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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?
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.
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?
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
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
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.
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.
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]