[googlryas]

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.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Do dormitories put acceptable use/abuse policies on the free electricity they give you?

The dormitory did not give the free electricity to the author, but to their friend.

If, for instance, an "all you can eat" buffet had an acceptable use policy, I do not think that it would allow "you can also feed a friend".

[Arubis]

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.

[googlryas]

So you believe it would be against policy for a non-resident visiting a resident to plug their phone in to charge?

[nl]

Of course it's against policy.

It would also rightly be ignored.

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.

[googlryas]

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.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> 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.