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Behind the Scenes at MIT's Network
BobB writes "MIT's head of computer networks and security gives an inside look at how the techie school is fending off hackers, cranking up its network to handle voice over IP and become a fiber network operator to link to other research institutions. From the article: 'Q - How do you actually enforce security standards among MIT's departments and network users? A - Enforce is not a word you can use at MIT. We try to entice people to do the right thing. We've made a lot of progress. We've removed the financial incentive to run your own network, which used to be cheaper than having us do it. We've been a cost-recovery network since forever now though. At many universities the network is free and they just fund it out of operating costs.'"
FTFA:
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Q:.. I know MIT has not been immune to breaches either, but what do you think when you hear about new breaches like these?
A:.. The problem we all have is the Microsoft patch of the week. I hate to say it, but it's sort of the payback for universities not paying attention to security for decades or being sloppy about administrative computing.
Not that MS is the only problem, but they helped secure that mentality. I don't think Linux would have made it easier or better either. He goes on to talk about use of SSNs and other bad ideas. If only businesses would listen to this type of advice!!
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FTA:
What about dealing with wireless on campus these days?
We recently started surveying our community about what mobile devices they are using, how they are using them, etc. We have a team of people worrying about this.
The cool thing about MIT is that they own the entire 18.0.0.0/8 Class A address space, so every device on campus has a public IP.
And all computers (even student machines) are connected directly to the Internet - no NAT, no firewall, no protocol limitations, no bandwidth caps.
The catch is that all computers need to have a registered MAC address in order to get on the network, so if your Windows machine gets infected with a virus, they can disconnect you in a hurry.
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How do you actually enforce security standards among MIT's departments and network users?
I like to rely on my friends Mr. Louisville and Mr. Slugger.
From the article: "our toilet server, which does voice mail and all the other crap, runs Asterisk software"
:-)
Wow, at MIT, even the *toilets* are servers? No wonder they have their own class A!
I really hate articles that describes all these great networks and server rooms but don't have any pictures of the hardware. It's not like someone is going to search a picture to find an unsecured air vent in the ceiling so they can drop down among the laser sensors to hack into the computer.
It's not "standard," but there are places that do it. Generally small campuses, or ones that didn't build-out wired infrastructure when they should have, and are now trying to catch up and be 'wired' using 802.11 as a substitute for a real copper network.
I know there are quite a few schools deploying it strategically, which seems like a good plan. It only takes a few minutes walking around a college campus to realize that there are a few key places where wireless would be most useful, and a lot of places where it would probably be underutilized. Libraries are huge -- go into any uni library and you'll see rows of people typing away on laptops. If you can't afford to put an Ethernet drop at every study carroll, wireless is the next best thing. (Well, actually, both would be best.) Study lounges and communal spaces are probably next, followed by cafeterias and big lecture halls (if you want to encourage people to use laptops in class; some schools might have faculty that would rather discourage that). In warm climates, outdoor locations can be great locations for Wifi, too.
But deploying it all over a large campus would, for most schools, be impractical. It would take too many base stations and would cost too much for the number of users you'd probably have at a time on most of them. I think if you did roll it out everywhere, you'd probably find pretty quickly that some nodes took huge amounts of load, while others were basically never used. For this reason, most large places with a competent IT staff don't just shotgun it all over campus, but are more selective.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
That MIT-level hackers (See Steven Levy's book) have direct, Class-A network access to the Internet, or that a school like MIT still doesn't get the idea of the network as an infrastructure utility rather than a cost-recovery service.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
When I switched to a keyboard that rearranged my “Super Six”, I was distraught too. I kept hitting the wrong keys and it was annoying for some time. This is not a trivial difference for people used to not staring at their keyboards as they work.
Why bother.
Are you kidding me? All he wanted was his old keyboard back. If somebody gave me one of those new keyboards with the vertical layout I would probably beat them around the head with it.
If someone wanting thwe same keyboard gives you a bad sttitude, it's not the customer, it's you.
Did you consider when using his keyboard he didn't look at the keyboard?
If this person job is data entry, then YOU were in the wrong for not anticipating then need for the same keyboard layout.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes, it is, you nimrod.
You probably spend a ton of time picking out your gadgets or aligning things to just the way you like them, but I suspect you just throw any old thing at users and expect them to "deal with it", after all, they're just clueless anyway, right? Hey, if the user liked the keys arranged horizontal v vertical, then what's wrong with that, and why does it justify your bad attitude becuase of it?
You give us IT "professionals" a bad rep.
I can't believe someone with enough technical responsibility to replace someone else's computer would use those keys so seldom that he wouldn't care if they were rearranged. It's bad enough that my laptop isn't big enough to have them, but if they were all there and I had to look at them, I would flip out.
Frankly, the keyboards with those 6 keys vertical bug the heck out of me, too. It's a lot harder to feel where the middle row is when it's 3-high instead of 3-wide, since my fingers are arranged horizontally on the keyboard.
Our school also gives public IP address to all our machines. It's so nice to be able to directly ssh/scp/sftp to your lab machine from home -- no tunnels, no firewalls, no VPN. Just you and your encrypted password. And then we go to some other institution and wonder why they take forever to load a web page -- and discover all the traffic for the entire network is being funneled through some machine which is trying desperately to NAT the entire campus's network. Siiiigh.
Yes I'm spoiled. It's good to be at a university that doesn't need to baby its users. If you run Windows and it's not up to date, it's kicked off the network until you patch it. Don't like that? Then run your *own* firewall, or switch to a system that doesn't leak like a sieve. Don't expect to ruin it for the rest of us because *you* choose to run insecure software.
If someone wanting thwe same keyboard gives you a bad sttitude, it's not the customer, it's you.
Looks like you were one of the people getting new keyboards.
And the point of this key rearrangement?
Each of the three things you note is change for the sake of benefit. Automatic transmission*, direct access to the number, arbitrary number of channels.
What is the point of rearranging the six-block that you describe?
If someone said "Here's your new phone. You have to use it constantly for your job. Oh, by the way, we rearranged the numbers so they now go
789
456
123
0
, would you just accept this change-for-the-sake-of-change, or would you want to know why the primary interface that you use to function in your job has been suddenly changed for no apparent benefit?"
Different is not necessarily better...
(*: not that an automatic transmission is automatically a benefit. Let's have the example of a "stick"-shift that has paddle shifters on the steering wheel with an automatic clutch. That's also change, but it's change with a benefit, because you no longer have to take your hands off the wheel to shift."
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright