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I guess the providers all over the world scrambling to disable this crap are not Internet "users." And the tens(hundreds?)-of-thousands of dollars in labor spent to implement the work-arounds need to be tallied up before they might admit to a negative impact.
If you like astronomy, geology, and/or archaeology Flagstaff is a cool place to go. The biggest attraction (pun intended) is the Grand Canyon about 100 km north. Geologically, you also have a bunch of volcanic formations, the Pertrified Forest, and Meteor Crater all relatively close. If you head onto the Navajo Reservation, there are a bunch of dinosaur tracks near Tuba City (normally a cardboard sign points the way from the highway).
If you're into space sciences, the Lowell Observatory is in Flagstaff. It houses a very nice refracting telescope in a wooden dome build by bicycle mechanics about a century ago.
Finally, there are tons of archaelogical sites scattered around. The biggest is Walnut Canyon, a cliff dweller site. But you will find all sorts of old dwellings sitting in the desert.
I can see how the individual campuses could be in the hurt locker. For obvious reasons, they are not going to want to do manual updates every time an address changes. That means integration with existing systems that (hopefully) allow students/faculty/staff to update their own records.
Many campuses (at least state campuses) are running really old student records systems. Imagine that the web front end for the users is built from screen-scrapes of old mainframe applications. To make it worse, now try to interface 20+-year-old, non-relational, pre-SQL student records systems with a new distributed database model.
The result is that the schools will have to reallocate senior programmer (who else will know how the records system works) time bumping other, mission-oriented tasks in the name of National Security.
Cox Cable just started blocking outbound port 25 in my area and there are quite a few problems with it. The worst is that they have arbitrarily decided that 5 MB is the maximum message size for email.
That would be fair if it only applied to mail being delivered to them (after all, it's their disk space) but it's unacceptible for a required SMTP relay. Many of my users subscribe to Cox for home connections and have valid reasons to send email that is quite a bit larger. The result is that their broadband connection no longer satisfies a critical function. Life was just easier when they could relay it through the department server.
In any case, what is the larger goal of blocking outgoing SMTP? What protocol will be next? Monitor the traffic and investigate/shutdown systems with usage signatures that match spammers or people that cluelessly open every attachment and are spewing Worm-of-the-Day. If someone's account is suspended because they got tricked by an email worm, they will learn better. It's time to put some responsibility on the users; the 'net is not TV. If we try to make the 'net idiot-proof, the universe will just come up with a better idiot.
From a planning standpoint, this is hideous. In my organization, a computer tends to keep the same OS over the life of the hardware. I don't have the slightest inclination to upgrade an OS just because something newer is out. For example, we ran SunOS 4.1.3 until 2000 because there was no advantage to Solaris on that hardware.
As for support contracts, sure we have all our Sun equipment covered; it would be irresponsible if we didn't have the harware protected and some recourse for software bugs. However, Sun's software support is very reasonable for universities. When I spoke to RH last, the cost for one 4-CPU system was comparable to the entire campus's Sun software support contract.
I haven't decided how to handle the changes in the RH product line. On one hand, I do like the default interfaces for RH. I've played with several other distros, but RH seems to work best for my user base (they're not hackers by any means). Further, I have zero interest in upgrading systems every 12 months. However, I don't see a reason to pay more than a few thousand dollars per year when all I want/expect is access to security patches. Phone support means nothing to me and I know that SMP configurations don't require much.
Even Microsoft provides more than one year of patches on a "consumer OS."
For commercial Linux distributors to survive, their bills need to be paid but this
support plan is awful. I'm willing to pay for service, but don't charge me for things I don't want because you think it's good for me.
One thing that came up in policy planning discussion is that this does not apply strictly to databases. (IANAL, but this came from the Legal department.)
If you were to make a hard copy document that includes the relevant personal information (think employee records), the piece of paper is covered by this law. Unauthorized access to the document would trigger the reporting requirements. Access to the unencrypted information is being regulated.
Hopefully non-techs are being told to lock file cabinets and shred old files.
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This is truly remarkable.
I guess the providers all over the world scrambling to disable this crap are not Internet "users." And the tens(hundreds?)-of-thousands of dollars in labor spent to implement the work-arounds need to be tallied up before they might admit to a negative impact.
What an arrogant bastard.
There are some amazingly difficult terminology problems for them to define:
If you like astronomy, geology, and/or archaeology Flagstaff is a cool place to go. The biggest attraction (pun intended) is the Grand Canyon about 100 km north. Geologically, you also have a bunch of volcanic formations, the Pertrified Forest, and Meteor Crater all relatively close. If you head onto the Navajo Reservation, there are a bunch of dinosaur tracks near Tuba City (normally a cardboard sign points the way from the highway).
If you're into space sciences, the Lowell Observatory is in Flagstaff. It houses a very nice refracting telescope in a wooden dome build by bicycle mechanics about a century ago. Finally, there are tons of archaelogical sites scattered around. The biggest is Walnut Canyon, a cliff dweller site. But you will find all sorts of old dwellings sitting in the desert.
I can see how the individual campuses could be in the hurt locker. For obvious reasons, they are not going to want to do manual updates every time an address changes. That means integration with existing systems that (hopefully) allow students/faculty/staff to update their own records.
Many campuses (at least state campuses) are running really old student records systems. Imagine that the web front end for the users is built from screen-scrapes of old mainframe applications. To make it worse, now try to interface 20+-year-old, non-relational, pre-SQL student records systems with a new distributed database model.
The result is that the schools will have to reallocate senior programmer (who else will know how the records system works) time bumping other, mission-oriented tasks in the name of National Security.
Cox Cable just started blocking outbound port 25 in my area and there are quite a few problems with it. The worst is that they have arbitrarily decided that 5 MB is the maximum message size for email.
That would be fair if it only applied to mail being delivered to them (after all, it's their disk space) but it's unacceptible for a required SMTP relay. Many of my users subscribe to Cox for home connections and have valid reasons to send email that is quite a bit larger. The result is that their broadband connection no longer satisfies a critical function. Life was just easier when they could relay it through the department server.
In any case, what is the larger goal of blocking outgoing SMTP? What protocol will be next? Monitor the traffic and investigate/shutdown systems with usage signatures that match spammers or people that cluelessly open every attachment and are spewing Worm-of-the-Day. If someone's account is suspended because they got tricked by an email worm, they will learn better. It's time to put some responsibility on the users; the 'net is not TV. If we try to make the 'net idiot-proof, the universe will just come up with a better idiot.
You've nailed the options.
From a planning standpoint, this is hideous. In my organization, a computer tends to keep the same OS over the life of the hardware. I don't have the slightest inclination to upgrade an OS just because something newer is out. For example, we ran SunOS 4.1.3 until 2000 because there was no advantage to Solaris on that hardware.
As for support contracts, sure we have all our Sun equipment covered; it would be irresponsible if we didn't have the harware protected and some recourse for software bugs. However, Sun's software support is very reasonable for universities. When I spoke to RH last, the cost for one 4-CPU system was comparable to the entire campus's Sun software support contract.
I haven't decided how to handle the changes in the RH product line. On one hand, I do like the default interfaces for RH. I've played with several other distros, but RH seems to work best for my user base (they're not hackers by any means). Further, I have zero interest in upgrading systems every 12 months. However, I don't see a reason to pay more than a few thousand dollars per year when all I want/expect is access to security patches. Phone support means nothing to me and I know that SMP configurations don't require much.
Even Microsoft provides more than one year of patches on a "consumer OS."
For commercial Linux distributors to survive, their bills need to be paid but this support plan is awful. I'm willing to pay for service, but don't charge me for things I don't want because you think it's good for me.
One thing that came up in policy planning discussion is that this does not apply strictly to databases. (IANAL, but this came from the Legal department.)
If you were to make a hard copy document that includes the relevant personal information (think employee records), the piece of paper is covered by this law. Unauthorized access to the document would trigger the reporting requirements. Access to the unencrypted information is being regulated.
Hopefully non-techs are being told to lock file cabinets and shred old files.