[ale] Fw: Petition for McOwen vs. Georgia case

Fulton Green ale at FultonGreen.com
Tue Jul 17 20:54:38 EDT 2001


OK, normally I skeeve away from Internet-fueled petitions, but for this I'll
make an exception. For the uninformed, the McOwen vs. Georgia case was
featured in /. a week or so ago, and concerns the plight of David McOwen,
a former sysadmin for the State of Georgia's school districts, who is facing
a felony charge for using what the state claims is $415K worth of school-
owned computing bandwidth and resources. Maximum damages would include
reimbursement of the computing usage and/or up to fifteen years in prison.
So what was he doing with all that bandwidth? Running a Distributed.net RC5
client.

Anyway, someone apparently familiar with the original distress signal posted
on Anandtech's RC5 message board has started a petition campaign, which at
last count had 524 sigs:

   http://www.PetitionOnline.com/movsog/

So if you're so inclined, take a spare CPU cycle (or 2 gigs' worth of them :)
from your SETI/RC5/computational-chemistry background process and sign.

And for further background, the original message from Mr. McOwen is here:
   http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=39&threadid=490400
and the Slashdot thread is here:
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/08/2153206&mode=thread

Thanks for your consideration!
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