🚀 go-pugleaf

A.D.B.Monro (adbmonro@cen.ex.ac.uk) wrote:
: Anyone have an oppinion as to wether DOOM comes under the catch-all of the
: Computer Misuse Act (denying rightful users access or some such wording?)

I don't know about the Computer Misuse Act but it's almost certainly
covered by local computing regulations.  In our case every user has to
sign the regs once per year.  These include clauses like:

    1.  University computing facilities are provided solely for University
        purposes, unless otherwise authorised.

    2.  No person shall deliberately or recklessly impair or undermine the
        usability or performance of computing facilities, the communications
        network, systems programs, or other stored information or data.

In our case we have had only one detected use of Doom.  Since we use
Novell all-nets broadcast forwarding these packets went everywhere and
clogged up our routers.  It also meant that we were able to track down
the particular machines and users concerned.  I suspect that having us
walk into a crowded computer lab and say "you two are playing Doom and
knocking out the whole network" was sufficient punishment in the
circumstances!


Sam Wilson
Network Services Division
Computing Services, The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK