
A Romanian campus computer lab pentested the world and helped protect it (2018) - rbanffy
https://arstechnica.com/features/2018/08/the-secret-history-of-ed011-the-obscure-computer-lab-that-hacked-the-world/
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visarga
Funny, I too was a freshman student there in 1993, and I used the ED011 room
to get my first taste of internet. I didn't know about web pages or there were
very few back then but I used Gopher, and I would simply try to reach as far
as I could around the world. I learned shell commands by looking over the
shoulder to the guys next to me and copying what they were doing. I didn't get
to use the 286 stations, just the DEC terminals. 4MB RAM seemed like a
supercomputer to me, after first learning programming with a Romanian Sinclair
Spectrum clone which had 16KB ROM and 48KB RAM.

Those were the days, when you had to load software from cassette tapes and
even the slightest movement could make the computer reboot (but that was 4
years earlier, when I was getting into 9th grade).

~~~
paganel
I think I caught the dying days of ED011. I was an Automatica freshman in
1999, when the lab and the die-hards populating it still looked like magic for
outsiders like myself, but by 2000 or early 2001 all the text-only terminals
had been replaced by 486 computers (I think), and the magic was gone.

The spirit of it still lived for a short while in the faculty's dorms, which
had freshly been fitted with Internet connections, and it was cool to see all
those network cables hanging outside of the dorm buildings while knowing that
because of those cables we had access to Audiogalaxy and to playing
AtomicBomberman with our colleagues from two floors bellow us. Lots of the
students that helped install and set-up those cables and the dorms' network-
systems ended up as key people at various ISPs.

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HenryBemis
I remember in the 00's a company I was working for was trying to recruit
talent to Romania.. they were SO good! I remember that a DBA in Romania would
cost the same as in the UK, and they would work miracles. I also remember they
had 2x optic fiber networks, one underground and one from the
telephone/uitility poles.

I am not surprised for this. At some point Romania was the DataCenter for many
large companies in Europe.

If only the corruption had gone away, Romania could have been a 'mini European
silicon valley'.

~~~
noir_lord
On average the smartest developers I've worked with from Europe have all come
from that neck of the woods, I'm in the UK and our best are the equal of their
best but their average is better.

They often write better English than English developers as well.

I say that as an average developer myself.

I think it's a cultural thing combined with rigorous universities and a strong
work ethic.

~~~
mirceal
as someone who is from that neck of woods I can tell you that the people you
interact with are probably not your typical developers from there.

as with everything in life there are people that are really good at what they
do and also there are people that are not so good.

i personally don't care where you're from when I'm working with you. what you
know and what you can do is what I care about.

~~~
noir_lord
It absolutely could be selection bias.

That said I still hold their English was better than the average English
person I've worked with generally (not just Developers).

~~~
dmix
I’ve always found Europeans seem more inclined to generalize by country at the
minute level than people in North America. Of course in an endearing sort of
way, not to be mean.

Talent is talent, it can come from anywhere but tends to congregate in certian
places. Usually because talent attracts other talent. Not merely just existing
opportunity/attributes of the area.

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HeWhoLurksLate
Inspiring! As a middle schooler, I was given free non-destructive reign in my
tech class to do whatever I wanted. From that, I learned so much- I set up a
Beowulf cluster out of old desktops, scavenged RAM from a pile of unused
desktops to get the workstation I found up to speed, and did so much more. [I
also mined BTC _at school_ , but I lost the wallet :( ] As one of those people
that will do ridiculous things out of intellectual curiosity, it was a huge
boon to me. Similar to Lari, I broke my share of stuff, and learned a _lot_ in
the process of fixing it.

It is from those days, six years ago, that my passion for technology truly
blossomed, and I've been so much better for it.

~~~
msla
I definitely think that breaking and fixing stuff, or just fixing broken
stuff, is vital to understanding any field where "stuff" is involved.
Doctoring and nursing are both apprenticeships in part so doctors and nurses
can learn how to fix broken people in a real setting, and we should do
something more like that in the computer field so the kids who didn't grow up
with their own systems they could break and fix can get the experience they
missed.

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cucubucu
Yes, those were the days. I was there with Lari for a couple of years. The
article is accurate but does not mention the hortible smells in ed 011,
especially after 2-3 days of some of us being there non stop, no showers
included.

Unfortunately the article also hypes up the value and impact of "hacking".

There was no rocket science nor much valuable to learn after hacking the 20th
server with the same old tired exploits. Plus most stuff was easy then.

This is why after the first 6-12 months of 3am hacking excitement, most of us
moved on to learning difficult fundamental things such as algorithms,
compilers, complexity, threading, AI and many others while others would still
be in ED011 years later "hacking" away ... without really making progress.

If you are thinking of pursuing CS as a major, certainly hack away in
highschool and early on in collegebut eventually don t forget to go for the
difficult fundamental things.

Interestingly, Lari was not a CS student and ED 011 was his place of
connection with computing ...

