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Complaint Challenges Univ. of Hawaii Email Partnership Wth Google
An anonymous reader writes "A recent move by the University of Hawaii forcing all students and faculty to migrate their independent university email accounts to Google has raised serious questions, prompting one student to file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education, with senior faculty questioning both the implementation and scope of this partnership." One of the stranger notes: a clause, defended as standard, naming Google a "school official" of the university.
If my Community College can get away with forcing (it is actually required you use it) all students and faculty to use Hotmail, which works properly on precisely zero of my three main computers, I don't see how Gmail warrants a shitfit for any reason other than some MS bribery.
Great Intellect...
Honestly if we didn't we'd be stuck on our old Cyrus IMAP servers and our 2 gigabyte quotas.
My old university moved from forcing every student to use an email account hosted by the University to forcing every student to use an email account hosted by Google, with the same .university.ca domain.
It saved the University money and provided better service because the old mail system was crap.
What's the beef?
As an employer there are laws on data retention, so faculty and staff e-mail has to be retained for legal purposes.
At this point I think it's foolish for students to expect e-mail at school to remain unarchived. Both free and paid private e-mail services are available all over the place.
As an employee I use work e-mail for only work-related purposes. Nothing private. In college this would be a good lesson for students to learn- use academia e-mail for "work" related purposes, as they'll have to do in their professional lives later.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have my Gmail account for years and loved, but a couple of weeks ago I lost some important e-mails stored in the Gmail (and several folks had same issues due to the upgrade to 10GB recently done). I have contacted Google team but got no help at all. Since then I lost my trust in Google and I am planning to open another e-mail with another e-mail provider to keep as another option. Another problem is the privacy issues raised some months ago here and other tech website. Also, researchers don't use gmail account as a contact e-mail i scientific papers. Too bad for the institution who does that. I would recommnend that every lab keeps their own server for e-mails and website hosting.
If this is beng provided for free via google(and it works), I wouldn't be complaining, especially if it saves “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” which could go better spent on other things
Not sure what the big deal is. CNM (central new mexico) and the community college i went to in Kansas, both had partnerships with google to create "school" emails. (@bartoncougars.com) with it actually being a gmail account. Just forward your mail to the the service you want to use, just like your previous school email system. did these students file a complaint because only Mac's and Windows computers are available to them? where is the linux computers! I think im going to file a complaint that they wont serve me beer on campus. total bs.
We are at the mercy of Google now. When Google decides to roll out a new "feature," it is not as though we can choose not to use it. I thought that perhaps I could shield myself by using an email client, but guess what? When Google decided to start classifying some of my mail as "important," messages started disappearing from my inbox and appearing in a folder I had not subscribed to. It took me a few days to figure out what was happening, and to disable the "feature."
That and the fact that official communication basically shuts down if our Internet service is ever interrupted, which has happened a few times.
Palm trees and 8
What about the issue of forcing faculty and students to agree to terms that essentially assign everything they send on gmail to google?
Moving the students and faculty to gmail enables a corporation to data mine their communications. You can't opt out of google, because even if you get another email service, others you are probably required to communicate with will give google access to those emails.
Maybe we shouldn't ask people to use a "free" service where the user is actually the product.
Normally, Google is the service provider. Which means if they get a warrant, or a subpoena, it goes to Google, and Google can answer it however they want or are required to. For example, with some warrants, Google would be forbidden from notifying the university about the warrant, and even when Google can, they are an intermediary that gets in the way.
By making Google a school official, such warrants and subpoenas go DIRECTLY to the University's attorneys. Berkeley's outsourced-to-google mail system has the same basic language from what I understand.
Test your net with Netalyzr
If you don't currently subscribe to any Google services, then you are a cookie and not a person to Google. Sure they can target your cookie, but they can't sell directly to you because they don't know for sure who you are. When you sign up and then sign in, they have you. Requiring a student or faculty member to give personal information to a non educational for profit organization to whatever they want with is where people take issue with things like this. It may be true that the college can't afford to maintain an email server to handle the load of so many students, but if one looked to the athletic budget I bet you could see where you might be able to scrape together the scratch for a new email server.
ASU has used "Gmail" for their official email since I was there in about 2006-ish. http://help.asu.edu/sims/selfhelp/SelfhelpKbView.seam?parature_id=8373-8193-5025
I can't tell if this is the same policy or type of account that Hawaii is using though.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Found out today Google Apps doesn't support .XXX top level domain, thought that was pretty strange since it was finally an official TLD. Oh well guess I'll be running my own email server instead of paying Google. - HEX of www.HEX.xxx
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Why is that people seem SO keen on killing off the decentralised nature of the internet? If there are many email providers, if a million random people run their own mail servers, the system is robust. It's robust against censorship, against services outages at that one remaining provider, against misguided attempts to stop people from sending this or that because it violates the policy against the other thing.
In what possible world is it a good idea to give ONE institution that much power? Especially one whose entire model is to data-mine everyone's email? In what possible world is it a good idea for there to be one single repository holding EVERYONE's personal communications?
It seems that's what everyone wants - not that the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it, but that the internet CANNOT route around it, because we gleefully put all our eggs in one basket.
My university, West Virginia University, recently notified us that it's doing the same thing: this summer, all email for students will be switched over to Gmail as part of Google's Apps for Education package. Email will still be accessed through the university, but it will be handled by Google.
The announcement was sparse on details, but here are my thoughts based on what I know and assume. On one hand, I'm sure Google will be much faster and more reliable than the current system, and it will be bringing a slew of new features as well. (It actually sounds a lot like Google+.) Of course the downside is that I don't trust Google to not analyze every email I send and receive through my .edu account and correlate it with everything in my personal Gmail account once it figures out that both are owned by me. Maybe a bit paranoid, but those are my feelings nonetheless. I'd really like to see some kind of guarantee from Google that there will be no data flowing in either direction between the university email system and the rest of Google.
It actually has more to do with Student record laws, especially with special education and IEPs.
Where I work we are a service provider for court public records, and are legally an agent of the court for exactly the same reasons. It allows any lawsuits or what have you to be directed to the court as opposed to us. If the court screws up, and makes some information public that shouldn't we do our best to correct the issue, but in the end it's the court's fault and not our own. We even have to be careful in how much help we give them in setting up what data they show, we can't direct them at all or it could make us liable for their bad choices. We can tell them what the majority of our other courts do in similar situations, but even that is a stretch.
I'm not gonna lie, I really want to see this get up to (+5, Troll).
1. Google in in a contract with the university that sets out exactly what Google can and can not do with the data. If they break that contract they will be sued and lose. It is not in a companies interest to leave themselves open to litigation and large judgments.
2. The "school official" phrase has a few implications;
a. Subpoenas can go to the school instead of Google
b. Teachers are required to post all correspondence on Gmail for retention purposes.
c. IT is only required to support Gmail
Many universities are trying to cut IT budgets and one of the best ways is to outsource email. One of the biggest failings in the critics is that they offer no alternative. It is very easy to be an obstructionist and much more difficult to solve the issue. No matter what provider was chosen there would always be a few people who object to it and/or the process that came to the solution. For example one of the criticisms is that the comment period was too short at a couple of months and people did not have sufficient time to comment. If that period was extended to say six months there would be people criticizing that such a simple decision should not take so long and the university was wasting time and money. It is impossible to please everyone.
The "lack of consultation" issue is yet another example of what is called the "outhouse principle". It goes like this; When a huge complex project is proposed, say a power plant, where non experts do not have enough knowledge to understand the detail the approval process goes quite quickly as almost all comments are "yes" or "no". When a smaller project, such as an outhouse, is proposed everyone can understand how one is built and want to comment on every little detail of construction; what shape hole in the door(round, moon, star?), dimensions of the door, which way the door swings, how much ventilation room under the door, etc. The approval process for a simple project can be longer than a complex project.
There is no reason for everyone on campus to debate this issue until everyone is satisfied. It is a decision by the IT department who made it based on their experience and requirements. Does everyone comment when the chemistry department changes their chemical supplier? Does everyone comment when administration changes their paper supplier? Just because people think they should be able to have a say in matters they think the know about does not mean they really should.
If you wouldn't shout it down the hallway in the dorm, you shouldn't put it in an email.
email is not private.
People may think it is. They may feel it should be. According to the specifications, it is not.
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
1. It's too open to issues: security, privacy, conflict-of-interest, reliability, etc. Everyone knows (or should know) that Google's and Microsoft's and Yahoo's mail services are "loss leaders": they exist only (a) to drive customers to products that make money and (b) to monetize as much private information about users as possible. That's why it should surprise nobody that the latter two are absolutely hideous: completely overrun by spammers years ago -- and the former muddles along at a minimally acceptable quailty level, no better.
2. Any university that can't stand up a functional mail service really needs to evaluate its IT capabilities. It's not hard. I know, I've done it many times. In fact, it gets easier every year due to (a) reduction in server costs (b) improvements in open-source software (c) improvements in load-balancing/fault-tolerance/scalability hardware and software and (d) reduction in storage costs. To put it another way: it's only hard if you make it hard. If you do stupid things like using Exchange, using Outlook, trying to implement mail quotas, failing to teach people how to send links instead of files, trying to use hideously-overpriced commercial anti-spam "solutions" that are anything but, and so on, then YES it will be hard. But if you do smart things -- like using open source throughout, like realizing that in any email environment at most 1% of the people will be storage hogs and it's silly to design an entire infrastructure just to deal with them, like paying attention on mailop/postfix/courier/sendmail/dovecot/imap/etc. mailing lists, like figuring out that basic traffic analysis will give you an awfully good first approximation to the whitelisting you'll need -- then it's just not that difficult. Or expensive.
3. The corpus of mail generated and received by a university community has value -- monetary and otherwise -- to third parties. Therefore there exists a nonzero set of potential buyers. Within that exists a subset who have sufficient funding and sufficient motivation to attempt to acquire it. And within that exists another subset who will succeed. When email is outsourced, the most cost-effective and expedient path to that goal is to identify someone who works for the outsourced supplier and bribe or blackmail them. If they're even modestly clueful, they'll be able to maintain full plausible deniability. Granted, this risk exists even with university employees, but at teast (a) they have a dog in the fight and (b) they're subject to university discipline.
Bottom line: the myth that email is hard/expensive is just that. It's really quite easy and quite cheap, when done in-house and done properly. And while doing it in-house doesn't guarantee privacy, security, or anything else, it's a far better bet.
Covered entities must consider the use of encryption for transmitting EPHI, particularly over the Internet. As business practices and technology change, situations may arise where EPHI being transmitted from a covered entity would be at significant risk of being accessed by unauthorized entities. Where risk analysis shows such risk to be significant, a covered entity must encrypt those transmissions under the addressable implementation specification for encryption.
"Newspapers: A tiny little part of the internet, printed out yesterday, and delivered to your house"
i celebrated because it's vastly improved service and now some grad student working part time as a sysadmin can't snoop my emails so it actually improved "real world privacy" even though I know some guy at google could still read my shit but since he doesn't go to school with me and my friends I don't care.
When you hook up with local hookers on craigslist or ask your drug dealer if he got a new shipment of dank you can still use your own email account. The gmail account is for school related shit like homework and administrative spam not for your personal picadillos. You can still use your regular email for that.
One of the problems here is that even if the students use a non-University (i.e., non-Google) email account, emails from university officials (likely containing confidential info) will go through Google, as will any email replies from the students back to the officials.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2401570&cid=37233676
None of this fake electronic imitation mail, we had real mail, delivered into actual boxes! If you wanted to use electronic mail, punch cards would fit in them, but really only for freshman projects; upperclass projects usually needed more than the hundred or so cards you could fit into a dorm mailbox, though if your department gave you a mailbox in the classroom buildings, you could usually fit one or two 2000-card boxes in them, plus a printout or two.
And no, we usually didn't have to walk uphill both ways through the snow - the main freshman dorms and the nearby Collegetown slums were on the downhill side, so most students had to walk uphill through the snow to get to class and a steep slide back down afterwards, optionally using a "borrowed" cafeteria tray as a sled.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
i cancelled my "partnership" with google two days ago. i am happily using duckduckgo now ...
HIPPA does not require any of that. It requires that the health care provider inform the patient of their privacy policies. My office offers the use of email for slow (1-3 day response time) communication on issues such a billing and appointments. We inform the patient that using email is not secure, and have them sign as part of their HIPPA agreement if they accept using email as an option.
We also try to tell patients not to but health info in an email, but they do it anyway.
Sending electronic billing is whole other issue.
BTW, I don't give a rats ass if the whole world knows I have a cold, arthritis in the neck, or a history of nephritis. One of my patients has Hepatitis B, and lives in fear people in this small town will find out.
Meanwhile: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSpNcP2fvAA
"No one will ever need more than 640k of memory." -Bill Gates (Disputed by Mr. Gates but who would want to be credited with saying that...?
From Microsoft's own site:
The following list describes the minimum hardware requirements for Windows 98:
486DX 66 megahertz (MHz).
16 megabytes (MB)
A full install of Windows 98 on a FAT32 drive requires 175 MB of free hard disk space, but may range from between 140 MB and 255 MB, depending on your computer configuration and the options that you choose to install.
One 3.5-inch high-density floppy disk drive.
VGA or higher resolution (16-bit or 24-bit color SVGA recommended).
MSN, The Microsoft Network, Windows Messaging, or Internet access require a 14.4 bits per second (bps) modem (28.8 or faster recommended).
14.4bps who could need 28.8?
That was a nice trip down memory lane.
Or it was until I remembered about dial up. Yurgh!!
I had heard it could use 2 GB of RAM which made the saying somewhat dated if true. The problem, which would never have been one to burden Microsoft was what specifications the hardware makers would allow. My 20 year old Compaq will only take 750 or whatever.
Getting seriously off topic:
Windows 95 will fail to boot if you have more than around 480MB of memory.
The total RAM limitation occurs because the size of the fixed block in the init-data segment needs to be large enough to satisfy all the memory allocations performed during the memory scan. If you have too much memory, an allocation during the memory scan fails and the system halts.
The size of the init-data segment was chosen to balance two factors. The larger you make it, the more memory you can have in the system before hitting an allocation failure during the memory scan. But you can't make it too large or machines with small amounts of memory won't even be able to load VMM into memory.
I can't remember when I last had to defrag a computer. I think it was on a Vista Laptop because I couldn't understand why the damned thing wouldn't move. It was about as mobile a laptop as a not very mobile thing.
Sorry about that.
On with your rants, people.
Anyone know wherre I can get a job that I can install that on someone's computer?
It would be worth getting the sack to do that if I could see their face.
Or replace the modem?
I'd have to have a camera fitted though.
Any videos of that anyone?