Re: Irresponsible user stories!
On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 04:26:02PM -0600, Nate Duehr wrote:
> On 4/23/07, Michael Pobega <pobega@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 03:25:20PM -0500, Gnu_Raiz wrote:
> >>
> >> [ Snip Story ]
> >>
> >
> >That's pretty awesome, one of the best stories I've heard in a long
> >while. Did you end up figuring out who this person is, or not? I would
> >have had a look through his browser history and cookies to check out
> >where he visits, and gotten him in trouble; Honestly, I don't mind if
> >people look at porn and stuff, but doing it on a public computer and
> >denying other people access is definitely out of the question.
>
> Bah. The people who should be in trouble here are the folks who don't
> know how to set up a lab properly in a college (read: hostile)
> computing environment.
>
> Those machines shouldn't be capable of booting from outside media,
> should re-image themselves regularly (possibly at each boot) and
> should be severely locked-down to only do the things approved in that
> lab.
>
> I wouldn't even call it an "interesting" story. Crud like that has
> been happening in college computer labs for decades.
>
> With appropriate changes, the lab admins would have known the second
> someone took a machine offline, and should have immediately approached
> and stopped the student from loading Linux on the box, if that wasn't
> the box's intended purpose.
>
> It's just another bad college lab admin story, is all it is.
>
> Welcome to college... if they don't respect their own network enough
> to protect it from people reloading machines, it probably shows what
> kind of engineering and work they do protecting both your
> network-saved data and your personal information in the main systems
> in the University too -- if it's the same admins. In many schools it
> is not.
>
> Buy your own machine, and keep it heavily firewalled with all outside
> services shut off, if you ever even THINK about plugging it into that
> network.
>
> Nate
>
>
Are you even able to do that with Windows? I believe the original story
said all of the computers were powered by Windows, so I wouldn't doubt
if the college didn't have any "big" tech guys. But you're right, it was
very much related to the laziness of the sysadmins, but you have to
admit it's still a humorous story.
--
http://digital-haze.net/~pobega/ - My Website
If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative
programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they
restrict the use of these programs.
- Richard Stallman
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