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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."
The students finally get an education.
Why UNIX?
When I was there, Penn State's IT group was rather inept. Glad they're starting to take security and computing infrastructure seriously. Good job guys!
AC karma whore post:
Penn State Tells 80,000 Students To Chuck IE Dec. 10, 2004
A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 puts the kibosh on Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
A public university with an enrollment of over 80,000 put the kibosh this week on Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and urged its students to switch to alternative browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, or Safari.
Penn State University on Wednesday issued an alert to students and staff recommending that they dump IE and use a different browser.
The university's Information Technology Services (ITS) gave the advice "because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities," ITS said in a statement. It cited the security problems in IE that have been the focus of both media reports and recommendations from such organizations as the US-CERT, the federally-funded computer response team housed at Carnegie Mellon University.
"The University computing community [should] use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities," added ITS.
Penn State's advice is the latest negative news about Microsoft's popular browser. Security problems continue to plague IE -- some patched, some not -- while rivals like Firefox slowly nibble away at its still-dominating market share.
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).
Penn state students tell college to ditch Joe Paterno
That should be ITS in the write-up. IST is the PSU school of Information Sciences and Technology (www.ist.psu.edu).
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.
I go to Temple University and while our CS department hasn't gone that far they have installed Firefox on all the computers in the labs
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
Thats not the first time they've said that:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2103152/
I suppose now at least you can access www.gnaa.us with Safari.
Why UNIX?
I believe the 80,000 refers to the students, not the staff.
Before any liberals are tempted to mod up one of my comments, a word of warning: I'm actually making fun of you.
Maybe now I won't have to install Firefox from my personal account every time I use the university computer lab.
Slashdot sucks
Joe Pa...
Joe Pa...
I say M.O., you say 'zilla!
...'zilla!
...'zilla!
M.O....
M.O....
(pause)
MOZILLA!!!
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
At Brown we get a CD with all the latest security patches and a copy of Firefox every year. Prevents trouble, methinks.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
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
if a student can run safari as an alternative, then he/she must be using a Mac. not to defend IE, but isn't IE for Mac less dangerous than IE for Windows? if he/she has already ditched Windows, does he/she need to ditch IE too?
Looks like IE get burned by the very same 'feature' that allowed it to get 95% market share : integration with Windows and total access to stuff it shouldn't. Lesson learned, Microsoft?
But even without security, FireFox is just plain better. Tabbed browsing is huge, Bookmark toolbar, extensions, find-as-you-type (HUGE improvement over CTRL+F search)... Now I look at IE (the rare time I need to open it for windowsupdate) and it just feels...dirty.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Use an alternate browser? Sorry, alternate to what?
... maybe alternate to the browser that well over 50% of the people use?
Oh, I don't know
I do have my own complaint about this article, though, in that it is a yet-another-victory-for-firefox, which though nice to hear, would belong in the nothing-to-see-move-along department. I do expect that a disproportionate number of posts will be M$ bashing and boring.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
At my college the first thing I did on every computer I touched was to install Firefox. I also put Winamp on a few open lab computers for listening to Internet radio while I worked.
Recently I became unable to login to my student account, with a message "Your account has been disabled, please speak to your network administrator."
Well I went and found my network administrator to ask about what was up. Apparently it is against school policy to install programs on their computers. This is totally understandable and reasonable, and I apologized. But he decided I needed to be chewed out and he had a killer fact that he just knew would crush me.
Looking me in the eyes he proceeded to tell me that due to me installing Firefox and Winamp on two of the open lab computers they no longer function and had to be totally reformatted. This man, who is in charge of keeping the school network secure, seriously thinks that Firefox and Winamp could possibly be the root of a computer's DEATH. I did not argue the matter no matter how ridiculous it is; I just wanted my account back.
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. How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
So now under threat of permanently losing my student account I am forced to use IE. It is excruciating, because I am not the only person installing software on the open lab computers, just the only one knowledgeable enough to install useful non adware-infested programs. Just opening Internet Explorer results in about 3 minutes of closing popups.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
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.
Although Penn State has issued this warning, it is far from true. All Penn State Computer Lab Machines have IE set as the default, and group policy is set such that you cannot switch even to the installed version of Firefox. In addition the Firefox user settings are stored in Application Data which has a 20 meg quota. This means whenever a user tries to log out after browsing, it refuses saying there is too much data. IE on the otherhand, gets cleaned of cookies and cache automatically so that when you log out there is never a problem with the quotas. If Penn State wants to actually get people to switch, they should do something about it on their own machines.
I go to Penn State and I'm in the school of IST. I know it was ITS that issued the warning from the reading although I never actually recieved an alert. Sort of strange, you think that they would send everyone an email or put it in the college newspaper. I wonder how they actually "alerted" us (the students). Maybe they did put it in the paper and i just missed it... I dunno
I've heard of running Firefox/Thunderbird off of USB Jump Drives. Then you get to keep your bookmarks too. You'd have a case that you didn't "install" anything on any lab computer.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Can quit using Windows be far behind?
already answered:
from the and-while-you're-at-it-mull-over-your-OS dept.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Whats 80,000 compared to their total user base?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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
Look, I don't see how installing winamp and firefox could kill the OS (although this is windows we're talking about) but you were installing software on someone elses computer, you deserved to get yelled at. On the other hand, why is anyone allowed to install software on a lab machine? We have some WinXP machines in our lab and no one but the lab admin can install anything on them.
It's been the onofficial policy for my University's helpdesk to install FireFox on any students' computers, particularly if they've been having Spyware problems. Here's part of an e-mail sent out on Nov. 5 to the entire Yale Community.
To Selected Members of the Yale Community:
We wanted to send you an important reminder about your privacy and
security while browsing the Internet. We are concerned about certain
vulnerabilities inherent in Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE). Even if
you do not use this application as your browser, you should consider a
read through for information about keeping your computer updated.
Due to its popularity, MSIE has increasingly been the target of technical
exploits and sophisticated "phishing" schemes. We strongly encourage you
to take certain precautions for your own security:
1. First and foremost, verify that your computer is updated with current
patches and updates. The best and easiest way to do this is to set your
computer to automatically update its operating system and antivirus
software. If you need assistance doing this, please see below for contact
information.
2. There are known vulnerabilities in MSIE that do not yet have patches.
This has happened in the past and appears likely to happen again in the
future. We recommend that you either:
a) Refrain from visiting unknown websites or providing personal or
financial information while using MSIE, unless you are absolutely certain
you are dealing with a truly reputable website (for example the CDW-G
website in the Yale ePortal).
b) Use an alternative web browser such as Mozilla or Safari. The Yale
Software Library (www.yale.edu/software) provides recommended alternatives
that are easy to install and provide the same basic functionalities as
MSIE. There are some web pages that will only display properly in MSIE
(since it contains certain special proprietary functions), but most web
browsing can be accomplished using the alternatives.
This is true, I put Firefox 0.8 onto my uni network space, no installation required. I'm not sure how well this will work for 1.0.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
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)
The tech support deparment I worked in for a state uni kept a Ghost image of the student machines so if they became screwed up it was a quick automated task to fix the problem.
"Just opening Internet Explorer results in about 3 minutes of closing popups"
So why were you putting your head in the sand by installing two pieces of software that had nothing to do with the problem? No wonder you got chewed out. You using FireFox and Winamp aren't doing anything to help.
If you want to make yourself useful you should have downloaded AdAware and cleaned up the system for them and then went to Windows Update and patched the system like engineers like to not do. Then, when AdAware is done getting rid of the pop-up problem you uninstall it and no one knows. And, you actually fixed the problem.
Rather than just breaking policy which is there to prevent unneeded crap from being installed and bogging down the system. If you can install your toys so can all the students and now the system is unusable and needs to be reimaged.
Work Safe Porn
You should ask the admin why he allowed common users to install software in the first place. I bet he doesn't even know how to prevent that.
I recommend not storing any of your personal files on computers he manages, because they'll probably be e-mailed to the world by a worm, soon.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
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
this wasnt intended as a flamebait :(, he genuinely does tell us to get a life for liking ie or windows. furthermore he has told us that getting a mac is a good idea.
Personally im not keen on macs , hence "problem is"
Thanks for that suggestion, I will give that a try. Assuming of course that I get a USB minidrive as an Xmas gift like I asked for. ;)
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
I've heard of running Firefox/Thunderbird off of USB Jump Drives. Then you get to keep your bookmarks too. You'd have a case that you didn't "install" anything on any lab computer
But in that case, when you cross the path of an ignorant, overzealous "sysadmin", you will get chewed out or flagged for disciplinary action for attempting to bypass security.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Apparently it is against school policy to install programs on their computers. This is totally understandable and reasonable, and I apologized.
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
its not a course per-se., its a module of the first year of an applied computing course. My bad for not making that clearer
They've recently been merged with/taken over by a larger college in a nearby town, and the surviving IT department is in the process of converting the site from
Common Sense doesn't always win.
A couple of months ago I was trying to convince the head of ITS at my work to switch to Mozilla. When Firefox went 1.0 he obliged and we did a complete rollout to all clients. The only real problem being that many Web programmers do not conform to W3C standards and only build applications that are compatible with IE. Personally, I do not use IE and have not for a long time, but the pages that I do create conform to W3C standards. The move to any browser is dependant on how pages are written. More of the IT/programming world should take this into account if we are to see a greater move away from M$ IE
Arizona State University's honors college recommended this same step to their students about a month ago. I certainly hope this trend continues at academic institutions. N.
What security?
a USER can install anything they want on the system.
In my book thats the fucked up system admins problem.
liqbase
Little anectdotal evidence from someone who goes to Penn State:No.
When I am on campus and need to print something(something that seems to come up fairly often since most hw assignments for certain classes are avaialable only online), I always laugh at the fact that students are willing to stand in line and wait for a windows computer rather than use the Macs which are always available. Doesn't bother me though, I just go right to the front of the line and go in, do what I need to do, and get out. I highly doubt most of the students are doing anything on those windows machines that cannot be done on a Mac, but for whatever reason they refuse to use them.....I will leave guesses as to the reason as an exercise for the reader.
Monstar L
It's only after college that I have started reading more text books. I only read C++ while I was studying, now I'm reading all sorts, I'm more interested in learning things now that I'm exploring more ideas.
Why UNIX?
Pardon my ignorance, but hasn't been running Firefox from a single executable without installing always been an easy option?
I remember the beta versions that would unzip to a single directory, and clicking the executable would run the browser without running any form of setup.exe or other installation file.
Has the program changed that much where special tweaks and hacks are required to make it a standalone executable?
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
During a major network reworking project at a college apartment complex, my partner and I recommend that the comlpex go over to Firefox. The interesting thing is that some of the tenats referred to the new internet at "Firefox" internet, as opposed to "Internet Explorer" internet. And even better was the fact that several of the tenats asked where they could get his new "internet." Out of the people over in the complex nearly half have switched over to Firefox. The exposure of Firefox actually started in their Internet lounge. And since people saw that the complex was using Firefox they started to what it. So I think that the best way to get some of these alternative standards-based browsers out is for exposure in main stream enviroments.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
I call bullshit on the actions of the Winamp agent.
It loads during windows startup - after a user has logged in, certainly not before the ntldr.
Show me a link to the problem you identify (The 2 you posted are to do with other issues).
liqbase
My college has been trying to put Firefox on there student computers. The problem is that IE always wants to be the default browser and the students cant simply us Firefox, they always click on IE and make it the default again. It's a constant battle so it's not necessarily the computers fault it has security flaws it's the users always choosing the wrong browser.
I submitted this same story with a lot more detail (but not the InformationWeek link) 28 hours prior to the timestamp on this story. It was rejected. Sure, mod me off-topic if you think I'm whining.
I posted my write-up in my journal for posterity's sake. Replies are welcome on this post in regards to the actual news story. Comments as to why you think the submission was rejected should only be posted in the journal. (You don't want to be off-topic, right?) Did I submit at the wrong time of day? Was the submission too long? Ok... enough whining.
I won't make you do unnecessary clicking, so here are some of the relevant links that I found:
Penn State's own news article
Chronicle of Higher Education article
ZDnet article
The journal entry also has comments taken from a PSU IT personnel listserv, as well as other links.
That is if you get windows to recognize the USB drive. Our school computers won't recognize anything plugged into the USB ports. I had to get the administrator to set my account up so I could plug in my digital camera and access it. Fortunately the administrator for our school is much nicer. You can approach him and ask to have software installed, and he usually will install it for you.
joepa's just like Internet Explorer. Bloated, outdated, unresponsive, he's having a negative affect on the whole department, and he's next to impossible to get rid of.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
You do not have to use IE/Windows Update. XP does a good job with Automatic updates. Plus if you have SP2 installed it naggs you about auto updates. I personaly havent used IE on this box in months.
I'm going to school at Baker College and at my campus, they've got Deep Freeze on all the computers. You are logged on as admin* and can install whatever you want, but when the computer is restarted it goes back to its original condition. It installs a filter driver that keeps track of all writes to the main disk, logs them and prepares to undo them upon restart. All your documents/files you want to keep are put on removable media (they'll get undone upon restart otherwise). Authorized admins can disable this temporairily to make permanent changes. Turn on a computer and it is in pristene condition; no crap, regardless of what the previous user did. This might not be so good for home use, but for the pre-installed standard lab environment needed for the computers, it works beautifully.
I would definately recommend Deep Freeze for any place with requirements like this. Put all the user profiles and documents on a central server, cluster or removable media and make permanent local changes impossible.
Viruses on the document storage area should be the only malware left; if you put it on a server, it can be scanned easily.
* It's not quite full admin, as you can't install new services or drivers; they might mess with Deep Freeze.
Love that sig. I got an awesome shirt a few years back with that sig on the front. It was a ray troll shirt, he's quite an artist.
c h. html
Can't find a link for that art, but you'll like this one by the same dude:
http://www.trollart.com/trollart_toplinks/nolun
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Amen. I took a television production program at a "prestigious" local corporately-owned "college." Then I found out that the degree was next to worthless in the eyes of local employers (and other schools, even other schools owned by the same company), their much-hyped job placement was useless (especially since they were flooding the job market with more people than jobs), and I didn't learn a single thing that I hadn't already learned from just going out and working on shoots for free.
As a result of this, I'm very suspicious of any school that's not a nationally recognized university, especially if it's corporately-owned. I'm going to the University of Minnesota now and doing freelance studio and sports camerawork and video photography on the side.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I go to Harvard University, and am a User Assistant -- basically, a student-employee of Computer Services who helps undergrads with computer problems. Our policy whenever someone comes in with a problem, be it a virus or spyware or even a simple problem with Eudora, is to install Firefox. I have never had a user object, and when I show them some features like tabbed browsing, they really warm to the browser. One girl even said that she used DeadAIM primarily for the tabs and loved it that Firefox came with such a feature too.
Of course, the best thing is that once the user is firewalled and virus-protected and has SP2 and Firefox, he or she will probably never come into the Clinic again!
Hmm my school computers all have limited accounts, so I've "installed", that is unzipped, opera as well as a few useful programs on them.
The teacher really can't say anything because it's all happening from our accounts which we are basically allowed to do anything on, until we get into hacking or something.
Hey, correct the English in your sig.
My organization has foolishly ignored the warnings against using IE, and refuses to authorize the installation of Firefox on company PCs, so in the spirit of self-preservation, I use Personal Firefox on a USB key drive. Nothing is installed on the PC, so I'm within the regulations. Might be a solution for you, too.
How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
One of my friends in college was running an FTP server out of his dorm room. He had pretty much maxed out his 10Base connection and was trying to find some way to tap into the college's backbone since all of the dorms only had 10 megabits.
But before he could do that the head of IT called him in for using too much bandwidth. My friend was a little worried because our college had pretty strict bandwidth policies and he stood to lose his account permanently. But when he went in, the first thing this guy (who makes >$150k) says is "Son, do you know you're using 13 megabits of bandwidth?" On a 10 megabit connection. Right. My friend stopped worrying after that.
Maybe it's because of the lack of floppy drives on the non-beige Macs, and students lack of a USB pen (or FTP server). Despise Jobs's (and now Gates's) efforts, floppies are still alive in many places. At my school, the same scenario as yours occurs. In the library's open lab, there are about 50 PCs with Windows 2000 and 5 Macs with Mac OS 9. The Windows PCs are usually always taken and a line always form, whereas nobody touches the Macs there, so whenever I'm in the library and need a computer, I jump to the front of the line and use the Macs there. There is also another open Mac lab in the graphics building, full of G4s with OS X Jaguar installed, but that building, for the most part, never gets filled. Yet, there is another open lab in another building with Windows 2000 machines, which also always gets full, too.
http://secunia.com/search/?search=Internet+Explore r
Yes. Far, far behind. There is no reason for a major university to switch off Windows-XPSP2 serves its purpose just fine.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Speaking of bullshit...
By the way, check the date on 0.1. It says "2002-09-23". If you can't do the math, that's more than two years.
Since IE isn't sold alone, people switching to other browsers isn't hurting their income.
With IE bundled with the OS, IE dominance, and so therefore MS's own web standards are not ever going to be threatened by people obtaining and using other browsers now.
All that anti-trust stuff has accomplished exactly nothing unless Microsoft are forced to uncouple IE (and Media Player) from the operating system, and they are forced to stop pressuring PC retailers into not supplying other operating systems.
In fact there needs to be a 5 year period where it is illegal for anyone to sell a single-booting pre installed widows computer in order to counteract the last 20 years of anti-competitive behavior.
i work at my school's network/computer help desk and we constantly recommend firefox. we even have the installation file on the school's website for students to download. hopefully ie will lose a lot more users soon.
Spiral out. Keep going...
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.
My money is on a variant of #1: They won't even notice.
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.
Being attacked by the parent you're replying to is actually funny, because he doesn't seem to have taken a look at the dates involved. I've been so busy I haven't even been able to look at the code for my projects or update my site since march. Look at all the free time I have! Wheeee!
If a site that hasn't been updated in 6 months and a year old rant written while I was drunk are all you've got, I can honestly say my life isn't so bad. Busy so I can't return to my old projects or spend time writing journal entries nobody will read, but not so bad.
Anyway, two responses in this thread is more than enough for me. I've got semiconductors homework to do.
It's been a long time.
It's funny how KDE does not suffer the same kinds of problems despite having better "integration". Ease of use does not have to be a security nightmare. With Konqueror, I have access to sftp, ftp and other network shares as if they were local files, drag and drop easy with split screens and multiple tabs. Floppy and CD mounting are as easy as clicking icons on my desktop. What really burnt M$ was pumping money into marketing instead of fixing their broken junk. According to the closed source apologists, getting these new features is supposed to be as cheap and easy as looking at the free source code.
Now I look at IE (the rare time I need to open it for windowsupdate) and it just feels...dirty.
I feel the same way about the whole single desktop, single user, spyware loaded GUI. I just don't trust it and know that there are far better alternatives out there.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Okay, dumbwad, how many times do we have to explain this to you? IT IS = IT'S; IT possessive = IT'S.
so close and yet so far...
I'm a Mac user, and I even know better than that.
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Every student at Penn State has an FTP server (whether or not they know it). Their storage folder can be accessed via FTP anywhere, or as "My Documents" on Windows Lab Computers, and as "Home" on Mac, Sun, and Linux boxes. No one uses the Macs at Penn State because of the anti-Mac FUD that the entire IBM-compatible industry continually propigate. On a side note... IBM-compatible really should mean Apples in todays world. With IBM's pc business sold, they are pretty much focused only on the POWER & PowerPC architecture which is... well only Apple, IBM, and Pegasus.
[insert lame joke here]
You also have to think about this from the adminstrators' point of view. At my school, academic computing is seriously understaffed, so they don't want to support more than one OS and one browser. My school also recently had a big hubbub over someone sending a death threat from one of the machines in the library, which is the only place on campus where you can use a Windows box without logging in on your student account; to the administrators, this is seen as a big liability issue indicating a need for tighter control (rather than as an inevitable result of the anonymous nature of the internet).
Find free books.
Portable firefox - no it won't cure [Jeff Lash's ?] incredible lack of clue, but it will let you run a decent browser without installing anything.
I go to Berklee College of Music, and all the computers here are macs. We have almost no internet connection problems from the numerous student/lab computers, but we do have quite a bit of problems witht the actuall network infrastructure. There is no MSIE that is running by default on any of the computers (not even the students, because we are all required to get a mac...). We just went through a major update on all of our earlier computers that ran OS9 and installed firefox and the like.
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.
I of course get the faculty newsletter. The interesting part is below. Looks like this is all because of CERT(www.cert.org). I love how firefox and mozilla are listed separately.
"4. CHANGE IN INTERNET BROWSERS RECOMMENDED
Over the past several months, considerable
attention has been paid to the security problems
surrounding Microsoft's Internet Explorer by the
general news media and information technology
departments in higher education. The Computer
Emergency and Response Team, Carnegie Mellon
University's federally funded research group
formed to deal with security issues on the
Internet, has issued numerous vulnerability
alerts and recommends that users switch to a
different Web browser. As a result, Penn State's
Information Technology Services (ITS) is urging
that the University computing community use
standards-based Web browsers other than Internet
Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks
that occur through browser vulnerabilities. ITS
has made this recommendation because the threats
are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web
browser vulnerabilities. Browser options include
Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape Communicator, Opera
and Safari."
DANGER! 10,000 Ohms
Don't Macs support USB floppy drives?
When you click on Windows Update in the Start Menu, it opens an IE window, not whatever your default browser is. That's Windows XP behaviour I'm sure, and Windows 2000 I believe.
:) Ok, students on the campus are going to use their personal computers with whatever account they usually use, but computers in the library etc? They would be incompetent if they let student use admin accounts on those.
You also need to be admin to run Windows Update, at least doing it that way. (I'm afraid I don't know much about automatic updates, as that is the first thing I disable
And if you are talking of automatic updates, I don't see how using an alternative browser could prevent them from working?
I still have Firefox 0.7 (I think that's the version, either 0.7 or 0.8, Windows version) on CD in case I go someplace that doesn't have Firefox installed, so at least I'm not forced into using IE. I can run it off the CD, and I have no problems and nothing to install.
I use IE 5.1 on Mac......Of course all my machines run OS9.1.
I am a strict adherent to the idea of chronological compatibility. I have 4 machines that run scanners and printers that cost many times what the computers cost. I purchased everything at the same time and have done one minor OS upgrade from 8.6 to 9.1. Since 1998 I have had no major problems and keep the machines runing nearly constantly. I have never had a virus, nor any type of problem from the internet on the machine that is connected to the internet.
I regularly find the problems of others humorous, as I see anyone who has problems with their computers to be of the same ilk that would lick a welding tip to see if it was working. Most of the people who are commenting here seem to beg these issues on themselves by constantly changing and "tweaking" things. perhaps some of them someday will learn the joys of leaving well enough alone.
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
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....
In my experience, windows admins and people that use windows a lot, are just supersticious people. Why? Because the operating system they use makes no sense. To watch a "windows guru" use thier computer by clicking things like "OK" "Apply" over and over again just "to make sure", and the extra "clicking around" almost makes me dizzy. The OS eats mouse events, it behaves differently when program X is running, it is most often loaded with spyware and adware, how is anyone able to get some sort of baseline except for reinstalling all the time (with the computer disconnected from the network).
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.
Alright, I just went there too...
meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 5.0"
Strike one.
visible interpolation of images on the main page (it looks like some fool blew things up WAY beyond native resolution).
Strike two.
Link on front page to the thing about 'regula' (upper right-hand corner) is a dead link.
Three strikes.
Methinks this admin will get what's coming to him in his own good time. Some kiddie will stumble on this site someday and have a ball. People who can't make sure they have working links on their front pages, and let users install whatever they want in labs generally don't know much about security.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
As a linux and firefox user, this is probably the wrong approach. Students should not be told that they must or must not use any particular piece of software as long as that software doesn't damage the network (I don't think IE causes nearly as many problems as p2p on college campuses).
My school has a slightly different way of dealing with this (at least for dorm computers): If your machine appears to be infected, they cut your internet access. Then, they'll fix your computer and give you a talk about security, but only once.
If you get infected again, you lose internet access, and don't get it back until you demonstrate that your machine has been reformatted. Every time. All of a sudden, even the most non-techie people start to be a little more careful, and start listening to you.
UNC-Charlotte's engineering labs are done like this as well. Maybe not Deep Freeze itself but another thing much similar. if you want to keep anything you save it to your AFS share
Getting firefox to work like this took some tweaking but as it stands the only reason i fire up IE is to browse the Godawful student portal that UNCC uses
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
I am a student at UC Davis in Davis, CA, as well as a web-developer for the accounting department there.
UCD has advocated Mozilla for years, including Mozilla browser and more recently Firefox as part of the suite of applications they recomend to incoming freshmen.
Consequently, use of the various flavors of Mozilla as a percentage of overall browser use is significantly higher for the web applications I develop, which are utilized primarily by staff and students of the university. In general, analysis of our servers' logs show Internet Explorer declining in popularity and Firefox growing in popularily steadily, ever since Mozilla's inception.
We are a very *nix/open source-centric school overall. The CS department (of which I am a part) acts as though Redmond, WA is best known for the timber production, and although I use a W2K machine at work, we are a jEdit/ColdFusion/Oracle/CSS-standards-compliant shop that does more to ensure total browser compatibility than a good many major internet presences I can think of.
That's all. Just wanted to toot my school's horn a bit.
My other
I go to a big ten school that has a massive campus wide agreement with Microsoft that gives us Windows XP and all other major Microsoft apps (office, frontpage) for 8 dollars each, except for Visual Studio.net, which costs 11. You can also download office XP from ITS (norton too, thank god). Don't get me wrong, they have more than just MS stuff - Mac OS X costs 14 or so, and Red Hat Enterprise costs around 10. I already filled up a binder of hundreds of dollars of software (I buy every version released) after 2 and a half years here. This agreement is campus wide - the CS department uses mainly linux labs, although it does have some connection with Microsoft.
Last semester, they started to teach intro computing classes in C#, and I'll bet they get some money for that. Oddly enough, I'm glad, as the course introduced me to Visual Studio, the crack of GUI windows programming (the labs used citrix to run it). They've successfully hooked myself and another of my friends to it. They're smarter than people realize, and go to great lengths to ensure that graduates in as many fields as possible rely on their software (Excel is almost universally used at my school). They also seem to understand that getting programmers using their tools is essential for them to keep their market dominance.
0.1 or 1.0... Isn't it all still Firefox?
[Trojan.]
The CIO called a meeting on security, brought in all the CIO's and CS managers from the University branchess for the state, and among other things, we talked about what to do about the slew of problems with student machines.
I pointed out that students get zero education on computer security, and that if they really wanted to fix the problem, they would create a 1 credit required gen-ed course on personal computer security. Students would thus be required to learn how to keep junk off their desktops one hour a week for a semester (plus it would be an excuse to give remedial computer usage insruction to some of the freshmen that come from living-under-a-rock high school.)
That idea raised some eyebrows. They said "now, THAT's thinking out of the box." They diligently noted it in their notepads and pointless PDA gizmos.
And then, did absolutely nothing.
But that's about what I was expecting, that just because they had the wherewithal to recognize a good idea when they heard it, didn't mean they would remember it for more than a week. That's not how it works. If it doesn't reach crisis proportions, these types of people don't do crap about it.
Someone had to do it.
I wouldn't have modded this "troll". Being the go-to IT guy for an office full of non-tech types, I can totally predict a similar response if I attempted to switch our office away from IE. People resist change, and fear the unknown. If it so much as looks slightly different than it did yesterday, it's never going to be as good (to some people). Sure, they'd be in the minority, but they know my number, and wouldn't be afraid to ruin my life, until I switched it back.
VOTE!
When did I say anything about the OS being broken? It's an easy way to give the user full control over the computer as long as they are sitting in front of it, after which it returns to its standard state.
It's not the only way: giving users non-admin access to the machines is another. Unfortunately, non-admin doesn't let anyone install new programs or run certain badly designed ones correctly. This method gives them root without comprimising the machine for other users.
Either way, as an admin you want to have some protection against gross user incompetence. Windows is perfectly usable and stable if you know what you are doing. There is no time limit and there is no reason that it will just fall apart. Unfortunately, it is somewhat easy for a user to break or infect the machine through igorance, given admin access. Like I said, this probably isn't a good idea for a personal computer but it does work well for a community one.
Note that there is a version of Deep Freeze for Mac OSX also; does this mean that OSX is also "fundamentally flawed"?
I thought you were joking... but you're not. A 'college' propagating the asinine fear mongering politics of the US govt? That's just depressing.
Power to the Peaceful
Which school do you attend and could they possible convince other universities to take this approach? Genius. People won't change unless it's economically in their interest to do so. This makes it that way.
Back in the day, folks would drink coffee from Amdahl mugs whenever IBM salespeople came in. This is the same thing I think. They "ditch" IE, Ballmer comes with sweat running down his back and strikes a deal with the school, and maybe makes a million dollar donation. Everyone's happy, everyone's using IE again.
Seriously, though, how are they going to enforce this?
Can you manage group policies with Firefox? I think it's impossible to do group policies, system wide updates, and user restrictions on a server level with firefox, unless there's a new application or tool to do it.
Penn is just making up for a useless group of admins who don't know how to take care of their machines.
That, or are too lazy to do some real work.
I am currently enrolled at PSU, and they should probably switch to firefox on the public computers that the University provides before they start telling its students to. When I first attended the university they had both IE 6 and Netscape 4 installed. I used netscape 4 which was heck, but it wasn't IE heck. This semester I was surprised to see that they got rid of it in all the computers. So when are they going to install another browser?
Well, not sure about the more recent versions of winamp, but many with the "winamp browser" uses ie as an embedded control, and many of the "webcasters" in there were abusing this with the video streams...
.. you can have a non-installed copy on a keychain device.. :)
beyond this, look at portable firefox
as for winamp, kinda on your own there.. an mp3 player is probably your solution.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
OMG you have uncovered the sekkrit conspiracy. Now you must "disappear."
we will end no whine before its time
I am a Ph.D. candidtate and they are still inept. But some stroke of Genius they figured that if people had less problems they wouldn't get as many calls. After this was achieved. A student probably said something like ... well I was having problems all the time and calling you like 3 times a weeks to fix my computer. But after one of my IM buddies told me to download Firefox I haven't had any problems.
I am a Grad Student at Penn State Univerity Park (Main Campus) and we get pretty good deals on microsoft products. As an example xp pro for $35 and Office 2003 Pro for about the same. I was to take a crack at the fall out, it will be that my cheap and legal software source is about to wither and die. I am all for legal software but at 300+ bucks a pop my budget couldn't afford that. Since in started at PSU I have forked over the bones like a good consumer and gone legal for all software on my rig. Why becuase it was at a pricepoint where I could afford! If that changes than sadly so may the legality of my machine :(
I don't make configuration changes more than once because I didn't expect the first few to take effect, or any of the other silly behavior you described. Windows is as detriministic as the next OS.What is this effect you are describing? Mouse events go thru the Win32 subsystem and are posted to the message queue in the thread that owns the window under the cursor. How and when the events are handled depends on the application's thread.Each process lives in its own address space. There are ways for them to communicate with each other, but interfere with each other (let alone the OS)? By what method are they doing that? Name some examples of this happening.I do not have and have never had any viruses, spyware, adware or other malware installed on my systems. It's not that hard to avoid. Running as a non-admin user prevents system infection and most forms of user infection. You wouldn't do everything as root on UNIX, would you?I have never reinstalled an operating system because it was broken, Windows included. I don't disconnect my computers from the network, either.
What you describe of users who treat the computer as a mystical black box and have infection problems they have can't fix or even know about is caused by ignorance and incompetence, not a specific OS. What makes you think it would be any different on a different OS?
You don't know that they did not do that. All you know is that the administrator tried to tell the student that winamp and firefox broke the computer and the administrator reinstalled the machine. We don't know how the reinstall was done or if the administrator really thought that's what broke his computers. I'd use Knoppix and partimage. The administrator might have just been trying to scare the student, which is almost as dumb as believing what he said.
"Just opening Internet Explorer results in about 3 minutes of closing popups" So why were you putting your head in the sand by installing two pieces of software that had nothing to do with the problem? ... You using FireFox and Winamp aren't doing anything to help. ... you should have downloaded AdAware and cleaned up the system ...
Now there's a really bad idea. Firefox, I'm sure, spared him one day's worth of pop up garbage. Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy are best of breed but dangerous to apply. Many viruses, worms and malware contain suicide pills. When you try to eliminate them, they take you out. Indeed, one of them might have detected firefox and killed the system over it. On a machine that screwed up, Adaware is almost sure to kill it. Reimaging was the right thing to do. The whole thing is a windoze cluster fuck and the poor guy is just going to have to put up with it until the administrator figures things out on his own.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Come on now. I like firefox too, but I don't get all stressed out if I run across a site that requires me to launch IE. It's a rare occassion and when it happens it just makes me remember how bad things used to be.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
that my college would do the same, that way people would stop knocking on my door asking to fix their computer.
I'd have guessed any department using Macs, Linux, Solaris or some other form of Unix. Microsoft themselves declared Winblows 98 obsolete. I've seen hundreds of dead 98 and 95 computers. XP does not do much better.
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.
You think people who can't install a simple browser are going to be able to find and use all the special crap it takes to keep Winblows alive on the web for more than four minutes? Right.
People keep telling me the sky is falling and I've yet to see it actually happen to my systems.
You get spam, right? 90% of that spam comes from Winblows infected computers. The same automatically installing malware is used for porn serving and porn dialing and credit card fraud.
If your system has not had to be reinstalled in the last year or two it's strictly because your IT department has shielded you. They can be providing firewalls, system updates and virus scanning of your email. Without those, your XP box is a sitting duck with a 4 minute half life.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That would be an incredible waste of time. A full undergraduate load is four courses, typically twelve credit hours. What you propose is close to ten percent of the student load and eight full credit hours over a student's career. If you added one or two computer science courses to that, you could have a minor. All of that to "support" Bill Gate's broken software? No thanks.
Most Universities have a one or two hour long course for students. There they can learn the wonders of anti-virus, pass phrases and a few other useless things that most people already know. That people still have problems with Winblows is not an indication of general ignorance so much as it's an indication that the thing they are using has problems. The Mac, Linux and Unix labs don't have problems, though the same people use them.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
They will find a way to make noting at Penn State work with Firefox. My bet is they slip something into the updates for them that starts spitting out error messages like Win3.1 did with DrDOS. They did not quit making IE for Apple because they were paranoid or no longer wanted the money, they did it because they projected their own behavior onto Apple.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But before he could do that the head of IT called him in for using too much bandwidth. My friend was a little worried because our college had pretty strict bandwidth policies and he stood to lose his account permanently. But when he went in, the first thing this guy (who makes >$150k) says is "Son, do you know you're using 13 megabits of bandwidth?" On a 10 megabit connection. Right. My friend stopped worrying after that.
If your 'friend' was paying attention in class instead of trading warez he might have learned that a 10megabit connection provides 10mb in each direction on a full duplex connection. You could be using 8mb in one direction and 5mb in the other. If your 'friend' paid attention in math he might realize that 8+5==13.
Over here at UC Berkeley, there is a different policy. At the beginning of every semester, new students receive a free "BeSecure" CD, which basically includes Windows XP SP2, all critical patches, Symantec Norton Antivirus and Firewall, and Mozilla Firefox. (The CD does include Mac stuff, though I am not sure what it includes, as I don't use a Mac).
;D
The catch is that you have to install the CD in order to use the in-room broadband connection. You are not, however, required to use Firefox, though it is suggested - you can use IE, which, honestly, is pretty secure after all the patches + Norton Firewall have been installed.
In talking to the people on my floor, however, I've found that despite not being forced to use IE, most people did switch over to Firefox eventually. Simply put, it's just a better program, and after demonstrating all the plugins etc. to the people on my floor, I was able to get them to realize this
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
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. How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
Maybe he was just assuming that you were dumb and he was trying to scare you into not installing anything. There're a lot of good reasons for restricting users from installing software, but the easiest way to explain to someone who doesn't know any better is to just say that it trashes the whole computer.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
Since you care so much about the details of my random story,
1. Connections were 10 half, not full duplex.
2. They don't care about your downstream, since lots of people use the full downstream legitimately.
3. If I were talking about myself, I'd say so.
Thanks a lot. Definently will try using this, as soon as I get a USB drive or equivilant. I am assuming it requires write access (ruling out a 'firefox cd' to carry around)?
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
With that,
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I've seen that too. Confuses me when I watch it. I think it comes from the 'to fix a problem, uninstall and reinstall' method of 'correcting' a problem that most Windows folks get into. With *nix, it's not going to magically change from failing to working just by reinstalling it.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
WOW! You ain't kidding...what ape cobbled that horrid mess together? BAH!
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I don't know why I didn't think of that. It seems so obvious, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's how they'll actually respond. Of course, the only people who will hear about it or care about it will be folks like the Slashdot crowd (and the unfortunates at Penn State's IT department).
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
Oh what a bleak, sober, secure future it will be!
UTF-8: There and Back Again
IE for the Mac is not at all the same. Even though the version says 5.5 it's very, very different from IE 5.5 on Windows.
About the only thing IE on the mac got right was really good CSS support (much better than Windows IE, or so I've read). Other than that it lacks many features and has far more compatibility problems than either Safari or Mozilla.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wrong. MS is in trouble if FireFox becomes capable of running all the other software you need (i.e. Java apps, HTML rendering, XML, e-mail, usenet, plug-ins). Then all you need is any CPU and any OS that runs FireFox. Heck, FireFox could evolve into a true standalone brower, meaning bye bye Windows. That's Microsoft's real concern.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Where I work this is how the network admin fixes problems on his windows boxes. 1.Reboot. 2.Reboot again. 3.Wait. 4.Reboot again. 5.Fiddle around some windows clicking on various things. 6.Wait. 7.Reboot. Ask him what's the problem is : "I don't know." Anyway after X amount of time it's fixed no one knows how it was fixed, what it was or to prevent it again...
Unless they're advertising cookies on my hard drive. :^)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Here's the kicker. If you're really ballsy, and want to take a stab at being an entrepeneur, offer to do a security consulting job for the school at whatever rate you can negotiate.
-You get paid by the school.
-The browser issue gets solved.
-You get to evaluate the prick admin and get to determine how much he gets bitched out by how badly you write him up (be professional though).
-And if you're really lucky, you may wind up with his job is you want it.
Oh, and just so all you Slashdotters know, I'm a marketing person. This proves once and for all that we can indeed be ethical, generous, intelligent, and beneficial. Ya dig?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Remove IE from Win2k
Remove IE from nLite
Oh, be sure to reply how:
1. Windows Update won't work! Even though I take great pains to point out the solution, I've never heard THAT one before!
2. It's really impossible to remove IE! Even though I document how to do it, I've never heard THAT one before!
3. It will make your machine unstable! I've been running IE free for 4 years and I've never heard THAT one before!
http://johnhaller.com/jh/mozilla/portable_firefox/
As far as the school is concerned, change schools.What I think is an amusing anecdote related to ignorant network administrators.
I worked at a university and at a community college as a tech and a sysadmin respectively. People like who you encountered are everywhere. My boss spent tons of money on outside contractors so they could be blamed if things went wrong and, well, because he didn't know sh*t. I remember looking at invoices for services rendered before I was hired. There was one $300 USD invoice was for deleting users from Novell. WTF?
a slut did tulsa
When they said 'because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities.' they really ment 'please change browser, so that we can continue slacking on the job'.
I am tired of hearing this as an excuse. It's bs.
I've been administrating a company's IT resources since 2000 and what have we had... 0 virus outbreaks (from mail, files brought in etc), 0 trojans and other windows/IE related issues, 0 spyware.
Now why is this I ask myself... Oh yes, proper anti-virus software, proper firewall software and keeping all the computers up to date at all times.
All is managed from a central server. I don't even have to visit each computer.
You'll be amazed how crappy computers are administered these days. I've been to tons of companies where their Windows workstations haven't seen an update since the last ice-age.
I'm tired of admins who are not doing their job properly. What's the problem?
Stop blaming vulnerabilities and take a 101 course in computer administration instead.
... as my email client because my department *prefers* (i.e. insists) that I do. Same as parent poster. I'm a research student, therefore I am the bottom of the power chain. If I don't like it, fine, I can go study somewhere else. So I got to use what I am told, despite my protestations, on the box they give me for my desk.
I install software on lab computers at Cornell all the time. Installs to network drives generally work, though not always. Many other labs I've seen just reghost themselves daily without any special intervention so that users can have full control. If you don't make installs an administrator only priviledge, and don't publicize your policy, that kind of implies that they're permitted. Controlling permissions is one of the most basic administration tasks, so any organization that sets up public use labs IMO should be assumed to have their permission set to allow you to do anything you're allowed to do, and restrict you from doing anything you're not. Also, if you yanked my account for installing Firefox when it was your own administrative screwup that allowed me to I would tell you to go fuck yourself.
At the moment it seems to be just a suggestion. But for the majority of students, they could simply configure the IE icon to load up firefox and they would be none-the-wiser.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
By "corporately-owned" do you mean a corporation owns and manages the college or some more general category like private colleges? I'm a little puzzled because I can't think of colleges off the top of my head that fit the profile you mention except maybe those dubious ones that advertise heavily on TV.
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. How can any competent network admin possibly think Firefox and Winamp are causing a computer to not boot?
because universities have the weight of beurocracy behind their hiring procedures, so the dood who's worked 50 hours a week doing all the IT for a small office for 10 years rates bugger-all, but the former high school geography teacher who decided to pick up an MCSE because his life needed a kick-start after he was laid off in the latest round of budget cuts, is obviously eminantly qualified
them's the breaks
so you're forced to using IE for the moment? send a link to this story to the IT head, and to his bosss, and to that dood's boss, and let them know that you're concerned about internet security at your school, but look! there's a free and easy solution that's already been implement by one of america's leading universities!
and as an aside, i reckon including the fellow's email was a low blow (albeit well deserved)
help yourself to maintain sanity and put firefox on a usb stick and run it from there, no software installed on the pc, no harm done.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I'm at the University of Durham in the UK. All of the Uni computers use mozilla and mozilla mail by default. We get copies of mozilla given out free for our own computers in our rooms at the start of the year.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/
Unfortunately, M$ Office is still standard.
I doubt it is Windows' fault. It is more the fact that; why would any well educated and experienced computer tech want to become an network admin at a school or university? I know I wouldn't.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
You can hardly blame people for wanting to use what they know. Sit somebody who's only ever used Windows in front of a Mac and ask them to do just about anything and they just won't be able to do it. Even if they can, the effort will be too much.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Macs are difficult to use, I'm just saying people will naturally want to wait to use a PC rather than expeience the pain to trying to work out how to use a new system - be that Mac, KDE, BeOS or anything. The idea that an operating system of any kind can be "intuitive" really *is* stupid though.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
i think it runs of the cd.
winamp 2 sure didn't have to be installed, i remember keeping it around during windows reinstalls
Even more amusing... click on that threat level, and you get brought to twotigersonline.com. Their home page is a store for items useful if someone drops The Big One.
I don't think people know this because they've probably never even tried the Macs. They'd rather stand in line for 10 minutes than have to learn something new.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
We limped along with IE at home, patching and patching for two years. Then my son came home from his first year at college and all but insisted that we all run Mozilla...and downloaded it for us.
.exe too.
We never even looked back, have removed the "cracked E" icon from the desk top and the start menu and if it weren't for some brain-dead activeX requirement in my employer's HR-self-help applications I could probably delete the
One result: the load of spy ware that I have to comb out of our machines has dropped to a small fraction of the plague that it used to be.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
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 ?
What is funny about reading the article linked to by /. and the comments here is that it just made me remember what George Mason is asking of their grad students. They set up these grad students with an email account but they give them instructions to use it at home by only using a version of Netscape - precisely between versions 4 and 7 to exclude http://registrar.gmu.edu/ check it out.
... if music be fruit of love, play on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hey in some places 20-23 is full load now. We don't take 6 years to graduate and the 5th year student is rare. 127 credit hours required and there are a few other classess that you have to take but get zero hours for. Most students here tend between 16-19 hours and it is almost impossible to take less than 15. I'm only managing 14 hours next semester. Twelve is the bare minimum: you register for that many or you don't register. Its not that hard and it makes me sick to hear people whine about their 15 hour load; especially when I was taking 21-22 hours. I've earned my rest.
I wear the ring.
He's not an english major either. I love it when people do stuff like that.
I wear the ring.
"I see PCs all the time which have IE up to date as well as have up to date anti-virus software that are *still* plagued with problems. Why? IE vulnerabilities."
Well, I see PCs under my care daily which DON'T have up to date anti-virus software and not even up-to-date patches on IE, yet they still aren't plagued with problems. For two years straight.
Why?
Decent security policies, starting with Limited User access. But that's just IT Staff (me) doing its job properly.
Use Evolution instead of Outlook? Bewa
>In addition the Firefox user settings are stored in Application Data which has a 20 meg quota
Those quotas exist because roaming profiles are being used. Lots of people have begged the firefox people to shift the cache to local settings where it belongs, but they havent, thus the pushing around of a useless cache through the network.
Saying "Give me a bigger roaming profile because the software I use isnt written properly" is hardly the answer.
About time these kids were educated on web browsers. Firefox all the way.
People should not buy Gateway, or Dell, or HP, or whatever.
I bought my logo-chiseled-off-with-a-blunt-screwdriver laptop from Fell-Off-a-Truck, Inc. (their Back-of-a-Van-in-the-Safeway-Parking-Lot branch), and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft didn't get a penny of my money, even though the laptop came with MS-Windows XP (Ukranian version) pre-installed (along with a file containing thousands of credit card numbers, a directory named "CIA Dirty Tricks", and lots and lots of porn).
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Won't it be nice when IT departments rate that piece of junk where it belongs. My University uses web mail, which works well enough though it forces me to use Mozilla rather than Konqueror. It takes time, but it looks like people are getting brave enough to suggest that Microsoft might not have all the answers to desktop computing and that their answers are really a problem.
I have an old laptop loaded with Debian Sarge. It's only a 233 MHz PII, but it's relatively secure and I can use it to ssh back to my cable box. You can get one for about $300 on ebay. The department is happy that I have a few tools they can't provide me.
If I were you, I'd use the Outlook just as they want and for nothing but school correspondence. It might last a little longer that way. Good luck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yes but ... there are some compensating features at Stark State campus ... when I went to their website I checked the Campus Building Map and noted the cool Fire Science training tower (Fire Science apparently gets two dedicated parking lots) and a nifty Diebold Incorporated Advanced Technology Center.
I want to find out how to incinerate paper backup copies of electronic voting.
All sigs should be as funny as possible, but no funnier.
So he fixed it and didn't do it scientifically. You dont change 30 things, reboot, and see if it solved the problem. You might fix it, but you don't know why. You HAVE to painstakingly try each thing at once to figure out what.
M$'s roaming profiles suck. They move around all sorts of things they don't need to and stuff both local and remote hard drives by default. It's bandwith intensive but does not move all of the settings it should.
That's not a Firefox problem. I've seen the stupid thing blown up whole networks with nothing but M$ junk running.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh sure, that's what it is, right. It's not like M$'s little browser has not slipped below the 90% mark for the general public. People are looking for a discount on IE, that's it, that's the ticket! No dissatisfaction here, everything is AOK for old Bill Gates. Really, it's all a money game. Any day now all sorts of people using Macs and Linux are going to just give up and go back to software much unchanged from 1995.
And then, poor Steve Baller woke up.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you do a lot of installs, I suggest you maintain a patched \i386 directory on a filesever, boot a BartPE CD on install targets and start the install from there. Extra points for making an unattended installation: pop the CD in, and when the process finishes, everything is done.
It may even be possible to boot into Linux from a CD have it copy the install files and setup program.Sounds like they give up too easily possibly because it's too much work to understand; a quick fix like restart or reinstall is easier (only in the sort term). Come on, it's software it has to be detirministic on some level.
So you don't have to be sarcastic here. But I seriously think this is just another ploy to milk MSFT for money or a good contract. Not for IE, but for W2K3, Office, XP, etc.
So, you agree with me? :/
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Firefox / Thunderbird is capable of Java apps, HTML rendering, XML, e-mail and usenet. That still doesn't make it a threat to IE in the medium term, because Joe Public is not going to have any OS that runs Firefox, he's going to have Windows.
If Microsoft had a real concern with this, they'd be doing something to fix IE. In the mean time they don't. As soon as IE is fixed, Joe Public won't bother downloading Firefox, because he already has IE. He bought it with his computer because his computer retailer's (anti-competitive) agreement with microsoft doesn't said retailer to retail a computer without windows on it.
This is what needs to change before this monopoly is broken and the profit margin (currently 400% for a bug ridden, poor memory managed OS with a ridiculous EULA) on operating systems can be subject to market forces.
I've always thought that having a network connection was akin to driving on the public roadways. They don't let just any 6 year old climb into a 2-ton automobile and start accelerating onto the freeway. Doubly so for commercial drivers of 18-wheelers with gasoline tankers. The more potential damage that can be done, the more the certification that is required.
IMHO, network access should likewise be restricted to those who prove they are willing to learn something about security and to continue to behave responsibly. Doubly so, the faster the network connection.
</soapbox>"Provided by the management for your protection."
Let me shout it from the rooftop....YES!!!! 'bout friggin' time! >
But Officer, I DID read the f**king article!
It's because the Macs are missing a mouse button.
What's an "Apple + Click"?
All the mice in the school are 2 button mice. Yes, the default mouse from Apple has 1 button(you have to hit ctrl-click to get the 2nd), but OS X has had support for 2 button scroll mice for quite a while, just plug it in and the OS recognizes it.
Monstar L