Slashdot Mirror
College Threatens Students Over Email Addresses
superdave98 writes "As a sign that a CIO has way too much time on his hands, Santa Rosa Junior College is sending emails threatening lawsuits to staff and students who have the letters 'SRJC' in their private email addresses. They contend that people could be confused and think these are official email addresses. Sure, I suppose people who fall for 419 scams probably could be fooled, but not any reasonable humans. I can't believe they found a lawyer who thought this was a good idea."
For 150 dollars an hour, a lawyer will never tell you any idea of yours is bad, even if it's suing McDonalds because your hot coffee is (gasp!) HOT, and should not have been poured all over your crotch.
A lawyer will take any case he can make a buck on.
They just put the fear of god into srjc_p1mp69.
This is more than a bit surreal since SRJC has a long history of being on the net.
For example, Santa Rosa Junior College is one of the very few non-4-year colleges to have a .EDU domain name. In the early 90's they had two junior admins, Dane Jasper and Scott Doty, who went on to become the founders of a Mom-and-Pop Internet company that actually succeeded. It started as Sonoma Interconnect, but is now known as Sonic.net.
It's a shame to add this squirrely episode to that history.
SRJC Sam Robert Jacob Christinson? Can I sue the college for using my initals in their offical email? Someone may confuse me with them
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Seriously, if you're a company/whatever, then the email address to contact me is YOUR damn company/whatever name @mydomain.com
So if I get a single godamn piece of spam at that address, I know you're the ones responsible for selling/giving that address to the spammers.
I, Steven Ray Justin Curtis, take great offense to this. My initials are SRJC you insensitive clods!!
greed@All_Evils:~#
I'm not saying I'm surprised; because idiocy is hardly surprising; but this move shows both legal asshattery and truly incredible ignorance of the technically mediated mores that exist on the internet.
With an email address, everybody knows that the local-part (before the @) is arbitrary and the domain corresponds, of course, to a domain. Using the local-part as an organizational identifier, except in flaky ad-hoc setups for small sub organizations(student_club@school.edu style), just isn't done. The domain is always where you look for organizational information.
This seems to be a case where somebody(who should know better, since he is part of their tech department) is treating all parts of the email address as being equally salient. If somebody had grabbed santarosa.com or santarosacollege.com (as opposed to the school's santarosa.edu) and was using email addresses in that domain for misleading purposes, I could sympathize with the case. Trying to dictate the form of email address local-parts from other domains is just bullshit, though.
I have never heard of Santa Rosa Junior College and if they hadn't gotten themselves on Slashdot, I never would have. Even if they don't get a single email address changed, they've gotten something out of this move.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
I can't believe they found a lawyer who thought this was a good idea.
I can't believe they only found one.
No problem dude, I'll just change my email to FU_KenFiori@gmail.com .
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The two people mentioned in the article as being behind the policy are:
MK Rudolph - mrudolph@santarosa.edu and
K Fiori - kfiori@santarosa.edu
The latter created the policy (director of computing services) and the former has her weight behind it (VP Academic Affairs). Just figured it'd be useful information to have. I'm in no way suggesting that all of slashdot go out and register variants of hotGritzIn_SJRC@gmail.com and youSuck_SJRC@yahoo.com or anything like that. And using hundreds of those emails to spam the everliving bejeezus out of their mailboxes would be nearly as morally questionable as suing your own students for making similar addresses. So I'd never suggest that either.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
Is it me or has the number of comments of an article been taken off the beta index?! :)
I for one am not happy with this!
Going back to the original, hmph.
To keep on topic, yeah it's a little silly
Don't panic
I worked for the California Community College system. A lot of these schools are running on old exchange installations on aging hardware with tiny quotas, that tend to have poor uptimes. (My school was 60MB for faculty due to Exchange 5.5's 16GB information store limit). Many professors within the college simply told their students to mail them at prof_name.(college_initals)@gmail.com because of higher quotas for massive amounts of students sending poorly optimized attachments as part of their assignment, that was web/client accessible in a better interface than 5.5 had, and had much better uptime. As an institution we advised them to use their college-provided account so IT could view the logs and say "yes or no" this student did/did not attempt to submit their paper ontime.
If anything, this helps students and faculty make sure they are communicating with the right "John Smith, Professor" out there.
Every single student whom crosses the door of SRJC is making a statement that "I feel qualified to be a college-level student." Part of being a student is understanding the tools you use to get the job done. Not taking minimal effort to verify an e-mail address for validity, particularly given most students are forced to use an Online Courseware system that is at something.mycollege.edu, so they know that "this address does not match this address", is no excuse for acting foolishly.
One of the biggest merits of going to any college is that after 18 years of hand-holding in the home and public education spheres, the college is not going to baby sit you, beg you to pay your fees on time, order you to attend lecture (though sadly some professors attempt to to artifically give merit to their poor instruction in the form of attendance-grades), or anything else for that matter. You are there because you want to learn, and almost no career has zero computer interaction, so you should learn to use the computer, just like you learned to read even though you didn't plan on being grammar or literature teacher. I am shocked and disappointed how many people flatly refuse to properly learn to use a tool that can make their job easier. I've never met anyone who "regretted" spending the necessary time to use a computer effectively.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
The administrators seem to be trying to keep people from using the college's name in their private e-mail addresses. So why are they going after abbreviations? I guess I could see it if someone registered SantaRosaJuniorCollege@yahoo.com and started spamming people, but attempting to claim ownership on SRJC? That's simply ridiculous.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Won't someone stand up, and tell the fscking business world that the internet was not created just for them?!?!
Seriously, it wasn't built for businesses to make money, sell things or what-have-you. Sure, you can do it, but, that was not (and hopefully will not) be its primary purpose.
What on earth are you talking about? They're threatening people with a valid affiliation with the college, not random Joe Blow who put "srjc" in his e-mail address because he wanted it to say "Señor Jesus" or whatever. The issue is that people who *do* have an affiliation with the college might be confusing people as to the officialness of a particular email channel, which definitely could cause problems.
Of course, the *real* issue here is that people create yahoo, gmail, hotmail, etc. accounts with their employer or school name in the username if they CAN'T USE THEIR OFFICIAL EMAIL ADDRESS. That is usually due to draconian spam filtering, poor support for email reading software, excessive downtime, small inboxes, or other technical or procedural issues that fall under the (you guessed it) CIO's purvey.
It is a real problem when people use free personal email boxes to conduct official business; see Sarah Palin's Yahoo account. But it's up to the technical leadership of the organization to make their own email domain useful enough that people have no good reason to do this.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
The State of California is doing some massive budget cuts. Santa Rosa is cutting so deep that they're turning off street lights in the middle of blocks to save money. Looks like we found some people who don't have much to do and can be laid off.
Woot! I grabbed JohnDoe_SRJC@yahoo.com!
1. Check slashdot
2. Grab example email address from news article
3. ???
4. Profit!
I'm sitting here watching the yahoo inbox, just waiting for the bucket loads of money to start pouring in...hahaha...SUCKERS!
I don't see them having jurisdiction or basis to bring a case that the contents of something as innocuous as an email address (the username mind you ,not the domain part after @ sign) are.
Frankly, I'd personally go further than that on domain names. I think it should be first come first serve really. I don't favor having things in favor of companies and celebrities that have fame and deep pockets to push the everyman from their domains they first register...ESPECIALLY when they have a very good reason to have it, like a company name or personal name or reasons. But, that part may be more debatable as to merit, but, for something small like a username part of an email address...no, they should have no basis for that.
I don't think that stringing together some alpha-numeric text for use as a username or even a URL should constitute infringement on images or company trademarks, etc.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
The district board members for junior colleges that hire these lawyers tend to have small minds. The junior college in my neighborhood is rebuilding the campus, and there was supposed to be a neighborhood meeting to make everyone aware of the changes. The board decided to hold the meeting at the district office on the other side of town. I don't know if they realized that no one was going to attend or someone threaten to sue them, but the meeting is being rescheduled to be held at the junior college in the neighborhood.
Can we strike down the assumption that in order for
a particular substance to be agreeable to your palate then it must also be judged crotch-friendly?
I like vinegar on my fries. I don't feel the need to test the viability of this combination by pouring dilute acid on my wang. I like hot peppers. I don't need to do quality control on these by first rubbing them on my groin. (I do it because I can.)
What an utter moron. Must be a lot of fun to work for this woman. I think our nationwide unemployment rate is about to go up by 1.