Can I beat up your devil? He's breathing a lot of BS, mostly Statist. The overall argument is that the University does not have to provide internet service and must control what it offers. They way they have deployed things to date has been unsatisfactory, so they are going to jump in and grab as much control as possible by blaming others. The result is an example of why government should stay out of IT: they are recommending the worst of class software with what amounts to a wiretap.
On Friday 07 May 2004 01:18 am, Doug Riddle wrote: > Dennis: > > Allow me to play the Devil's Advocate for a minute. > > This is a growing trend. A college requires the use > of computers, and the administration consider them in > much the same catagory as the text books, software, > and other equipment they require students to purchase > such as specific calculators. From their point of > view allowing a PC to connect to their network, and > use their backbone to access the internet, makes them > responsible for the actions (or irresponsible > inaction) of the computers connected via their > network. Translation: everyone else is doing this so it must be right. Though your tax dollars and even university fees were specifically earmarked for this, we still consider it our network and your privilege to use it at all. We will consider you guilty until proven innocent of terrorism. Though there is all sorts of case law protecting communications providers from the actions of their users, we will pretend that does not exist and make it look like we are taking a great by letting you use the equipment you purchased. > > In an ideal world they could push patches and virus > scanner signitures and updates to every PC on their > network. This would, in theory, be a good thing. > > However, in the real world, they lack the manpower, > resources, money, and apparently the expertise, to > bring this concept to fruition. I am getting a port > scan every few seconds on my group at the AgCenter. > All but a very few are from computers the LSU A&M > campus IT group supports. The problem is that the A&M > campus is not equally supported. Each college or > department gets the level of support they can pay for > in cold hard cash. Where the tires meet the pavement > there is a tragic disconnect. > Translation: most of our computers need constant and expensive maintenance. We have yet to figure out how to get around this despite published examples and advice from IBM, HP and others. > Laying LSU A&M ideals aside, taking the tools of > choice away from the geese that lay the golden eggs > simply isn't going to happen. What OS you get to use > in your department will be decided the same old way as > always - If your department has the research and the > stroke, you will do as you darn well please. I > suspect you are quite safe Dennis. Let's be honest, > in a Microsoft Shop, if you weren't good, and your > faculty wasn't happy, your > long-haired-OSS-hugging-bearded-self would have been > skidding down the sidewalk sometime ago, no? > > You were in the last meeting sitting next me. I asked > specifically, is their a policy against OSS, > shareware, freeware, or any other software. Hell, > they don't even care if we give bandwidth away to > commercial distributed computing projects. They > allowed they ought to care about the last, but don't > have anything against it. Translation: Don't worry, though you will have to own and use a current copy of backdoored and wiretapped Microsoft for a few required actions, you can use whatever you want for everything else. If you don't go along with this, you will be fired. What a typical M$ way of doing things, to make Windoze the baseline and everything else the part that's extra effort. > .... > I understand your complaint, but if you want a > service, in this case an education, from some entity, > then you pay the piper. They call the tune, you > dance, or go home. Life is not fair. If you are > lucky, you at least get what you pay for. > See my opening. The University network has been paid for by tax money and specific student fees. You can argue all you want that the money did not have to be spent in the first place, but that misses the point of who actually owns what was bought. LSU does not exist to produce sheep. When the University gets up to something that is both technically and morally wrong, it is the student and faculty's duty to speak up. University students are supposed to be society's greatest investment in itself. If they can't protect themselves from abuse, who can? It's easy to predict a disaster. Student laptops go home several times a year where they are not "protected". They come back with all sorts of bad news and whole dorms get turned off because of it. All this is going to do to students is force them to purchase and be dependent on Microsoft.
