Slashdot Mirror
Yale Switching To Gmail, Not Without Opposition
PwnSnake writes "While it makes sense for small (and large) corporations to move to Gmail, something seems amiss when a top private university decides to hand everything over to Google. Although most in that community seem to welcome the change, several organizations on campus have joined forces to call for a transparent process and get students and faculty thinking about the downsides of the switch. The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
Anyone ignorant of the possible problems of things like this need to become educated.
Ugh, idiots.
I was a grad student there, and most of the people I knew hated the Horde webmail interface. I practically never used it, since I've always set up IMAP.
My current university also outsources most of their student e-mail services to Google... again, I almost always access it through IMAP. The main downside I've run into is that the university version of Gmail doesn't have access to Labs features that you get with regular Gmail.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
It only happens sometimes, but it could bring a university to a grinding halt. And give a LOT of people a very bad 2.5 hours.
A first I thought this was about the lock manufacturer.
Now a whole slew of lock-picking jokes are consigned to oblivion. :(
Even puns about keys.
Damn you.
God, I wish my university would do this. We have 40MB account limits and professors routinely send out 10MB worth of attachments. Sure, you can forward it all to gmail (and who doesn't), but don't forget to delete your mail off the university's shitty server once a week or you'll get everything bounced!
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Whatever they decide to do, some people are going to complain. The gmail-based service lets people use POP and IMAP so they can use a different UI if they want. So you've got real flexibility, and a default UI that (in most people's opinions) doesn't suck. So... what was the problem again?
When I was with their dept of psychiatry at the med school, they had terrible problems with constantly infected and reinfecting machines, both theirs and customers'. They had good admins, but couldn't keep up. With email farmed out, perhaps they can tackle the problem now.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Why is everybody always trying to put all eggs in one basket? Can't the university simply register an email address of choice for everyone? If you don't want to run your own mail service, that's fine, but then don't fake it by selling everyone out to a single commercial provider. Besides, it's a deplorable state of affairs when a university can't muster the resources to at least operate an on-site forwarding mail server.
Harvard, just to spite Yale, has switched its mail system over to Yahoo! Mail. Also, 3 MIT students are currently being investigated for breaking into the accounts of the presidents of both universities and sending out notices to their entire university saying that the cafeteria systems at their universities had recently added a free bar.
I am officially gone from
My university is also switching to not just gmail, but integrating the other Google apps also.
If a man empties his purse into his head no man can take it from him. An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
I too want to make a living astroturfing. Where do I apply?
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz?
I would hope not...
Yes, outsourcing your infrastructure to a private company is always "chillaxing". It keeps the costs down, users don't pick up on service quality and in-house experience and development is unwanted.
Government mail, now with 100% legal links to the NSA.
You would think Yale having all the Skull and Bones types someone would know about not trusting mail servers.
After China are the terms "off-site" and Google "maintain it" of any real use to US academia?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
At least, they should openly specify the reasons why they chose Google.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
It's a service. Just like the phone company, janitorial services, accounting, and insurance.
The students and faculty don't clamor for input and transparency on which payroll company the university uses to issue paychecks and work/study payments, and there's something they use every day. Sounds to me like this is a lesson to be learned for a bunch of college brats who can't adjust to change.
Anyone ignorant of the possible problems of things like this need to become educated.
Go on, give us a few. Avoid ones that are easily mitigated.
You don't like your email being read by someone else? Then why are you sending it as a postcard? And if you don't care about that then who cares if Google reads it and sells the information to advertisers?
FireGPG and others make encrypting webmail easy, and PGP/GPG and SMIME have been integrated into most mail clients for years.
Deleted
The technical quality of the email service they provide is one thing, but the storage of so many people's emails by one company, with access to the content, is quite another.
The more that people use the same email service, the more that service will appear to be a target for the NSA and big business. Those organisations won't have to hack into the data; they will simply have to sign contracts, and Google will be glad of the money.
Say goodbye to anonymity. From now on everything you do will be logged, correlated and used to predict what you will do next - before you know it yourself.
Of course, if you are a cud chewing milch cow, you won't see a problem because you will enjoy the sensation you experience in the milking parlour as big business fondles your teets, but for the rest of us, it is a problem.
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
Outside of that, many people like to protect their own privacy.
I work at a large University considering the same thing. I like the idea. A couple of points.
* Just forwarding is not the same as having a hosted solution. Branding is important, and Colleges/Universities don't want to give that up.
* The answer to people's privacy concerns is the same as it's ever been. Privacy is the end-user's responsibility. SMTP has never been, and will never be, a private communication protocol. Recall the recent survey indicating that some 30% of sysadmins admit to violating people's privacy. Encrypt your messages, if that's important to you.
* Show me a privately hosted email solution that allows you to easily manage multiple gigabytes of storage per user.
* Email is a commodity. It's uninteresting, from a competitive practices point of view - but everyone must have it. The easier and cheaper, the better.
* You can continue using pretty much any email client you like.
Not the only university to do this. My university in Dublin (Trinity College) also switched to gmail and it was met with overwhelming support from students and staff alike. POP, IMAP or web interface that most were used to and that new users welcomed, reduced spam (95% of college mail being spam and exchange filters not catching more than 50% of it), higher level of storage, easier external access, bigger attachments. Overall it was an easy transition and a reduced workload for the syadmins. The only initial problem was different passwords for network access and email, which DOES make a difference for less technical students such as those in arts and letters faculties. Overall it was a step forward with a positive reception from staff, students and sysadmins. Good luck to Yale and let's give it 6 months or so, then poll each of those groups to see if they prefer the gmail way or the old way.
Nothing a legal agreement can't handle. How secure do you think your local email system is? How many admins are there? How many contractors roll in and out? If you want to protect your privacy, only use cash, cover your face when you go out side, never look up, always wear gloves, always rent, move every 23 days, etc...
Give me a break.
Of course anyone doing that kind of work should not use unencrypted email in the first place, but still, traffic patterns can't be avoided even with end-to-end encryption and they can be revealing sometimes.
You're just making up what Google does with that data.
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60762
Let me fix that for you:
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using EMAIL, because it involves sending privileged information over an insecure medium.
Anybody sending that type of data should not be using email, period. It doesn't matter if you're hosting it locally or in the cloud, it is an insecure transport.
The IT dept will have a budget. That budget is set by whoever controls the finances. If the person controlling the finances thinks you are only worth 40Mb of storage, then that's all the IT dept will give you.
If you want more, then bitch to whomever controls the finances. There is almost certainly no point bitching to IT because they can only go to the finance people and say give us more money. The people controlling the money aren't feeling the pain so why should they spend the money?
BTW, this isn't just for IT. This is any organisation, government or private.
Deleted
You can go to Yale, or you can NOT go to Yale.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
A University shouldn't be handing students rights of privacy without their consent. If the contract with google prevents any data harvesting for use outside the University and provides separate server and storage infrastructure, I wouldn't have issue with gmail being used. There are things emailed that shouldn't be emailed because many people don't think of it as a postcard.
I like outsourced solutions. I simply dislike when the solution providers are less than clear what they are doing beyond what the client requested when it could do harm in the future.
Google could easily solve my issues by placing a disclaimer on all outbound email from their services clearly stating how they analyze all traffic, emails, and attachment content for use in advertising. Simple enough. Then only the people stupid enough to email anyone with a gmail.com address are screwed. I won't do it. I've lost email communication with a few friends over them going to gmail. I call them instead to leave a long message.
Back in the 90's, it made sense for Universities to create a mail service -- many students had no other access to email in those days. But why today, when there are so many free email options? There is really no good reason for Colleges to be in this business, and it totally makes sense to turn it over to Google or some other company that will do it for free. We did a study at our University and found the cost savings to be in the range of $500,000 per year, which actually is money that some people felt they could use elsewhere :) (This argument may not apply to University employees, such as faculty -- it may be prudent to provide an in-house or contracted email service for this small group, but at a fraction of the cost required for the entire student body)
Anyone ignorant of the possible problems of things like this need to become educated.
Ugh, idiots.
Google Apps for Education currently provides e-mail services to more than 2,000 colleges and universities, including Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, Notre Dame and Georgetown.
Perhaps you believe that the decision makers at these universities are not educated? Perhaps You are not?
Comments like the one above, offered without any supporting evidence or even arguement and that receieve a 4 for insightful really highlight the weakness of this forum.
Ugh, IDIOT,
Google's IMAP implementation is horrible, to the point of only barely being usable. I get frequent IMAP errors regarding folders not being found, even when the folders are being reported by the server -- and I am not the only one. Google has been aware of these problems for years now and done absolutely nothing about it.
Of course, my main objective to universities switching to Google has nothing to do with functionality. GMail is proprietary software, and universities should not be locking themselves into solutions provided by specific corporations. Hey, maybe I am just too much of a free software guy, but if nobody voices the concern...
Palm trees and 8
Horde is pure, utter shite, obviously written by weekend PHP developers with short attention spans, and wouldn't know a decently-designed user interface if it jumped up and bit them in the face.
The university I went to used (and probably still does) use it. It's a pain to use, and a pain to administer.
What's so hard about writing a decent Web email client anyway?
Lots of colleges and universities are switching over to Google. The reasons are pretty straightforward: Google offers more storage space than most higher ed IT departments could reasonably afford and the move relieves them of the need to administer an email server. See this article for an overview. Even Hope, in Taco's home town, switched over a couple years back and I know they've been pretty happy with it.
No statement is true, not even this one.
Company-internal mail that needs to remain confidential needs not be encrypted -- as long as the company's mail servers remain within the company. Move your mail to google, and suddenly google knows you're getting a rise before you know it. Oh well, some people will call it a good thing if they're getting job offers before they learn that they're going to get laid off. Too bad though that the job offers will be for male escorts or something, as google also knows the reason why you're about to get laid off.
What kind of sadist sends 10MB attachments?
Anybody doing research.
Seriously, I've had 30MB attachments show up. 10MB is nothing when you're talking about a research paper written in MS Word.
Before you tell us how they should be using a magical free alternative to Word that produces tiny files yet has all the same capabilities, these papers have to be read by management types at the sponsoring organizations (often the Federal government) so sending them anything other than a Word document is out.
Putting moderation advice in your
I'm an IT manager at a major University.
okay... so the thing is, everyone loves gmail. They love it because it's a pretty, intuitive interface, they have good spam filtering, it's free, plenty of storage, hugely distributed servers for good and reliable performance, nifty features, lots of happy fun time. Why *wouldn't* you switch your whole IT mail system to gmail?
You wouldn't do it because google's entire business model is based on profiting from the content of your data. Mining that
data for targeted advertising (yes, even if they're not displaying ads in your gmail, they are mining your data for useful stuff to sell to advertisers), gleaning useful tidbits about your behavior and buying practices, etc., etc. They *own*
the content of your email.
If you are working on potentially profitable research, you'd be insane to collaborate on it through google.
If you are handling privacy-sensitive data (such as student records), you'd be insane to communicate that data
through google.
If you are handling any other sensitive information (like passwords to financial accounts, potentially embarrassing
internal memos, career- or relationship- destroying office gossip), you'd be insane to communicate it through google.
GOOGLE READS YOUR EMAIL. When you sign up with google, you AGREE TO LET THEM DO IT FOR FUN AND PROFIT.
They are providing this service for free -- if something goes wrong and they lose a bunch of your data, they'll have
a minor public relations black eye and move on. You'll be out a bunch of valuable data. You can't fire anyone,
you can't take tangible measures to make sure it doesn't happen again (or that it doesn't happen in the first place), etc.
There are lots of reasons NOT to take your IT mail to google. It's mostly about data security, privacy, and accountability.
You are surrendering all of that when you go to google. If those things aren't important to you, then by all means, switch to google.
And I'm not saying this just because I'm not anxious to have my job outsourced. I'm saying it because after 20 years of
being responsible for this sort of data, giving it to google is one of the worst things you could do with it. It's not all about "Easy interface, low cost", but unfortunately anyone who ISN'T responsible for managing the data only sees those two things.
Oh, yeah... and universities don't generally prioritize storage/systems/personnel for student email. TFA talks about saving 12 TB of space, which these days I could install new (and reliably) for well under $10k, if someone was willing to spend the money on it.
If google provided free software to run a webmail system locally, now THAT's something I could get behind. THAT is what
Universities should be trying to get google to provide. Let them provide the interface, and let your local guys set it up and manage the data, keep the storage servers local.
YMMV, especially if your local IT guys just suck. :)
All of the issues they're clamoring over are completely non-unique. The simple fact that Google is giving Yale their Google Mail service for free is an advantage that cannot be glossed over in one sentence (as these authors did) for the following reasons:
This doesn't include the fact that no system, regardless of how well it's put together, is immune to the occassional outage. One can argue that administrators don't have much control over fixing an outage on Google's turf, but they have shown consistently that they can get everything back in working order extremely quickly. Plus, being able to manage millions of accounts (which include calendaring and contact storage for almost every account) while retaining extremely reliable levels of uptime is impressive.
I think the only reason why large-scale corporations haven't considered doing the same is to retain compliance. (Legal would never allow it).
I work for a higher-ed institution, and we recently provided a university-sponsored GMail option. We heard this issue about sending private data via GMail, from some folks in our health departments.
Our response was: why are you emailing anything with private data in it!?
Email of any kind, whether run locally at the department level, institution-wide at the central IT level, or outsourced to someplace like Google ... Email is an inherently insecure transport method. You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
So, let me amend your statement:
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using email, because it involves sending privileged information over the Internet.
I'd imagine lots of organisations are using email where their clients only communicate with the mail server using SSL (either via webmail or SSL encryption of standard transports like IMAP and SMTP or MAPI).
Those organisations may well treat their internal email as being secure. I believe there are plenty of hospitals use email to send patient information between DRs and staff. I'd expect they only do so because they consider their internal email to be secure.
If they switch to Gmail for the Horde servers it will ONLY affect their student population and few outlying departments. The main e-mail and calendaring system at Yale is Exchange. This switch, if it happens, is probably one to free up resources.
University & College servers/email are all hopelessly bad in general and 5 to 10 years behind.
Google is a step up!
All university email addresses through Gmail also have .edu addresses.
* Google could change privacy settings in the future. Imagine that external parties could buy lists of "names" or "grades".
As with any contract, if a company decides to change its policies, you can renegotiate or go with another. Other companies (aka Microsoft et al) will have migration solutions.
* Once hooked, it is difficult to switch back. Once, the IT culture has been outsourced, also the IT talent has disappeared and higher education becomes dependent on external companies.
You outsource phone, mail, construction, and other services. Once it is outsourced, it will actually be fairly easy to migrate to another solution. Plus, with the savings from getting rid of parts of the IT staff and infrastructure costs, you'll be able to afford consultations with more money on top.
* There is a lot of research and confidential information going over email. If I were a researcher working in a cutting edge field, I would be worried to have information about the projects safe.
There is a lot of confidential information going through the snail mail system, cell phone towers, and the regular phone system. All in all, seeing incompetence of a lot of university IT staffs, I would trust a company whose core business is to keep your information safe more than the local IT staff.
* Google delivers now. Will it in 10 years? What happens if Sergey and Larry have moved on completely and accountants eying primarily the stock market have taken over? It might become more expensive for a university in the future. Or, due to lack of other possibilities, one is forced to accept a partner which is less careful about privacy settings.
Again, like any utility, there are options.
* A lot of students and faculty already use gmail now. But they do not have to. If somebody wants, it is possible to have all benefits from external email providers. Why force it?
Cost savings that can be applied elsewhere, .edu address associated with your gmail, the ability to migrate seamlessly from your .edu address to a alumni address.
* Some redundancy is nice. Its can be beneficial to have different email addresses and use them for different things. If one provider does not deliver, one can use an other one. Being forced to use an external email provider leave less options and adds more dependencies.
Being forced to have all of your information going through the university mail servers provides the same issue. I've seen outages at the university level that would shame a corporation. Outages do happen, but a company like Google has the expertise and resources to resolve it quickly.
I came, I saw, She conquered.
I work for a higher-ed institution that's in the Big Ten. We recently provided GMail on campus, to all faculty, students, and staff. It was a remarkably easy transition for us to make. Here's how we did it:
Opt-in.
Really, that was it. We said, "Here's the GMail system that we arranged through Google and the University. If you want to move to GMail, please do - here's a link to make that happen. If you prefer to remain on the existing University email system, that's fine, we aren't taking that away and we're still committed in supporting the University system."
It's worked out well. As of last week, our overall adoption rate is 26% across faculty and staff (I don't have the student numbers) with several colleges and departments already at 100%. Overall, students opted in very quickly. Our outliers have been staff and faculty - this is likely because moving to GMail is a change, and change can be scary. (Note you can use the web interface, or access GMail using POP/IMAP.)
It's not entirely opt-in, though. Incoming students are not given an option - they'll be issued a University GMail account by default. The goal is that over the next 4 years, we'll gradually have all student accounts move to GMail automatically. (But as I said, students tended to opt-in very quickly.)
If the schools email system failed to properly send your class assignments and you didnt receive emails properly,
you should have contacted the university and appealed your grade. At the very least the university would have
allowed you to retake the class without cost or GPA penalty. You couldnt have been the only person in school this happened to.
You may still be able to appeal if nothing else to just get the F removed from your transcript(I assume to retook the course).
If you kept your emails since then you can print out your email directory where the old emails are missing.
Are you quite mad? I seriously hope you don't really have a job in IT. Email was invented by academics as a means to share information with other academics. Telling them not to use it is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard.
Departments with sensitive information should be using mail clients with GPG, and running their own PKI, but at least by running your own email servers you have more control (eg limit logins to campus IP addresses and provide VPN for remote login).
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
it's actually illegal to use email for that type of data. see HIPAA.
I bet Yale's medical school would fall under HIPAA rules and would need to protect medical records of folks they work with. I would also bet Google's privacy rules and data handling are not HIPAA compliant.
Anyone using unencrypted email is saying, "I don't care if the entire Internet reads my email messages." ... whether they know it or not.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
I know it's bad form to reply to your own post, but I'd like to pre-apologise for suggesting you shouldn't work in IT. You are entitled to your own opinions. I strongly disagree, however, that simply dismissing email as insecure is an excuse for not properly mitigating risks for those that do use email to send private information.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I can see an enormous upside to this, namely Google apps. Sharing documents makes the coursework and administration so much easier. I wish we had it at the school I teach at.
Artificial Intelligence stands no chance against Natural Stupidity
It does not involve sending data over the internet when it's only intra-institution within an institution that runs its own mail servers. Even with HIPAA, it still makes perfect sense for co-workers to email each other at their work addresses. And this is in fact the rule that many hospitals (and research universities use): privileged information may only be sent to email addresses within the institution.
Really? So if I run an email server that doesn't route outside of the local network and is encrypted on the local network is that more insecure than any other form of communication? Paper can be misdelivered, conversations can be overheard, etc.
That's just simply not true. Set up a LOCAL mail server, then the data never even goes on the Internet, you fool! To top that off, implement IMAP/POP over SSH with mail encryption and it is extremely secure.
To recap:
1) The email is never put on Internet wires, but MUST be sent over the Internet when using Google.
2) Entire email encyption is possible, but Google doesn't offer this.
3) SSH is excellent for local traffic, and Google only has SSL (HTTPS:/) which is easy to break with man-in-the-middle attacks.
You may as well ask them to install and run their own, personal cold fusion reactors in their offices. Most people will just get angry walk away at the mere suggestion that you make their computing environment less convenient. Professors are not exceptional in the above regard.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
Opt-out? It's a private email service. You can opt out by not using it. Forward the mail to some other email account.
That like saying, I want to opt-out of Starbucks coffee.
Assuming that Yale isn't blocking access for other mail services, I fail to see how this is any different. Use the yale.edu account for school related matters, and get your own account for private messages.
Of course, this also means that Yale's IT organization has taken into account the implications outsourcing has on the school's intellectual property, etc. As part of the RFP and selection process, these items should be taken into account to ensure the outsourcer's offering has sufficient controls. This is really no different than any large organization choosing to select Exchange, Notes, GroupWise, or outsourcing the service through any number of third party providers. *I do recognize that Google Buzz does change the thought process for GMail users. Of course, that is also a contract issue with Google-as-outsourcer (i.e. privacy and intellectual property protections should be built into the contract, and the outsourcer is obliged to ensure their offering meets the contract specifications).
Yeah seriously. Google's going to use that information to display medical-targeted ads to you. Preeeeetty bad.
I have interned at Google before. There are extremely strong safeguards in place against using email data for more than that. Google employees cannot read your email without a damn good reason, and Google would rather shoot itself in the foot before giving any of it away, even to their own advertisers.
Email is an inherently insecure transport method.
This statement was true in the mid 90's. It is no longer universally true.
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS, a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user. This setup is more common than you think, especially in universities. I would estimate that about half of all US universities already deploy SMTPS. Email traveling over SSL/TLS is not that bad from a security point of view -- the only way to intercept it is to compromise a mail server or one of the end users' machines, and if a hacker has that level of access, you have much bigger problems than email.
SMTPS will not encrypt the link between the MUA and the MTA. For that, the end user needs to explicitly configure IMAPS or POP3S. However, this link is one of the easiest links in the chain to secure, even without cryptography. Ethernet switches (not hubs) and physical access control will prevent the vast majority of local sniffing attacks, and WPA2 is good enough for WiFi links.
You don't send private data over the Internet. Period.
I disagree with this statement. At the very least, it is almost impossible to function in modern society without sending private data over the Internet in some form. For example, if you never send your credit card number over the internet, then e-commerce is almost impossible, and if a merchant subscribed to this philosophy, he would not remain in business. As another example, you almost certainly had to send your slashdot password over the internet in order to log in, and you probably consider it to be private (if not, feel free to tell me what it is).
I agree that you should never send unencrypted private data over the Internet, but I would stop well short of recommending a complete ban on sending even encrypted private data, which is what you seem to be saying.
"Perhaps you believe that the decision makers at these universities are not educated? Perhaps You are not?"
The decision makers are often not technical people and are either unwilling or unable to grasp the complexities of such issues.
I'm always glad when a large institution or company publically chooses something other than Microsoft Exchange.
Sadly, people are going to use email inappropriately and there's nothing the university can do about it except punish those who's actions result in major breaches or scandals.
Also, I'm a gmail user (since 2004) and I do not consider it any less secure than any other public email service. Running your own smtp server is the most secure option but that seems like overkill. If I want secure mail I use gpg.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
When one of the top public universities already switched?
Email at UVa: Account Choices
Account choices:
- Students: Microsoft Live and/or Gmail
- Alumni: Gmail
- Faculty/Staff/Special cases: Exchange and/or CMS (former mail system)
It's probably cheaper to outsource e-mail providers, but UVA still maintains control of the @virginia.edu domain and forwards e-mail to Live or G-mail.
Reliable e-mail is not that hard, especially if you don't have to deal with "enterprise" software.
Running a IMAP/webmail interface for students and grads is not that difficult, nor that expensive, nor that energy intensive. Dovecote, sendmail/postfix, and Squirrelmail/Roundcube run without problems on any decent POSIX system (Linux, BSD, Solaris). Attend a LISA conference or two, or go back into the archives, and you'll find plenty of examples of people running mail for thousands of users on a few moderately-sized machines.
Don't paint mail as "hard" just because people can't run Exchange properly.
Um even the nature of sending an e-mail may represent private information. Your services for students with disabilities for example, by nature of saying 'you have a meeting with so and so in our office every thursday this term' is letting the cat out of the bag so to speak. Or a 'You have a meeting with prof A at 3 pm. Signature: Prof A, lead researcher diabetes lab' or similar.
If you think people, on average, outside the engineering and comp sci departments have the technical skill to transmit drafts of papers, meeting with potential subject schedules etc. over something other than e-mail, you're grossly misinformed. The problem we have had at the last two universities I've been at is that people just used gmail because IT worked hard to keep our internal mail so secure you couldn't send .pdf and .zip attachments.
That said, I'm not sure any inherent problem with Google (or Sun or whomever) doing your e-mail. Someone is running your e-mail, your internal guys have a lot of trouble keeping e-mail sufficiently up to date for people to actually use it (especially in the era of shrinking budgets). These big outfits can aggregate the costs of backups, UI design etc over dozens of institutions. Admittedly they're marginally more likely than your internal guys to have a market to sell any of the private data too, but I don't see that as a huge gain in risk. Your contract with them should specify the service they provide limits what they can do with your e-mail data, and if they violate that it's a breech of contract issue. You're probably better with them running it in a decent fashion with half decent contract than your students using gmail for everything, with no contract about what they can, or cannot do with private data.
Yes, that is useful. According to Google, their black information sucking hole is of no harm to your privacy.
Departments with sensitive information should be using mail clients with GPG, and running their own PKI, but at least by running your own email servers you have more control (eg limit logins to campus IP addresses and provide VPN for remote login).
Actually, the rule is that departments that need to send/share things like PHI data need to de-identify the data before sharing. If a researcher at one university wants to share PHI data with a researcher at another university, you are supposed to de-identify that data first.
If you're working on the same grant together that requires both researchers have full access to the PHI data, then there are other rules about access, transport, etc. Using GPG or other encryption over email doesn't really make the grade here. Email + attachments is not a file transfer protocol, anyway. You should use other, more secure methods to share that data with the grant partner researcher.
By the way, I liked your suggestion that departments should be "running their own PKI." That made me laugh, thanks.
As noted above, e-mail itself is not HIPAA compliant.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Hmmm, I've never heard of this other email system called Without Opposition. Is that supposed to imply that it's so good it'll generate no opposition? But I guess Gmail proved them wrong in this case.
Figure out the "real cost" of maintaining a separate, local mail system in addition to Gmail. Hardware, software, maintenance, and the salaries and benefits of any staff needed just to maintain the local system. Then give people the option of using the local one instead of gmail, and charge them their share of the total cost minus whatever Google is charging per Gmail account. Since most people will go with Gmail, the local accounts will likely end up being absurdly expensive. But if you REALLY want one, its there for you.
There was no option to opt out? I'm a grad student at Nortwestern University; they outsourced most of their e-mail to google about a year ago. However, there is the option to declare that one is dealing with confidential information, in which case one can keep the university e-mail account and does not have to switch to google. As far as I know they also don't allow faculty to switch to the google provided services because of privacy concerns.
Well ... Except if they use one of those newfangled encryptors like GPG/PGP/..., perchance????
I know, it's only been in active use for the better part of 20 years, but still: Be brave, try something new!
How is an email sent to someone else at the University going over the Internet? Only once you have GMail as an intermediary.
Neither is a file server or a database until you put in the proper controls, security, and encryption. I would imagine a secure email server with proper controls and data protections would be compliant as well.
Just about every hospital in the US uses Windows - either as internal end clients or as internal servers. So it's not secure. No matter what.
This is why things like secure e-mail were created, in many cases you something like port authority (now websense, unfortunately the page has been redirected but not setup) that scans outbound email for confidential information and if found, sends an email with a link to the sender so that they can fill out a few questions for the recipient to answer. Only if all questions are answered corectly, will the https connection allow viewing of the message...
Never seen that. At least not with patient identifiable info. You can use certain services to notify you that you have a secure message that is stored on a separate server (not an email server). Banks seem fond of this approach although it's rather clumsy.
And do read up on exactly what Google does with any email. It's NOT Echelon folks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
But that doesn't address whether another organization should have access to this data in the first place which is the heart of this issue. Hosting conveniences aside, the best counterargument to using any other hosted service will be close examination of the consequences of one's chosen hoster(s) (and whomever the hoster(s) deems worthy) having access to one's data. Eben Moglen's Talk on "Freedom in the Cloud" seems remarkably apropos here.
Digital Citizen
Our University recently migrated (almost all) student email to Google. There were a few exceptions with students working on ITAR projects.
The biggest complaints we get now are from departments saying their mass emailings to their students are being caught by Google's spam filters. In the past we could look at our own spam filter logs and tell the departments what to do so their mail wouldn't be caught by the filters. Since Google is a black box, all we can do is open a ticket with Google and hope they'll answer us. Short of whitelisting outbound mail servers (not going to happen) there's not much we can do.
Still a bad policy unless you lock down exactly where you can send ANY email. Do you think any random doc or tech is going to know the implications of sending confidential information to doctorno@spiffyhospital.org vs. doctorno@yahoo.com? Ain't gonna happen.
If anyone actually does that, I'd love to see the audit trail. It's simply too dangerous to let happen.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Wish I could mod this up. An excellent response to the baffling attitudes towards email I've seen at a number of university IT departments (similar to grandparent).
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
Outside of that, many people like to protect their own privacy.
Sure, and the campus sys admin is completely reliable. Of course, he has been screened and he has signed an agreement to become a true email-man. Give me a brake. Email privacy is almost always based on people's decency. When I was the sys admin of the dept I worked, I developed a skill to NOT look into other people's emails, to shy away when passwords are typed and certainly NOT to gove anyone access to the user data, etc... I'm not so sure everyone is like that.
The argument that Google would be less discrete with your data than some other provider is flimsy.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Don't they have a CS department? You know most of the UNIX tools which are in use are actually invented/developed by the students studying in that particular university.
A prestigious university like Yale can't implement their own webmail/imap system and relies on Google handing all the student data at first place. Hopefully they didn't pay for such an unjustified publicity boost for Google.
I can't really believe a prestigious university like Yale or any other university can't really fix things themselves. Really mysterious to begin with... OK; 40 MB is stupid because e-mail isn't used in its original intent anymore... Why not fix it instead of handing the entire thing to Google?
Yale is internationally known for their law school... That is the funniest part when you know gmail isn't really that "free" if you actually think about the rights you give to Google and your private mail.
We looked into switching from in house Exchange to Google for about 3 months and ultimately scrapped it due the huge number of unsupported features we would be left with. We went with a hosted Exchange solution instead, for about the same overall cost.
My university is switching to Live@edu.
Bear in mind that Google runs Gmail so they can read your emails automatically and profile you. That's why Gmail is offered for free.
Think about that. Google has profiling data on Ivy League students, many of whom will grow up to be business leaders and political figures. (Ford, Clinton and both Bushes went to Yale.) That data will be politically valuable in the future.
Google has the information to figure out a GMail user's social network. They can tell who responds to whom, and how fast, which allows figuring out the social hierarchy. Google can easily detect discussions of criminal activity and drugs. They have real name data, so they can correlate mail accounts with other information, like criminal records. So they're acquiring the data that will tell them where pressure should be applied to coerce people.
For most people, that data is barely worth collecting. But for Yale students, it's golden.
My current university uses Gmail, but operates a separate legacy system. If I remember correctly, human subjects researchers use the legacy system to make appointments with subjects. This information is not secret, since anyone can stand outside the lab and see who goes in, but it is still forbidden for the researcher to share the information with Google.
Disclaimer: Not a human subjects researcher.
Simon's Rock College
Changing to webmail is really a win-win for everyone involved. It's pretty much the most important IT service, and it needs to work near 100% of the time. Those types of guarantees are only viable with a large corporation like Google or Yahoo. Also, in my opinion, one less thing that IT manages, is a good idea for me. All they seem to do here is put up roadblocks to doing what you want to do. ("Oh you want to install linux? Too bad, Windows XP service pack 3 is the only thing we allow on computers" "you want administrator access to your OS? I don't think so...you might install a virus which would compromise the security of the ENTIRE network). "You want to buy a computer other than a DELL? Why would you want to do that? We get major kickbacks from forcing you to buy DELLs...so no! Oh you want to buy a DELL Home system? No, you have to buy a "business" system because that fancy "precision" name and box is worth $1000 more for the same shitty components inside. Don't worry though, you'll get a 3-year warranty that we force you to buy."
A collage is like any other business,when a company makes a choice based on money there nothing you can do except look for another job.
Jack of all trades,master of none
By the way, I liked your suggestion that departments should be "running their own PKI." That made me laugh, thanks.
Yes, departments as in plural. A simple set-up would be one Uni to volounteer to run a key server which then use the default used by collaborating Universities. It's really NOT that hard.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Using techniques such as opportunistic SMTP over TLS [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. SMTPS, it is possible to provide link-level encryption of email without requiring any special configuration on the part of the end user.
That definitely helps, but on the other hand you don't know all of what happens to email in transit. If I send you an email, I might know that my server is pretty secure, but I don't really know how many servers the mail will be routed though, what the security policies might be on those servers, or even whether they might be compromised. And then I don't know whether you're using encryption for SMTP/IMAP on your client end.
So while I might say you can secure email within your organization pretty well, once it's going over the Internet, email isn't very secure-- not unless you're using something like GPG.
The problem is choice (users can already forward mail to Gmail; it doesn't make sense to force that option and not have a backup or opt-out mail server)."
the difference is that they won't have to manage / maintain campus mail servers. they won't have to field support calls related to email problems.
Why shouldn't we expect them to? Those who handle confidential information are expected to learn how to properly handle it, whether that means "don't leave a briefcase full of sensitive documents unattended" or "don't send same said documents in electronic form unencrypted on the Internet." If you're not concerned with how to handle confidential information, and, well, keep it confidential, you shouldn't be handling it at all. We wouldn't accept "I don't know how to use the snail mail system" for a doctor sending such information on a postcard rather than in a sealed envelope. If you're handling sensitive information, especially your customers' sensitive information, you make damn sure whatever you're planning to do with it will keep it secure. I think doctors who learn complex medical procedures can handle learning how and when to encrypt an email.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
(Running a PKI)
It's really NOT that hard.
The technical side of running a PKI is not hard at all.
The process side of things - making it auditably secure - is really quite hard. You've got the crown jewels -- the CA private key -- on a server. How do you make that absolutely safe? Bearing in mind that there are corruptible humans in the equation.
You do know that from a legal perspective that a privacy policy, even one that does not claim it can be changed at essentially anytime, has been held to be unenforceable as a broad statement of corporate policy vs being any sort of a contract? And even if it does just update some stats, the question is which stats? Data mining and profiling technology can be expected to get better over time.
Point taken on privacy policies, although getting caught violating it would be a huge PR no-no.
And even if it does just update some stats, the question is which stats?
Google does let you look at what they know about you:
https://www.google.com/dashboard/?hl=en
http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/view
I'm not even sure why people think that the University NEEDS to host students' email accounts any longer. Seriously, it made sense in the 1990s when not everyone even knew what email was. But today? There are better things that schools can do with their resources. Running a multi-tens-of-thousands of accounts email server is NOT trivial, especially if the users are expecting backups and redundancy.
Setting up a vanity forwarding service for students is nice, a good way to allow them to create a filterable identity and give the faculty a known way for communicating with the students. And yes, having a faculty mail service makes a ton of sense for business-critical email as well as protected private communications. But students don't need the mail to actually be hosted locally any more and most probably prefer it not be.
There most certainly isn't a -right- to such services.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
They are providing this service for free
Wrong. Google hosted mail (which I use for my company) is not free. You pay Google to have access to an smtp server that accepts your domain, and have user accounts...
If you don't want Google to be able to see email then encrypt it. You say you are "insane" to send student records over gmail, but why are you not equally "insane" to send it from any other server when it may travel the whole internet to reach a student, or even if the student address is local they are just forwarding to GMail anyway?
There's no issue with email that is not just as much a problem if you have local email servers vs. using Google, only managing email servers is one of the suckier aspects of being an SA and definitely a thing worth strong consideration of outsourcing... if not Google, then someone else.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, I didn't realize before I posted that in fact the university is getting the service for free (lucky bastards).
The rest of my post stands though, there's no problem with email that isn't a problem no matter who hosts it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'd pretty much agree with this. The trend of University outsourcing is the result of symptoms caused by bad management. As you describe, the management will have become bloated and influenced by consultants with deep conflicts of interest.
At the university where I work, they outsource our Web paystubs. They outsource our W-2s. I mean, how hard is it to write an application that generates W-2s from payroll information? For that matter, why can't the ERP system they paid hundreds of millions of dollars for do those simple things? Such things are incomprehensible and very frustrating to technical professionals.
Nitpick: SMTP with opportunistic TLS is *not* SMTPS. The latter is on port 465 and is like HTTPS where you start encrypted. Opportunistic TLS starts out unencrypted but at some point STARTTLS is issued and the connection switches to encrypted at that point. If not, it continues in the clear. This way, both encrypted and non-encrypted communication are supported over the same socket.
this is my sig
The (certainly partial) folks crying about the transition are missing the main point. Yale is doing it to save money. Companies all over the world understand that they should leave tasks that are not their core competencies to others, and IT is becoming one of them. Those who think IT is strategic and too close to the bottom line should consider that most large corporations partner with financial companies to manage their capital.
Complaints about the transition of Yale to Gmail usually fall into a few categories:
- We'll lose our privacy. Those who wave the privacy flag have likely never read the privacy policy of their institution and compared it to Google's.
- We will have no choice. They seem to ignore that Google allows you to use IMAP and POP3 to get your e-mail wherever you want. And that Yale did not give them any choice before either.
- Gmail can fail and we can lose access to our e-mail. As opposed to the current Yale e-mail system, which never fails. Plus Gmail, as noted above, allows you to download your messages to any e-mail program you choose. And it has offline access.
- (if honesty was in their arsenal) Their system will make a lot of the in house IT obsolete, as it should be, and will destroy the income of that legion of undergrads that maintain it. True. Nonetheless, during your college years, you should be focusing on more productive things than a set of skills that are increasingly becoming irrelevant.
...at least for the arts and sciences college. Like a good Slashdotter, I'm in engineering, which hosts their own mail (we even get a proper mailspool on our Unix home-directory). We have Pine or IMAP, or basically whatever we want.
Meanwhile "they" have Live Hotmail. I feel just terrible for them, and I'm embarrassed we're even doing such a thing.
In short, Yale - it could be worse.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
One of the things to consider is that Google's service is not available in all countries. Some countries block Gmail. This would be a downside for those international students.
This is happening at my university (University of Colorado), except that we selected Microsoft. Both Microsoft and Google offer this service free of charge. I'm not entirely sure why Microsoft won the contract, but I know that the person in charge of the selection process is actually a big Linux/FOSS fan, so there must have been some compelling reason.
Frankly, it can't happen soon enough. The university is not in the business of running email - they're in the business of providing education. If email services that are higher in quality can be offered for a lower cost, it just makes sense. Privacy, ownership, and other details are dealt through during the negotiating process. As with the power company, the phone company, or the cable company, the university has a binding contract that prevents things like Google/Microsoft unilaterally shutting off service. Additionally, the service will be advertisement free.
FireGPG and others make encrypting webmail easy, and PGP/GPG and SMIME have been integrated into most mail clients for years.
Does FireGPG make it easy to create a public key for my non-technical, non-paranoid friend? Does it make it easy for me to set up his mail client to automatically decrypt mail?
Because he is not going to do that. And without him doing that, there is no decryption. And without decryption it's a waste of my time to encrypt.
So while I might say you can secure email within your organization pretty well, once it's going over the Internet, email isn't very secure-- not unless you're using something like GPG.
Considering this originated in discussing a university's email system, this applies here. You can, if (hypothetically) sending from one @yale.edu address to another @yale.edu address, be certain, as long as the IT staff has done their job enforcing the use of SMTPS/IMAPS/POPS/HTTPS, that the e-mail is secure end-to-end from prying eyes.
With such a setup, you'd only have to trust yourself, the server administrative staff (likely a small number of people), and the person you addressed the e-mail to. All of whom could be, fairly easily, held accountable if something goes badly wrong.
There is nothing as "free", especially on Internet. There is always a hidden cost. I am not saying "Google is evil", I just say nothing is free and one should always consider this before making arrangements.
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using GMail, because it involves sending privileged information to a third party corporation and, in this case, a corporation that has a vested interest in using the information they're gathering.
The university that I work at switched from it's own e-mail system to Gmail. You really have to ask who you find more competent and trustworthy, google or your own IT staff. I wasn't at all involved in that switch, don't know how the decision was made, and haven't seen any stats from the university's own e-mail system. Since the migration though, mail service has been down once in about 2 years, while it was more like once every 2 months with the university mail system. I suspect the university's system was also much less secure.
I suppose gmail does represent a much bigger target than "yale-mail."
If an organization transmits data via email between employees, and an email server located at the same location, there is NO internet transmission to intercept. However, once the organization outsources this function to an outside party like Google or anyone else, one has to consider intercept risks, as well as interception risks at the service provider.
In the first case HIPPA and other such rules would allow the email messages between the parties since it is all containable and within the control of the organization. In the second case, I would guess the law would prohibit it, as Google has access and is in fact data mining the info.
Thus, schools with medical facilities better be very careful with this. If the system is intermal, it is not truely email across the internet. However, if they go to Google, Yahoo, etc, those in the medical area better not send ANYTHING medically related via that system as it is a violation of HIPPA rules.
Of course they could encrypt the emails, but the infrastructure needed to do this might be more expensive than running their own mailserver. Also, Google might prohibit this in their contract since they want to be able to data mine.
Have you looked at that? It's clearly not exhaustive. There is tons of data from the correlation of my various Google cookies during general web surfing which isn't listed or even vaguely alluded to. The Dashboard page just lists a bunch of things that were always available by going to the respective Google service sites. It takes a smattering of info from each, and puts them together in one place to assuage the sporadically paranoid.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I work at NC State and we have Groupshit. It is the worst piece of email software on the face of the planet. Everything from it's user interface, management interface, inability to allow outside users to email groups, and so on and so on and so on. Add to the fact that most administrators won't even let you setup an IMAP connection and if THEY DO... it's laggy, and a piece of shit.
This is said from working with 7 seperate instances of groupwise email server, the latest being our campus wide MANDATORY switch. The ncsu helpdesk had to ADD three new help reps to help with the influx of trouble calls.
However, NCSU recently put all Students on Gmail. Out of 14,753 trouble calls (that I can see) in NCSU's helpdesk system in the past 6 months 99% are groupwise, with over 1400 unresolved issues.
The benefits to organizations that want to use Gmail are INCREDIBLY tempting.
1) No managed Hardware
2) No staff
3) Redunancy out the wazzu
4) Connect how YOU WANT. Not using some mail client (groupwise) that won't work if you have thunderbird or outlook EVEN INSTALLED LET ALONE OPEN.
5) Integration with a calendar
6) Tons of groups and the business interface allows groups people can email to.
7) Web interface is simple and easy to use.
8) Built in spam protection
The point is... Google offers business solutions that not only meet data retention requirements of government agencies, but have 99% uptime, and allow people to use their email how they want to FROM WHEREVER they want to.
As a side note... so far in the past 6 months I've had these problems with groupwise
1) Forwarding error resulting in over 300,000 emails in my inbox which took the admins almost 3 weeks to clean up.
2) 34 missed calendar events and 100+ emails that never got there until 2 months later where I was slammed with all of these at the same time. No clue where they've been.
3) Client crashing on a standard XP install (nothing special) almost 10 times a day.
This is why Gmail is a godsend. It removes the retards from control.
You can know quite a bit, if you take the time to look.
You can find out how many servers your outbound mail always goes through by sending a message to yourself at an external email address and looking at the headers.
You can find out whether the recipient organisation handles its own email by looking up the MX records and then checking the IPs for each server to see whose address space they're in.
You can find out whether your correspondent is using SMTPS or STARTTLS, and whether there's an unbroken encrypted chain, by looking at the headers of messages you receive from him or her.
About the only thing you can't always find out on your own is whether he/she is using SSL for IMAP. Though if you're familiar with the institution, you could always ask. Or if it's a large organisation with a public web page for mail configuration details, you could try yourself and see if unencrypted IMAP/POP sessions are entertained, and the same for their webmail. If not, then you can probably rest assured on that score too.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
You'd think so, but it doesn't translate to the real world. If you were a large organization with a large, well supported IS staff that had the ability to lock down systems and force good practices then maybe. Otherwise, not so much. I recently asked one of the older docs at my hospital if they had looked at a flow diagram that I had sent as a pdf attachment. He noted that 'he had problems with his email'. Since he had managed to look at one previously, I asked him what the difference was. The answer - his son was home last time.
So I faxed it over.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There are issues that need to be considered, and risks that need to be accepted when contemplating a migration over to using Gmail.
1/ a large organisation currently using MS Exchange will most likely end up needing to replace their existing server(s) with potentially more servers in order to go with a gmail solution - especially if a single-sign-on solution is wanted.
2/ internet bandwidth costs will dramatically increase.
3/ there is presently no easy way to walk away from using gmail if a decision is made at a later date to move away from gmail.
The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA or the Buckley Amendment) should be read and understood by everyone thinking that switching to Google is a good idea.
A college student younger than 18 that has sensitive information transmitted by email that gets compromised may well have their parents sue an institution based on this law. One can certainly say that university operated email systems can be hacked, but they at least will have some marginal level of control, which is unavailable with Google datamining. If I were IT at a university, and I was asked to back a gmail rollout, I would want a CYA letter, not an email, from university counsel, indemnifying me.
Yale, AFAIK, is a private uni. who cares who they choose for any supplies. Rich students can wine all they want.
Who said they were using gmail? If you read the article, you will see they are to supply email service and other on-line tools (using their technology). Basically they outsource the service to Google. This can be done without compromising the privacy of the information provided they identify and mitigate the risks adequately. This is nothing new.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
SUNY Buffalo did the same thing starting this past August. Oh Gods, it broke EVERYTHING. The Law School in particular sends out torrents of daily emails, all of which go to different people, different classes, &c. When we switched to Gmail, every single one of the recipient lists had to be recreated by hand. It took two months. I, for one, wish Yale the best of luck in dealing with the shitstorm they're about to unleash.
I've got users that want to send single images larger than 40MB (and it works with no problems within the company). Then they try to send them to people on accounts that limit them to attachments smaller than 3MB. That's why I still have to use FTP, the stupidity of client companies outsourcing email based on price alone with no regard to details.
Outsourcing email creates problems outside of the control of both parties. We couldn't even get a job offer out to one person for nearly a week since their University email had been outsourced to hotmail and they mucked up some DNS settings and wouldn't fix it for a week (I got it there in time by changing the "hosts" file on my server).
It's problems arising where the square peg of research and business communication is bashed into the round hole of low budget personal email.
(Disclaimer: I work for a large US University, and I work on the team that provides student email, so I think I can speak with authority on this issue)
In the early 90's, students couldn't really have been expected to have an email address, so departments like CS and Math departments set up their own email servers for communication with students and with faculty in other universities. Registrars and student affairs departments wanted other ways to communicate with students, so they created centralized email systems for students. These days, schools are realizing that instead of providing a service to students that they want to use, the "official" school email system goes largely unused by a large population of the students, and a great number of students forward their email to their personal Gmail, Live, or Yahoo accounts, or they only check it at the beginning and end of the semester.
2 years ago, we were one of the first large Universities to outsource our email to Google Apps for Education. We in IT loved it, since it saved us a ton of money that we were going to have to spend to upgrade the student email system from the archaic, home-grown patchwork that was the old system. A lot of students liked it as well, but again, a lot of them forwarded their email to their personal accounts or just don't check it. Surveys of our students overwhelmingly show that students would prefer to just us their "regular" email accounts instead of forwarding, and another survey showed that a significant portion of the professors simply pass around a sheet for student to write their personal email addresses on anyway, or use our Blackboard online course management software to send messages to the class.
In this day and age, it is a pretty safe bet that incoming freshman already have an email account that they use frequently, running an email system is expensive and unpopular with students, and outsourcing has headaches that aren't apparent from the outset (or the outside looking in). We are starting a project to simply allow students to choose their personal email address as their "official" email account and slowly phase out Google Apps (nothing against Google Apps, it's a great service and we love you guys!).
Our CIO put it this way: I already have a joe.smith4324@gooyalivemail.com email address, I don't have a joe.smith@mybank.com email or a joe.smith@theelectricco.com or a joe.smith@myinsurancecompany.com, so why do I need a joe.smith23@my.school.edu???
That works fine all the way up until any kind of private information gets sent outside of the organization. Of course, you can assure your users that email within the organization is safe while educating them that email outside the organization isn't safe. Hopefully they'll understand the difference, remember the distinction clearly, and follow whatever guidelines you've set up.
Of course, if you've ever worked a helpdesk position, you probably don't have a lot of faith in normal users' ability to understand the difference, remember distinctions clearly, and follow whatever guidelines their IT staff puts forward.
You can find out how many servers your outbound mail always goes through by sending a message to yourself at an external email address and looking at the headers.
Of course, most of the things you mention could change at any time without you knowing about it. Things like whether your recipient uses SSL for IMAP can vary from user to user-- a user may not configure their client to use SSL even if it's available. You can check to see where their email is going from looking at MX records, yes, but you can't be sure where that email finally gets routed. Email gets routed within organizations and sometimes even outside organizations. Email sent to my gmail address gets routed to another mail service, but you wouldn't know that by looking at MX records.
And ignoring all of those limitations, I'd still wonder if you're actually willing to do such investigations for every email recipient you send to.
The University of Minnesota is moving all their e-mail over to Google as well. The push from the top doesn't seem to take into account that some faculty, staff, and students DO NOT WANT their e-mail going to Google. The plans are a joke; you can see them at http://www.oit.umn.edu/google-initiative/. The way it's being handled is like it's somebody's MBA project or something, not like something that's really being done for the benefit of the U. If you know staff there talk to them about it.
... it's also vulnerable to MITM. There's no verification of the cert, the servers blindly trust each other.
(Yes it's possible to set up verification, but nobody actually does for external hosts)
Surely Google would lose some big existing or potential accounts if they were caught.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
Still a bad policy unless you lock down exactly where you can send ANY email. Do you think any random doc or tech is going to know the implications of sending confidential information to doctorno@spiffyhospital.org vs. doctorno@yahoo.com? Ain't gonna happen.
Does happen. Every single day. Thousands of employees at large institutions. The secret is something called "mandatory compliance training".
My university provided me with a typical student mailbox of 50MB (which was increased to 300MB in 2007). It had a clunky web interface, no filters and no support for IMAP or POP for that matter. So the problem is inevitable, you are out of space all the time.
It wasn't a bigger deal back in undergrad days. But once I joined back as a postgrad, I had to use the official university account frequently to correspond with students, counter-parts, administration and so on (mostly official work). I ended up FWD mail to my gmail, then set up gmail to send on behalf of my university account. Then I managed to access gmail with outllook using IMAP. Things are all good and organized, unless google IMAP runs into some sort of trouble.
But then again, I am wondering who communicates with e-mails these days.. apart from people working in office environments. I know some junior fellas in here who literally don't check their inboxes. They are happy to settle with FB, twitter, IM or text messages. Then I met someone the other day, she finds e-mail so old fashioned and irritating (and she went on complaining how hard it is to concentrate reading long ones and keep track of details.. sounds ADHD to me).
I am not lying here, my university implemented a "results over text message" system and was considering delivering news, event details and other important messages via text, as students don't check their inboxes frequent enough. I don't know, I find it ridiculous nevertheless!
The process side of [running a PKI] - making it auditably secure - is really quite hard. You've got the crown jewels -- the CA private key -- on a server. How do you make that absolutely safe? Bearing in mind that there are corruptible humans in the equation.
Actually, it's not that hard in practice. You have two keys. The top master key, the trust root, you keep on a normally-powered-down machine in a secured area, and that machine is to have no networking. The main purpose of the master key is to sign the production key, and that you leave in the charge of some techie who is good at being an officious prick. Every organization of any size has a few of those, and in this case their anal-retentive rule following is exactly what you want. Moreover, if they slip up you've still got the master key and can rebuild the whole system of trust without too much work.
If you recognize yourself in that description, I apologize and note that you'd do the job well.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
There are issues that need to be considered, and risks that need to be accepted when contemplating a migration over to using Gmail.
1/ a large organisation currently using MS Exchange will most likely end up needing to replace their existing server(s) with potentially more servers in order to go with a gmail solution - especially if a single-sign-on solution is wanted.
Err, no. You need a single server to provide SAML, or two if you want redundancy. We run a couple in VMWare.
2/ internet bandwidth costs will dramatically increase.
Possibly. However, to offset the increase in web traffic to gmail.com, if you've changed your MX records, will result in all in-bound email, including SPAM, to go to Google and not your network.
3/ there is presently no easy way to walk away from using gmail if a decision is made at a later date to move away from gmail.
Yes. But at least Google provides POP/IMAP so it is pretty easy for users to have a local copy of all their email.
You've tossed in the phrase "secured area" as if that in itself isn't a challenge. Who is allowed physical access to the secured area? And the rules that your nominated officious prick follows to the letter, who writes those rules? How do you *demonstrate* that they really are being followed to the letter?
The point is, the root CA private key is as valuable as all the information protected by the PKI. I hope you wouldn't say that keeping, say, diamonds locked up securely was cheap and easy. Yet the private key might well be more valuable.
Mitigation: you can't revoke stolen diamonds the way you can a key
Anti-mitigation: you might be able to steal a key without leaving a trace. If you steal a diamond, someone will notice the missing diamond.
By the way, I'd be terrible at it. "Yeah, I know I shouldn't, but it saves a walk up to the safe if I keep a copy of the private key on this USB stick in my desk".
Anybody doing any sort of human research, say from the medicine, biomedical and psychology faculties, shouldn't be using email, full stop.
I work at a medical device company and we frequently send hippa information through email. (I also see lot of people use their paper calenders on their desk for this information and well as postit notes)
It will be a cold day in hell before people start remembering to even lock their desktop when leaving for break / lunch. Hell, my old supervisor would call from lunch and ask people to run over to her unlocked laptop to check her outlook calender.
Fascinating "Thread". I typically just read on Slashdot, but I can't help myself here. I consider myself an Internet Security nerd of sorts and I created a website that was meant to give everyone an choice when it comes to secure communications on the Internet. No, I'm not going to make this an advertisment, but I had not even considered medical researchers as potential users. What I created has all of the latest security features (like 2 Factor Authentication) built into an easy-to-use, free web application. My problem is getting people to go to the site. There is a lot of competition in the security space. So, all I'm saying here is that there is at least one free, easy option for protecting PHI. It is HIPAA compliant. It will be free for life for anyone that starts using it this year. If you are really interested, search Google for "private secure encrypted" and you will find the site somewhere on page 1.
they can champagne too
Ever heard of HIPPA?
http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Apps%20Partner/thread?tid=4d6f74d03de056c7&hl=en
Biomedical data is shared outside the corporate firewall all the time. And as a general rule third party dedicated solution providers do a much better job of security than time-sliced internal sysadmins.
I recently graduated from a university that was using Google Apps. The biggest problem was moving my Google Apps emails (while keeping all the labels intact) to a free gmail account. At least till a few months go there was no easy (and free) way to do it than to manually copy mails using an IMAP client (with all its idiosyncrasies).
Why no one realized "Zimbra" ? Go check it out. Its already implemented in more than 500 US univs (which includes Stanford) and has an amazing framework for internal integration.
Ok, the Senior Sys Admin plans to quit without warning anyone, has a majority of his 'documentation' in his email folders, deletes all of his email months prior to quitting. Ask Google (nicely) to restore the email to that account on your Google Apps Premier business account, get thrown into lawyer land requiring legal documents to get to their backups of your own data, which may or may not exist (they exist but Google didn't obviously build the proper infrastructure to make it a simple process).
In a normal situation, you'd just pop in a few tapes or mount a few backup locations and run restores of the mail boxes. In this case, you are at their mercy, and have to jump through hoops over the course of months for access to stuff you need NOW.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I didn't make up anything. Google is a third party corporation. That is sufficient by itself. It's also got an interest in any data it collects. It doesn't matter at all what Google says they do with the data, nor even what they actually do with it.
Have you heard of SSL? If you're talking to an internal mail server using SSL it's secure. Generally when something gets sent outside it has to be anonymized very carefully anyway, but it happens a lot that you send someone else in the lab or hospital an e-mail with information that shouldn't go outside. Perhaps it's not the best practice, but it happens and it's not insecure so long as you're not using an external mail server.
"You don't send private data over the Internet."
If you're not sending private data to an external mail server you're not sending it over the Internet, are you?
Do you encrypt internal memos? Notes to your boss? Meeting agendas?
No. Because they don't get distributed to the outside.
The sysadmins are vetted just as well as any other employee. Yes, they might end up being a leak but at least they can be held accountable. There's also the issue of how your mail gets to Google. If it stays within your own network it's much more secure than if it goes flitting across the Internet.
"Give me a brake."
You can also decide whether or not to hire sys admins who can't spell.
The issue isn't that email is being outsourced, it is that people are forced to accept gmail's controversial terms of service. The reason they chose gmail over real providers, with real privacy policies, is that gmail is free. Yale is simply too cheap to pay for an email provider that protects the information Yale itself is responsible for. For instance email sent by faculty to students from a gmail account.
Can they even legally do this? Yale must have a privacy policy, and I surely hope it is incompatible with gmail's privacy policy.
I almost never encrypt messages. I hardly ever have reason to. If it's really sensitive data like a password change, I do encrypt. Yes, even if it's internal. The odds are pretty good the Exchange server has been compromised, what with it being a Microsoft product and all.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
The University at Buffalo did this months ago. All new incoming students receive a google powered @buffalo.edu account. With over 20k in a student population it saves a ton of work for the University. The savings are not only with regard to storage and server maintenance upkeep, but we've also had a reduction in helpdesk calls.
Ever heard of HIPPA?
No, but I have heard of HIPAA.