Univ. of Illinois Goes War-of-the-Worlds On Students

theodp writes "'Strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.' (Orson Welles, 1938). 'Active shooter at BUILDING NAME/INTERSECTION. Escape area if safe to do so or shield/secure your location.' (Univ. of Illinois, 2011). An alert message sent out Thursday to 87,000 emails and cell phones warning recipients to escape from an 'active shooter' at the University of Illinois was an error, the Office of the Chief of Police confirmed. 'The alert sent today was caused by a person making a mistake,' explained an email. 'Rather than pushing the SAVE button to update the pre-scripted message, the person pushed the SUBMIT button. We are working with the provider of the Illini-Alert service to implement additional security features in the program to prevent this type of error.'"

Comments

Re:Scary

[guruevi]

It's a University, people in the administration of those institutions waste massive amounts of taxpayer money doing other random stuff that nobody asks for and nobody wants. At least they did something somewhat productive with their time. When you can explain to me why a 15,000 University where individual departments take charge of their own IT need ~1,500 heads in the Central IT department to keep a network, a datacenter and some phones running, let me know.