Ramble On

Phillip Greenspun followed up on the Harvard Business School applicant [non]-"hacking" incident yesterday.

His description helped underscore this incident as something that is a priority practices for my group. I don't want a screwup on our part creating a situation where one of our students is accused of "hacking" (unless they willfully and maliciously attempt to exploit that screwup).

At some point there has to be a modicum of common sense. I'm not sure why in computing security "common sense" seems to fly out of the window.

See also a somewhat related Slashdot thread about network security scans and lack of common sense.

If you are reading this, you undoubtedly know that a fellow going by the alias 'The Pirate Captain' won the NC State Student Body President this week.

I'm a staff member at NCSU, in computing, and I have nothing to do with Student Development, Student Government, or really any student organization at all (I interact with the PackMUG and provide a webserver for Engineering student groups - but that's it), so I have no influence or role or anything else in student elections. And besides, the election is said and done. I also don't know Whil at all.

But I think what he did was great. I'm sure those that know me at NC State would not be surprised. I'm a big fan of those that epitomize the words from Apple Computer's late 90's "Think Different" marketing campaign:

Here's to the crazy ones,
the misfits,
the rebels,
the troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules
and they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them,
disagree with them,
glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do
is ignore them,
because they change things.
They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to
think they can change the world
are the ones who do.

Think Different.

He energized the student population, creating a student voter turnout that was higher (26-27%) than it has been in years. He created a ongoing debate and discussion about the role of student government. And he showed that one guy, even with a merry band of followers, can change things. I think NC State is much the better for students (and faculty/staff) like Whil.

I'm excited to see how he'll work through what undoubtedly will be a tough road in some places ahead. An awful lot of people don't like to see the status quo messed with. But I think he'll do great.

Good Luck Captain.

I spent a fair amount of time catching up on email and archiving old emails tonight. I have kept all my email for years, but I only have email going back until 2002. The first two years of email at my current job were lost because they were on a laptop that was stolen in January of 2002. Even system administrators fail to have backups sometimes. It was interesting to go back to 2002, 2003, and 2004 and see what was going on.

Selected items on this date (4/14 - 4/15) in:

2002

• One of our Alumni had suggested to the Dean of Engineering that we should be putting out a email newsletter like Stanford was doing - and we were asked about what it took technically to do it
• I found a bug in the emailed notices from our (then) Steltor Calendar Server that had a TZ setting of -23852 - causing really wacky time displays in email clients. ITD knew about and was working to get it fixed
• There were wrong addresses in the NCSU Leave application (a web-based leave tracking system) - the developers assumed that everyone used first_last@ncsu.edu as an email address which was not true for most of my staff
• ITD was pursuing a cost-sharing arrangement to license the 'XV' application for campus, and I was trying to find out why (it was a lot of money, and there were plenty of alternatives)
• I sent a note to a departmental system admin that were not (yet) shutting off telnet, but new installs didn't include it
• We still had two netware servers and had updated them to eDirectory version 85.20c (Novell's version numbers still are horrible)
• A student and faculty member in CALS were trying to get the media for TecPlot and I had contacted a CALS IT staff member to work through them to get it distributed to them

2003

• We were trying to coordinate a golf outing with NCS and ComTech
• I reported a problem with Javascript and the new ACS authentication for Leave and other web applications
• We were reviewing our web services documentation that was in draft form (and later become http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/web/
• Lin had mostly completed our Eos locker request forms and was getting feedback
• Billy had replaced our lab image the previous - and we were getting complaints about updating it mid-semester, and had sent the fixes/differences in the changes to me - part of Arena had to be broken in order to allow Solidworks, Autocad, Office, and even the main Arena to work properly, and ArcGIS had to be blocked from distribution to our labs

2004

• I sent a late night email to Bill and Charles proposing that we offer 1GB of storage and web space to grad students - we still haven't been able to get to the point we can implement that
• I had sent out the 2004 rest-of-the-year meeting schedule to engr-sysadm
• the CERT had released a whole set of Windows Security warnings the day before
• We had been asked for an account number to get charged for our portion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• I was trying to figure out a #%!@#$&*% problem with Eudora not being able to read text/enriched mail that Mulberry was producing if it didn't have a newline after the closing tag - in the process finding a bug in the Windows version of Mulberry
• A CSC-managed computer was hitting our Webservers an awful lot - and I sent a bunch of mail complaining about it. Turns out it was the CSC webserver doing a reverse proxy to republish information that our webservers were publishing
• The eventual solution to the problem in 2002 with the Newsletter was an outside vendor, our Engineering Foundation folks were having a problem with the software that the outside vendor gave us to help manage the list
• We apparently lost one of webservers for about 15 minutes - resulting in a lot of Pager notifications