🚀 go-pugleaf

Carl says:
>    (I understand that these polices will revised soon.)

Yes.  The email/news policy in particular, since there are freely
available email accounts on campus that don't have such policies
"restricting" email use.

>    The policies are better than most. The privacy policy is especially
>    good. In my opinion, the weakest policy covers email and netnews.

Thanks.  I don't especially like the email/news policy myself, but as
one of the sysadmins, I appreciate the reason for its being there if
nothing else.

>    It says that undergrads are prohibited from posting or emailing off
>    campus.  This rule is enforced very selectively. To quote an OSU sys
>    admin: "it's just something that's usable as a weapon against the
>    occasional real jerk." (I think such selective enforcement is
>    despicable.)

Sigh.  The main point of the policies is that we have some written
down "rules of conduct" to which we can refer when someone starts
"acting like a jerk".  The main cases I've been involved with have
revolved around "appropriate use" sorts of things.  People trying to
crack passwords.  People wasting disk space with a.s.p bitmaps.
Sexual harrassment with aforementioned bitmaps.  And so on.

Far as I know, the email policy has never come into play.  But yes, in
general the policies are enforced selectively, in the sense that we
aren't scanning through the mail logs to see that undergrads aren't
using email, we don't watch through news postings to see that they
aren't posting news, heck, we don't even enforce the quotas in a
consistent basis, unless there's a problem that needs to be dealt
with.  If a file system fills up or gets nearly full, we get more
serious about quotas with the people that are over quota.  If someone
starts displaying xrated bitmaps in a harrassing fashion, we get more
serious about appropriate use with them.  If someone were to get
involved in mailing chain letters across the Internet, for instance,
we'd get more serious about email use with the offender.

Selective enforcement isn't ideal, but its a fact of life.  Speeding
tickets are selective - not all speeders are caught and fined.  Is
that fair?  No.

>    It is vague, prohibiting "other unsociable [email] acts".

Intentionally.  It isn't a law, its a policy.  There's a difference.

>    The fatal flaw in the policies is the lack of any notion of due
>    process. It looks like a student or a faculty member could be
>    suspending or expelled from the computer system at the whim of sys
>    admin without recourse to a formal hearing.

Well, its a policy, not a law - it describes, even vaguely, the proper
and appropriate use of our facilities.  It doesn't describe at all how
violations of that policy are to be handled, which is why it doesn't
go into due process.

As far as enforcement goes, the sysadmins here will deal (hopefully
politely and tactfully) with any policy violations that they come
across, which typically involves pointing out (in person or by email)
to the offender that they're "being a jerk" and would they please cut
it out.  We don't have the authority to suspend or expel users from
the system.  Anything serious enough to warrant anything like that is
handled as an academic misconduct sort of thing, through whatever the
usual channels are (involves faculty, the student, usually the
chairman, and sometimes the Ombudsperson.  The sysadmins usually
aren't involved in cases like that, except to provide technical info
or evidence.  I should point out that far as I know, things have gone
up to the chairman maybe 3 times (2 breakin incidents and the sexual
harrassment case) in the last several years.

--- Steve