If universities jailed everyone who did something stupid on their network, they'd have to close their computer science department for lack of students.

I once stood up a DHCP server without realizing I'd start serving addresses to my entire dorm. I shut it down after just a minute or so having served 10 or 15 addresses out. A few minutes later my dorm phone rang asking about what I had done. Fortunately I could say with a straight face I'd already shut it down.

(Before anyone says "why didn't they just", this would be 1997 or 1998. Networks and their tooling have come a long way since then.)

I've did plenty of shit stuff in school, always got polite requests to stop rather than getting the police called on me, except one time.

I think "kid did a hacking, adults called the cops" is less common than people think, it just doesn't usually make the news when that happens, only when the cops get involved the media get involved, so essentially survivor bias.

Happened to me too. Back in the early 2000s, my college had two outbound Internet connections. One was shared with all students and one was shared with all labs/classrooms/etc. Connecting from dorms to labs was quick, and labs to internet quick, but dorms to internet was slow as molasses especially at certain times of day when a ton of students were on the Internet.

So I found some always on lab machine and ran squid on it, so I could get on the Internet through the labs from my dorm.

Turns out some tech found it after a few months, and tried to kill it but ended up fork bombing the system. And it fork bombed again whenever they rebooted it. That system apparently was the one used for scheduling anything at the college and they weren't happy with it going down.

At like 8am one day 3 techies knocked on my door and were like "uhhh..please don't run squid any more" and that was that.

It was a glorious 3 months though when I was getting 1mb/s downloads and everyone else around me was getting 75kb/s