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SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
Screenshots or it didn't happen. You almost certainly failed to set its priority to "low" or "idle" which would have been easy to tell by looking at the process list.
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
This is a school district, it practically shuts down after 5-6pm in the evening, and generally any network intensive activity shuts down by 4pm.
There are also 3 months out of the year where there is little to nothing happening, when all of this should be taken care of. There is absolutely no reason to have that rat's nest there, or to not have an accurate inventory of the network, or to have inadequate cabling. In some cases the last part can be hard to fix (like running new lines through the building), but rolls of Cat5e are cheap, and if you have 3 months with nothing to do you should be cleaning up the cabling if nothing else.
He also apparently made firewall exceptions for SETI@Home on 5,000+ machines across the district. Think about that, if you did any kind of computer security at all you should be screaming bloody murder at this guy for being so incompetant and unethical, if not outrite malicious toward the district's network security.
It wasn't until SETI@home began interfering with the teacher's ability to teach that anybody actually investigated this guy (though he had been told to remove SETI@home in the past). That's when all the crap came up.
He isn't being fired because of SETI@home (though that triggered it), and he isn't being fired for a rat's nest in a cable closet. He's being fired and brought up on criminal ethics charges because his unethical and incompetant behavior is going to cost the school district upwards of $2 million to fix. Removing SETI@home from 5,000 machines will cost in the neighborhood of $50,000-$100,000, though he may have fucked up the computers bad enough that they decide to start with a fresh build, save everyone's data off, and re-build all the computers. That will cost considerably more, but will bring the computers back to a clean state. The rest of it is cabling, inventory, and infrastructure costs which this guy should have been making sure got done on an incrimental basis, mitigating the costs.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering -- Arthur C. Clarke
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The earth actually has PLENTY of resources to feed everyone quite well.
It's only thanks to fuckups (both malignant and benign) at the top of the totem pole that they aren't getting distributed properly.