McOwen Case Settled

ewilts writes: "Back in July, you ran a story about David McOwen, a computer adminstrator at DeKalb Technical College in Georgia, who was being charged for installing SETI software on school computers. This case has now been settled. See also the EFF press release on McOwen's web site." Update: 01/18 16:11 GMT by M : It was software from distributed.net, not SETI.

Comments

If I was the person in charge Ida CRUCIFIED him

[CDWert]

Here it is plain and simple. THEFT of network resources, I wouldnt have stopped anything short of a public stoning on this. He had NO authority to do so, and was consuming resources that are limited and billed for. His motives were even iffy, was it to rake in the prize $$$ ? Was it to be helpfull to the project at the expense of the university ?

I am as much in managment as development or administration any more. I am and always will be a company man, that probably one of the reasons I still have a Job in the Dot_Bust world. This is assinine, if a university employee, or contrator was taking a power tap off their grid to power the red cross say 4 blocks away its still theft no matter the motives. It wasnt his resources to allocate, and it wasnt within his authority to do so, the fact he plead quilty shows he knew. Maybe he was stupid and didnt see it this way at the time but hindisght is 20/20.

I have succefully prosecuted against this type of theft in the past, yeah Im a hacker and I have roots, Most people simply didnt think they would get caught. And then tried to say well we didnt see we were harming anyone, we had one employee at a previous company who was the owners son, doing things JUST like this, Guess what after I got done anting he was No Longer an EMPLOYEE, the brass dosent like the THOUGHT of anything costing them money that isnt directly tied to their core business, I cant blame em, what if it was your network a peon administrators assistant installed this crap on without asking ?