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."
Love how they make it sound like a sci-fi novel (Score:1, Insightful)
Great... (Score:1, Insightful)
So instead of teaching something useful with that million, the school had to pay for upkeep.
This is why I pay little attention in school, because most of its just fucking stupid shit. 90%+ of what I've learned about computers has come from reading online and learning things by myself (CCNA, Compsci1, AutoCAD). Maybe instead of wasting money, use it to provide a better education for the students.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, kids, it's a 1-million-dollar civics lesson. "Screw up in county-level government, and we'll sic the cops on you and paint you up as a UFO-worshipping freak or something." Uh-huh. And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
Ten years to find it on 5,000 computers? (Score:4, Insightful)
AUP? (Score:5, Insightful)
However, this case seems to be with a difference of opinion. Ftfa: '"We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research," said Higley superintendent Denise Birdwell. "However, as an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T."'
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons. To say he would allow protein folding but not seti is asinine. When I decided between the two, I figured that finding ET would have a greater impact on society that a cure for cancer. Who knows, maybe ET will be able to help us cure diseases while curing diseases will not help us find ET.
Re:$1 Million... Really? (Score:1, Insightful)
So are you implying that "screen savers" somehow don't use any processing power or electricity?
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree, filing charges was way out of line. His only real mistake was not asking permission, and getting that permission in writing.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
They were his machines to configure, as a technology supervisor. It's not like he hacked into the machines in the dark of night to set things up on the sly. Sure, his configuration may have been a failure as far as the business needs of the school system were concerned, but when TFA is claiming "there may be charges filed!!"
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws. This guy set up a SETI account in his own name, for whatever joy he gets from being at the top of SETI crunch lists, and used government-paid electricity for his own purposes. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars. If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
A little silly? Perhaps, but judging the degree of his "ethics violation" and the subsequent consequences is the job of a judge or jury. The fact that an "ethics violation" that breaks an ethics law has been committed isn't really debatable.
Re:$1 Million... Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, pinning equipment failures on SETI is a stretch. But $1000000 for power consumption is not so far off the mark. SETI estimates $5/month/computer. If he's been doing it for 9 years, 12 months a year, at that rate it would require 1851 computers to reach $1M. IIRC, this guy was in charge of about 5000 computers. It adds up.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, his contract never said he wasn't able to run these types of background calculation programs. Even superintendent Denise Birdwell admitted, "We support educational research and certainly would have supported cancer research." So the issue is not the installation of the program, which would have been okay if the technician had installed Cancer@Home instead.
Furthermore Birdwell said the massive software cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts. How did he arrive at this 1 million dollar figure? Can he produce actual calculations derived from collected data, or did he just pull the number from his nether region?
I would not resign.
I'd tell them, "Sorry I'll uninstall everything," and if they chose to fire me then I'd drag Mr. Birdwell into court to provide proof before a judge that I actually cost the school 1 million in damages. If they can't then it would be unjustified dismissal, and in violation of multiple employee-protection laws that exist when you work for a state government.
Re:Love how they make it sound like a sci-fi novel (Score:3, Insightful)
Reporters (in my personal tech experience which includes a stint at a metro newspaper) are one of the groups that understand Tech the least. When coupled with the self-importance and arrogance that is present in most journalists it means they can't even be bothered to go down the hall and ask the publication's own techs if their story makes any sense. So you have this idiotic type of hand-waiving reporting. Watch CNN when there is a tech-related security story. Jeanne Meserve will come on and spout psudo-technical garbage that makes no sense at all.
Re:AUP? (Score:3, Insightful)
He was likely in charge of writing the AUP.
Re:But how is it a crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the documents, district officials said they found Niesluchowski had abused his authority in purchasing and oversight of district technology and equipment, downloaded pornography, and added to every district computer a University of California-Berkeley program that searches high-frequency radio signals for signs of intelligent life in outer space.
Much better article. Apparently the firing/resignation wasn't really about SETI, that was just icing on the cake. Of course, leave it to the media to run away with the "crazy guy looking for aliens" angle.
Re:Commendable... (Score:3, Insightful)
And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
I'd like to add that a competent sysadmin would do his best to keep costs to a bare minimum, and that includes things like buying the lowest-power CPUs that can get the job done, sticking to the job's specifications for software, cycling computers into powersave when idle, and -- in a school environment -- switching the damn things off at night, when very few people have legitimate reasons to use them.
Treating your work computers as your personal playground to install random stuff on to amuse yourself is completely unprofessional. Why do you think he didn't ask for permission? Because for whatever the reasons might be, he would probably have been unlikely to procure it.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, I think the people of Arizona would be better off if the school district officials were less interested in making a big showy news article about UFOs and filing criminal charges and dragging the legal system into things (and spending money on lawyers and courts and such) and more interested in just running the system effectively (let the guy go, quietly, and leave it at that). The world is a better place for everyone when we leave the legal system as a last resort. Of course, since these are officials in government service, let's ignore sense and guess which move will do more to further their career - the showy one, or the one that makes sense?
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Insightful)
distributed.net key cracker - was Re:Oops (Score:5, Insightful)
At work we have a large number of dual CPU/eight-core (16 with HT) machines with 24, 32 or 36GB running java VMs, and we notice there's a very big hit on performance if we try and run more than a few VMs on a machine, almost certainly due to loss of cache efficiency; this performance loss doesn't particularly show up in simply looking for CPU cycles used by the OS!
baaaaloney (Score:5, Insightful)
Birdwell said the massive software slowed down educational programs in every classroom and cost the district more than $1 million in added utility fees and computer replacement parts.
Well, actually -- they claimed $1.2--1.6 million.
The software is designed to run at the lowest priority, idle. It takes up 16-50MB of RAM while running. Given that most school labs only run web browsers, office applications, and low-quality educational games, I doubt the systems were running out of memory. Antivirus apps take up a lot more than that, as to most web browsers. So on the charge of "slowing down education programs in every classroom" -- no.
Regarding computer replacement parts -- not really. Those machines are going to sit there no matter what, and they will fail at the same rates regardless of what software is running on them. OTOH, if they were running 24/7 and that was being done only so SETI@Home could run, then yes -- replacement costs of fans and harddrives would have gone up.
Regarding utility costs -- they might have a point on this one.
Bandwidth: Each SETI@Home work unit is about 0.25MB in size, padded to about 0.30MB with overhead they add to it. There aren't any stats I could find readily available online for how much network overhead is added to this, but let's say 0.35MB of bandwidth is used. Unfortunately, there's no way for us to know how much processor power is available -- so I'm going to take an estimated guess and say about 5 hours per work unit. That seems to be in the ballpark from what I've read online. So I'm going to round up to an even 2MB per computer, per day. He installed the software onto about 5,000 computers. That works out then to 9.7GB per day. Or about 294.2GB per month (remember, 4.33- weeks in an average month). That might add up to, I don't know, a few hundred extra a month if they had a leased line and a poor contract. But it's paltry in comparison to the electricity costs.
How much power does the average computer take? Answer [techreviewer.com]. I'm going to say 80watts is pretty close. Again, just working with averages here and trying to get a ballpark figure. To convert this to a usable cost figure, we need to use these formulas: Watts=Amps*Volts Cost per hour= (Watts/1000)*(cents). Cents being the per kWh cost. This guy did this in Arizona, and conveniently enough, we know what the average kWh cost in that state [doe.gov] is: It's 10.4 right now. So, each computer, per day, uses 1.92 kWh of juice, if it runs 24/7. If they were programmed to go to standby during that time and didn't -- we'll say 16 hours of that day, or 1.27kWh, went to SETI@Home beyond what those computers would have spent otherwise. This doesn't take into consideration holidays, weekends, or anything else... Someone else could probably create a much better estimate than this without too much work, but I'm in a hurry and this is slashdot. 5,000 computers use 6,350kWh of extra juice per day doing Seti@Home, when they could have been powered off. That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
I doubt most organization's ethics rules would cover this - Particularly since he had the authority to determine how he wanted to configure each machine, and in no way profited from his actions. As for the cost of electricity (I think we can safely write the rest of the claims of "accelerated hardware depreciation" off as complete BS, talkin' about school lab computers, not a datacenter here), although he really should have considered that, I wouldn't call it beyond the realm of possibility that he simply didn't. Keep in mind he started doing this before self-throttling CPUs became popular, meaning it made next to no difference in power consumption whether you kept your CPU idle or pegged at 100%.
If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws.
Although most organizations actually do have rules specifically relating to network use (as opposed to what screensavers you may run, about which I've never seen anything more than "no porn walpaper/screensavers/themes"), in the absence thereof and depending on the terms of internet connection, I would arguably call that less abusive. If you have a flat fee for a fixed bandwidth, and limited your use to legitimate works (ie, no porn or copyright violations) and made sure it never interfered with legitimate traffic, such use costs the organization literally nothing. But... Beside the point.
I will further defend this guy for having school-owned hardware at his house - Schools and local governments rarely have proper procedures in place for EOL'ing older computers. I personally had two from a local college that technically would have counted as "stolen property" if it ever came up, but I had obtained them by as close to kosher means as possible (the guy in charge of their computer labs, the father of a friend, had literally hundreds of decommissioned PCs piled floor to ceiling in a storage area and begged anyone who dropped by to take a few). So if he had a dozen brand new quad-core boxes the district didn't even know they bought, okay, problem; If he had a collection of P4s and 32-bit Athlons in various states of disrepair, I'd have a hard time returning a guilty verdict on that jury.
Personally, the fact that they let him resign makes me wonder about the truth of the issue. Given the facts as stated - Generally abusing the hell out of his authority, outright failing to do his job, and stealing from the school - I find it mind-boggling that they wouldn't have him arrested and fired for cause, never mind the "spend more time with his family" line.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Buying the lowest-power CPUs?! Are you absolutely sure about that? This seems like REALLY bad advice. Needs always rise (ALWAYS) to what "gets the job done" today won't tomorrow. This advice is a crock of ****, always was. You want to be efficient? Buy systems from the middle, not the slowest, and not the fastest. The middle is usually the right choice. The slow ones will have short lives (and replacing machines is expensive - not just in machine costs) the fastest machines cost a fortune (and there is always diminishing returns at the top end).
Now like all rules, it's there to be broken. If you don't expect the system to have a long life - consider cheaper (typical examples are harsh environments). If replacing the system is really expensive (because downtime is a problem, expensive specialists are required whatever) then consider something more expensive.
But always buying the cheapest is just bad advice.
Re:But how is it a crime? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, just freaking wow...
I am wondering how long before I see the headline "Man arrested for using linux", just to read on and find out that he beat his wife to death using a Ubuntu Laptop.
A few observations (Score:2, Insightful)
Funning SETI@Home 24/7could indeed cause the premature wear and malfunction of computer parts over a long period of time.
IMO this would probably affect hard drives the most (as one of the most likely internal parts to fail due to extended use), but the excess heat generated
by running SETI could also prematurely age the CPUs and RAM modules to the point that they need to be replaced sooner that usual.
This of course would all depend on how intensely the program was run (was it being run as a 'low CPU utilization' background process or not).
Having said that, to claim that this program alone could have caused all of the maintenance/repair issues with these computers is specious.
These computers would have incurred maintenance/repair costs irregardless of whether SETI@Home was installed or not and it would be
nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly how much this one particular program contributed to the costs mentioned. Assuming these computers
would have been left on in some fashion even if SETI@Home wasn't installed, they would have been using electricity either way as the computers
would always be running some sort of background/idle process even when not being used.
I think the bottom line is whether or not this Administrator violated the School District's terms of acceptable use and whether or not the installation and
running of this program clearly contributed to those violations. And for what it's worth it may well have, but for this superintendent to make all
sorts of grandiose claims about the costs involved with running this program without a true knowledge of the technical nuances is just irresponsible, IMO.
If need be let the details be hashed out and examined in a court of law before spouting off.
To me the real 'crime' was that it took the school system 10 years to figure out that a resource hogging program like SETI@Home was being used in the
first place.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Insightful)
I love that it took 5 different technology companies to figure out why the PCs were running slow.
The first 4 have never heard of the Task Manager.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if you know this or not, but for more than 10 years now when a computer isn't doing anything, it generally goes to sleep. In sleep mode, even the most ancient, piss-poor power management cuts the power consumption of the PC by a large fraction.
I don't know if you know this either, but generally applications like SETI@home are designed to monitor your computer usage, and if you aren't doing anything with it cranks up the CPU share to 60-70%.
I'm not sure if you know this too, but generally a computer that is actively sending data across a network cannot go into sleep mode, nor can a computer that is consuming large amounts of processor time (30%+ definitely).
If you want proof, try starting a download and then putting your computer to sleep. It will do one of two things: It will either kill the connection and go to sleep, or it will simply not go to sleep. You can't do both, it is not possible, and in either case the computer won't go into sleep mode automatically.
In other words, Starry Night and My Pictures stop running after 10 minutes, cutting their power usage to nill, while SETI@home continues crunching away, burning up 100-150w (I doubt they used much more than that though) as opposed to 10-20w. Some quick arithmatic shows that the Starry Night PC is using about 240-480wh per day, while the SETI@home is using roughly 2400-3600wh per day. The SETI@home PC would use about an order of magnitude more power per day than your standard screen-saver laden PC. Multiply these rough figures out by 5,000, and the SETI@home is costing the school district 18mwh per day more electricity usage than a standard PC with a standard sleep mode.
Now that's worst case scenario, it's probably costing more like 10mwh per day more energy consumption, because they are using these computers for school. Since the average cost per-kwh is about 10 cents (it varies a lot by region, it can be as low as 5 and as high as 25), we can estimate that this guy was costing the school district between $1000 and $1800 per day with his SETI nonsense. If he ran it for several years (I did not RTFA, so I don't know how long he ran it) he could have cost the school district several million dollars.
If that's the case, not only should he lose his job, he should probably face criminal charges for stealing government resources.
Re:Commendable... (Score:1, Insightful)
You're an idiot. And the only reason you didn't lose your job is because your boss is a bigger idiot.
Congratulations.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the comments in this article [eastvalleytribune.com] (thanks to this post) [slashdot.org] from people who are there, it sounds like a real hatchet job.
Salient points:
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Christ, I want to upmod you.
My wiring looks like this. And for the exact same reasons: No, we can't have the downtime to move any wiring around, no we can't take the time to pull those old cables, we don't have time/money to order cables, use the wrong length cause that's what's on hand, it needs to be in production today/it's unfunded, for cable management you can use all the zip ties and velcro that you can scrounge, and multiply it all by ten years. And now they want to use it as evidence that the guy is incompetent or even criminal? Because he hasn't had the backing to incur costs and downtimes for neatness? Because he lacked the pull to make them build buildings and buy new infrastructure?
And, knowing that he's getting unfairly accused on these counts makes me mistrust the remaining accusations as well.
Re:$5/machine? Depends on the machine... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Insightful)
The very article you linked to says that it was SETI@home that tipped them off, because it almost imediately* severely impacted their system.
* For definitions of "almost immediately" that include "almost ten years later".
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you need to get some reading comprehension skills.
Nope - they estimate that for fixing the problems with the network, etc., that have accumulated over a decade of lack of funds, etc. This includes things like a secure building for the servers. Certainly not his fault.
The "downloading porn" is an unproven allegation. If we were to fire every admin who's ever downloaded something that a prude would consider "porn" (like accidentally clicking on a goatguy or tubgirl link), there'd be no admins left.
$10 to $30 per computer to click the "uninstall" button? I don't think so, Clyde.
Those whiteboards have been reported elsewhere to have deployment problems - it has nothing to do with seti@home, and yu'd have known that if you had a clue. It also certainly didn't "immediately impart their system" if it's been running for almost a decade.
As for the rest - "taking computer equipment home" is often done with obsolete systems or "parts boxes", the "increased network usage" is 150 tb over 10 years, which sounds like a lot, but is really 41 gigs a day or less than 10 meg per box a day - incidental traffic (think 10-20 slashdot pages - heck, I've done 400 gigs in one month on a single box at home without breaking a sweat) - that wouldn't interfere with normal network usage in a system capable of supporting 5,000 computers. As for the "punching holes in the firewall" - you might want to read this [boinc-wiki.info] and this [unitedboinc.com] - do you have a problem with ports 80 (http) and 443 (https/ssl) being "open"?
Riiight - having ports open so that users can surf the web is a terrible thing - quick - block ports 80 and 443 on your machine! It's a security risk!
Don't be a tool, mkay?
Re:AUP? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is why the Tenure system was instituted. To prevent dismissals due to political or idealogical reasons.
I'd say it's more along the lines of preventing dismissals for reasons of gross incompetence.
Re:Commendable... (Score:5, Insightful)
You should probably re-read the article too. Some of the money apparently includes a new building. Unless the tech supervisor was moonlightning as a demolitions expert, I doubt he's responsible for that. And some of the comments in the article by the locals are very... interesting... as well.
Re:baaaaloney (Score:5, Insightful)
THE DAMAGES ARE BUNK (Score:3, Insightful)
Does ANYBODY ever fairly calculate damages? Sometimes one has to wonder how they calculate these numbers they pull out...
SETI costs will not be as high as the legal burden on the system; sure the FA was missing some of the details but having seen some college IT workers who largely come from the student population and few stick around-- it doesn't surprise me they'd have some issues. Some of the top guys are just the kids who didn't leave.
As far as porn on a staff computer-- don't get me started. I'd say that is quite common; sometimes its not intentional... http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ [thewebsiteisdown.com] strikes true in too many ways (on both sides of the IT/staff.) We have a situation where staff are encouraged to take laptops home, answer personal emails etc-- to blur the line between home and work so they can get unofficial worktime from people without them realizing it. Being on call with a cell phone without pay... etc. This clever movement to sucker employees with these kinds of "benefits" also has the side affect in that they think of the stuff as also being THEIRS-- or loaned; again, business tries to blur professionalism and friendship/family to get the best of both worlds.
I did IT for a bit. I found porn. The MEN who blurred the line the most also had the stuff or more of it and not really hidden either. I also found those with laptops INCREASED this tendency. If its partially THEIRS then they treat it as such. I think it is fair for them to do this simply because I strongly oppose the intentional blurring going on but a contradictory professionalism that comes up when the darker sides surface. Don't want abuse? don't "loan" your "family member" hardware for their personal use.
My IT job was harder because of these modern management methods; people were extremely upset if they couldn't run what they wanted to, have a laptop to take home, surf anywhere (from any location,) etc.
Re:Commendable... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:AUP? (Score:4, Insightful)
The thing that has always bugged me about SETI is that after decades of scientifically-rigorous research, nothing has been found yet to even hint at the existence of extraterrestrial life as we define it. If we never find E.T., it may be because our definition of "life" is too narrow, or because there's really nothing else out there other than stars, black holes, and other mundane phenomena. It doesn't matter. Putting your own personal time and resources into SETI is like playing an intergalactic lottery: the payoff is mind-bogglingly huge, but the chance is winning is mind-bogglingly small. (I could expound upon the lottery analogy to further discuss why SETI is so attractive from a psychological perspective, but I think you get the point.)
If SETI@Home were the only thing out there that I could put my unused cycles towards processing, I might go for it. But the fact is that there are plenty of other distributed computing projects that are generating data which is useful to scientists (and by extension, everyone) right now.
They're just not quite as glamorous as finding E.T.
Re:Commendable... (Score:4, Insightful)
Really...$100k to remove seti from 5000 machines? ...because I *REALLY* want that job. It's an hour of scripting and a few days (at most) to test. Push it out over a weekend, run an inventory...follow up on the few failures.
To say Seti "fucked up the computers" is pure BS. It may have caused problems with their operation but it's a simple, essentially self-contained, program. Remove it and you're back to where you started...no re-image needed.
As for the rest of the cabling "problems" I suggest you walk a mile in a tech's shoes. Who's to say the guy's supposed to work during the 3 months that school is closed too? Get off your high horse.