Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael S Czeiszperger <czei AT webperformanceinc.com>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Thursday 02 August 2001 08:26 am, you wrote:
> One wonders what's going on there.  It seems a leap beyond the usual FUD
> factor.
>

My first job out of college was as a UNIX sysadmin for Ohio State, and 
there's nothing more political than a university. In my experience most of 
the computers are purchased through grant money, and each lab is controlled 
by a separate professor with his or her own political machine. If you get on 
the bad side of one of the powerful professors, the computer admin management 
certainly isn't going to back you up.

Once I was accused of causing a long running program that was part of a 
research program to crash. It took a couple of meetings to straighten that 
mess out. If the distributed.net program was at all even suspected of 
interfering with research or classroom activities that could explain the 
problem.

The big question, though, is I can understand the unlucky guy getting fired, 
but to have the university pursue the matter and press for a criminal 
prosecution is wierd.

One of my duties as sysadmin was security, and I normally ran the standard 
password crackers against our password database to identify any security 
holes caused by students or professors picking easily guessed passwords. 
Given the lack of familiarity of computer management by the 
administration, I was in fear of being fired for "computer hacking" on the 
very machines I as administrating.

- -- 
Michael S Czeiszperger
czei AT webperformanceinc.com

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP 6.5.8

iQA/AwUBO2leCFgOl/a4Fw2AEQKrhwCfd5bBn+ssSC6FuTvo78keYyJZlxwAn1mV
WhXj1NpViRYWl07ceduqaG5/
=sWXK
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----