Slashdot Mirror
University Professor Chastised For Using Tor
Irongeek_ADC writes with a first-person account from the The Chronicle of Higher Education by a university professor who was asked to stop using Tor. University IT and campus security staffers came knocking on Paul Cesarini's door asking why he was using the anonymizing network. They requested that he stop and also that he not teach his students about it. The visitors said it was likely against university policy (a policy they probably were not aware that Cesarini had helped to draft). The professor seems genuinely to appreciate the problems that a campus IT department faces; but in the end he took a stand for academic freedom.
Good to see some university professors still have integrity.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Could they not be bothered with actually checking the policy since they were there to enforce it?
I think the issue was not with his use of it but being told that he couldn't talk about it in his classes.
Asking the professor not to use Tor on the university-owned network is reasonable.
Attempting to censure what he can say to his students is clearly not reasonable.
it might also be noted the BGSU, along with other state universities in ohio force graduate students on assistantships to sign forms saying that they are not members, or have not supported terrorist groups.
Since these are stored in university archives, and not checked, new graduate studies are (more or less) required by the state to sign loyalty oaths.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
I think the bigger problem is that they still figured out it was him!
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Common sense would dictate that the detectives, doing their jobs and trying to investigate an online scam, ask the professor some questions to determine if he was involved. But instead they asked him to stop doing something legal, tried to get him to NOT share something with his students, and used some vague provisions of an IT policy to back it up. This is a direct attack on academic freedom - 'Thou shalt not tell your students about this' and even worse, telling him not to use Tor himself - obviously because they couldn't track what he was doing.
Overblown? Hardly - we are losing our rights bit by bit by bit and people who think something like this is 'overblown' are part of the reason. By the time you all realize you've lost most of your rights it'll be too late.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Oil, farming, auto (roads), space (NASA), rail (AMTRAK), the defense industry, telecom, utilities,
What if I replace the word TOR with the word "internet". Do you see why your post doesn't make sense?
Bit torrent gets throttled because it is a bandwidth hog, not because its often used for copyright infringement. If that was the issue, it would be blocked totally in the places where it is throttled instead.
What exactly is your point? Shit gets abused all the time.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
Actually, he says "could be a huge headache for network-security administrators" and "could approach technological anarchy". Notice the use of the work "could" as opposed to the more definite "will".
Furthermore, just because something "could be a huge headache" for IT doesn't, necessarily, mean it isn't, still, part of their job responsibilities. Giving students/faculty at a university access to the Internet in the first place will, inevitably, produce headaches for IT. That said, it's also the only reason they have a job. It would be just as absurd for the IT department to attempt to strong-arm all the students/faculty into not using the Internet at all as a method of decreasing the IT workload.
The fact is, there are ways to deal with it in the event it ever, actually, became a problem such as announcing a ban on the software for student PCs and banning systems from the network as soon as Tor use is detected. It's not difficult to do and means that Tor would only cause the network to dissolve into "technological anarchy" if the IT people sat around and did nothing. If they were even more reasonable and even handed about it, they could ban or traffic shape Tor users that were found to be using an obscene amount of bandwidth (most likely to have had their system injected). This, probably, wouldn't even require a re-write of their network use policies.
"He has the RIGHT to use it, of course, nobody else should. It's a tool only for the gifted."
While I'm assuming you meant this to be sarcastic, YES HE DOES HAVE THAT RIGHT! Its called academic freedom and was, clearly, mentioned in the article. It allows him and other professors to do their job. There are plenty of times that professors research/teach about controversial topics or topics that could cause problems if they were abused. He was teaching a class directly related to Tor and was using it as a way to become more familiar with the software. He never suggests that the general student body, or even the rest of the university employees should, necessarily, be allowed to use the software. You and I may not have the right to use Tor on out employer's networks but, then again, we aren't college professors (unless you happen to be). They represent a, very specific, special case when it comes to thing like this.
As an example, I went to school for computer science. In one of my classes, on how operating systems work, our professor explained how a programmer could, very easily, take down almost any flavor of Unix system no matter how well secured the system was (thus causing headaches for anyone else using that system at the same time as was common in our CS computer labs). This was a fundamental flaw in the design of operating systems that, for Unix systems at least, was pretty universal. He also informed us, very clearly, that we were, in no uncertain terms, banned from using this technique on any of the lab systems (which ran Sun Unix). Furthermore, he informed us that, should we decide to try, they would, very easily, find out who did it and deal with them accordingly. This was an issue directly related to the subject of the class. Knowing it meant that we, as students, could avoid it in our own future software. There is a good chance that, at least one time, my professor had to write a program like this himself (or one of his colleagues did) and test it on one of the lab systems just to prove that it did, in fact, work that way.
The story is that an IT guy and two Campus Security goons came to his door and tried to strong-arm him into not using the software or teaching about it. It's like a bad scene from a melodramatic police drama. They tried to feed him some nebulous garbage about it being against "policy" (a policy he actually helped edit and probably knows better than they do) and use it to threaten his job. The story is about a professor having his job threatened for researching a topic they don't like which flys against the very essence of acade
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
While the government's response to Katrina was slow and poorly executed, it was not contingent upon ability to pay. If there was a pandemic illness sweeping the nation, a national emergency would be declared, and people would get the immediate attention they required. If I can count on my government for anything, I can count on it to blow through money in a panic.
I can't stand how the word "majority" has in recent years disappeared from our language and been replaced by the phrase " vast majority" (at least in any context that's even remotely political).
This may sound like mere linguistic pedantry, but it really isn't -- this usage both feeds, and is part of, the trend toward polarization and "extremification" (yes, afaik, I just made up that word) of political discourse. When you claim not just a majority but a vast majority, you're doing more than just adding emphasis: you're actively marginalizing the other side (by implying that they're not just a minority but a tiny, insignificant minority).
And it's self-escalating: it creates a sort of "linguistic arms race", where "everyone else does it", so people feel compelled to tack on the "vast", lest it sound like their side is only a mere "majority". But that just leads to linguistic inflation: when (almost) everyone says "vast", it loses its meaning, sending everyone scrambling to find ever-more-emphatic (and more insulting) modifiers, like "overwhelming".
It may seem to make your argument sound a bit stronger, but the constant minor insults don't help us get anywhere closer to building true consenus. After all, wouldn't the overwhelming majority prefer to see a political arena with more true communication and less poo-flinging?
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
'If there was a pandemic illness sweeping the nation, a national emergency would be declared, and people would get the immediate attention they required.'
Most illnesses of this sort, including the black plague; could have been stopped if appropriate care were provided BEFORE the pandemic was a pandemic. Bum A slips off a ship carrying the new plague. He feels sick but can't afford healthcare and doubts he'll receive the treatment he needs if he shows up at the ER claiming a heart attack again. So he hangs out with other bums on the street. They in turn ask you for change outside the subway. 48hrs later thousands of people are infected and starting to feel sick. But they don't go to the doctor either. After all, you only go to the doctor if you are really sick in this country because it is expensive. So they wait and thousands more contract the illness. Some of the first were on their way to the airport so they spread it from city to city. And so on and so forth it goes from there. With free healthcare you go to the doctor when you feel sick and everytime you feel sick. The doctor doesn't prescribe anti-biotics if you have a cold because he no longer feels like he has to do something to justify your $75. Anti-biotics remain effective and plagues have a much higher probability of being caught in the first place.
Oh yeah. Plus nobody dies sick, alone, and unable to chew their food because you are rich, cheap, and have principles. Healthcare (including the sub-aspects like Dental, Vision, etc) is a basic fundemental human need. This is the wealthiest nation in the world; this nation is so wealthy that our definition of lower income bracket has a lifestyle that exceeds the wealthy of other nations in many respects. It is just fucking pathetic that a wealthy nation like this can't afford to provide the essentials to its citizens.
It might hurt your work ethic but the secret is that working hard does NOT bring success or a guarantee of making your way in life. The only ones who claim that are the ones that worked hard and succeeded.