Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
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Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#2For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today?
When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every computer in the cluster, and then using nohup or screen (this was pre-tmux) you could have your program run as long as the system was up. I had to ssh in a couple times because I'd forgotten to logout and didn't want to get "baggy pantsed".
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#3For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
Well, with protected memory you’re not going to be getting full access to the lab machines anymore ;)
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#4For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
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.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#5For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
Well, with protected memory you’re not going to be getting full access to the lab machines anymore ;)
Is gp mentions SSH, that means software is not running in real mode.
And if you can get SSH, chances are sooner or later you can exploit some misconfiguration or something else to escalate to root.
Years ago having send mail installed basically meant having a security hole... And sendmail was very common.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#6For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
Well, with protected memory you’re not going to be getting full access to the lab machines anymore ;)
True, you're not going to get this extreme level of access to the machine. But even doing things like ssh'ing in to many machines to use it as a personal distributed cluster, even if you did everything to make your program run at the lowest reasonable priority, got some people in trouble at one university I was at.
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#7Thread on a single page: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1389106103179378689.html
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#8For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
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…
> if a student even had their own printers set up.
Students aren't allowed to have a printer? O_o
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#9For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
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…
> 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?
Re: Back in 1993, I was taking a number theory class
#10For anyone still at or associated with a university, how would they react to behavior like this today? When I was in school (circa 2000), the IT offices were starting to crack down on students (with some threats of expulsion) for activities like this, though it wasn't yet typical or uniform. I know at GT there were a few computer labs that, if you paid a bit of attention, you could easily get ssh access to every comp…
At my uni, it's pretty much solved by having the student's computer society own the most capable machines on campus (sponsored by Facebook if I've understood things correctly). If any one want something done, they just ask the root of the society, and move on with their newfound computer resources. This access can range from a tiny VPS (automatic access for all students) to shell access to the (small but capable) HPC cluster.