(http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300)
> A computer network administrator faces multiple felony charges and years in a Georgia prison for allegedly installing Distributed.net clients without permission. Prosecutors say its justice, others aren't so sure
> A college computer technician who offered his school's unused computer processing power for an encryption research project will be tried next month in Georgia for computer theft and trespassing charges that carry a potential total of 120 years in jail.
> The closely-watched case if one of the first in which state prosecutors have lodged felony charges for allegedly downloading third-party software without permission.
What a lot of people missed was the significantly raised electricity bills from having 500 PCs running this software all day.
And a gorgeously authentic 2001 page (http://freemcowen.com/)
Facing a huge prison sentence for "hacking"... sounds eerily familiar. >sigh<
He faced a theoretical 120 years in jail. Even though that was unlikely he settled because, from the EFF statement:
> "David never should have been prosecuted in the first place, but we're glad that the state decided to stop," said Senior Staff Attorney Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). "This is a very good result for David. He very likely could have won if the case had gone to trial, but trials cost money and you never know what will happen."
And this is what he got for settling:
> Under the terms of the deal, announced today, McOwen will receive one year of probation for each criminal count, to run concurrently, make restitution of $2100, and perform 80 hours of community service unrelated to computers or technology. McOwen will have no felony or misdemeanor record under Georgia's First Offender Act.
His research was into finding a faster/easier way to do prime number factorization in an attempt to speed up cryptography of any kind that uses it. Part of that was finding an easier/faster way to compute prime numbers in the first place. It was fascinating stuff ... but those machines were useless for anything but doing those calculations since it was using up all cores/HT's.
Edit: note the OS will "boost" priorities on certain processes or threads sometimes. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms68...
(also, not sure about cgroups but ionice did absolutely nothing useful with swap churn when I tested it awhile back)
It would have been discovered sooner if you hadn't done that. :)
One thing that was annoying however was the prime finding software was put on every lab computer possible. It was suppose to pause when a user got on a machine and resume when they got off. This seemed to never be the case though because they would all run terribly slow and when you checked the process list the prime software would be pegging the CPU. After reporting the problem several times I simply added a line in my bash file to kill it when I logged on.