, probably, reading this article, unless the person is a computer admin or a law student) and would find themselves in a position they don't want to be in.
Oh yeah, $0.59/second? What is that crap? I suspect their actual cost is under 1/100 of a cent per second, if that.
pray
seriously - call someone you know and trust and ask them to remove it OR call your boss and admit it but be nice and ask him to remove it. This is much smarter than letting them find it.
Of course there is NO business reason why this is here but whats he going to do fire you ? most companies wont take legal action without a good reason.
OH if this HAS caused damage you are screwed.
"Sanity is an illusion of the diseased mind"
Aaron Blosser lost his job at US West and had his computers seized by the FBI two years ago for doing the same thing. Well, almost the same thing: Blosser actually thought that he had permission (IIRC he asked the computer administrators but not the network administrators), while it doesn't sound like David McOwen even tried to get permission.
Oh, and as for that 59 cents/second... I don't believe it for a moment: That would work out to somewhere around 18 billion dollars of damages. More likely the actual figure is 59 cents per day.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
According to the State of Georgia, one single Distributed.net client costs 59 cents per second in datatraffic.
First, let me start by saying that they're on crack as far as this goes. Maybe it uses that much for the rare second it actually uses the network, but even then, they're getting raped by their bandwidth provider.
Of course, what this guy failed to recognize is that access != permission. Just because you have access to a computer doesn't mean you can do whatever you please with it.
This was just stupid, but they're WAY off on the damages. As for the jail time, they're probably equally off base. Heck, if the math finally works out to less than $1000 worth of bandwidth, he probably cannot even get jail time.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
What would be the proper way for that person to cover his/her ass?
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
xoxo,
Andy
--
Let's also remember that we don't know what basis that $0.59/minute cost includes. The perpetrator was very vague on this, probably in an attempt to shift blame to the victim. It may include the aggregate cost of several items:
Come on, people. Walking into a building full of hundreds of computers and personally compromising the security of each one at its console is *stupid*. It's like trying to rob a police station.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
(I was actually being *extremely* conservative on the recovery costs. Many devices, like motherboards, BIOSes, and video cards use field-programmable flash devices. To fully recover from a compromise, you'd have to replace them all. Would probably be cheaper to just scrap the equipment and buy new stuff.)
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
By security analysis, I meant that you had to check the machine for signs of malicious use. Compromised machines are frequently used as jumping off points for attacks on other systems, and you have to fix those systems too.
Each machine must be suddenly power cycled off to preserve evidence, and it's hard drive must be physically removed and read out. Most organizations are too lazy to do this (probably including the bozos in Georgia), but if you want security, it's what you have to do.I should have made it clearer in my comment that I was exploring the worst-case costs of recovering from a compromise, the moral being that sysadmins should be utterly paranoid. A lot of this probably doesn't apply in David McOwen's case, since the 'victims' seem to have a severe case of recto-cranial inversion. It'll be interesting to see the details when they are made public.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Look at your disagreement with my post: you were able to directly argue against particular points of mine. You didn't have to untangle half-formed, vaguely qualified statements. It went 'clear statement, clear counterargument'. In fact, it is obvious that you were approaching it from the angle of a practial admin who isn't overly concerned about security and assurance, while my POV was known-good security and certifiable quality.
Security is having confidence that every bit on the hardware comes from a known, approved source. You lose that when you install an untrusted program, and the only way to regain it is to delete everything and start from scratch. A false analogy. A better analogy would be if you hired a mechanic to change the oil in your street-legal drag racing car with a $30,000 racing engine, telling him to only use Mobil synthetic oil, and he used olive oil instead. Maybe the engine wouldn't be hurt by it, but you don't have to put up with maybes. You are *owed* confidence that the engine is in a certain state. He'd be buying you a new engine, and compensating you for the loss of use. When confidence is the commodity of interest, you don't take chances. OTOH, if you installed S@H on a live banking server 'just because', they'd beat you to death with CAT5, even if you have admin privileges.-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
OTOH, we don't know what machines McOwen used -- the AnandTech story was too vague. If they were semi-public computer labs that were ghosted at the start of every day, the damages would be minimal. Nobody could reasonably expect such machines to be particularly secure, and therefore the damages for insecurity would be minimal. It all depends on the circumstances -- McOwen could be getting off easy, or he could be royally screwed. Hopefully /. will post more details soon.
First off, it seems to not be a university that this occurred at. I don't know how we got that meme going...Besides which, any school large enough to have dozens of computers has a budget of several million dollars a year. It has accountants who must produce accurate numbers or they'll have to shut down. It has payrolls that have to be met on strict deadlines. It has confidential information that will cost millions if it is improperly disclosed. The school's few millions of dollars may be piddly compared to Chase-Manhattan, but that money is *very* important for the school.
Try being late for payroll at even an elementary school. The teachers, teacher's union, school administrators, board of education, city politicians, and press will hold a competition to see who can hand your head to you on a silver platter the fastest.A university is even worse. Try making a department head miss a publication date for his paper in Science. The police detectives won't even be able to find your body, it having already been run through the particle accelerator one atom at a time.
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Unreviewed, untested, warranty-less binaries that engage in continuous communication with remote servers are a serious security threat, as well as a threat to the integrity of the machines. Many a machine has been brought to its knees because of some weird interaction between the installed packages.
A competent professional would *never* risk his client's machines for an unnecessary program.
And what the fuck does that have to do with this discussion? The question is whether he had permission, not whether he would have had a good justification if he had asked for permission.And even if that was our discussion, brute-force cracking RC5 is a stunt. It doesn't do a damn thing for security.
Are you an idiot? Do you know nothing about computers? Diligent recovery from this compromise would involve 1) backing up all data on the compromised hard drives, 2) formatting them, 3) reinstalling them from scratch, 4) sanitizing all the backed-up data, 5) and reinstalling all the backed-up data. Assuming a $150/hour sysadmin, three labor hours per machine, and 200 machines, that's a direct recovery cost of $90k.Then you've got all the people who will be sitting around with their thumbs up their asses while their machines are offline. Assuming an average downtime of 1 week, an average employee salary of $25k/year, and an overhead rate of 100%, that's an indirect recovery cost of $192k.
Then there's the investigation cost. Assuming a security expert at $500/hour, and an analysis time of 30 min/machine, that's an investigation cost of $50k.
Then there's the legal costs. Because of the severity of the compromise, and the threat to the University's IP, a top-notch law firm specializing in insider sabotage will be needed. Assuming the law firm charges 80 hours @ $200/hour, that's a legal cost of $16k.
Then there's the prosecution cost. I have no idea what DAs, judges, and courts charge, but it's gotta be a lot.
That's a total of $348k for direct and simple indirect losses.
Then there's interest. It will probably take the Uni about three years to get a judgement for the losses. At the standard 25% rate for unsecured credit, that's a net interest of 95%, which will bring the final judgement to $679k.
Then there's the potential reputation cost to the university. Insider sabotage of the IT infrastructure makes tech and biotech firms very antsy, and less likely to engage in lucrative contracts with the Uni. Likewise for alumni support. The damages from this are pretty much unlimited; if the fates are against you it could run to tens of millions of dollars.
It's their bandwidth and they can sell it for whatever price they want. It's up to you to ask for the price before you start appropriating it.But that's irrelevant. The $0.59/min figure is almost certainly an aggregate number. They added up the total losses, divided them by the duration of the compromise, and that was the number.
It will not. Competent professionals help the client accomplish their mission. If they have ideas for new mission objectives, or even for cool charitable projects that don't really accomplish much, they discuss it with the boss. They *don't* run off and reconfigure hundreds of pieces of high tech equipment for their own whimsy. Bullshit. Sysadmins *never* have the right to turn hundreds of the institution's machines into zombies for their own pet projects. The reason sysadmins have wide latitude in decisions is because *that's what it takes to accomplish the mission*, and not because the machines are part of their personal toy chest. Hardly. It's vandalism, plain and simple. The alterations he performed obviously had no relevance to the organization's mission, they had a potential serious deleterious impact on the mission, and he deliberately chose not to ask permission when doing so would have required little time or effort. The law is the least of his problems. Not only did he recklessly fuck over hundreds of his client's machines, he whined about the client's consternation on the Internet. For the rest of his life, any time a prospective employer does a web search on him this story will show up in all its tawdry glory.I propose a new phrase for the Internet lexicon: "Pulling a David McOwen". It will be the Darwin Award of Career Limiting Moves. Example usage:
-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The lawyer has an AOL email account? If that's true, this David guy should be thrown in jail for choosing such a lawyer to defend a computer related case, but some how, I don't think it smells quite right. Troll? Has anybody tried emailing the State of Georgia people in question? Maybe the State of Georgia courts to see if such a case has been filed?
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I agree. However, I was talking ethics, not law. He didn't seem to care one way or the other if he broke the law, only that he not have to pay the consequences. My point was that, regardless of law, what he did was very likely wrong.
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Q: Did he have permission from the school to install the software?
Yes: They can't touch him.
No: Stick a fork in him; he's done.
Regardless of the bandwidth costs - say it only cost 59 a day - it's still money that the school/state wouldn't have had to pay if he'd done his job (and only his job).
He's hysterical: "...the future of all that use the Internet and computers is at stake."
The future of all people who install bandwidth-sucking apps on equipment that belongs to someone else, perhaps.
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Chances are Georgia has a WAN connecting schools via 128Kbps ISDN (remember this started 2 years ago) and then a gateway with a T1. To save money, they probably were being billed in a 90th or 95th percentile for usage. So the excess bandwidth used all day by many computers constantly downloading new keys and uploading results may have been enough to break them out of their billing tier into another, more expensive tier. Anyone who is familiar with the school district have any insider perspective on their LAN/WAN configuration?
"Thank you everyone,
For the guy that thinks it's a hoax simply contact the Georgia State Attorney's Office or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the lead Agent in charge of the year and half investigation that he said it took him to determine that running this Distributed.net client is a felony offense as outlined by the Computer administrators at the school and the State is Bob Stanley, the GBI office number is 770-987-9168.
The Law Firm of my Lawyer is 770-564-1600. My Attorney is David Joyner
The charges are from the 1999 Georgia Computer Crime code book Volume 14 Title 16-9-91 to 93 Pages 669 to 672.
David"
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
While I can't find anything yet on the website for the State of Georgia AUP or TOS, I do know that most govt agencies have you sign a form wherein you acknowledge that they can put you in the pen. and fine you oodles of dollars for theft and such. Well, unless the poster had WRITTEN and SIGNED approval to install RC5, he is probably in for a world of hurt.
Text of subject's post from Anandtech is pasted below:
This is David McOwen, dmcowen674@aol.com. I need everyone's help that possibly can. I worked at a school system 2 years ago that is part of the State of Georgia and was the configurator of the computers. They are now prosecuting me for Felony conviction with up to 15 yrs in prison and wanting $ 415,000. They are saying the Dnet client costs 59 cents per second for the Internet transmissions! If you or you know anyone that can help please contact my lawyer Mr. David Joyner at cdjoyner66@aol.com , phone number of the Law Firm 770-564-1600 . Beside my life and my family, the future of all that use the Internet and computers is at stake. Don't let them turn the good of computers into something so terrible. If it was so terrible it should be taken away from the world and not prosecuting one individual. People were panicking about rumors of the Govt tacking on a 5 cent surchange to supplement the Postal service because E-mail is taking away from their business and now the State of Georgia is saying E-mail costs 59 cents per second and this is not a rumor!
Also we need to know if anyone in the United States or the world has been prosecuted for this. We need to know for sure that they are setting this dangerous precedent, making me an example and everyone is next. They did not give me an opportunity to just turn the client off, they also said that there was no harm done after they turned it off. How can they call it a felony then and looking for nearly half a million dollars! Please help in any way that you can, whether by E-mails or any other support.
Thank you
mrgoat
'Hail Eris, baby, hail Eris...pfffffffttt.' *cough* 'Yeah.'
Any browser that show the ALT text when the pointer is hovered over images will show you that he registered on AT forums in Oct '99 when they were created. Also, read the thread. One member named Russ has already contacted the attorney's office and has offered help. In case you didn't know, Russ is the maintainer of the TA Cube account, which is seventh overall in in the RC5 contest. Russ is very involved in RC5, and I would assume he knows what he's talking about. Finally, read the guy's RC5 stats. Note that he's 94th overall but his current keyrate is only about 1000 kkeys/s compared to his overall of over 55,000. The PCs he lost are probably the ones he's being sued over. I don't think this is a hoax at all.
It's real.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn. Or a juggernaut.
You state a cost of 3 hours per machine to "sanitize" and a cost of 1/2 hour per machine for a security analysis. Huh? One or the other are necessary, not both. Examine one machine, then ghost out a new image using ghost multicast. Not 3.5 hours per machine.
Sounds like you bend over a bit too much.
My 2p...
./), then people should riot in the streets, um, I mean write a letter to maybe a judge or their Mom or something, you know, take like, a stand.
I think they should lose in court if they can't say they Warned him - at least once. Otherwise, a company - or a government! - can make you liable for all sorts of rules that they make and simply do not promulgate. Any court in the land ought to throw this out; and if they do not (I hope to hear updates on this, yeah, even here in
Good God, look at the time.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Stated is the Max penalty for that class of crime, what he is really subject to is completely dependent on the Jury decision to 1st Convict, and 2nd Award. Research Computational Cycles charged to any project at a major university (or typical corporation by MIS dept) are fully burdened and ouch a bit. In this case I can well imagine that those resources could have been used by a paying research project had the machines been conscripted into a distributed cluster envirionment instead. With holding the resources to boost personal stats is theft. Had he enrolled the stats under the school name a lot less could be said.
Write and call. I am not a Georgia resident, so my voice may not have much weight. But I would encourage Slashdot readers who are Georgia residents to write to your state elected officials.
The state of Georgia is prosecuting this guy, and the state can drop its case at any time. Your elected state officials are very sensitive to public opinion, and it's not like they have a lot to gain by seeing this poor fellow "brought to justice," so they may be perfectly willing to admit a mistake and walk away with minimal PR damage.
Don't be rude, and make sure you double-check the facts first, but it might not hurt to suggest that some investigative reporter at a local television station might find the story interesting.
Caveats:
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
Not for security it doesn't. Security is a matter of knowing where every program on the machine came from, and knowing that no uncertified programs have even been run on the machine. It is solely a matter of trust...
Spoken from the POV of the rule-rigid. Symanticly you are flat-wrong. Why would you trust your Oracle ODBC driver or copy of winsock.dll more or less than Dnet? Dnet is as known and understood as either Oracle or M$ wares - what makes you sure there isnt some trojan code on one of your 'certified' binaries? Give me a break, Dnet only does what it reports - as much as anything else - and there is no reason to think-otherwise. Your argument would have made sense in a universe where RC5 was Sub7 - in this one, the reality is, it is not.
BTW, what 'certified' you to be the All Knowing Sage of Securtiy? Your whole post is really in left field - do you have an MBA?
To fully recover from a compromise, you'd have to replace them all. Would probably be cheaper to just scrap the equipment and buy new stuff
Are you on drugs? A troll? These were commonly-available, general use computers - with accessible cases and (*gasp*) disk drives - do you think this is the control-room for a nuclear missle or a office computer? Your argument would have made sense barely in the former installation.
Yeah, and you never read slashdot at work? Don't be so quick to jump on this guy, unless you are so scrupulous that you never use a work computer to send email to your girlfriend, book a plane flight home, or check the weather.
sulli
RTFJ.
Excessive, but not unwarranted.
A few years ago, when I was in college, I stuck it to some idiot for doing the same thing (might have even been MD5). It's the one and only time I reported someone for abusing the systems (yes, I approached him nicely the first time). He was a regular undergrad running it on every available machine in the CS department. It was nice'd, but it still managed to peg the CPU and slow down interactive use on all the machines by quite a bit. Very annoying; nobody has the right to monopolize computer time on public systems at the expense of everyone else. Use your own.
Actually, come to think of it, I wonder why they sued the poor guy with his Distributed.net node instead of those mass-marketing digital ass-sores that have been clogging the Internet for so long.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The rediculous amount of damages claimed is for a good reason (at least from the universities point of view). They know that they're not going to ever collect nor see that kind of penalty in place. But faced with that sort of claim, most lawyers advise their clients to bargain it way down... It's easier to win a court case claiming 2000$ damages against you than it is 500,000$. Dollars to donuts, you'll see this bumped WAY down to no jail time and (max) 20,000$ dollars fine, and most likely less than that. Bahumat
"To pass through the jungle; silence, courtesy, ferocity, as the occasion demands." -- Kamau, "Proper Passage"
The audit alone should cost a few million...
Burn Hollywood Burn
This situation seems to be about the same, he basically did no harm (the GIMPS client is very well behaved, and I can't think that the Dnet would be much worse), but it basically boiled down to the fact that he didn't have permission. What seems to be different is that this guy is facing huge criminal charges, I don't recall that Aaron faced any jail time or fines, but was still slapped around by the FBI (mostly out of cluelessness) for a long time.
That said, I hope and pray the thugs prosecuting this case are called out and shown to the public clearly for what they are. Or else we are all in serious danger.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
When they try to say he was competing for a $50,000 prize, it would be good for the defense to point out the expected value of his prize (as of that day) was $50,000/129,251, or approximately thirty-nine cents.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Whoops. My bad. Make that $2,000/129,251, or approximately one and a half cents.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
I hope you never use the bathroom at work, unless you don't mind being monitored. It's their resources and their time.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
Well short of having any formal documents to confirm this guy's story, we can make a pretty good guess at this guys truthfullness. First off this guys stats are throught the roof for about a year and he is still at spot #94 for all time RC5 crackers. It would take quite a few p3's to crack as many blocks in 1999 as this guy did, at least 50-150. These stats drop drastically about after July 2000 which certainly supports his story about getting caught. Second, no one has come forward to refute his story. I'm sure that the email address which was posted that correlates to the RC5 stats is being flooded with email full of questions relating to the post. Third, the member in the forum who posted was of "member" status not "junior" status which gives more credibility to this being an actual fact rather than some dumb joke. Keep in mind that none of this is concrete evidence it merely supports the story given to us.
here is the guys rc5 output click
The post is kind of vague as to how specific his job duties were, and if he was just doing a bad job at his position, or whether he was in violation of his described duties. I would imagine a state agency hiring a sysadmin/IT person, would put some clause in regarding malicious or unapproved software.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
This space for rent.
"Just explain them what the correct definition of hacking. Writing or altering sourcecode or system-settings e.g. programming. Cracking on the otherhand is illegal. I'm a hacker, but I've never broken the law. I agree that he misused the means given to him but 500000$ and 15 years among hard criminals. Anyone should be able to see what's wrong. (Well obviously not lawyers, but then again ...)"
Of course, eductating the courts is the answer, but unfortunately, the courts are under NO obligation at all to listen to us. Keep in mind, most judges are older people, who didn't grow up with computers.
When Gen X gets old enough to become politicos and judges (almost there), things may start to improve.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
"He will never get 15 years / $500000 in fines. He will however, go through hell defending himself and getting off with an approprate punishment. He completely deserves it too. Using other peoples computers and bandwidth (reguardless of how little they will be affected by it) for your own personal gain is just plain evil."
Don't be too sure. Most judges know more about nuclear physics than they do about how computers and networks REALLY work.
And pretty much ALL you have to do to fuck someone in the courts is to call them a "hacker". As 2600 found out in the DeCSS case. Doesn't matter what the merits of your defense are once that label is thrown out like red meat to the judge. Of course, having a corrupt and/or incompetent fool like Kaplan for a judge didn't help.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
He did "administer" the machines.
I thought that he said that he was the "configurator." To me, that means that he's the guy who made the Ghost image that was deployed on 500 machines statewide. That's quite a difference from the "administrator," the person who in the end is responsible for all of the day-to-day workings of the systems under his control.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
My understanding of the situation (flawed though it may be) is this. The entire point of these background clients is to use a small amount of bandwidth at long intervals and to use only unused processor cycles to preform calculations. Now then... if we assume this to be the case (if I'm wrong on this please ignore the rest of this comment) then the defendant has not used any significant amount of bandwidth that the prosecutor wasn't allready paying for anyhow (broadband like this is a flat charge, not by the bit right?) and he's not taking processor cycles away from anything else right? So, really, how can they claim any monitary damages? It seems to me that this can be equated with raiding the shredder waste bins for paper scraps for making paper mache or something.
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Sure, just get the attribution right, that would be Barbara Bush.
Feel free to send a copy to my parole officer.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
I would not rely on that as a defence argument. There are many academic programs that run in background mode to snarf up otherwise spare cycles. Physicists have lattice gauge calculations, Geant simulations, meteorology, there are lots of biologists with gene sequence data to crunch.
Unfortunately most of those programs are also designed to have minimal impact on the other users of the machine. Just because a program is at a low machine priority does not mean it is not important to someone. The crack program will take cycles from other distributed applications.
Probably the best approach is to turn the question arround and assert that running batch jobs in spare CPU cycles is a standard academic practice and that a competent sysadmin should have the knowledge and experience to run such programs on their system.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
The problem with the 'background task' argument is that breaking RC5 is not necessarily the best use to which those cycles can be put.
The issue of authorization is the weak point in the State case. Running a codebreaking program falls pretty squarely within the normal run of academic persuits. The fact that a prize is offered does not necessarily mean that the enterprise is 'for profit'. All sorts of prizes are offered for academic research. In the case of the RSA cryptography challenge prises they were started by Ron Rivest so that he did not have to spend half an hour reading each day about the latest factoring scheme people had thought up. Peter Trei later suggested to Jim Bizdos that there might be other challenges that would be somewhat more fun and relevant.
Best chance of getting the case thrown out is likely to be demonstrating a that running a crack program is considered acceptable academic behaviour at most universities.
I don't see the terms of service giving the prosecution much help. They are so broad that they could be read to permit or prohibit practically any behavior. The defence get the benefit of the ambiguity, not as some slashdotters appear to believe the prosecution. Nobody is disputing that the guy was authorized to use the equipment, the issue is whether the specific use made was authorized. That is a very subjective question, hardly one that should be at the center of a criminal prosecution.
The reason we had to start putting up the terms of service notices was that without them the courts would not even allow prosecutions of people who broke into computer systems to abuse them in the most malicious ways you can think of.
Still the guy has only himself to blame, you go to live and work in a mickey mouse state that only gave up the swastika (oops sorry symbol of the slavers side in the civil war) on its state flag with great reluctance, you expect the type of legal system portrayed in Stir Crazy and My Cousin Vinny.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
1. Every professor running "SETI" should be included in this lawsuit
2. Unless this guy was NUMBER ONE, their own network management would have sniffed this out long ago, which makes me wonder what is REALLY going on that that don't know about ;)
3. The software in question isn't cloaked
4. Unless he was the ONLY administrator even a junior admin (ie, another employee) would know about it
5. Admins are in tight with the professors -- surely somone on staff knew and implicitly approved of this
6. The state is frankly full of shit when it comes to bandwidth pricing and couldn't possibly legitimately price "per minute" rates for data -- that is ridiculous -- what are they on? Circuit-switched cellular?
7. This is a school right? A learning institution? The bad PR alone will cost them more than they would ever hope to gain.
Unless this guy locked all the passwords on the boxes its ridiculous to think he is "ultimately responsible" for this. He had superiors (well, bosses anyway), and some form of peer review.
Shit, just think of the number of vanilla installs of most Unices out there trying to pull down netnews, and worse, the ones that are succeeding
I sure hope its a hoax -- i'd hate to have to add Georgia to my "wish it would slide into the ocean" list ;)
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
And you too could have found yourself fighting to stay out of jail. I'm sorry I don't have any sympathy for the guy. This is one of those common sense items that some people just can't comprehend. If you don't have permission to run this type of client on someone elses computers then you are guilty of theft of processing time and theft of the bandwith. I don't care how good the cause is or whether you personally can gain any benefit from it. You have to cya by getting permission. You don't own the machines, the network, or pay for the bandwith, so you don't have the right to decide to use them in any way that is not directly related to their purpose for being there.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Gee whiz, this is only insightful if you didn't read the actual thread, here's a post from the guy that is accused, I invite skeptics to just confirm it by themselves:
For the guy that thinks it's a hoax simply contact the Georgia State Attorney's Office or the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the lead Agent in charge of the year and half investigation that he said it took him to determine that running this Distributed.net client is a felony offense as outlined by the Computer administrators at the school and the State is Bob Stanley, the GBI office number is 770-987-9168.
The Law Firm of my Lawyer is 770-564-1600. My Attorney is David Joyner
The charges are from the 1999 Georgia Computer Crime code book Volume 14 Title 16-9-91 to 93 Pages 669 to 672.
David
Now that wasn't too hard, wasn't it?
By overshooting with such an insane amount, the university will not have credibility in court. I bet even a demented old judge wold be sharp ewnough to send these guys packing. Rc5 uses very little network bandwith. A CPU needs several minutes to process a single key.
He must have pissed someone off, or paranoid pointy-haired beancounters must have gone totally berserk at Georgia.
I bet that if we calculated the dollar cost for the network bandwidth of his rc5 clients, it'll be around the average for a student's surfing budget. I bet my 2 pennies that a download of cnn's homepage including banner ads and graphics, consumes enough bandwith to do a week's worth of rc5 transfers for a handful machines.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
So much for his chances in the geek lotto.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
my aunt's friend was murdered, and the killer only served 7 years in jail. a guy steals otherwise wasted computer time and they want to give him 15 years? is this the same as killing two people or something? sometimes i just get fed up with the world.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
If you'd read the entire thread there, you'd see that apparently it's been confirmed by quite a few regular folks at anandtech. I thought it to be a crock at first glance, as well, but I suppose it's been proven otherwise. The first thing that threw me was the fact that ANYONE in the IT industry would use AOL -- but I suppose if he was dumb enough to run RC5 on public hardware ....
I'm a student at Georgia Tech and it was made pretty clear to us when we were registering and moving in to our dorms that use of the networks for personal profit were prohibited. In the Computer and Network Usage Policy it states that Computing facilities, services, and networks may not be used in connection with compensated outside work nor for the benefit of organizations not related to Georgia Tech. It goes on to discuss incidental use of the systems and networks but this does not sound incidental and because there was a prize offered I assume it would fall under compensated outside work.
Slashdot has fallen for the oldest trick in the online scam book and has posted a story believable by only the most inexperienced net users. Why would he discredit himself by associating the email tax hoax with his story? Why would you need to say "This is not a rumor!" if you were talking about a true story.
Don't let them turn the good of computers into something so terrible. If it was so terrible it should be taken away from the world and not prosecuting one individual. People were panicking about rumors of the Govt tacking on a 5 cent surchange to supplement the Postal service because E-mail is taking away from their business and now the State of Georgia is saying E-mail costs 59 cents per second and this is not a rumor!
Frank
I haven't run an RC5 client for about 2 years now, but if I remember correctly there was something the license / terms of use / whatever that said you're not allowed to use it on computers you don't have permission to install it on.
I assume they wouldn't be suing him if he'd asked whether he could install this and use their bandwidth. So he's got no one to blame but himself.
It's like people at work that think they have a "right" to not have their email or web usage monitored. You're using someone elses resources, you have to follow their rules. If you don't like it, don't use it.
--
You didn't ask your employer's permission to use your employer's computer for non-work-related activities.
/. for instance. Everyone who has their bosses' explicit permission to read and post to /. please raise their hands. I thought so. Or how about checking personal e-mail on your lunch break? Or checking out the (non geek) news sites during down-time?
I would agree with you in the literal sense. Yes, of course he was using resources that he didn't have permission to use. However, stop and consider this from the perspective of your average Joe on the job.
How many of us don't use our computers for non work related activities? Take
Fact of the matter is, this man is guilty, in a technical sense. But, if cases like this start to gain momentum, who knows how many companies we'll have suing their workers for non-work related internet usage.
Chris Canter
Sorry if a strong opinion trips your internal troll alert. YHBT in that case.
Anyway, if he wins the rc5 contest, he will get $2000 (or 1k if he is on a team...). Plus the increase in lateral penile dimensions coming from all of those keys he was crunching. Installing the client on a boatload of State owned computers to increase his keyrate and chances of finding the winning key is wrong. He does not own those computers and he had no business installing the client on them.
Distributed.net has a clear policy that says that they will not tolerate this shit either. All of the keys cracked on those machines, as well as the ones cracked legitimatly on his own machine will no longer be credited to him.
You are right, however, in that he is not in the same category as kiddie porn freaks or pirates. He deserves a FAIR penalty which I think I said in my original post. (Checking back I see that I said appropriate).
It's sad that I get branded a troll by people because my opinion is unpopular.
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Gobble a dick!