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You're right in that I don't have first-hand experience with the culture at MIT, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it's normal that outsiders break int

by roel_v 13y ago

You're right in that I don't have first-hand experience with the culture at MIT, but I'm highly skeptical of the claim that it's normal that outsiders break into the closets there used for the networking equipment while wearing bicycle helmets so as to not be recognized. Likewise, I'm skeptical of the claim that it's considered 'normal' for people to be repeatedly and explicitly told not do something on the network and not face repercussions eventually. E.g., how many torrent sites are hosted on MIT machines? Or on machines hidden in closets and connected to their network? Maybe there are, I don't know - but the extent of your claim (not the fundamentals of it - what I mean is, the extent of the Wild West-ness on the MIT network you claim) doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

ericd 13y ago
Having gone there for undergrad, I do have first hand experience with the culture. I doubt Aaron was as much of an outsider as you seem to think he was. It's a very open and accepting place. Given that his dad worked for them in some capacity, and given that Harvard and MIT students cross register regularly, and where his interests lay, there's a good chance that he was at least socially involved with people there, and that's generally enough to take part. The social norms there don't resemble those of the country at large or even those of other schools, so I would be very careful about extrapolating what's acceptable elsewhere to what's acceptable at MIT. Nothing about what he did struck me as something that would be very far offbase there, I think it would be seen as a really cool hack. I'm sure the admins would feel a bit different if it caused problems for them, but generally this kind of thing was more than socially acceptable. To answer your question about torrents, file sharing was very common on the network, but people had much better solutions than torrents (cert. authenticated file servers, internet2, etc). Edit: Also, c'mon - he wasn't wearing his bike helmet to avoid the cams, he didn't think he was doing anything very wrong. He probably just rode is bike to the building and left it on.

by roel_v 13y ago

ericd 13y ago

Having gone there for undergrad, I do have first hand experience with the culture. I doubt Aaron was as much of an outsider as you seem to think he was. It's a very open and accepting place. Given that his dad worked for them in some capacity, and given that Harvard and MIT students cross register regularly, and where his interests lay, there's a good chance that he was at least socially involved with people there, and that's generally enough to take part. The social norms there don't resemble those of the country at large or even those of other schools, so I would be very careful about extrapolating what's acceptable elsewhere to what's acceptable at MIT. Nothing about what he did struck me as something that would be very far offbase there, I think it would be seen as a really cool hack. I'm sure the admins would feel a bit different if it caused problems for them, but generally this kind of thing was more than socially acceptable. To answer your question about torrents, file sharing was very common on the network, but people had much better solutions than torrents (cert. authenticated file servers, internet2, etc). Edit: Also, c'mon - he wasn't wearing his bike helmet to avoid the cams, he didn't think he was doing anything very wrong. He probably just rode is bike to the building and left it on.