> it was a long story. > > short version is, he was a consultant, working at some biga$$ > insurance company as a PC Tech. he pre-loaded Prime95 on the > desktop install so it > was running on a few 100 machines at said company. he thought he had > verbal permissions from the desktop systems manager, but > someone in corporate security got freaked by the nonstandard > network traffic they invoked, and sic'd the FBI on him for > 'hacking', and they hit him with a search warrant, and took > *all* his business computers, tapes, CDs, backups, etc. left > him unable to complete ongoing consulting contracts, or even > file his taxes as his books were on the computers too.
US WEST... Yeah, phone companies don't appreciate when their contractors "see all those computers and just can't resist" (paraphrase of one of my more infamous quotes). It was actually somewhere in the several thousands of machines... The whole reason they got so upset, I think, is that a couple days *before* I'd started running all those, they had some other network problems that was causing their main app to run slow, and when they investigated, they found Prime95 running, so of course they jumped a conclusion or two and blamed Prime95 for the slowdown. Later on of course we (meaning me and some log files) ascertained that the problem began before Prime95 was ever there, and maybe that's something that helped them decide to drop the whole thing eventually. That and the fact that I didn't actually "hack" anything. They were all machines I'd built the master image for, and they just never changed any of the passwords in the 2 years since those were deployed. In a strange way, those were my babies... We'd unload 100 machines a night during the deployment... Unbox 'em, put them on desks replacing old dumb terminals... During the deployment of those, we'd sometimes need to send out "hotfixes" to machines we'd already done, so I wrote some scripts to update them all in the field. Basically I just did one final "hotfix" to install that oh-so-critical program, prime95. :-P Bad judgment, yeah. Criminal? I never thought so. So, word of the wise to anyone installing this without permission: Don't! It did suck not having all my documents and what not... I tried a couple times to get backups of all my important docs but even though there are federal guidelines that allow for that, I had no luck. Probably the part that stunk the most was paying TCI $400 to replace my rented cable-modem. Well, I did get a signed document from TCI that when I returned the cable modem I'd get my money back... Think I could still cash that in? :) Sure it's gone from TCI to AT&T to Comcast, but hey, maybe... Shows how much the price of cable modems has dropped. :) _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
