OPINION

Use of Institutionally-Owned IT Resources for ‘Personal Gain’

By Terry Calhoun

SOME INSTITUTIONS ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO RUN BUSINESSES FROM RESIDENCE HALLS, OTHERS FORBID USING IT FOR SUCH PURPOSES

You know, some of the things that annoy me more than almost anything else in daily life are rules and policies that are in writing but that don’t scale, or ignore realities, require compliance in counterproductive ways, or simply can’t be complied with.

For example, what d'es your institution say about the use of “IT resources” for personal gain? Some institutions even encourage students to create and operate businesses from residence halls. Others have language like this: “You may not use university IT resources for personal gain.” That’s a pretty big spread in policies there and I expect that the latter one is breached several times a minute.
Read more

IT NEWS

Academic Publishers Protest Google Online Library Plans

D'es the Google library project, which would digitize large library collections, threaten copyrights and sales of academic publishers? The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, sent a letter to Google saying the library project "appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale." (San Francisco Chronicle)
Read more

8,000 Passwords May Go Missing at Michigan Community College

Administrators at Jackson Community College report that a hacker left (non-working) software that could have left him able to steal more than 8,000 passwords; many of which were users' social security numbers. (The Jackson Citizen Patriot)
Read more

Hacker at Middle Tennessee State U. Raises Few Fears

Is complacency about security a new trend? MTSU notified 25,000 students, faculty, and staff recently that their personal information may have been revealed. No one's busy enough to care much, and everyone thinks that IT staff will handle things for them. (Daily News Journal)
Read more

Purdue Issues Alert to Current and Past Employees

Maybe we have no choice but to be complacent, because privacy loss via information technology is becoming as ubiquitous as wireless connectivity and there's little we can do about it: Here's Purdue University (ID) with its third security breach this year, alerting 11,000 people that their information may have been accessed. (Indiana Business)
Read more

RESOURCES

Society of Women Engineers Publishes 2005 Job Market Review

The Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has released its "2004 Literature Review of Women in Engineering," a collection of articles on programs designed to increase the number of women and minorities involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics in higher education and industry. (Society of Women Engineers)
Read more

DEALS, CONTRACTS, AWARDS

Trump Makes a Deal to Start an Online University

The Donald seems ready to apply expertise gained in building casinos etc., to creating an online campus. This week Trump University launched online courses “in entrepreneurship, real estate and wealth accumulation.” What else? (USA Today) Read more

Guess Who’s Talking to Intel? Apple