A computer technician at Georgia-run college who found himself facing criminal charges after installing software for a volunteer distributed-computing effort will face probation instead of prison. David McOwen, once a systems administrator at DeKalb Technical College, faces a year of probation . . .
A computer technician at Georgia-run college who found himself facing criminal charges after installing software for a volunteer distributed-computing effort will face probation instead of prison. David McOwen, once a systems administrator at DeKalb Technical College, faces a year of probation and a $2,100 fine for connecting a number of DeKalb computers to Distributed.net so that the spare computing cycles could assist in a communal code-breaking challenge.

But McOwen's supporters, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said today that an agreement reached with state prosecutors was far better than the worst-case scenario: years in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and restitution.

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