"Going Google" Exposes Students' Email 244
A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected. "While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"
3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that three days after they were notified, or did the affected students keep it quiet for a couple of days for 'research purposes'.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a safe bet that that's only a few hours after they found out, and 3 days after the first student did.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Informative)
It's a safe bet that that's only a few hours after they found out, and 3 days after the first student did.
That was my thinking too, but TFA says that the students notified their admin on the Friday, who notified Google on the Saturday, who fixed it on the Tuesday. It's not clear - bad writing - but they may have suspended the service on the Monday.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:4, Insightful)
Its conveniently devoid of detail regarding the timeline of things. I don't mean to be a google apologist, but the article seems full of conjecture.
11 % of users were affected during a migration. OK it could have been better, but a 3 day turnaround (over a weekend) of an outage during planned maintenance doesn't sound *that* bad to me. Is this still the gmail that you don't pay for btw?
The critical (missing) detail is how quickly did Google turn off access to other people's mail following notification. Yes it may be a contentious decision if it was made without approval, but in areas of privacy it might be a good idea to CYA first ask questions later.
Heated discussions are one thing, being taken to court over Data Protection is quite another.
I'm confused at the reaction from Brown, were they advocating leaving people's data out in the open whilst it was resolved?
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Informative)
"11 % of users were affected"
No, ~1% I think. Following the links in the links, you'll find that Brown University transferred 2000 accounts, not the 200 in the above summary. It seemed suspicious that a university was only transferring 200 accounts, to begin with. An individual small college would have that many accounts, or more.
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Interesting! I must admit I had to do a double take when I was checking the total user-base to figure out a percentage, it did seem low to me for a University but as I'm not familiar with the US system I didn't go any further. Seems, I should have dug deeper - I'll never make a journalist eh.
I suspect this bit of misinformation was another convenient re-phrasing designed to increase the newsworthiness of this non-event.
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Following the links in the links, you'll find that
Nice summary, isn't it?
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Informative)
Is this still the gmail that you don't pay for btw?
Schools get Google Apps for free (that is to say, they don't pay for the licenses) but it's the full-fledged Google Apps that normally costs $50/user/year. It's effectively the same as the enterprise version.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this still the gmail that you don't pay for btw?
Actually, having worked for a "university" who outsourced e-mail services to Google, it's not free. Not at all.
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Is this still the gmail that you don't pay for btw?
No, it's the education edition of Google Apps. They've been offering
for a while now to colleges and universities.
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Saturday: Google got email from School. They sent an email to all 200students asking who was affected
Sunday: I only assume they we waiting on replies.
Mon: Ditto.. Prolly working out what it is.
Tuesday: Problem fixed early in the morning. Only 22 accounts were affected. Of those accounts they couldn't see everyone's email, all of some accounts or just a few emails that weren't theirs.
If this weren't a free service I'd definitely raise hell, I don't think I'd
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Are these students not paying fees, and (were it to occur in most other countries) taxpayers paying also?
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Yes, but if Brown uses a free email system, it's their fault, not Google's.
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It's a safe bet that that's only a few hours after they found out, and 3 days after the first student did.
That was my thinking too, but TFA says that the students notified their admin on the Friday, who notified Google on the Saturday, who fixed it on the Tuesday. It's not clear - bad writing - but they may have suspended the service on the Monday.
That was my assumption too. And actually, that's not too bad... If they shut down the accounts on Monday morning, that's as prompt as it gets. To my knowledge, Google email support doesn't work on sundays.
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To my knowledge, Google email support doesn't work on sundays.
For Google's sake I hope that is conjecture on your part and not the reality of the situation. Any organization that is touting their software as "enterprise ready" better have tech support there and ready to take care of problems 24x7x365 for organizations willing to pay for it.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I'm the guy at Brown who actually does the part of the migration that switches over internal email to Google (though others are involved), and I can tell you that we knew about a few almost immediately, from student reports. Google was involved as soon as we found out, but it took them a little while to determine exactly what happened.
Also, this wasn't as bad as it sounds. Students weren't receiving new mail meant for someone else, the problem was with the tool that migrated their old existing email from our Exchange system to their new Google email boxes. The 22 students got the contents of other students' -old- mail boxes, not new mail.
It appears that Google upgraded their IMAP migration tool on the back-end, and there was a problem with the new version. Interesting thing about 'the cloud', all the tools available on it are upgraded without the end user being aware. Had there been a 'migrate user email boxes - updated today to version 1.1!' button instead of 'migrate user email boxes', I might have waited a few days to let Google shake-out the bugs.
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:5, Insightful)
No offense, but from a privacy perspective there is nothing "less bad" about seeing "just" the contents of old mailboxes.
If I have nude photos, love letters, an email from porn-porn-porn.com, or just something I don't want someone else to read in my old mailboxes, how is someone else being able to see them not horribly bad even if they are over 90 days, (or whatever), old?
Re:3 Days Turnaround (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, have they already arrested/suspended/expelled the students that reported the problem?
Still more secure than most school systems (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still more secure than most school systems (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet most of us could read everyone else's email at school...
Not convinced. Mine used Solaris's default maildrop security, which is pretty effective, and I think was fairly standard practice until recently.
Re:Still more secure than most school systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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Gmail must not ve very secure, and their reaction to glitches makes me want to stay away from it. I had a Gmail account, one day it wouldn't let me log on, saying it had been used for "improper purposes", odd since I'd only used it to email friends, never forwarding anything or sending a mail to more than one person at a time. One of the questions it asked was "do you think your accout was compromised"? I probably should have said yes, because they took the account away. No big deal, they're no better or wo
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Google's version of... (Score:5, Funny)
...social networking.
Taking it to a new level, no joining or other conscious actions required to share everything about your life.
Re:Google's version of... (Score:5, Funny)
"You have sent an email to Emily. 6 people like this. 3 people have left a comment:"
"Frank has sent/received 26/20 emails to/from your friend Tom, 20/23 with your friend Megan, 15/12 with your friend John. Your social graph proximity is therefore 45.1. Click here to add Frank to your friend list and read his emails."
People would love it! :P
Re:Google's version of... (Score:4, Funny)
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Considering the appeal of reality TV like Big Brother, I bet a number of people would surrender this privacy in exchange for the possibility of winning money too.
I'm feeling lucky (Score:2, Funny)
So that's the use of that button!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google: Lowering standards for the rest of us (Score:5, Insightful)
The current IT guy is laughing .... it is out of his hands and he cannot do anything about it and everyone knows this ...the person who outsourced it to Google however .....!
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More and more of this is coming. At my local community college they are actually postponing the meeting in which they were supposed to explain what positions are being cut, and which are being cut back, to almost immediately before the new budget comes in, so that they can avoid static with the union; they're just not going to tell them. Begging for a strike? Probably won't happen anyway in this economy, right? Let's see how far we can push. They have already outsourced router configuration, which is pretty
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He didn't lose his job, he became less efficient than someone or something else at it.
The unions definitely ruin the efficiency of the division of labor in the world. It is the division of labor that makes us wealthier by saving us time and money. PCs, phones, iPods, TVs, even clothes and food have a tendency to get cheaper because new competitors enter a market and do things faster/cheaper/better.
I hope IT continually gets cheaper -- it means cheaper infrastructure and support for the 99% of the world th
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He didn't lose his job, he became less efficient than someone or something else at it.
False. Everything the college has outsourced so far has become a problem. Not having someone onsite will be a bigger one. They are actually settling for less service because they are out of money (in this case, mostly because the administrators get paid very, very well.)
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Oh, and while you're looking for ways to prevent such a 'catastrophe' from ever happening again, consider boosting the IT budget, will ya?"
[BigBoss] It only affected students and not my e-mail so it's not a problem. No budget increase for you. NOT YOURS.[/BigBoss]
Re:Google: Lowering standards for the rest of us (Score:5, Interesting)
we've decided to migrate everything to some giant, well-liked third party with a reputation for excellence,
Does Google actually have a reputation for excellence? Apart from their search engine and maybe Google Maps, is anything they make "excellent"? Does anything excel; is anything groundbreaking and complete in utility and quality? I remember when a lot of their releases stayed in extended-Beta, which is code for "it's free, it's out there so use it at your own peril". I find a lot of their stuff nifty, and I think they head in interesting new directions, but they seem to be always short of excellence. Personally I think that they have gained years worth of kudos - and, by extension, a reputation for excellence - by creating a great search engine (not to mention the big plus of not being Microsoft) and are spending it.
Re:Google: Lowering standards for the rest of us (Score:4, Interesting)
Apart from their search engine and maybe Google Maps, is anything they make "excellent"?
I have to say, I'm really glad to hear someone share this opinion. I've been a long time "fanboy" of Google, seldom questioning any of their choices (while finding all manner of things to be critical of with Microsoft, Apple, and *nix/open-source). On reflexion after reading this, I've come to realize something: Google is what would result from my IQ being doubled and a thousand clones made from me. They find some problem-space, develop something with really cool potential, get bored when it comes to refining the product and making it viable, then find some shiny new problem to work on. It's like they're grad students getting paid by a commercial entity to do research.
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Don't sweat it, that's just the usual slashdot compartmentalization going on. When it comes to Google, anything they do in relation to MS or Apple is good thing, anything else they do with privacy, it is a bad thing. Nevermind that Google's "rejected" voice app substitutes itself for the native one that comes with the iphone, and thus could almost be considered malware for the iphone and by admitting it to
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They must be kidding (Score:5, Informative)
While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days
Pardon my ignorance, the glitch was minor?
What?
The fact that emails contain back-mailed passwords to many kinds of online services, including those involving payments (which is stupid practice, but the online service providers do it anyway, they send you the password when you sign up)...
The fact that I can reset your password to any third-party online service account where I know that you use it and that you associated it with this email account...
Still minor glitch? Reading others emails? Really? I or TFA must be missing something.
Re:They must be kidding (Score:5, Informative)
The glitch itself wasn't fixed for three days, true. However, the glitch occurred on Friday, and the CIS department notified Google of the issue Saturday. Prior to the fix on Tuesday, Google had disabled the accounts. The article also states that during this 24 to 48 hour windows before Google shut down the accounts, the CIS had sent out emails to the students and waited for their replies. I don't know how fast you expect students to reply to an email sent out over the weekend, but I am guessing that those emails didn't get back to the CIS department immediately. Let's give it 12 hours.
So, a free service responds to your problem and disables the accounts within 24 to 36 hours, then fixes the problem 18 - 36 hours later. All the while this same service is responding to similar glitches at ten other institutions, with no word on how large those universities were.
Overall, I'd say that is a pretty fair turnaround, all things considered.
By the way, the author of the article, Sarah Perez [sarahintampa.com], seems like a fairly Microsoft-centric person, considering her personal website. So the guess by miffo [slashdot.org] doesn't seem that far off.
Consider the article itself
then she says:
The author includes "parts of Friday" even though she had made it clear Google wasn't notified until Saturday. I mean, my God, Google didn't even bother to go back in time to before they were notified!!!
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By the way, the author of the article, Sarah Perez [sarahintampa.com], seems like a fairly Microsoft-centric person, considering her personal website.
Understatement, she is a contract worker at Microsoft and has what reads to me as a very defensive disclaimer on her site. Her neutrality is questionable.
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Who the hell uses their college e-mail account for anything important unless you're part of the staff? When I was in school I just forwarded my university address to my home account.
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Please don't use services that actually mail passwords to you.
I've had it happen too, when I've forgotten my password, that a website just sends it to me -- and I immediately E-mail them about how stupid and insecure it is and beg them to implement a mandatory password changing page link instead.
Being able to retrieve the password is completely unnecessary and potentially exposes one of your well-used passwords to others.
Even assuming you reset all of a co-student's website passwords using this glitch, they
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I'd like to know the difference between a site emailing you the new password and the site emailing you a link to reset your password (in both cases assuming you have forgotten the original one). In either case if someone intercepts the email they can achieve the same effect. I suppose that a reset link at least gives you a chance that you'll be there before an eavesdropper and the link is one use?
Or are you explicitly talking about the site emailing your existing password, which means they are storing it in
Small breach? (Score:2)
"While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days"
That's not exactly what I would call a MINOR breach.
Legal issues? (Score:3, Informative)
In Finland reading someone else's mail, of electronic or snail variety, is illegal. What about other legislations? This sounds like something that would be taken rather seriously here.
(Actually, due to how seriously this is taken a recent law has (unfortunately) been put in place, to explicitly allow employers to read employees' work mail. Google "lex Nokia" for more info.)
The IT manager is praising them (Score:2)
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This will make me unable to moderate, but what the hell?
Brown had a unix based backend for years. A few years back, they got a new IT head, who insisted on off-the-shelf packages for everything. So out went postoffice, and in came Exchange. It's been running Exchange since then, and yes, untold numbers of problems (though nothing like this). We're not even on the most recent version of Exchange, which will make my office's future transition to Snow Leopard problematic since afaik the native Mail interoperab
Translation (Score:2)
However, the real issue that concerned the university was the matter of communication between Google and the CIS department. Before fixing the issue on Tuesday, Google suspended the affected accounts, a necessary step that was taken so no more data was improperly shared. What angered the IT director, though, was that the accounts were suspended without first notifying CIS.
Translation: We sent you an email communicating the issue at hand. However, we had to disable your email account so nobody else could accidentally view it.
"I've spoken very forcefully with the account (executive), my boss, senior administrators at Brown -- including the president. (Google needs) to find a better way to communicate with us," said Tom.
Translation: We told them to stop or else we'll say stop again.
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Well, duh (Score:2)
Clouds are translucent.
FERPA (Score:5, Interesting)
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As a college student, the possibility of having my own personal emails with faculty members exposed concerns me, but nowhere near as much as the confidential student data emailed between me and the staff members I work for.
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And I suppose that if a defense contractor leaked classified information then it's ok because you are a private company.
Point: Being a subcontractor doesn't let you off the hook when you're handling confidential information belonging to someone else.
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Re:Breach of privacy (Score:5, Funny)
I'm French
Just save us the trouble and surrender this argument now.
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"I'm French and if my personal or professional email were to be made public, that would be one hell of unsatisfactory service."
Well, who do you think would want to read a Frenchman's mail, anyway?
More seriously, what does nationality have to do with privacy issues? You think that maybe a Ugandan needs more privacy than a Russian? Degrees of privacy are scaled from one nationality to another? Had you said something to the effect, "The Iranian government has grown really oppressive, so my mail being made p
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My understanding is that's it's actually for accounting purposes. The equipment can't be written off the same way if they are donated, or something like that. I'm neither an accountant nor a tax specialist.
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That's easy to handle.
Example.
During WWII, for the aeons before the US entered the war, they were 'neutral'. Neutral to all the death and slaughter, and cry for help from their allies.
Uh, sorry.. off track a bit there. :P
Seriously though, it wasn't all bad. For whatever reasons the US remained neutral, they weren't as neutral as could be. One thing they did, was 'accidentally' leave massive quantities of ammunition and weaponry right near the US border. Somehow, the Canadian military would fine out, and
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And that's why the American legal system is FUTA. In most sensible countries, you *can* sue them *if* you have experienced a major problem due to their behaviour - eg, if you can show that you have lost money/posessions/safety etc as a direct result of someone else having access to your emails. You can't just go "I feel slightly aggrieved that someone read my email - give me a bajillion dollars!!!!".
Spoken like someone whose only expose to the American legal system is via television...
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Depends on your version of "sensible".
They exist to hammer home wrongs done.
Unfortunately, in the past, they've been given for any willy-nilly thing instead of handing it down for egregious conduct. I know about egregious conduct- I'm experiencing it right now in a matter that I can't discuss for legal reasons.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint, there's a cap on just how much punitive damages you can get in most of the states. Texas' is three quarters of a million after computing 2.
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Most people don't keep that on their email accounts...
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I use gmailfs you insensitive clod!
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Meanwhile, AC has 387 invites from new friends who have discovered his bestiality photos, most of which involve German Shepard males and stud ponies.
Re:methinks he doth protest too much (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people don't keep that on their email accounts...
Most people don't keep that *what* on their email accounts?
Private stuff?
Passwords?
User ids?
$25,000,000 money-making invitations?
Shakespeare quotes?
I know one fact about email which makes it an incredibly important security risk - the 'I forgot my password' link. Log on to a site you think the user uses, click that 'forgot' link, read his new password a few moments later. erm.. profit.
That said, this is google mail we're talking about, the one that bills itself as "store everything on us" we're safe and you'll never lose an email again thanks to our massive storage, indexing and searching facilities. So, for some people email is downloaded immediately and never stored on the server, for many many others, it stays right on the server.
I'd have cancelled the account, the way it was handled is not acceptable, even a free service has reasonable expectations of security. To let it linger for 3 days... that's simply not good enough.
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Well, that's one reason why those passwords aren't sent in clear. Breaking into someone's email account to get access to a forum/blog/website account is relatively easy - preventing them from catching on is hard to impossible.
Another security feature is to force you to leave your account unused for a week, to make sure the account is really not accessible. Few sites actually use it, unfortunately (Gmail does) - it's a substantial convenience trade-off, and people always value convenience above security.
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I don't know that I'd call that inconvenient. I'd say being locked out of my email for a solid week is unacceptable, and I'd migrate away from that provider immediately.
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I don't think they are giving this away for free.
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Re:Someone has high demands. (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't FREE, people.
Google advertises all over the place. They store your mail for an indeterminate period of time.
They link your gmail account cookie to your google account cookie, which is linked to various advertising streams.
Do you think TV is free? Really? Ever heard of commercials?
TV is a deployment method for commercial advertising. It's at breaks (standard commercials). It's during TV shows, with in show spots for products.. such as actors pumping various products. It's at the bottom of the screen, with dancing advertising logos and such, while you watch the show!
This is not free. This is an arrangement between two entities. You watch our shows, and we try to sell you things. Clearly your time has value, you watching has value, and that is why TV is on the air. It isn't on the air to be 'free'.
That is, unless you think that 'free' means 'no hard currency was exchanged'. If you do, then I suppose you help your friends move for 'free', and the beer and pizza after isn't compensation?
Gmail is not different. It isn't free. Google is making a PROFIT on this -- or if not, it will be. It will make money by examining the relationships between people that use gmail. It will make money by examining those relationships, and what you search for on the web. It will make the same money, by looking at those relationships, your financial data (Google finance), the places you search for on Google Maps, the apps you download with Andoird/Gphone, the people you call in your gphone, and on and on and on.
Google has become the largest depository of human interaction. They span more than email and searches. They know who you are in contact with, who you buy from, and the list goes on and on.
Further, they store this information for an indeterminate period of time.
Whether or not you like this, whether or not you approve, it is what you pay for using their service.
Free? Hell no!
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That is, unless you think that 'free' means 'no hard currency was exchanged'.
Yea, that's pretty much what we all think. do you really think someone is reading your post and going
"holy crap, he's right - they DO look at my data! and tv DOES have ads! none of this is FREE!!!!"
Yea, we all know we are giving up time, or letting company X gain something by giving our time, or whatever, but most of the general public (including me!) considers only their pocketbook when thinking about whether or not something is "free". Hell, even if i have to spend 20 minutes doing something (lets say
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No, I don't think you are correct in stating that you 'all' know. For starters, there are people here indicating that there should be no expectation for quality of service, since it is a 'free' service. You *are* paying for the service, and in exchange, you should demand a certain level of quality.
"Free" would be a download of Ubuntu. While there are certain social expectations that go along with using open source, none of them are ripped from you, whilst you use that product. The closest I can think of
Re:Someone has high demands. (Score:4, Insightful)
What the FSCK! How lame is your college that it can't run an email system?
When you finally get out you might want to check and see if your diploma is signed.
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I don't think anyone, except you, is suggesting the colleges can't run an email service.
Email is time consuming and expensive to provide. 10, 20 or 30 thousand accounts, all demanding storage - and these days you can't give folk 100MB quotas. Accounts that are all attracting spam that requires either constant tweaking of anti-spam rules, or outsourcing spam and virus checking. Add in off-site backups, support, abuse and you are quickly spending tens
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It sounds like we're talking about a couple hundred accounts. I totally agree though.
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What the FSCK! How lame is your college that it can't run an email system?
When you finally get out you might want to check and see if your diploma is signed.
Higher education is all about money these days. It's not so much "can they do it?" as "can they do it for anywhere near the same price?"
A highly available email system for any large organisation like a college pretty much means a SAN and a cluster of some sort, which immediately implies a fair bit of hardware and a hell of a lot of work to get everything tied together. Even using free software everywhere you can, the hardware costs money and so does the engineer time to set up and manage it.
Google, OTOH,
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A lot of things (not just higher education) are like this.
I contemplated writing my own or even hosting a pre-written photo gallery application since I have the skills to do so, for my family photos.
I then realized that Flickr, which exists already and has incredibly good tools is only $20/yr for unlimited bandwidth usage and unlimited storage, and its really not worth it for me to put any more than half an hour's work a year into doing it myself at that rate.
Re:Someone has high demands. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, perhaps you missed the part where students could read each others emails.
Microsoft participation is not required in this case.
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"I'm sorry, perhaps you missed the part where students could read each others emails."
If we are to be true, students could not reach other students inboxes. During migration mails wore put in wrong inboxes. Its a pretty big difference if the source system is on crack or if there is a security breach in the target system. In this case the problem could lie in the software used to migrate the users mails but it did not lie in Google Apps itself.
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Obviously I don't know how they managed the migration, but I'm looking at doing the same thing myself and I can see one glaringly obvious way how this could happen.
One of the migration mechanisms Google provide is you enable IMAP on your mail server and give them a CSV file listing IMAP usernames, the corresponding Google account username and IMAP passwords. Google's system then brings all the email across and puts it in the relevant accounts.
Of course, if the mechanism you use to generate the CSV file is
Re:Someone has high demands. (Score:5, Interesting)
What the fuck.
This is a really big deal. And if the excuse is that 3 days (admittedly, 2 of them weekend days) turnaround on an absolute security breach is what you get for free, and to expect better you must pay for it, then the proper response is to pay for better and not use this service because it's shit-broken. It is my understanding that Google Apps for Education is not a tiered service -- you're a school, you get it free; there is no paying for better. If there IS paying for better, then we should spread awareness that the free version is bad.
Might I point out that losing privacy on your email and THEN losing access is pretty much the worst possible failure mode? This is an enormous fuck-up. This has nothing to do with Microsoft. Why would you bring up Microsoft? YOU are the one twisting something into what it is not to make some other company look bad. If I were as paranoid as you, I'd suggest that Google or Apple or somesuch was paying you to do this, but in fact, I know that you're capable of being fuckwitted all on your own.
Jesus Christ. Google Apps' security fails utterly, and that's Google kicking Microsoft in the groin to you? Maybe Google can start a puppy-stomping program; I bet that's just like Google ripping Microsoft's arms off.
I'd be a lot more comfortable if Google said "yeah, we fucked up, here's what we're going to do to prevent this from happening again". Instead we get the self-contradictory "it was a small hiccup [...] it's an issue we've taken extremely seriously".
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My impression is that this incident is a fuckup at the customer end of things. The problem was getting the emails out of Exchange into the right account in Google Apps.
This is something where i personally have missed a couple of times and its very common since there are always some accounts that are broken in an exchange system.
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No, why don't you RTFA and get off your high horse. According to an article linked from TFA, Google acknowledged the problem was on their end [browndailyherald.com], and an earlier comment from a Brown sysadmin [slashdot.org] indicat
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Everytime i see an article like this all i can think is "what Microsoft backed puppet wrote this crap?". Microsoft is working very hard to make out Google as craptastic, greedy and customerhating as them.
Why are you diverting a serious matter like this into smearing a company that most likely had nothing to do with it? E-mail accounts can contain very sensitive data, ranging from bank papers to personal issues. And especially if people you know get access to this, it makes the problem more serious than ever.
I won't comment on Google's actions because I don't know enough details, but if I had my mails exposed, I would be pretty pissed. And the fact that it is free doesn't make it more acceptable. It's lik
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"Why are you diverting a serious matter like this into smearing a company that most likely had nothing to do with it?"
Because Microsoft is running a big campaign in portraying Google as bad. Google is a really hard hit target right now for FUD. The fact that this was a big Microsoft Exchange customer before makes my radar tingle a bit extra for that reason.
"E-mail accounts can contain very sensitive data, ranging from bank papers to personal issues. And especially if people you know get access to this, it m
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Off the top of my head... Facebook
Are you suggesting that it's the school's responsibility for the students to use social networking tools?