Slashdot Mirror
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."
I did this at my brothers company too. I thought that the program "ran on minimal resources" while the computers were being used. But shortly after installing them on a dozen programs, everyone was complaining about how slow their computers were, so I had to covertly remove them to hide the true reason why they were slow. Lesson learned. At least it didn't cost me my job.
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
We just all went up a spot!
40 watts x 24 hours x 365 days x 10 years x 5000 machines x $.06 /kwh = $1,051,200
The criminal part (that apparently wasn't in TFA) was the 18 school computers they found at his house that he'd taken home with him. This is a better source: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/11/30/20091130searchforaliens1202.html
Most businesses or schools will have an Acceptable Use Policy. To paraphrase the AUP where I work, A person must have permission to install 3rd party software. This permission must come from building administration or Tech Department administration. If Joe Employee installs Seti without permission, that could be cause for termination. If I install Seti in my buildings' computers, it will be because I gave myself permission to do so. (Which I have, so I did.)
However, this case seems to be with a difference of opinion. Ftfa: '"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."'
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons. To say he would allow protein folding but not seti is asinine. When I decided between the two, I figured that finding ET would have a greater impact on society that a cure for cancer. Who knows, maybe ET will be able to help us cure diseases while curing diseases will not help us find ET.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
The school administrator has already decided that there are no ETs, so it's silly to search for them. Science should only look for stuff we already know about! (:-)
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
It actually does use more power running the CPU full throttle vs idle. The rule of thumb I learned was a buck a watt per year. By which $200 sounds nuts. School PCs do not have 200W worth of CPU in them.
But..oh, over 10 years. That's $20/year/system. Very plausible.
This guy learned the following lesson the hard way: Systems you manage are not yours. They are your employers. The potentially mitigating factor here from TFA, is that he claims he had permission. If so, whoever granted permission should be fired. $1m is real money, especially if you're a school district.
They were his machines to configure, as a technology supervisor. It's not like he hacked into the machines in the dark of night to set things up on the sly. Sure, his configuration may have been a failure as far as the business needs of the school system were concerned, but when TFA is claiming "there may be charges filed!!"
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws. This guy set up a SETI account in his own name, for whatever joy he gets from being at the top of SETI crunch lists, and used government-paid electricity for his own purposes. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars. If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
A little silly? Perhaps, but judging the degree of his "ethics violation" and the subsequent consequences is the job of a judge or jury. The fact that an "ethics violation" that breaks an ethics law has been committed isn't really debatable.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
On the other hand, his contract never said he wasn't able to run these types of background calculation programs. Even superintendent Denise Birdwell admitted, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research." So the issue is not the installation of the program, which would have been okay if the technician had installed Cancer@Home instead.
Furthermore Birdwell said the massive software cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts. How did he arrive at this 1 million dollar figure? Can he produce actual calculations derived from collected data, or did he just pull the number from his nether region?
I would not resign.
I'd tell them, "Sorry I'll uninstall everything," and if they chose to fire me then I'd drag Mr. Birdwell into court to provide proof before a judge that I actually cost the school 1 million in damages. If they can't then it would be unjustified dismissal, and in violation of multiple employee-protection laws that exist when you work for a state government.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
According to the documents, district officials said they found Niesluchowski had abused his authority in purchasing and oversight of district technology and equipment, downloaded pornography, and added to every district computer a University of California-Berkeley program that searches high-frequency radio signals for signs of intelligent life in outer space.
Much better article. Apparently the firing/resignation wasn't really about SETI, that was just icing on the cake. Of course, leave it to the media to run away with the "crazy guy looking for aliens" angle.
I almost lost my job when I was working in a NOC at a previous company. I was in charge of maintaining the monitoring and the machines that ran them. Really, these were workstations that were connected to a handful of monitors, all with webpages up that would refresh once a minute, they were not the servers that were running our actual monitoring software (firehunter, whatsup, big brother, etc) so since they were just running a few browsers they were never under any load. So I tossed SETI@Home on all these workstations, that no one uses, that just display browser windows, and it was all fine for several months.
One day I came to work, and my boss was breathless (I wished physically, not just literally), he couldn't figure out why all these boxes were all running at 100% CPU. After several hours (he was SOOO slow) he figured out it was SETI. He tried in vain to prove it was me, I wasn't going to admit it, I knew that between him and HR they would hang me, over at best the theft of some company power (which is stupid because every linux admin had super shiny screensavers that their computers couldn't quite handle, and they had to be running at 100% util for 16+ hours each day once they went home). It's been a while since I've ran SETI, but what I recall is he could have figured out it was me if he knew to check the ID it was uploading the results under, then went to SETI's site and check the ID, which would have at least pointed him to the name Tynin, which since my personal email address uses tynin in it, it should have been the nail in my coffin. Luckly, he was incompetent, and missed that detail, and I sail past what would have been one of the more silly disasters of my life.
If you are reading this Ed, please know your staff will celebrate the day you die, pizza and beer in the hallways!
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
I used to set up dnetc on many machines, it caused the machines to run flat-out all the time, using more electricity as well as more cooling. Whilst it did only use up otherwise unused CPU cycles, it definitely had an impact on performance for higher priority processes. Modern CPUs run very fast and depend on their caches to maintain performance, and any context switching and loading other apps, even small ones, eats up memory bandwidth as well as CPU cycles. I think this goes relatively unnoticed as most people naively count CPU cycle ratios between processes.
At work we have a large number of dual CPU/eight-core (16 with HT) machines with 24, 32 or 36GB running java VMs, and we notice there's a very big hit on performance if we try and run more than a few VMs on a machine, almost certainly due to loss of cache efficiency; this performance loss doesn't particularly show up in simply looking for CPU cycles used by the OS!
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
PHB: I've got a great idea, why don't we run all our programs as screen savers?
Dilbert: How will we type? As soon as someone hits a key the application will close and we'll be back at the desktop consuming electricity again.
PHB: Couldn't we login remotely? We could create a terminal application that ran as a screen saver!
Dilbert: Again, how will we type?
PHB: We could type really slowly.
Wally: I already do, somedays I don't type anything at all!
PHB: See Dilbert, you need to be more like Wally!
Well, that, and lying about removing the software when the problems caused by it came to light and he was ordered by previous administrators to remove it.
...and downloading pornography using school computers.
...and, on top of all that, generally not doing the job he was hired to do.
At least, that's what he is being accused of, according to this more complete article on the story.
SETI@Home is not the only issue here.
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation.
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine how he wanted to configure each machine, and in no way profited from his actions. As for the cost of electricity (I think we can safely write the rest of the claims of "accelerated hardware depreciation" off as complete BS, talkin' about school lab computers, not a datacenter here), although he really should have considered that, I wouldn't call it beyond the realm of possibility that he simply didn't. Keep in mind he started doing this before self-throttling CPUs became popular, meaning it made next to no difference in power consumption whether you kept your CPU idle or pegged at 100%.
If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws.
Although most organizations actually do have rules specifically relating to network use (as opposed to what screensavers you may run, about which I've never seen anything more than "no porn walpaper/screensavers/themes"), in the absence thereof and depending on the terms of internet connection, I would arguably call that less abusive. If you have a flat fee for a fixed bandwidth, and limited your use to legitimate works (ie, no porn or copyright violations) and made sure it never interfered with legitimate traffic, such use costs the organization literally nothing. But... Beside the point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers. I personally had two from a local college that technically would have counted as "stolen property" if it ever came up, but I had obtained them by as close to kosher means as possible (the guy in charge of their computer labs, the father of a friend, had literally hundreds of decommissioned PCs piled floor to ceiling in a storage area and begged anyone who dropped by to take a few). So if he had a dozen brand new quad-core boxes the district didn't even know they bought, okay, problem; If he had a collection of P4s and 32-bit Athlons in various states of disrepair, I'd have a hard time returning a guilty verdict on that jury.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue. Given the facts as stated - Generally abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause, never mind the "spend more time with his family" line.
Luckly, he was incompetent, and missed that detail, and I sail past what would have been one of the more silly disasters of my life. If you are reading this Ed, please know your staff will celebrate the day you die, pizza and beer in the hallways!
Why you dirty son of a %$#& Ty, you'll pay for this! I knew it was you! No more pizza and beer for anyone or you're all fired!
Buying the lowest-power CPUs?! Are you absolutely sure about that? This seems like REALLY bad advice. Needs always rise (ALWAYS) to what "gets the job done" today won't tomorrow. This advice is a crock of ****, always was. You want to be efficient? Buy systems from the middle, not the slowest, and not the fastest. The middle is usually the right choice. The slow ones will have short lives (and replacing machines is expensive - not just in machine costs) the fastest machines cost a fortune (and there is always diminishing returns at the top end).
Now like all rules, it's there to be broken. If you don't expect the system to have a long life - consider cheaper (typical examples are harsh environments). If replacing the system is really expensive (because downtime is a problem, expensive specialists are required whatever) then consider something more expensive.
But always buying the cheapest is just bad advice.
Wow, just freaking wow...
I am wondering how long before I see the headline "Man arrested for using linux", just to read on and find out that he beat his wife to death using a Ubuntu Laptop.
The article says the district hired "five experts" and reports on "one company" that did a district-wide technology audit.
It doesn't say "five companies". It also doesn't identify the problem the five experts were hired to address as being "why the PCs were running slow?" I suspect from the description of the problems (though its not clear which were uncovered when, and which motivated the action) that a variety of intermittent problems with systems and higher than anticipated maintenance and replacement costs, which their in-house tech staff couldn't adequately explain, are what the outside experts were brought in to explain, which goes beyond "why computers are running slow?" to "why are paying so much for tech and still having so many problems?".
I don't know if you know this or not, but for more than 10 years now when a computer isn't doing anything, it generally goes to sleep. In sleep mode, even the most ancient, piss-poor power management cuts the power consumption of the PC by a large fraction.
I don't know if you know this either, but generally applications like SETI@home are designed to monitor your computer usage, and if you aren't doing anything with it cranks up the CPU share to 60-70%.
I'm not sure if you know this too, but generally a computer that is actively sending data across a network cannot go into sleep mode, nor can a computer that is consuming large amounts of processor time (30%+ definitely).
If you want proof, try starting a download and then putting your computer to sleep. It will do one of two things: It will either kill the connection and go to sleep, or it will simply not go to sleep. You can't do both, it is not possible, and in either case the computer won't go into sleep mode automatically.
In other words, Starry Night and My Pictures stop running after 10 minutes, cutting their power usage to nill, while SETI@home continues crunching away, burning up 100-150w (I doubt they used much more than that though) as opposed to 10-20w. Some quick arithmatic shows that the Starry Night PC is using about 240-480wh per day, while the SETI@home is using roughly 2400-3600wh per day. The SETI@home PC would use about an order of magnitude more power per day than your standard screen-saver laden PC. Multiply these rough figures out by 5,000, and the SETI@home is costing the school district 18mwh per day more electricity usage than a standard PC with a standard sleep mode.
Now that's worst case scenario, it's probably costing more like 10mwh per day more energy consumption, because they are using these computers for school. Since the average cost per-kwh is about 10 cents (it varies a lot by region, it can be as low as 5 and as high as 25), we can estimate that this guy was costing the school district between $1000 and $1800 per day with his SETI nonsense. If he ran it for several years (I did not RTFA, so I don't know how long he ran it) he could have cost the school district several million dollars.
If that's the case, not only should he lose his job, he should probably face criminal charges for stealing government resources.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
RTFA It says in the article that "the software was authorized by a previous administration". He did ask (supposedly) and was allowed.
By running all of the school machines at 100% load the school used more power and network then they would have otherwise and so this situation did "cost" them. The fact that he was given approval will probably shield him from any legal action regardless of the 'change of administration'. Where they got the $1M number I'm guessing is straight out of their posteriors but who knows over 10 years what the real delta probably was.. they are just laying the groundwork for a potential lawsuit, restitution or just a cooler news headline.
My favorite part of the article is the fact his wife sounds like she thought he was *directly spending all of his time at work searching for aliens. He should probably tell his wife how his fleet of software toys work. Gave me a good chuckle which is always worth the article read.
According to the more complete article on the story, "Former administrators, including former superintendent Joyce Lutrey, knew about the software and told Niesluchowski to remove it" and "[h]e assured them he had removed it". So, I'm guessing, that's why "I'm sorry and I'll remove it now" wouldn't have been an adequate response, even if SETI@Home was the only problem issue, and there wasn't the porn issue, and the issue of the school equipment at his house apparently being used in his home-based business.
...after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines.
IIRC, this guy was in charge of about 5000 computers.
Your memory is astounding.
I don't intend to troll but to get a response.
Seriously, I don't believe in God beyond the movies, and I don't understand the interest about religion. I'd like to know why would someone go to church, can some god-people tell me about it?
(But please no conspiracies)
The world's population is already too high, and growing beyond the unsustainable level. While it's nice to think we can get rid of something that causes pain and death, pain and death are part of life. If you reduce the death rate, you'll have to reduce the reproduction rate.
My school district's network of 8000 computers is running NUKES@HOME, helping our government figure out ways to build better nuclear weapons to save the planet for the right kind of humanity.
This is my sig.
From the comments in this article (thanks to this post) from people who are there, it sounds like a real hatchet job.
Salient points:
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
... and ...
Christ, I want to upmod you.
My wiring looks like this. And for the exact same reasons: No, we can't have the downtime to move any wiring around, no we can't take the time to pull those old cables, we don't have time/money to order cables, use the wrong length cause that's what's on hand, it needs to be in production today/it's unfunded, for cable management you can use all the zip ties and velcro that you can scrounge, and multiply it all by ten years. And now they want to use it as evidence that the guy is incompetent or even criminal? Because he hasn't had the backing to incur costs and downtimes for neatness? Because he lacked the pull to make them build buildings and buy new infrastructure?
And, knowing that he's getting unfairly accused on these counts makes me mistrust the remaining accusations as well.
His wife says that in TFA. In the more complete, newspaper-sourced story, the district says that a the problems had come to the previous administrator, who had ordered the software removed, and that the tech supervisor who is now under investigation claimed, at the time, to have removed it as directed. Now, as far as I know there is no public concrete evidence of who is telling the truth here, but its worth noting that the wife could be telling the truth as she knows it and the district could be telling the truth, the only thing required for that to be true is for the tech supervisor to have lied to his wife to make himself look persecuted when the trouble started coming down, and for her to trust him. And how hard is that to believe?
personally, i'd rather waste my processor cycles and electricity on folding@home, maybe find a cure for cancer. which i think would be far more useful than finding *evidence* of aliens.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Perhaps you need to get some reading comprehension skills.
Nope - they estimate that for fixing the problems with the network, etc., that have accumulated over a decade of lack of funds, etc. This includes things like a secure building for the servers. Certainly not his fault.
The "downloading porn" is an unproven allegation. If we were to fire every admin who's ever downloaded something that a prude would consider "porn" (like accidentally clicking on a goatguy or tubgirl link), there'd be no admins left.
$10 to $30 per computer to click the "uninstall" button? I don't think so, Clyde.
Those whiteboards have been reported elsewhere to have deployment problems - it has nothing to do with seti@home, and yu'd have known that if you had a clue. It also certainly didn't "immediately impart their system" if it's been running for almost a decade.
As for the rest - "taking computer equipment home" is often done with obsolete systems or "parts boxes", the "increased network usage" is 150 tb over 10 years, which sounds like a lot, but is really 41 gigs a day or less than 10 meg per box a day - incidental traffic (think 10-20 slashdot pages - heck, I've done 400 gigs in one month on a single box at home without breaking a sweat) - that wouldn't interfere with normal network usage in a system capable of supporting 5,000 computers. As for the "punching holes in the firewall" - you might want to read this and this - do you have a problem with ports 80 (http) and 443 (https/ssl) being "open"?
Riiight - having ports open so that users can surf the web is a terrible thing - quick - block ports 80 and 443 on your machine! It's a security risk!
Don't be a tool, mkay?
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"
You should probably re-read the article too. Some of the money apparently includes a new building. Unless the tech supervisor was moonlightning as a demolitions expert, I doubt he's responsible for that. And some of the comments in the article by the locals are very... interesting... as well.
What if the aliens have a cure? Duh.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!