[exmadscientist]

I worked in a very similar place a decade ago, and probably know a few of the major people involved here. Not that I've kept up with them.

The machines 10 years ago were on a LAN with limited access to the global (well, Chinese) Internet. It wasn't great but it wasn't terrible.

More troublingly, I would bet a large sum of money that there are Windows XP installs in this lab, and even pirate installs of LabView. I distinctly remember being onsite watching the guy next to me open up a NFO file to get the instructions for the LabView crack. At my station in one of the boxes I had a fully licensed multi-seat institutional LabView DVD set, paid for at staggering cost somewhere in the University hierarchy. I debated speaking up, but decided to just let him keep going on doing what he was doing. That was probably the right choice.