Clueless managers at the Tenessee

Clueless managers at the Tenessee Valley Authority decide that SETI(at)Home is a threat to their systems and come down like a ton of shit on the practice of running distributed computation apps and other "unauthorized" programs. It's funny — in the old days, the lab-coated Priesthood of the Mainframe controlled the computation in the organization by giving their users nothing but dumb glass teletype terminals. After years of guerrilla computation, where employees, students and researchers literally snuck in their PCs and did the computation they needed to be more productive, comfortable and happy, the priesthood finally allowed their users the freedom to undertake whatever computation they wanted, opting instead to put a fence around the network — the firewall. Now that P2P apps have demonstrated that tunneling through firewalls over http and port 80 is trivial, the priests are scrambling to lock down the machines again. Lotsa luck. Link (via Slashdot) Discuss