SETI@Home Install Leads To School Tech Supervisor's Resignation 621
Posted
by
timothy
from the totally-worth-it dept.
from the totally-worth-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the most prolific of users in the SETI@Home community has resigned his job as a school technology supervisor after it was revealed he had the software installed on some 5000 school machines. The school claims to have lost $1 million in upkeep on the affected machines."
Re:Oops (Score:4, Informative)
He also had equipment from the school at his home (Score:4, Informative)
He probably shouldn't simply be installing software that isn't essential to his work function on machines that he does not own.
I also heard on NPR that they found lots of equipment that belonged to the school at his residence. The criminal charges probably stem from that and not just for installing SETI@Home (haven't read the TFA so just speculating).
Re:5,000 machines, US$1M (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But how is it a crime? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:5,000 machines, US$1M (Score:4, Informative)
Re:5,000 machines, US$1M (Score:5, Informative)
It actually does use more power running the CPU full throttle vs idle. The rule of thumb I learned was a buck a watt per year. By which $200 sounds nuts. School PCs do not have 200W worth of CPU in them.
But..oh, over 10 years. That's $20/year/system. Very plausible.
This guy learned the following lesson the hard way: Systems you manage are not yours. They are your employers. The potentially mitigating factor here from TFA, is that he claims he had permission. If so, whoever granted permission should be fired. $1m is real money, especially if you're a school district.
He was fired for stealing and porn (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/story/147847 [eastvalleytribune.com]
Re:Would cancer research been a better use? (Score:1, Informative)
There is no known 'grow-old' gene in humans (unlike some other mammals), it's caused by radiation breaking up certain DNA/RNA type moluecules that cause the cells to fail to reproduce adequatly (i.e. produce colligen, etc).
Re:He also had equipment from the school at his ho (Score:4, Informative)
The other article linked here really should be in the story: Higley firing tied to alien-search software [azcentral.com]. This one makes it pretty clear that the guy was fired because he's a bad employee and a lousy manager, not because he wants to find aliens.
Quite frankly, it's a little annoying that the OP's story only mentions "ET". That's irresponsible reporting, and it's why newspapers are folding all over the country; when your reporters can't even write a proper, coherent, unbiased story, people go elsewhere for their news.
Re:Oops (Score:2, Informative)
That's because of crappy Windows process scheduling and/or your computers were already slow to begin with. Folding@Home is currently running on what would be known as Idle (nice 19) and is not disrupting anything.
Re:But weren't they on anyway? (Score:5, Informative)
Is it really likely that the computers weren't on anyway? If not, then surely someone would have noticed the fact that the computers were running all night for no reason sometime in the past 10 years...
Plug your computer into the wall through a power meter and you'll notice the difference between idle and heavy CPU use being easily over the 40 W the GP used.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that, and lying about removing the software when the problems caused by it came to light and he was ordered by previous administrators to remove it.
...and downloading pornography using school computers.
...and, on top of all that, generally not doing the job he was hired to do.
At least, that's what he is being accused of, according to this more complete article on the story [eastvalleytribune.com].
SETI@Home is not the only issue here.
Re:$1 Million... Really? (Score:2, Informative)
You think the majority of these computers are either laptops or are desktops recent enough to do serious power saving? In a school system?
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Informative)
The article says the district hired "five experts" and reports on "one company" that did a district-wide technology audit.
It doesn't say "five companies". It also doesn't identify the problem the five experts were hired to address as being "why the PCs were running slow?" I suspect from the description of the problems (though its not clear which were uncovered when, and which motivated the action) that a variety of intermittent problems with systems and higher than anticipated maintenance and replacement costs, which their in-house tech staff couldn't adequately explain, are what the outside experts were brought in to explain, which goes beyond "why computers are running slow?" to "why are paying so much for tech and still having so many problems?".
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Informative)
That screen saver will also allow the computer to go to sleep mode after a few minutes, slashing the power consumption. SETI@Home cannot allow this, or it would defeat the entire purpose of the program (which is to crunch numbers during idle time).
When a computer is in sleep mode, it is essentially off. The only power flowing through it is the power that keeps the data in RAM, and the power that allows the BIOS power management to monitor for that little mouse wiggle and bring everything back up. The CPU is off, the hard drive is off, virtually all of the motherboard is off, and the monitor is off.
To compare that to a program crunching numbers (which is a CPU intensive task) is silly, the number crunching app needs the CPU at almost full throttle, obviously the motherboard powered up, the NIC powered up and actively sending and recieving data. Depending on how well it was written, they may get away with little or no hard drive usage, but that's iffy.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Informative)
Apparently, he told them that the first time he was caught. And then didn't bother to actually uninstall anything.
Re:Ten years to find it on 5,000 computers? (Score:3, Informative)
According to the district, problems with the software were noted before, which is why he was directed by a previous administrator to remove it. Also, the over $1 million (more specifically, $1.2 to $1.6 million) cost estimate is not the cost of electricity, its the cost to correct the various problems the district claims stem from the various misconduct and neglect of duties he is accused of. TFA sucks, read the more complete article on the story here [eastvalleytribune.com]. (Newspapers may suck in general, but they tend to cover things far more completely than TV news organizations, which is where TFA comes from.)
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Informative)
The school computer may be "on" all day, but you can bet your ass any half way competant IT manager is going to have those computers sleep after 10 minutes or less of inactivity. In sleep mode, most of the PC is off, with primarily just the BIOS and RAM recieving power. It sips, as opposed to guzzles power like even an idle desktop does. If he had set it up to hibernate during off-school hours, they would have used no power at all for 16 hours a day. That's a massive difference.
Besides that, even a complex screensaver (like thos nifty aquarium screen savers) uses almost no resources and adds very little to the power consumption of an idle PC, but SETI@home is a number crunching app, and number crunching is extremely CPU intensive.
Why the hell do you think they need to do this distributed number crunching and data sifting in the first place? It's because they cannot afford the super-computer it would require to get the work done in a reasonable amount of time.
It's not cheap to run, SETI@home will tell you that your power consumption will definitely go up, but for an individual user it ends up costing $20-30 per year for something they care about. In the case of this guy, he was costing the school district upwards of $300,000+ every year, and if he was doing this for several years the total cost could easily be in the millions of dollars.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Informative)
SETI doesn't have a whole lot to do with science, other than the fact that they do use nice big radio telescopes. These are people with wishes and dreams and faith to test instead of hypothesies and observations. We've observed nothing, as yet, to suggest there is anybody else "out there", and yet these people are scanning for radio signals they may have sent to us. That's great, and more power to them, but I wouldn't call it serious science by any reasonable definition.
Criminal charges are completely appropriate for dealing with an employee who knowingly mis-appropriated government resources, disregarded his employers when told to remove the application, and showed more regard for his own notariety than the school district he was hired to support.
See we have this concept called ethics, and what this guy was doing was very, very unethical. The school district did leave the legal system as a last resort, they told him repeatedly to remove the software and he refused, and continued to load it on new machines. He needs to pay restitution for what he cost the school district, and it is not an insignificant amount.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Informative)
Some of those computers date back to 2000 - sleep mode?
Also, as comments in this article point out, the techs were forbidden from rolling out a script that would have turned the computers off at night, as it was against school policy.
Read the comments - some are from people who worked there, some from people who live there. It looks more like the guy was fired because someone - Superintendent Denise Birdwell - wanted to polish her image.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Informative)
You should probably re-read your article, because you forgot some things, like:
- Taking computer equipment home (at least 18 computers and other equipment for personal use)
- Downloading pornography
- Inhibiting the teacher's ability to do work (SETI@home)
- Increasing network usage (SETI@home)
- Punching holes in the firewall to allow unapproved software to run (SETI@home, massive security risk if done improperly)
- Generally not doing his job
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately severely impacted their system.
It also wasn't like he installed it on just the lab computers or whathaveyou, something he might be able to get away with. No, he installed it on EVERYTHING.
They are estimating close to $2 million to fix all the problems this guy caused, and based on what I've seen I can believe it. I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000, and if they are contracting the work out (they will probably have to) it will cost more like $100,000-$150,000 because of project overhead and profit markup for the consultant. That's serious business.
You say it's all political, but what ever happened to ethics, huh? If this guy had time to download porn at work, why the hell wasn't he fixing the absurd rack wiring in the photo? If they had a firewall policy, why the hell was he breaking it run some pet project (on thousands of school district machines, no less, I'd have some simpathy if he kept it to his own machine). He apparently compromised the security of the entire network just to run this app, if that doesn't scream unethical and incompetant to you, then I don't think anything will.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Informative)
I work at schools myself and have lots of old school gear at home, and scattered all around the place. I often take stuff home to work on, and such is common practice for my coleagues.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Informative)
I figure removing SETI@home alone will cost at least $50,000
Oh please. The worst-case scenario is that someone writes a script that calls msiexec to uninstall the software, and either makes it a startup script for all PCs using group policy, or they use psexec to call it on all systems by name. If someone thinks they have to pay $50,000 for that I'll give them a great deal and do it for $10k, but the actual cost should be 1-2 days' wages for one person.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Informative)
In terms of power used, yes they do. Bear in mind that the vast majority of public school applications aren't going to involve 100% utilization 100% of the time. These are machines that are expected to not consume a lot of power simply because the work they're tasked to do isn't going to be that complex in the first place. Take your typical school computer's power consumption in kilowatt-hours at idle CPU and compare it to full CPU and there will be a significant difference. Multiply that across every machine that has SETI@Home running in the background and you've got quite a lot of power being used (and being paid by taxpayers).
If this guy was truly competent enough to earn his salary, those computers, at very least, would not have been "bogged down" in the first place. The SETI@Home CLI client can be installed as a service and set to idle priority, so that full CPU utilization can be achieved without slowing anything down, and installing it as a service would mean no obvious CLI presence unless your users have the presence of mind to open up Task Manager and look at your process list. And of course, what competent admin would allow users access to Task Manager in the first place?
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit! You need a budget and you need authorization. Without both of those, you end up with a rats nest. Same as telephone systems from Ma Bell. Same as anywhere else.
OMG BLOCK PORT 80 (http) AND PORT 443 (https/ssl) NOW!
It wasn't until right before the school board elections that the board member pushed this. The hardware problems with the white boards have been covered elsewhere on slashdot - they're not unique to this school. Teachers complained about being given the hardware and no training beyond "Here's the install cd. Good luck."
The $2 million is for updating hardware and a new secure building - infrastructure improvements - NOT to "fix his unethical and incompetant (sic) behavior"
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Informative)
That remains in doubt. The tech supervisor at issue probably had that authority assuming no specific instruction was received from above, but the more detailed news articles on the case relate that the district position is that this came to the attention of a prior administrator, who provided specific direction to remove the software, following which the tech supervisor reported that he had complied with that directive. If that is true, after that point he arguably did not have the authority to configure the machines with that particular software without requesting and securing a change in directives from the administrator or that administrator's successor.
Of course, that's more an issue of direct insubordination than "ethics rules" at that point.
Local governments, including school districts, generally have (often from higher authority, such as the state) laws and regulations which must be followed in disposing of computers (which include procedures to assure that confidential information which may have been stored on them isn't compromised.) The responsibility for assuring that policies and procedures exist that meet those requirements generally lies with the person with lead authority over IT for the local government at issue, which appears, in the case at issue in this thread, to also be the person at the center of the whole controversy.
So its not clear to me that he can get out of responsibility for the computers at his house because the district didn't have a process for dealing with EOL computers, because establishing such a process would appear to be part of his job.
He resigned "in lieu of termination" after getting a termination notice. Its not at all unlikely that there are civil service rules applicable to the case that, while allowing "administrative leave", prohibit firing without a notice period to allow for appeals within the civil service system. Of course, if he chooses to resign after the notice but before the required notice period has expired, the issue becomes moot.
They initiated the process of getting him fired for cause (that's what the "termination notice" is), and also the process of getting him arrested (that's what the police investigation is.)
He made the first irrelevant by quitting after the termination notice, and the second process hasn't yet come to a conclusion.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, the C1 "idle" state was added with the 486DX4, and the HLT instruction it's based off of dates back to the 8086 (source here [hardwaresecrets.com]), so it's a lot older than ten years.
As for SETI@Home being "designed to monitor computer usage," when I used to run it, this wasn't the case, and I doubt seriously this has changed much. If the process is running at normal priority, it'll attempt to use CPU cycles the same as any other program running at normal priority. Proper configuration practices for "unnecessary" background processes/services would have them running at idle priority, at which point it's the scheduler's job to allocate spare CPU cycles when nothing else other than all other idle processes actually needs CPU time. If the SETI@Home CLI client was configured in such a manner (even better if it was configured as a Windows service) the user would see no impact whatsoever in system performance because all of the user's programs would run at a higher priority than SETI@Home.
And SETI@Home doesn't constantly use network resources either. It downloads a work unit, processes it, and then sends it back, as opposed to something like bittorrent which actually generates constant network traffic even if it's not otherwise doing anything of note.
Re:SETI (Score:3, Informative)
It has nothing to do with conspiracies and everything to do with science (I support SETI, but I don't believe that aliens have visited Earth or anything. I don't even believe aliens exist, I just believe they might exist).
There isn't any reason there couldn't be aliens out there, and if there are, one of the best ways we know of to find evidence of them is to look for their radio signals (either for their own use, or that they intentionally broadcast in order to be found). SETI ran for many years from Arecibo and then from the Very Large Array. The budget was never that big, and as the amount of data that could be gathered increased and budgets decreased, they came up with SETI@Home as a way to crunch the data without spending $$$ on supercomputers.