TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: When Students Open up - a Little Too Much; Colleges Cite Risks

Re: When Students Open up - a Little Too Much; Colleges Cite Risks

Jim Haynes (haynes@alumni.uark.edu)
Thu, 29 Sep 2005 22:12:33 GMT

Some years back I worked in computer administration for a university.
At that time we allowed students to pick their own login names. At
first the accounts were created by a manual process, so the
secretaries who handled the work were given veto power over names they
considered too raw. Which turned it into a game of just how spicy a
name you could invent and still get it past the secretaries.

Later the process was automated. Students were warned at the outset
that it was very hard to change a name -- later we instituted a fee of
something like $25 for name changes. And still every year we would
get several requests for name changes, along the lines of "My parents
just got email capability, so I don't want them to see the name I have
been using among my friends."

We also quit doing file backups on the mail server machines, figuring
that people have the expectation that when they delete email it is
gone. If they store it in their home directories and later delete it,
then it will be on the backups for their home directories prior to
deletion; but at least if they deleted it immediately on reading it it
would indeed be gone.

jhhaynes at earthlink dot net

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