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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today?

When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every computer in the cluster, and then using nohup or screen (this was pre-tmux) you could have your program run as long as the system was up. I had to ssh in a couple times because I'd forgotten to logout and didn't want to get "baggy pantsed".

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In a public lab that is used frequently, I believe this would be viewed quite negatively. Not from a "you hacked our systems" perspective but a "it could have been damaging to other students' education if things had gone wrong". To make the differentiation somewhat more clear, filling up a bucket of water from the bathroom sink to clean something vs. removing all the shower heads and making a super funnel of hoses to spray wash your car outside. The former activity is clearly much less likely to cause issues with other students. If the computer lab was in some basement used by 3 students throughout the year, I don't think anybody would care.

Building on that, many universities have computational resources for any level of needs as long as they are justified. Free network storage to last a lifetime and access to computer clusters that comes with your university email. Upgraded computer clusters for class projects, personal research (like this), or really any legitimate need (as long as you don't say something like "I want to mine bitcoin") is an email away from the university IT. The next level would be the university's super computer that generally needs a short proposal to justify the academic purpose. When these systems are in place now, it is kind of hard to justify these type of things.

Edit: The author of the post put a comment basically confirming that things haven't really changed. He was being respectful (low usage lab, allowed people to stop his programs if they needed a computer, low impact to others, etc.). He was given access to more legitimate resources afterwards at the request of the professor. Not as easy as it is now, but that's Moore's law.

I graduated last year, and I worked for my colleges IT department. We used to have to come knocking at the door if a student even had their own printers set up.

It definitely would not go well.

That being said, I did know people who clogged the cs department's machines with batch jobs to train really expensive ML models that did God knows what. Its not the same as bypassing a security system, but it is an instance of people having the ability to run whatever code they'd like in certain circles.

> if a student even had their own printers set up.

Students aren't allowed to have a printer? O_o

Printers used to be expensive and noisy.

In 1993 I was one of about 3 people on a dorm floor of ultraturbonerds who had a printer in my room; it was a Canon BJ130, I think, which had the distinction of being a tractor-fed 300dpi black-and-white inkjet, and thus much much quieter than my friend's IBM ProPrinter 24XL. How much quieter? It wouldn't wake up people in the next room.

In 1988 when I was at Purdue, one of my roommates had a Coleco Adam. Presto, instant printer!

Buying a combination computer/printer was a terrible idea for longevity, but it helped me out a lot that year.

(Edit: stupid typo getting old)

I too had a ProPrinter 24XL! Compared to daisy wheel printers, they were very quiet.

From what my college-going friends tell me, some colleges want students to pay for a higher print quota instead of having their own printer. More money for the college that way.

> We used to have to come knocking at the door if a student even had their own printers set up.

What's wrong with having a printer?

If I had to guess the wording of completely insane contracts signed with companies that provide campus wide printing.

IOW just an extension of why they don't want you using libgen to get all of your books for free.

Funny, because I remember bypassing my university's print quotas in grad school a few years ago simply by printing directly to the IP of the printer. I didn't set out to do this. It was just an unintentional side effect, and one I never abused, but I did happen to notice that whenever I printed, my quota allotment never went down.

LPR is a pretty ancient and basic language. And it has 0 security!

I did this out of pure convenience, and actually never experienced the university's Windows account system at all (would I have had to sign up for an account? who knows). I had a list of strategically-located printers in my printcap, chose one on the way to whatever class I was headed to, kicked off the print job, and collected it as I passed by to class. In class I would get the previous week's assignment back, take the staple out with my pocket knife, and reuse it to staple the current week's homework before turning it in.

I couldn't imagine a situation where if someone knocked on my dorm room door asking if I had a printer in there, I would not have told them off with very unflattering language and telling them to perform fellatio upon themselves.

How many students are just rolling over and saying sorry? I would imagine most would give you a very hard time.

Replying all gets you booted off the school network for a certain amount of time, it's in the TOS so they can do it. I imagine people value network access over having their own printer.

When I was in university IT ~2008 our main concern was people accidentally serving their own DCHP onto the network and colliding with ours, generally by plugging in a router LAN port out. I could imagine a decree with this goal saying "no personal devices" to keep it simple.

> How many students are just rolling over and saying sorry?

Probably most/all. IT infrastructure is critical and there's a very good chance that the IT staff have a process in place for dealing with kids who won't let them do their jobs. And it's probably a pretty effective process that has been refined over the past decades.

Some universities provide distributed computing resources.

Example: https://www.psc.edu/resources/allocations/

A primary mission of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is to train students, including undergraduates, in high performance computing. To this end, PSC offers Coursework allocations which are grants of free supercomputing time to supplement other teaching tools.

Typically, Coursework allocations have been used in heavily quantitative subjects, such as numerical methods, computational fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry. But we encourage all fields, including the social sciences and humanities, to take advantage of Coursework allocations.

I think that it totally depends on the definition of 'behavior like this today'.

If 'behavior like this' is creatively toying with lab equipment that you have been given physical access to, bending the rules a little bit in the process, to participate in an academic challenge? If it would be up to me then a slap on the wrist would suffice, now just as well as presumably in 1993.

But if 'behavior like this' means breaking into computers, which nowadays are essential parts of a university's infrastructure, in straight violation of rules and conventions on hacking that have been in place since before you were born (say 2000), just to get some computer time to, say, mine whatevercoins? Then a little more than a slap on the wrist would be completely fine by me.

> For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today?

They would wonder why the student went through all that trouble instead of getting time on our HPC cluster.

Not even that. You can reach those kinds of levels with a GPU these days (and GPU programming is sufficiently obscure that most people won't even attempt to go that route).

Though... with the whole GPU shortage going on right now, maybe it'd be easier to steal computer time from someone else's lab right now!!

Hah, fair enough, HPC clusters are certainly more common than when I went to school. In that case, take the "like" to be a generalization (how I meant it): A student (or students) pushing the limits of the existing rules and infrastructure to accomplish something productive or interesting. Yes, it breaks some rules, but what's a typical reaction anymore? Do they get hired by the university or pushed to work with particular researchers like when I was starting school or do they get pushed out or punished like when I was wrapping up college?

Today the sysadmin sends you a frustrated email at you asking you not to do that again. You are using someone else's stuff that is carefully maintained by other people, it's polite to abide by the rules these maintainers have set up since it's their job and their free time on the line when things go wrong.

When I was in uni a few years ago it wasn't exactly unusual for students to use the PC pool for things like this, but you didn't need to circumvent any security to do it (which presumably would have drawn some ire - some poking at security was ok, but always a bit uneasy). Nobody cared unless you really got in the way of people wanting to work on the machines.

At my uni, it's pretty much solved by having the student's computer society own the most capable machines on campus (sponsored by Facebook if I've understood things correctly). If any one want something done, they just ask the root of the society, and move on with their newfound computer resources. This access can range from a tiny VPS (automatic access for all students) to shell access to the (small but capable) HPC cluster.

My university had a lap specifically for computer security research. So you could do anything you wanted in there, including screw with network infrastructure (though, you were asked to plug all the machines back into the appropriate ports after you were done).

There were apparently scripts set up that would reset everything every Sunday.

That’s a rather unfortunate typo you have there.

Well, with protected memory you’re not going to be getting full access to the lab machines anymore ;)

Is gp mentions SSH, that means software is not running in real mode.

And if you can get SSH, chances are sooner or later you can exploit some misconfiguration or something else to escalate to root.

Years ago having send mail installed basically meant having a security hole... And sendmail was very common.

True, you're not going to get this extreme level of access to the machine. But even doing things like ssh'ing in to many machines to use it as a personal distributed cluster, even if you did everything to make your program run at the lowest reasonable priority, got some people in trouble at one university I was at.

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