His point, though, was that the Uni may be held responsible if there is traffic on a port they aren't blocking that is illicit, they will be liable for the contributory infringement.
Addidionally, if they block legitimate access, they open themselves up from their students.
I don't think the contributory infringement thing would hold up - using best practices to prevent network abuse is a pretty effective defense. They're still not filtering content.
AFAIK only file-sharing applications default to port 1214. If you sued me because you couldn't use port 1214 I'd point out there were more than 65k other ports you could use:)
I think the bottom line is it's a private network. If they want to block any traffic they're probably within their rights to do it.
I don't think it's quite that simple. I can monitor without looking at content at all.
F'rinstance if I see traffic on port 1214 I can be reasonably certain you're running Kazaa. If I see traffic on port 6667 it's pretty safe to assume you've got an IRC client running - if I wanted to do a bit of packet analysis I could even tell if you were running ircd on the school network.
sysadmins can monitor the network without monitoring content, I'm afraid.
I think I see where we're missing each other, baltimat -
We do image servers. I was under the impression the article was talking about workstations, though - and we have a standard desktop Ghost load that contains the OS and all the office automation products 90% of the users need. If a tech took a week to restore a desktop user's data I'd fire the tech:)
True, you can't back up open files in Windows without a third-party program. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing.
Most large corporate IT shops have a standardized software load and no requirement to image a running PC - for the times we do need to image a machine we use Symantec's Ghost and image the machine to one of five snap servers. Works every time.
The only time I've had Ghost balk at an image was when I tried to image a RAID5 array - and RAID support with Ghost is kinda hit and miss - it's officially unsupported.
My unsolicited thoughts on this issue are that one should backup data, not the OS. If things are screwed up enough to require a wipe and restore you probably don't want to restore the OS anyway:)
I don't back up the OS - I keep everything I need in my "My Documents" folder - and I have a batch that runs every night that copies my "My Documents" folder to my wife's computer and vice versa.
If MS has a vested interest in catching the guys inflicting the nasties on the computing public I think they may also be willing to invest in helping prosecute the guy once they catch him.
Face it, the local district attorney's office doesn't have the technical savvy to prosecute somebody for hacking - but I'd bet with a bunch of MS money helping to build the prosecutor's case we'll see a few of these guys put away.
Emails don't self-destruct unless you set that property in the message before you send it. The default is a nonexpiring message.
Another really cool trick to prevent messages from disappearing is to create a rule that marks the email read as soon as it hits your inbox. Pretty easy in OL2003:)
I'm a Microsoft MVP. I only use the identifier in microsoft.public.* newsgroups. My own little niche in the newsgroup is connecting non-Windows machines to Windows networks. If you can't spell samba and post a question about how to share files between your spiffy new Redhat box and your XP Home machine I'm probably the guy who'll answer your question.
If you wanna put an MVP after your name have at it - nobody here is gonna stop you:)
Seriously, the MVP program is what MS uses to recognize IT professionals who donate time providing technical support to the public - normally in newsgroups but it can also involve writing books or articles. It's an annual award where MS tracks my Usenet and other posts and I imagine they've got somebody who gets paid to read/.
In return for the probably 500 hours a year I spend answering the same questions over and over I get a couple freebies from MS and a really spiffy certificate that's suitable for framing if you're into stuff like that. Cash value of the award for me is a little more than a buck an hour.
Somebody already posted the link to the MVP site. If you wanna be an MVP just hop into microsoft.public.windowsxp.network_web and answer half a dozen questions a day until about this time next year. I'll be happy to recommend you:)
I wonder how many people howling about Office 2003 have actually used it?
I did some pretty extensive testing with Outlook's self-destruct feature yesterday and here's what I learned -
Expired *unread* email will be deleted from a user's inbox. It's not deleted from the server and any mail administrator can recover it.
If the message has been marked read it's not deleted. Same thing for mail routed by a rule.
I think it's a pretty handy feature - I send a lot of mail that requires either a quick response or no response. An example -
boss -
If you get this before your 1:00 meeting can you bring up (insert rant of choice)?
Not too hard to understand.
Messages that are marked read that have expired show up in Outlook with a line drawn through the two-line preview. They can still be opened and read. I find the feature pretty handy.
Also, OL2003 appears to be a bit more intuive for the end user than previous versions. The thing that scares the crap out of me (and would anybody else that does direct customer support) is that it *looks* different from previous versions. That's often enough to freak out your more non-technical users, who call the helpdesk because they can't figure out how to work their shiny new email program.
I like it well enough that we're gonna skip Office XP and upgrade users from Office 2k to Office 2003 when we do the big WinXP deployment next spring.
I wouldn't worship at the altar of spindle speed alone. There are a few 7200 rpm drives whose performance rivals 10k rpm SCSI or ATA drives.
If you remove the onboard cache from the equation three things determine data throughput on a disk drive - sector density, rotational speed and track-to-track seek latency.
At 80Gb per platter this drive should transfer a heck or a lot of data per turn of the spindle.
The interface doesn't look too bad but this drive suffers from slowish seek times - I wouldn't use it as a system drive but it'd serve up files just fine.
To be honest, I do look in the Hotmail account once a month or so to make sure there isn't really something I need to respond to, but I'm really grateful for free email services. Thanks, Microsoft!
On my own mail server I run spamassassin and filter mail through spamcop and about forty other places before it's finally delivered. It takes about two minutes for me to receive email but at least a lot of the garbage has been taken care of by public twit filters.
Use a hardware router and network address translation to stick the web stuff on a nonroutable network like 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x and only have a single port on the router show up on the public Internet.
Then, with a combination of SSL and password authentication you ought to be about as secure as you can make things.
Microsoft doesn't send security patches as email attachments - not ever.
It does yank my chain a bit that the lastest couple of worms apparently were created using information from MS security bulletins. They try to patch a vulnerability and somebody writes a worm to attack all the unpatched machines.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't, I guess.
If a person shows a willingness to stay with a company that is very obviously doing the Wrong Thing, I wouldn't want to work with them. Yeah, it's a tough job market -- and SCO is trying to make it tougher for folks in the Linux crowd by sowing FUD about Linux and trying to stall or stop its adoption. If you stay on with the company -- even as the receptionist or janitor, you're condoning its actions.
Trying justify this "anything for a buck" mentality just doesn't work for me. How evil would a company have to be before you'd stop taking money from them?
If only life were that simple:)
A lot of people have families - my kids are grown and gone, but does the family breadwinner automatically have the right to stand on principle when it may mean depriving the kids of stuff they need?
I quit a job on principle exactly once - the guy I was doing sysadmin things for was a bit of a control freak and a master gameplayer and I decided to walk out the day he didn't pay his employees because the toner cartridge in his home laser printer went empty and he couldn't print checks. The guy had less than 20 employees, fer Chrissake. Hadn't he ever heard of a pen? Wonderful invention. Not only that, but he left town on a business trip and didn't tell anyone until immediately before Monday's staff meeting they weren't getting paid that day.
To make a long story short I walked out - but:
I had a family to support. Quitting a job without having another one to go to is IMO irresponsible at best if you have people depending on you for life's necessities. I got exceptionally lucky and found a job within two weeks.
If one can exist on altruism, fine - and I'll support you 100%. But - some people have to feed their kids and in my mind that's a higher calling than just about anything else.
Thank you, BJZ - I do feel better about kids' school records now. I figure school is to learn and I don't know about you, but *I* learn most stuff by screwing something up first.
Discoveries are made by not following instructions:)
Fascinating. It appears system logs would be protected - except "to comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena". I didn't think system logs would be considered "education records".
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Addidionally, if they block legitimate access, they open themselves up from their students.
I don't think the contributory infringement thing would hold up - using best practices to prevent network abuse is a pretty effective defense. They're still not filtering content.
AFAIK only file-sharing applications default to port 1214. If you sued me because you couldn't use port 1214 I'd point out there were more than 65k other ports you could use :)
I think the bottom line is it's a private network. If they want to block any traffic they're probably within their rights to do it.
F'rinstance if I see traffic on port 1214 I can be reasonably certain you're running Kazaa. If I see traffic on port 6667 it's pretty safe to assume you've got an IRC client running - if I wanted to do a bit of packet analysis I could even tell if you were running ircd on the school network.
sysadmins can monitor the network without monitoring content, I'm afraid.
We do image servers. I was under the impression the article was talking about workstations, though - and we have a standard desktop Ghost load that contains the OS and all the office automation products 90% of the users need. If a tech took a week to restore a desktop user's data I'd fire the tech :)
I've worked in corp IT for many years.
Most large corporate IT shops have a standardized software load and no requirement to image a running PC - for the times we do need to image a machine we use Symantec's Ghost and image the machine to one of five snap servers. Works every time.
The only time I've had Ghost balk at an image was when I tried to image a RAID5 array - and RAID support with Ghost is kinda hit and miss - it's officially unsupported.
My unsolicited thoughts on this issue are that one should backup data, not the OS. If things are screwed up enough to require a wipe and restore you probably don't want to restore the OS anyway :)
I don't back up the OS - I keep everything I need in my "My Documents" folder - and I have a batch that runs every night that copies my "My Documents" folder to my wife's computer and vice versa.
Face it, the local district attorney's office doesn't have the technical savvy to prosecute somebody for hacking - but I'd bet with a bunch of MS money helping to build the prosecutor's case we'll see a few of these guys put away.
I signed up for the RIAA Do-Not-Call List.
Outlook has had delayed sending for awhile - I remember using it with Outlook 2k but they may have had it earlier than that.
Another really cool trick to prevent messages from disappearing is to create a rule that marks the email read as soon as it hits your inbox. Pretty easy in OL2003 :)
If you wanna put an MVP after your name have at it - nobody here is gonna stop you :)
Seriously, the MVP program is what MS uses to recognize IT professionals who donate time providing technical support to the public - normally in newsgroups but it can also involve writing books or articles. It's an annual award where MS tracks my Usenet and other posts and I imagine they've got somebody who gets paid to read /.
In return for the probably 500 hours a year I spend answering the same questions over and over I get a couple freebies from MS and a really spiffy certificate that's suitable for framing if you're into stuff like that. Cash value of the award for me is a little more than a buck an hour.
Somebody already posted the link to the MVP site. If you wanna be an MVP just hop into microsoft.public.windowsxp.network_web and answer half a dozen questions a day until about this time next year. I'll be happy to recommend you :)
I did some pretty extensive testing with Outlook's self-destruct feature yesterday and here's what I learned -
- Expired *unread* email will be deleted from a user's inbox. It's not deleted from the server and any mail administrator can recover it.
- If the message has been marked read it's not deleted. Same thing for mail routed by a rule.
I think it's a pretty handy feature - I send a lot of mail that requires either a quick response or no response. An example -boss -
If you get this before your 1:00 meeting can you bring up (insert rant of choice)?
Not too hard to understand.
Messages that are marked read that have expired show up in Outlook with a line drawn through the two-line preview. They can still be opened and read. I find the feature pretty handy.
Also, OL2003 appears to be a bit more intuive for the end user than previous versions. The thing that scares the crap out of me (and would anybody else that does direct customer support) is that it *looks* different from previous versions. That's often enough to freak out your more non-technical users, who call the helpdesk because they can't figure out how to work their shiny new email program.
I like it well enough that we're gonna skip Office XP and upgrade users from Office 2k to Office 2003 when we do the big WinXP deployment next spring.
If you remove the onboard cache from the equation three things determine data throughput on a disk drive - sector density, rotational speed and track-to-track seek latency.
At 80Gb per platter this drive should transfer a heck or a lot of data per turn of the spindle.
The interface doesn't look too bad but this drive suffers from slowish seek times - I wouldn't use it as a system drive but it'd serve up files just fine.
To be honest, I do look in the Hotmail account once a month or so to make sure there isn't really something I need to respond to, but I'm really grateful for free email services. Thanks, Microsoft!
On my own mail server I run spamassassin and filter mail through spamcop and about forty other places before it's finally delivered. It takes about two minutes for me to receive email but at least a lot of the garbage has been taken care of by public twit filters.
Use a hardware router and network address translation to stick the web stuff on a nonroutable network like 10.x.x.x or 192.168.x.x and only have a single port on the router show up on the public Internet.
Then, with a combination of SSL and password authentication you ought to be about as secure as you can make things.
Presto. Unencrypted tunes. I might have to buy a better sound card, though :)
I think maybe digital signatures could solve this problem. It doesn't solve the "songwriter getting paid" thing but maybe it's a start :)
I'd imagine the RIAA wouldn't think too kindly of this idea - but it is kinda fun to think about :)
Microsoft doesn't send security patches as email attachments - not ever.
It does yank my chain a bit that the lastest couple of worms apparently were created using information from MS security bulletins. They try to patch a vulnerability and somebody writes a worm to attack all the unpatched machines.
Damned if you do and damned if you don't, I guess.
I think you've munged up a quote, Frymaster.
I'm pretty sure the above is a Bushism.
What's a serial mouse?
Damn. I kinda liked this job :(
Trying justify this "anything for a buck" mentality just doesn't work for me. How evil would a company have to be before you'd stop taking money from them?
If only life were that simple :)
A lot of people have families - my kids are grown and gone, but does the family breadwinner automatically have the right to stand on principle when it may mean depriving the kids of stuff they need?
I quit a job on principle exactly once - the guy I was doing sysadmin things for was a bit of a control freak and a master gameplayer and I decided to walk out the day he didn't pay his employees because the toner cartridge in his home laser printer went empty and he couldn't print checks. The guy had less than 20 employees, fer Chrissake. Hadn't he ever heard of a pen? Wonderful invention. Not only that, but he left town on a business trip and didn't tell anyone until immediately before Monday's staff meeting they weren't getting paid that day.
To make a long story short I walked out - but:
I had a family to support. Quitting a job without having another one to go to is IMO irresponsible at best if you have people depending on you for life's necessities. I got exceptionally lucky and found a job within two weeks.
If one can exist on altruism, fine - and I'll support you 100%. But - some people have to feed their kids and in my mind that's a higher calling than just about anything else.
Thank you, BJZ - I do feel better about kids' school records now. I figure school is to learn and I don't know about you, but *I* learn most stuff by screwing something up first.
Discoveries are made by not following instructions :)
cheers -
Fascinating. It appears system logs would be protected - except "to comply with a judicial order or lawfully issued subpoena". I didn't think system logs would be considered "education records".
With all due respect, what regulation says that a student's network use is private?