Hacker News Reader

Comment by vuciv1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com