As soon as I started reading I knew this was going to involve stealing electricity.
"took it to my friend’s student dormitory where the electricity was “free”."
I was not disappointed! Life hack: stealing can make you money!
"took it to my friend’s student dormitory where the electricity was “free”."
I was not disappointed! Life hack: stealing can make you money!
I know for a fact my university in the early 00's did not have an acceptable use/abuse policy on internet usage, and I was the person that caused them to create that policy!
We had 2 T-3s for internet access, one dedicated to dorms, the other dedicated to labs/office spaces, but there was fast LAN access between the dorms and the labs. The dorm T3 was always slammed in the evening by about 5000 students, and the lab/office one was 100% available - so I set up squid proxy on a lab computer, and was getting 10 Mbps where everyone else was getting 50 kbps.
A sysadmin saw the process running and tried to kill it and it forkbombed for some reason, crashing the lab computer. So they came and knocked on my door and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn't do it again, and then next year every incoming student had a to sign a policy saying they would behave on the network.
I still maintained that I did nothing wrong, and it was the sysadmin that didn't know how to kill a process appropriately that needed to be talked to.
The dormitory did not give the free electricity to the author, but to their friend.
If, for instance, an "all you can eat" buffet had an acceptable use policy, I do not think that it would allow "you can also feed a friend".
It would also rightly be ignored.
A visitor charging their phone? Ignore it. A resident running an extension cord to the carpark to charge the car of a different visitor every day? Enforce it.
Don't ask bad-faith questions like this. There's nothing gained by arguing the extremes of a case.
You're just asserting that there is some kind of policy, without providing any details of it. Since you're arguing from a point of knowledge, it isn't bad faith to ask you about your knowledge of the policy of the unnamed dorm at the unnamed college attended by the unnamed friend.
I don't believe you actually know anything about the policies of the dorm - I think you're just assuming there is some policy, and it was reasonable in 2013.
> You're just asserting that there is some kind of policy, without providing any details of it
Human interactions, customs, policies and laws are not code, and should not be thought of as merely a bunch of if statements to run.
When faced with something obviously ok, such as "a visitor plugging in their phone that they need to charge on one occasion" we don't apply any written policy, we ignore it. This is basic hospitality such as allowing a visitor in need to use the toilet facilities.
When faced with something obviously not ok, such as "a visitor extracting as much electricity as they can, for no benefit but their own private profit" we raise that this is blatantly an abuse of the resources. If there is a policy, we apply it to that end. If there is no policy, then we add to the policy, to that end. The policy is merely an instrument.
My favorite crypto miner story was from a guy who caught an employee hiding ASIC miners above the ceiling tiles in their office. For some reason he thought nobody would notice. They noticed both the noise and the weird new devices on the network.
I suspect he lost more money from getting fired than he gained from the crypto mining. His miners were offline for quite a long time while they were seized as evidence in the ensuing investigation, too.
Is tech still counter culture now that it pervades every place in society? Is it still okay to completely shirk the law now that many tech companies, for all intents and purposes, write the laws?
These are interesting questions to me.
Tech is not counter culture (and has in my personal observation never really been). Hacker culture, on the other hand, was counterculture from beginning on and still mostly is.
And Hacker News is run by YCombinator, which has an application form that asks applications to explain a time when they cheated ("hacked") a system for personal advantage.
Besides, breaking the law is not inherently a bad thing.
Edit: Also, I absolutely didn’t get rich from this if that’s what you’re concerned about for some reason. We cashed out after an early price spike, pocketing several thousand dollars each, which with both considered to be a major windfall.
Only a handful of people were mining Bitcoin in 2009, which is the same year it was created.
Maybe it was different in the US. In Europe I get the impression the FOSS community is predominantly left-leaning. My local Debian community certainly is, and they're anti-cryptocurrency (like myself).
Slashdot was also quite skewed against bitcoin, and that was a pretty international geek readership.
>Meanwhile, my monthly electricity bill was hovering somewhere around a thousand euros"
The Man will fuck you on any technicality they can - don't turn around and give them the benefit of the doubt
But a lot of people do see him as a role model. And he wields considerable influence and power. See what he did to Gawker. How many of us can ruin a publication just because of a personal vendetta?