[selwonk]

Brad Niesluchowski is asked to resign his position with Higley Unified School District after installing [email protected] on every computer in the school district. Much like [email protected] the rules and policies clearly state the following:

"Run [email protected] only on computers that you own, or for which you have obtained the owner's permission. Some companies and schools have policies that prohibit using their computers for projects such as [email protected]"

Niesluchowski, you see, enjoyed the authority to purchase all sorts of technology for his district. And his alleged downloading of alien-hunting software might well have used additional energy resources and caused other related damage or accelerated depreciation to the hardware. The school district estimates these losses at between $1.2 million and $1.6 million.Specifically, Niesluchowski stands accused of downloading a program called [email protected] to every computer in the school district.

SRC: Legit Reviews http://www.legitreviews.com/news/6895/

 

[hondo]

Thats exactly why I put the warning in, under One final thing, here The guy must have been :crazy:

It's kind of like you taking your car into a garage for whatever reason, and later you find a staff members been using it, when they shouldn't be.

 

[mord]

all he is guilty of is failing to get permission to install this application. so therefore is guilty of breaching the computer misuse act.
there would be no physical damage to the hardware in any way by running such an application.

the most the computers would have needed doing is if they are all connected via Active Directory to have a script pushed to all pc's that uninstalls the undesirable application on next startup.

At very worst they would need to have someone visit all sites and spend 3 min un-installing the app.

If they were really ana1 retentive then the PC's would need re-imaging.
real world costs incurred would be less than $5000 for one of thier permy staff to do the rounds and sort it out.

Looks like they are trying to hang him out to dry by over inflating the supposed damage by installing an app that does nothing other than use free processing cycles to do a bit of math and utilise some free bandwidth.

If he had done folding at home for cancer research would they have thrown the book at him so hard.


remember kids.... Dont live in the USA, they have crazy laws and idiots running about with guns. (most of them are laywers and police):crazy:

 

[hondo]

mord, it makes you wonder if they already had a dagger half way in this guy's back, and that issue was the easy out.

If he had done folding at home for cancer research

Now, hows about you joining us on the Renault Forum team?

 

[tahrey]

Not really Hondo... I'm in a position where I could easily do similar on every easily accessible computer where I work, and could probably get away with it... but I understand that, good as it may be to contribute 0.1% extra to the global effort, it would cause more harm to the institution than it's worth, and land me in some serious doo-doo.

Besides I already asked / suggested it to my manager and though interested, he didn't think it would fly. We're currently very definitely after reducing machine energy use and shutting them down entirely when there's no users sat at them, rather than having them hum away at 100% CPU all the time.

[email protected] uses up a lot more power, and therefore money (say an RM EcoQuiet going at its full 50w blast instead of idling at 20-ish average between doing not much and actually being powered off... folding 24/7 would then cost us £30 PER COMPUTER per year extra), then there's the noise issues, potential disruption of performance or stability, having arbitrary open ports to the internet behind whatever the legit users are doing, having to turn up the AC to deal with all the extra heat (a 33-machine PC suite using 30 unneccessary watts on average per PC = a one bar fire), the poor old poorly-located and already failure prone WD HDDs keeling over and dying at a rate even higher than their current darkly humorous one, etc.

I think that million-plus estimate is a bit high unless the district has a LOT of schools with a LOT of machines each, but it's sort of believable. I can more easily credit someone getting the sack for this sort of thing - though public spirited, it's still dumb, and damaging to already stressed budgets, and probably counts as gross misconduct; "dagger in the back", no I don't think so.

Sad thing is that if he had actually asked - and by some utter miracle had received the go-ahead - no-one would probably have questioned the electricty bill spike. I guess this is the exception proving the "easier to apologise than get permission" adage.