“Illegal” Moscow state university network built by students (2002-2013)
medium.com
medium.com
Building a network puts you in trouble? Cooperation, technical skills and social competence is what universities are meant to teach.
It's bad that an university could punish students for that... and quite appalling that people accept this state of affairs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_spoofing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_mode
EDIT: yes, and this is insane https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/viewing-website-...
This is important because many students today are fearful of other people even when on campus transit with a driver, so you better have a verifiable reason why you should be there.
2) University cops in the US are usually real cops - armed and authorized to arrest or shoot you - not "mall cops."
If you assume your students are helpless immature idiots, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let me try to explain, the network was quite organic for that place and time, I guess: The dorms administration really had no idea what internet is, and while the network wasn't officially sanctioned, it wasn't (very) actively prohibited either. It wasn't regulated, and obviously was a nuisance for the people managing the dorms. But at the same time I don't remember anyone being punished for maintaining it. It existed in a gray area so to speak: The network provided a utility to the students, but the school did not want to be responsible for it and also did not provide any alternatives. So the school administration turned a blind eye to the network for the most part, I think, until it was finally officially legalized.
Btw, I found a link to the dorms forum ("forum.local"): https://forumlocal.ru/ubbthreads.php it still exists, and its topics are going back to the times described in the article. Some old moderators are also still there (!).
It was hell and heaven.
On one side we had free, unrestricted couple hundred megabits per second when the rest of the country was dreaming about having a modem.
On the other hand there were 5 lines of BNC cable each spanning one entire floor with about 50 rooms connected. Clueless students mishandling their T connector would regularly got significant portion of the dorm without network access.
Once had a situation where one of the rooms would regularly be responsible for network disconnections. I binary-searched the spot so I knew it must be inside the room but the room was always closed when this happened and nobody responded.
It took some time but I figured it out. The guy had sex with his girlfriend on a bed that rested on the BNC to BNC coupler.
This part hit on me
> Getting on the roof was illegal, of course, and required a bit of climbing walls. But who cared? Delivering an internet connection to our friends and other students was much more important
It’s not the point of the linked post, but it made me think about the value of friendship.
Nearly everything in life is transactional, even romantic relationships can be quite transactional, but these people were risking their lives climbing walls just to see their friends have Internet. And of course also for the intellectual challenge of providing Internet to the building!
Probably friendship is the purest human feeling there is.
That said, the way it actually ended up being provided probably built a lot of solidarity among the students, but at the same time prevented fair access to people outside the service range.
As for the article… there is a big part of me being extremely jealous for not being able to get that experience. :/
That said, I don't see all that fire hazard. The cables certainly aren't.
There is a lot of relief when something just works (i.e. this network). This may be a stretch but consideration for dangers that are remote and hard-to-imagine (i.e. fire safety) typically doesn’t happen in Russia, a la Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs, because the in-between needs aren’t taken care of.