This is thrilling to see and read, but a few paragraphs and photos in I get a sad nagging feeling knowing that today this type of thing would likely get us complicated or put in trouble in so many different ways (USA). I keep thinking "how dangerous it is to have photo evidence of this", and it overrides the part of my brain thinking "this is a story for the ages, and I'm glad there is photo evidence of this".
As a person who lived in that dorm at the time, I don't think that the photo evidence is dangerous or incriminating for the author now. Maybe it could be ..somewhat.. incriminating at the time to share some of these details, but the existence of the network infrastructure was never a secret to the administration.
Let me try to explain, the network was quite organic for that place and time, I guess: The dorms administration really had no idea what internet is, and while the network wasn't officially sanctioned, it wasn't (very) actively prohibited either. It wasn't regulated, and obviously was a nuisance for the people managing the dorms. But at the same time I don't remember anyone being punished for maintaining it. It existed in a gray area so to speak: The network provided a utility to the students, but the school did not want to be responsible for it and also did not provide any alternatives. So the school administration turned a blind eye to the network for the most part, I think, until it was finally officially legalized.
Btw, I found a link to the dorms forum ("forum.local"): https://forumlocal.ru/ubbthreads.php it still exists, and its topics are going back to the times described in the article. Some old moderators are also still there (!).
Most universities already punish you for attaching anything to their network that isn't an end user device. I know a switch or router in my old dorm will result in a near instant switchport disable, even with DHCP off.
This combined with everything being so sensationalized. Inevitably someone's going to fire up bit torrent, get caught, and suddenly it turns into 'a sophisticated underground hacker cabal, formed right under our noses'.
When did MAC spoofing go mainstream? I remember the Orinoco Gold WLAN PCMCIA cards being a go-to for that kind of thing back in the day. Now it seems like Alfa gear is the go-to for that kind of thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
University security teams (if they exist at all) have enough trouble enforcing security policies with university employees without having students setting up unauthorized devices. They don't want students running crappy vulnerable servers out of their dorm room, or pirating movies (the university gets a legal letter for that), or port scanning the network, or a whole host of other at best annoying things that aren't necessary to get an education. If you want to do that, rent your own infrastructure, or better yet practice that in a lab.
Having been caught without ID while working at a university site as a contractor, I'm 100% certain that a university somewhere has carted some poor sod off to university prison. They are like extra powerful mall cops.
1) When I do consulting for profs on campus, I ask for a uni library card.
This is important because many students today are fearful of other people even when on campus transit with a driver, so you better have a verifiable reason why you should be there.
2) University cops in the US are usually real cops - armed and authorized to arrest or shoot you - not "mall cops."
I have been one of admins of a legal but student-operated network in a dorm with about 250 rooms. It was around 2000-2001 and it was 10BASE2 (with BNC connector).
It was hell and heaven.
On one side we had free, unrestricted couple hundred megabits per second when the rest of the country was dreaming about having a modem.
On the other hand there were 5 lines of BNC cable each spanning one entire floor with about 50 rooms connected. Clueless students mishandling their T connector would regularly got significant portion of the dorm without network access.
Once had a situation where one of the rooms would regularly be responsible for network disconnections. I binary-searched the spot so I knew it must be inside the room but the room was always closed when this happened and nobody responded.
It took some time but I figured it out. The guy had sex with his girlfriend on a bed that rested on the BNC to BNC coupler.
> Getting on the roof was illegal, of course, and required a bit of climbing walls. But who cared? Delivering an internet connection to our friends and other students was much more important
It’s not the point of the linked post, but it made me think about the value of friendship.
Nearly everything in life is transactional, even romantic relationships can be quite transactional, but these people were risking their lives climbing walls just to see their friends have Internet. And of course also for the intellectual challenge of providing Internet to the building!
Probably friendship is the purest human feeling there is.
Seems like the network was really obvious. If the University had wanted to stop it they would have gotten a guy with a cherry picker to just cut the crazy cables on the outside of the building. I wonder what the situation was that they tolerated this enough without providing their own network? Lots of props to the guys that built this thing!
This makes sense on the surface, but why then continually mess with the student network instead of working out a way for them to do it in a partnership?
That said, the way it actually ended up being provided probably built a lot of solidarity among the students, but at the same time prevented fair access to people outside the service range.
I’m from Bulgaria and I don’t remember it 100% but I think most internet networks in the early days were built in some Gassion like that. Cables just hanging on trees and switch as well.
As for the article… there is a big part of me being extremely jealous for not being able to get that experience. :/
This kind of articles always reminds me how conservative I've become. There are chances where I could have built something like this, but I didn't and now I regret that.
Various spontaneous networks were build at Belorussian universities (БГУ, БГУИР) as well in ~1997-2002. In about 2002 they were rebuild and legalized to some degree.
1. It sad that one of the country top universities could not provide Internet access in the dorms. but not suprising.
2. I see a lot of fire hazard in the photos
Russian culture is fairly tolerant for visual clutter and generally doesn’t care about aesthetics. This might be related to the “worn-down” psyche of the people who endured a lot of cultural upheaval that was not in their favour. Think about a time where you were under pressure and the general state of your desk/room/home.
There is a lot of relief when something just works (i.e. this network). This may be a stretch but consideration for dangers that are remote and hard-to-imagine (i.e. fire safety) typically doesn’t happen in Russia, a la Maslow’s Hierachy of Needs, because the in-between needs aren’t taken care of.
Concrete buildings don't really burn well. That means one doesn't have to be as careful with other fire safety stuff as even a major fire normally won't affect more than one room.
You're right - you need self-closing fire doors too. That then contains the fire, usually for long enough that it'll burn itself out before the rest of the building is damaged.
She's not wearing a top, for many on Earth that's not considered naked, this is hardly a "Russian" thing, most of Europe has no such prudish hang ups. America on the other hand considers it on par with extreme violence being shown on tv. Just a cultural issue I guess.
