IT worker faces jail for installing screensaver at work

Keeks

Check out this article in the Reg and see what BS that a US state prosecuter is trying to pull. No wonder it takes so long to bring criminals to justice when the courts are full of BS case.

Here is the article:http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/20695.html
and here are some related sites:
http://freemcowen.com/
http://www.tacube.com/pages/mcowen.html

What is the world coming to.

entropi

serves him right the fool, companies have strict policy about installing anything on your{well their} pc. We all know about the viruses and worms you can get so i will shut up now.

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That island has freedom written all over it" Sir, that's Cuba. [url="HTTP://WWW.thesimpsons.com"]look at that smithers!![/url]

Gladiator

dont be stupid, getting fired is one thing, jail is another

Greenbean

You can put it down to waste of company resources and fire them, but jail? What *******s think this way?

Technically these programs only run when the resources on the machine are not being used, thus they do not affect company resources at all.

Legally it will mean that you won't dare install these screensavers in future. At the moment the majority of them do nothing but compute pure crap - seti@home, distributed.net - all geeky wastes of times. The only decent ones left are folding@home (valuable academic research into protein folding) and the cancer researching project (though commerically biased). So now, if you install screensavers you would have to get the permission of your bosses and if you explain you will be using it for cancer research. Most management would have no problem with charitable donations of their resources, especially if they could associate themselves with the charity (there goes the cancer research one, being commerical). So I suggest in future we may see more charity based distributed computing systems.

ConUladh

I take it the Cancer Research one you are talking about is Popular Power, their commercial ambitions went down the toilet a few months back, the idea was to run commercial and charitable projects and let people pick and choose or mix

They only ever had the charitable one(cancer Research) running

I uninstalled it quite some time ago but have been getting grief over the last few weeks (american bloody company), apparently it clocked up quite a bit of time connecting to it's server.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Greenbean:
You can put it down to waste of company resources and fire them, but jail? What *******s think this way?

Technically these programs only run when the resources on the machine are not being used, thus they do not affect company resources at all.

Legally it will mean that you won't dare install these screensavers in future. At the moment the majority of them do nothing but compute pure crap - seti@home, distributed.net - all geeky wastes of times. The only decent ones left are folding@home (valuable academic research into protein folding) and the cancer researching project (though commerically biased). So now, if you install screensavers you would have to get the permission of your bosses and if you explain you will be using it for cancer research. Most management would have no problem with charitable donations of their resources, especially if they could associate themselves with the charity (there goes the cancer research one, being commerical). So I suggest in future we may see more charity based distributed computing systems.</font>

Gerry

I run folding@home, I think it is a worthwhile project. The only annoying thing is that it needs to connect to a server every 10 hours or so.

Chaos-Engine

Absolute Power of Companies
its a mark of capitalism..

Fight the power

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