Actually, that's not really 15 hours of programming a day.
This period is called "piscine" (swimming pool). That's the same "marathon" as the one you face when you're an epitech student.
During your first month at school, you'll learn, from scratch, how to use a UNIX shell and C programming by coding various things, such as some str*() functions and implement various functions for linked lists manipulation. If you've never programmed before, you may spend ~10 hours on this. Else it will just take a few hours. 15 hours is because some exercises can change at the last minute, just before the deadline which is around midnight every day (for example, at the last minute they may ask you to return 42 instead of 1 in some function, and the automated checking script will check whether you return the right value).
Maybe he wasn't authorized to access this proxy server.
Or using a proxy to browse the web is considered illegal ? After all, in some countries it is forbidden to go in the street and wear a mask (France). Using a proxy can be considered the same :)
Then, sometimes, journalists use terms they shouldn't. Maybe that wasn't a "real" proxy (according to the definition of a proxy), but a simple "bounce" (a hacked box/server somewhere), in which case it is illegal (for example he hacks a-company.com, installs a socks server and tunnels his traffic to this socks server.)
Yeah but (blind) IP spoofing over the Internet is infeasible nowadays. Maybe 15 years ago when ISN randomization was not the rule (successful attack described in http://web.textfiles.com/hacking/shimomur.txt)
But that's correct, in recent openssh versions, it seems that you can add specific-host-only rules for authentication etc.
Started as C/UNIX dev, but as a way to find a "first job" because I needed $$. I did this for around 3 years.