Prison inmates built working PCs out of ewaste, networked them, and hid them in a closet ceiling

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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/04/12/mother-necessity-where-would-w.html

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What the article doesn’t mention is how they got their gaming fix. My bet is ZDoomGL.

I also wonder if they had strong opinions on text editors.

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Prison’s Best LAN Party!

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Is anyone else weirdly proud of these guys?

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Does this mean the training was successful?

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Right, so the effectively slave labor being used to recycle ewaste might require a bit of supervision.

Who would have thought.

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Prisoners can be amazingly resourceful. My favorite story in this vein would have to be the glider built by the POWs interned in Colditz.

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hmmphhh ! in my day , if an inmate wanted a computer , a visitor brought it to them , baked into a cake ! ( we hid the floppies in the frosting , because they tended to melt while the cake was baking ) and , we liked it like that , we liked it just fine !

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Visitor: “I heard you like… raspberry pie” (WINK WINK)
Prisoner: “But this is clearly a sheet cake.”

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Its amazing what length inmates will go to for their e-porn fix!

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ALWAYS remove the hard drive before getting rid of a computer. ALWAYS. I wonder whether the identity theft was by checking the the hard drives of e-cycled computer for banking information.

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Hell yes!

Creativity under trying conditions must be congratulated.

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Desperate times call for desperate measures… and by that, I mean ASCII porn.

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Its not just effectively. It is straight-up slave labor. The 13th amendment, which outlawed slavery, contains a clause that preserves the peculiar institution for convicted criminals.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

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Yep, i do find it highly amusing that you literally could bake a computer into a cake nowadays :smiley:

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Sounds like IT was asleep at the switch, so to speak.

Controlling contraband is hard. Observing that a new system has shown up on one of your ports, and isn’t one of yours? Much less hard.

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The execution, yes. The alleged choice of activities once they had them operational, not so much.

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This.

My guess is there was some complicity in IT.