alt Hacker NewsIf 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.)
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I got my first job in technology when I moved into my dorm freshman year. I had been looking forward to having Ethernet for a while, and once I plugged it in, no network. I realized that they still needed to assign IP addresses, and no network admin was around, so I watched the network, found free IPs, and spun up a DHCP server that gave out these free IPs. A few hours later my port shut off, and the network manager came to my room, asked what I did. I explained, and he offered me a job on the spot. I worked in networking for the university until I hooked up with the Unix guys, and my tech career shot up like a rocket from there. This was late 90s early 00s, so no fear of prosecution then. Hell, we ran a nearly-officially-sanctioned file sharing service when the internet handoff got too busy and we needed people downloading music and movies to lay off. The server ran in a rack in the datacenter for a few years until the MPAA paid a visit.
There is a big difference between accidentally doing something, realizing quickly that you did it, and correcting it...not to mention only causing a minor problem for less than a dozen people...
...and intentionally pushing campus-wide infrastructure really hard (mostly because something isn't happening as fast as you would prefer), breaking the entire campus network (of a school with 7,000 students), and then proudly bragging that you broke that infrastructure.
...and then proudly bragging about that...
This kid has a huge ego that is going to get him into a lot of trouble some day when he swings his dick on a network where people are Not Amused.
I'm going to guess his next run-in will be at an internship or his first job, and he'll get fired.
Getting hauled into the dean's office and being told he'd lost the privilege to do any network 'investigating' outside of direct supervision in a pre-approved academic project would do a great job of correcting the inflation level of his ego and keep him from doing the same thing later where the people who run it are Not Amused and there are serious consequences.