Slashdot Mirror
Penn State Tells Students To Ditch IE
Hoyceman writes "About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert 'because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities.' InformationWeek is carrying the story."
Will this ITS department support issues with other browsers. Each browser has its quirks, and work arounds for certain things. If they recommend using other browsers, they must be able to support them, especially if they run proxies.
I ditched it as soon as I discovered Camino (fka Chimera).
Kudos to Penn State for not falling into the "it's built into the OS so we'll use it as a standard!" trap.
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
2) They'll sue
3) They'll go on a charm offensive
4) They'll spin the virtues of Longhorn
5) They'll talk about IE's innovative approach to browsing
Others...?
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
But make sure that your alternate browser it is a recent version of Firefox or Mozilla. They have responded very quickly to security issues, and are being proactive about security, much more so than the the people behind Konqueror or Opera. Also, keep your alternate browser patched just as vigilantly as you would Internet Explorer. As the popularity increases you will see more attacks against Mozilla based browsers.
I don't know what the answer to security is. I hope it isn't educating users, because that just plain doesn't work for most people. The problem is that right now there doesn't seem to be any other way.
Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.
--Proverbs 9:7
At my university I am a student helpdesk worker and everytime someone calls about spyware problems I always recommend they install firefox. Also on the cd of software we include for all 6000 students on campus we have firefox as well as openoffice. No one objects to using firefox and are actually happy to hear that it will make their spyware issues go away.
The college of ed at a major state university where a certain couple famous people recently debated, where I used to work only uses IE on their systems. They also used Windows 98 until recently (now they use XP). During the hay day of blaster and myDoom and whatnot guess which department was the least affected by it all? The College of Ed. Even with all our Win98 boxes being directly on the wire. Even our division of teachers was the least affected. There were a few that turned off automatic update like we told them not to and those were the ones that got it.
Guess who was most affected by the worms? The engineering department which requires logging onto the domain with your student ID and who run Windows 2000.
The College of Ed tech support people actually did their job and that prevented a lot of problems. So the fact that the IT people of Penn State are sending out a warning to 80,000 students just makes me laugh.
Our wonderful IT deparment can't even keep the network running reliably during heavy usage times such as pre-registration week and when grades come out.
IE and Windows aren't the problem.
Sending out a rediculous warning e-mail isn't going to do anything for them or the open source movement. People keep telling me the sky is falling and I've yet to see it actually happen to my systems.
A better solution would be to educate the students on where to get the free VirusScan software from the university and how to keep it up to date along with their Windows system.
It doesn't matter what browser you're using. It needs to be kept up to date.
Work Safe Porn
...the level of prosperity where it's not shocking when people or organizations ditch IE for it? Firefox is the obvious better choice, this shouldn't be 'news'.
Department of Duh." Sheesh. Windoze lusers have to be most impervious people on earth. How many times do their systems have to get compromised before they dimly ponder alternatives? Infinity -1, apparently.
we will end no whine before its time
IE for Mac is no longer being developed at all. All current known bugs and exploits, as well as any yet to be found, will never be fixed. No new features will ever be added.
If you still use IE for Mac, switch for god's sake! Safari, Firefox, whatever. Just about any browser you can think of is a better choice, now more than ever.
But Firefox, being open-source, can be fixed so as to eliminate the need for workarounds. The IT department can coordinate with the project developers and find solutions. Something closed-source doesn't do nearly as well.
As annoyed as I am with Microsoft in general, if they would make the Windows XP source code shared-source, I'd track down and fix bugs I found. I wouldn't mind. I'd be Microsoft's biggest fan if their stuff would just work worth a crap.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
You are dealing with a Windows admin. For many of them, the common reason for everything is that the problem is someone else's fault. That someone else being a combination of Microsoft, Firefox, Winamp, the computer's mood that day, some virus, "an act of God," or hackers that don't really exist. Don't take it personally.
Open Source Sushi
Most college admins' time is spent dealing with student spyware. IE is a big source of it (though not the only one). Something's got to give. I think it's a great idea to recommend installing Firefox and to lock out machines with spyware run amok. I'd think that mandating Ad-Aware and/or SpyBot would be an even bigger help. I don't know the feasibility, but if they could force any connecting machine to identify itself as having SP2 installed, that by itself would be a huge start. They just don't have the time to deal with unprotected machines.
Then you should have a look at portable firefox: http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/ or here http://portablefirefox.mozdev.org/ (within the next week)
How is it they let people become the network administrator for an entire technical college, a college that hands out degrees in technical fields, that are just that ignorant.
Because technical colleges are a joke as far as technology degrees are concerned. They also probbably pay jack shit to a network administrator, so they wind up with people who believe in computer voodoo. i.e. "it must have been that mysterious fire-fox and win-amp that those damn kids are all hopped up on these days." Remember, to anyone non-technical it's often hard to tell the difference between a good network administrator and a bad network administrator.
AccountKiller
Sometimes, thanks to clueless professors, I've needed to use IE. I actually talked to two professors about using standards instead of cheap development tools that foist garbage on their students and would require expensive software and break in a year or two. It was like talking to a brick wall and they could care less. I was polite, and I can only hope that they remember me and think, "hmmm, that guy was right."
Having a University policy in place would be great. The line, "Use a standard browser" would no longer work. More importantly, stuff that does not work with Mozilla or Konqueror would get fixed and that would spare me a few trips to the library.
A policy like that would also be nice for the staff. Morons who think Microsoft is some kind of standard would get the message loud and clear. More importantly, this removes any kind of lingering FUD about the University not "supporting" alternate browsers. I'm sure the IT staff would love it too because they are the ones who get to spend the all nighters and who bear the embarrassment of turning off whole dorms and sections of campus when the next M$ born worm crawls through.
This kind of transition has been happening at my University but slowly. The student log in still has an advertisement for Microsoft software on the first page but all the public kiosks in the Union have been converted to Linux terminals running Mozilla. The continuing security dissaster is finally getting solved with something other than the blame the user game.
It's nice to hear some good news coming from Penn State.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If this is their public face, it most likely means that the place is run by total dicks. You're better off switching to a different school.
Penn State's IT department is definitely NOT inept. I was there from 1999-2003 and I was always impressed with their implementations, policies, security, and interest in encouraging new technologies. Hell, all Computer Science grad students are given Apple Powerbooks with VirtualPC and Windows. Penn State was one of the first to give their students free Napster service in order to circumvent the RIAA bullshit. Even as a Mechanical Engineering student, I had access to Windows, Macs, Suns, and Linux boxes. I had FTP-able storage that I could access from Lab computers and from my apartment. They may not be the best, but from comparisons I've made between them and other Tier 1 schools that I've visited or attended, they are above average.
[insert lame joke here]
You also have to realize that although you consider yourself to be more knowledgeable than this admin, there are lots and lots of users who are way, way lower on the scale. At my school, the network admins are currently squabbling with the faculty over an attempt to keep faculty from attaching their own dekstop machines to the campus network. Well, I really don't think the FreeBSD box on my desk is a likely source of infection, but the plain truth is that there are a lot of lusers who just don't have the faintest clue about how to keep their Windows box secure.
Find free books.
First of all, there's at least two different ways to measure megabits, which might account for the discrepency. Second, the line might not exactly be 10, it just might have some packet shaper on one end to throttle traffic, your friend might have maxed it out. Third, your friend is a dick for doing this, there are actually people there to learn and not trade files.
Stable maybe, but Word and Access don't invisibly download spyware et al.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
When I was in school, I remember using Netscape 3 to view webpages (after all, we were using Unix).
I'd rather say that universities are going back to their roots. IE was designed for home computers and the Joe User, not for universities.
This is just security through obfuscation. Those browsers are not unequestionably "more secure" they are just "less targeted".
I am currently a student at Penn State Altoona that oversees a team of students that fix computers on campus. Myself and another avid read of slashdot having been pushing the movement to get rid of IE long before ITS officialy declared it a threat. All the students I have given FireFox to have thank me graciously and love not having ridiculously amounts of popups.
Penn State takes the network very seriously and has as implemented many network policys. They have search and deactivate probes on the network to determine if a host is infected and secondly they lock the terminals in the dorms to specific MAC addresses. The team is constantly reactivating virus-cleaned computers. The network security could be compared that of government security.
Anti-InternetExplorer is the primary spyware and virus solution.
I bet you worked a full-time job, walked on the football and basketball teams and played in the band at half time too.
what does it matter how long one stays in school ?