If you ever start a business, please be sure to look me up.;)
Seriously, I honestly think Distributed.net's intentions are fairly innocent -- which is a helluva lot more than I can say for the whole distributed "cure-for-cancer-it's-not-for-profit-honest-well-a t-least-not-yet" project. Large-scale distributed computing is a big deal, and they've been instrumental in showing that it CAN be done. Besides, there's a lot of folks that enjoy doing things just because it's there.
By the by, what's the deal with the IMDB? I've made submissions before, but I'm pretty ignorant of any shady goings-on, and I'd be curious to know. I'm unfortunately not much of a fine-print reader when it comes to contributing to "public" databases, even when commercial ties are apparent (which, more often than not, tends to be the case anyway).
This is a state-run public school we're talking about. They're not gonna be teaching cryptography or distributed computing in Mrs. Blaileen's 5th-grade geography class. It wouldn't matter if he were calculating Mersenne primes -- he used taxpayer resources for personal use. He meant no harm, his intentions were good, he shouldn't (and likely won't) get much more than a slap on the wrist (compared to the maximum penalties under the statute he's accused of violating), but he still broke the law, and he should have known better. He has my sympathy, but I'm not rushing out to contribute to his court costs.
Just where did you see me say it was or wasn't? I was commenting on goat, not your post. Yes, it was in the wrong bleedin' end of the thread. Calm down, no one wants you to anonymously burst a vessel.
You raise a good point, but the difference is that, unlike the maintainance tools you mention, this is software can can be clearly proven (even to the layperson) NOT beneficial in ANY way to the operation of the systems in question, and can easily be deemed detrimental to the performance of said machines, all in the name of personal gain (that this personal gain is primarily of an educational and scientific nature is completely beside the point, even discounting any potential cash prize.)
He was given a job to do, and this wasn't remotely part of it. 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.)
Now I feel dumb. I hadn't realised this, either, although it doesn't change much in my mind. I'm not certain about the dollar amount, but many folks have stated that 15 years is the maximum under the statute he's apparently voilating. He almost certainly doesn't deserve that (I'm not sure he deserves ANY time in the clink, poor bloke), but he broke the law, regardless.
Because he was dumb enough not to know better. The problem with the mass-marketing spammers is that they KNOW it's illegal, and make every effort to tie up every loose end, stealing resources from wherever they can, then moving on to wherever else so they can start the whole cycle again. It's easier to catch a rabbit in your garden than to find him where he lives.
I think, in the midst of all this "but what about all the recreational office Web use" talk, we need to realise the difference between the much more benign (and commonly outlined and accepted by employers) practise of filling your spare time with sporatic bursts of CPU and bandwidth with extraneous Web traffic during office hours, and installing clients (and likely a proxy) that take whatever's left of that computer's power 24 hours a day. Their figure seems arbitrary (especially since they're making such a big deal of the bandwidth, which is fairly trivial with RC5 clients), but there's clearly damages here of some sort that can be collected, if not something tangible that can be metered and tabulated.
I'm still waiting for some of these folks running gaming servers on office equipment after-hours to get caught, if we're gonna talk about serious bandwidth.
I couldn't agree more. Yes, the extent of the charges are frivilous and uneducated, at best. But he should have bloody well known better. As I was reading the anandtech forums, I kept seeing posts saying, "We can't assume anything, we don't know that he didn't have permission!" etc. Of COURSE he didn't have permission. Yes, US state courts tend to be a bit ignorant in the enforcement of tech-related laws, but this would have NEVER gotten this far if anyone had the slightest shred of proof that he had permission to run DC on those machines. Just because someone hires you to give their car a tune-up does NOT mean you're allowed to take it for joyrides.
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....
After all this time, I still get a giggle out of the torment that site draws from so many people. Their webmasters need to be sainted. Fortunately, most of my friends who I've sent to that site "get it", but it's still a gas to watch the folks who don't.
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If you ever start a business, please be sure to look me up. ;)
Seriously, I honestly think Distributed.net's intentions are fairly innocent -- which is a helluva lot more than I can say for the whole distributed "cure-for-cancer-it's-not-for-profit-honest-well-a t-least-not-yet" project. Large-scale distributed computing is a big deal, and they've been instrumental in showing that it CAN be done. Besides, there's a lot of folks that enjoy doing things just because it's there.
By the by, what's the deal with the IMDB? I've made submissions before, but I'm pretty ignorant of any shady goings-on, and I'd be curious to know. I'm unfortunately not much of a fine-print reader when it comes to contributing to "public" databases, even when commercial ties are apparent (which, more often than not, tends to be the case anyway).
This is a state-run public school we're talking about. They're not gonna be teaching cryptography or distributed computing in Mrs. Blaileen's 5th-grade geography class. It wouldn't matter if he were calculating Mersenne primes -- he used taxpayer resources for personal use. He meant no harm, his intentions were good, he shouldn't (and likely won't) get much more than a slap on the wrist (compared to the maximum penalties under the statute he's accused of violating), but he still broke the law, and he should have known better. He has my sympathy, but I'm not rushing out to contribute to his court costs.
Just where did you see me say it was or wasn't? I was commenting on goat, not your post. Yes, it was in the wrong bleedin' end of the thread. Calm down, no one wants you to anonymously burst a vessel.
You raise a good point, but the difference is that, unlike the maintainance tools you mention, this is software can can be clearly proven (even to the layperson) NOT beneficial in ANY way to the operation of the systems in question, and can easily be deemed detrimental to the performance of said machines, all in the name of personal gain (that this personal gain is primarily of an educational and scientific nature is completely beside the point, even discounting any potential cash prize.) He was given a job to do, and this wasn't remotely part of it. 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.)
Now I feel dumb. I hadn't realised this, either, although it doesn't change much in my mind. I'm not certain about the dollar amount, but many folks have stated that 15 years is the maximum under the statute he's apparently voilating. He almost certainly doesn't deserve that (I'm not sure he deserves ANY time in the clink, poor bloke), but he broke the law, regardless.
Because he was dumb enough not to know better. The problem with the mass-marketing spammers is that they KNOW it's illegal, and make every effort to tie up every loose end, stealing resources from wherever they can, then moving on to wherever else so they can start the whole cycle again. It's easier to catch a rabbit in your garden than to find him where he lives.
I think, in the midst of all this "but what about all the recreational office Web use" talk, we need to realise the difference between the much more benign (and commonly outlined and accepted by employers) practise of filling your spare time with sporatic bursts of CPU and bandwidth with extraneous Web traffic during office hours, and installing clients (and likely a proxy) that take whatever's left of that computer's power 24 hours a day. Their figure seems arbitrary (especially since they're making such a big deal of the bandwidth, which is fairly trivial with RC5 clients), but there's clearly damages here of some sort that can be collected, if not something tangible that can be metered and tabulated. I'm still waiting for some of these folks running gaming servers on office equipment after-hours to get caught, if we're gonna talk about serious bandwidth.
I couldn't agree more. Yes, the extent of the charges are frivilous and uneducated, at best. But he should have bloody well known better. As I was reading the anandtech forums, I kept seeing posts saying, "We can't assume anything, we don't know that he didn't have permission!" etc. Of COURSE he didn't have permission. Yes, US state courts tend to be a bit ignorant in the enforcement of tech-related laws, but this would have NEVER gotten this far if anyone had the slightest shred of proof that he had permission to run DC on those machines. Just because someone hires you to give their car a tune-up does NOT mean you're allowed to take it for joyrides.
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 ....
After all this time, I still get a giggle out of the torment that site draws from so many people. Their webmasters need to be sainted. Fortunately, most of my friends who I've sent to that site "get it", but it's still a gas to watch the folks who don't.