Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you?
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
The uni I attended did indeed have an "all you can eat" buffet, and strong-armed dorm residents into overpurchasing meal plans. Students swiping in people experiencing homelessness to expend their otherwise-forfeit meal credits was a relatively common sight.
A visitor charging their phone? Ignore it. A resident running an extension cord to the carpark to charge the car of a different visitor every day? Enforce it.
Don't ask bad-faith questions like this. There's nothing gained by arguing the extremes of a case.
My entire point was asking whether there is an acceptable use/abuse policy, and providing an anecdote about how there was no policy in place for a similar kind of "hack" that I did.
You're just asserting that there is some kind of policy, without providing any details of it. Since you're arguing from a point of knowledge, it isn't bad faith to ask you about your knowledge of the policy of the unnamed dorm at the unnamed college attended by the unnamed friend.
I don't believe you actually know anything about the policies of the dorm - I think you're just assuming there is some policy, and it was reasonable in 2013.
> My entire point was asking whether there is an acceptable use/abuse policy, and providing an anecdote about how there was no policy in place for a similar kind of "hack" that I did.
> You're just asserting that there is some kind of policy, without providing any details of it
Human interactions, customs, policies and laws are not code, and should not be thought of as merely a bunch of if statements to run.
When faced with something obviously ok, such as "a visitor plugging in their phone that they need to charge on one occasion" we don't apply any written policy, we ignore it. This is basic hospitality such as allowing a visitor in need to use the toilet facilities.
When faced with something obviously not ok, such as "a visitor extracting as much electricity as they can, for no benefit but their own private profit" we raise that this is blatantly an abuse of the resources. If there is a policy, we apply it to that end. If there is no policy, then we add to the policy, to that end. The policy is merely an instrument.
> As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity.
My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network.
I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.
This is just at the beginning of the story to be fair. Later on he is mining in his living place and also writes about the electrity cost needing to be covered by the mining revenue.
The universities also very quickly banned crypto mining in dormitories. People still did it secretly, but it was very easy to get caught. There would have been no way to have any sizeable operations in a dorm.
A friend and I managed to run a PS3 cluster mining bitcoins in one of the labs on campus for pretty much the entire 2009 academic year. But I think that was before mining rigs became much of a nuisance.
The first Bitcoin difficulty adjustment happened on Dec 30 2009. Which means that for entirety of year 2009 there was on average just one computer mining Bitcoins.
Not really a stretch. I have a similar story that I can attribute to 2009/2010 (attempting to mine on the person's computer I was living with at the time)
Was just sharing my experience with the topic really. Tbh, building a PS3 supercomputer was one of the most educational experiences I had during my time at university. If they didn’t have an 11 figure endowment I might almost feel bad about it.
Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
Considering the typical behavior of about 90% or more of all major tech companies that many people on this site work for or contract to, it's laughable that you'd snark at someone talking about a minor pseudo-theft of electricity form a dorm room several years ago. Hell, much of the shit being thrown by commentators on this site on cryptominers, who often use renewable energy sources for their mining, is itself laughable considering how much electricity and resources the mega tech corps they work for burn all the time. You could argue that said companies do so for "better" reasons, but that's debatable and a separate matter.
That's an interesting statement. Are there still people on here who define hacker as a bad thing, instead of someone who wants to take things apart to see how they work?
Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws?
Those who end up amassing fortunes have often ruthlessly exploited the loopholes of unwritten rules - Peter Thiel taking advantage of Roth IRA, Uber and AirBnB dumping the externalities of unregulated taxis and hotels on the wider society, Walmart putting its lowest paid staff on medicaid etc. Just look at Panama papers to see how the rich exploit all the loopholes to save on taxes.
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.