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Comment by 0des | Hacker News Reader

This is thrilling to see and read, but a few paragraphs and photos in I get a sad nagging feeling knowing that today this type of thing would likely get us complicated or put in trouble in so many different ways (USA). I keep thinking "how dangerous it is to have photo evidence of this", and it overrides the part of my brain thinking "this is a story for the ages, and I'm glad there is photo evidence of this".

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As a person who lived in that dorm at the time, I don't think that the photo evidence is dangerous or incriminating for the author now. Maybe it could be ..somewhat.. incriminating at the time to share some of these details, but the existence of the network infrastructure was never a secret to the administration.

Let me try to explain, the network was quite organic for that place and time, I guess: The dorms administration really had no idea what internet is, and while the network wasn't officially sanctioned, it wasn't (very) actively prohibited either. It wasn't regulated, and obviously was a nuisance for the people managing the dorms. But at the same time I don't remember anyone being punished for maintaining it. It existed in a gray area so to speak: The network provided a utility to the students, but the school did not want to be responsible for it and also did not provide any alternatives. So the school administration turned a blind eye to the network for the most part, I think, until it was finally officially legalized.

Btw, I found a link to the dorms forum ("forum.local"): https://forumlocal.ru/ubbthreads.php it still exists, and its topics are going back to the times described in the article. Some old moderators are also still there (!).

> or put in trouble in so many different ways (USA)

Building a network puts you in trouble? Cooperation, technical skills and social competence is what universities are meant to teach.

It's bad that an university could punish students for that... and quite appalling that people accept this state of affairs.

Most universities already punish you for attaching anything to their network that isn't an end user device. I know a switch or router in my old dorm will result in a near instant switchport disable, even with DHCP off.

This combined with everything being so sensationalized. Inevitably someone's going to fire up bit torrent, get caught, and suddenly it turns into 'a sophisticated underground hacker cabal, formed right under our noses'.

Did your university have MAC based network access control? That's probably why.

When did MAC spoofing go mainstream? I remember the Orinoco Gold WLAN PCMCIA cards being a go-to for that kind of thing back in the day. Now it seems like Alfa gear is the go-to for that kind of thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_spoofing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitor_mode

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORiNOCO

https://www.alfa.com.tw

In the US you get threatened to be put in jail for viewing the source on an webpage.

Remember, a 'governor' is a device that regulates speed; the older ones use inertial force. You may choose to elect more efficient ones.

Has there been an actual case of that?

EDIT: yes, and this is insane https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/10/viewing-website-...

University security teams (if they exist at all) have enough trouble enforcing security policies with university employees without having students setting up unauthorized devices. They don't want students running crappy vulnerable servers out of their dorm room, or pirating movies (the university gets a legal letter for that), or port scanning the network, or a whole host of other at best annoying things that aren't necessary to get an education. If you want to do that, rent your own infrastructure, or better yet practice that in a lab.

Having been caught without ID while working at a university site as a contractor, I'm 100% certain that a university somewhere has carted some poor sod off to university prison. They are like extra powerful mall cops.

1) When I do consulting for profs on campus, I ask for a uni library card.

This is important because many students today are fearful of other people even when on campus transit with a driver, so you better have a verifiable reason why you should be there.

2) University cops in the US are usually real cops - armed and authorized to arrest or shoot you - not "mall cops."

Re 2), it wasn’t in the US, but yikes.

I recall a lot of the things mentioned contributed significantly to the education of many of my peers from undergrad.

If you assume your students are helpless immature idiots, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pretty much what happened to Aaron Swartz.

Perhaps it's a bit flippant to make this not-obviously-true assertion without attaching any reasoning.

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