Card ID Office Upgrade will Shutdown Several Services
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
If you have incoming personnel that will require obtaining a Card ID for use with building access, please be aware that the Card ID Office will be upgrading their system the week of May 14th. They plan on only being down the first two days, but as with all upgrades/changes, unexpected challenges arise.
It is recommended that you have such personnel processed to the point of having an EmplID in the system for 48hours and get their card prior to the 14th or expect to wait till the following week.
Other services across campus that use ID Cards
other than building access will be disrupted during the outage. Likely to only affect students, they include:
• purchase meals and snacks at all Campus Dining locations
• purchase snacks and beverages from vending machines
• charge pharmacy purchases at the Student Health Center
• purchase tickets at the MSA ticket window or the Hearnes Center
• charge laundry costs at a residence hall laundry facility (Residential Life residents only)
• purchase ice cream from Buck's Ice Cream Parlor
• purchase meat from the MU Meat Market
• purchases from the Pro Shop, greens fees, and rentals at AL Gustin Golf Course
• purchase materials and take classes at the MSA Craft Studio
• purchase flowers at Tiger Garden
... Again, card access to the facility will
NOT be affected.
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Google Drive 5GB Announced… But Are You Handing Over Your Data?
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
MU DoIT and DCRC IT both highly recommend staying away from cloud storage services like Dropbox, SendIt, MS Skydrive, MegaUpload (defunct), etc and now
Google Drive. More so with work related data... absolutely for data falling under MU's
Data Class 2, 3 or 4 definition or any personal data that could lead to identity theft or abuse.
Why? Well, Google's EULA (end user license agreement) you must agree to before using Google Drive sums it up very clearly... we get to go through your data!
The unique portion notated in C|Net
article by Zack Whittaker...
"Your Content in our Services: When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes that we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.
The rights that you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing that you have added to Google Maps)."
As he indicates, Dropbox and Skydrive are not so drastic, but their EULA's don't necessarily state they will not access, use internally, etc, just that the EULA doesn't grant them any specific legal or intellectual rights to your data.
Nothing is stopping these EULA's from changing and the service altering either. MegaUpload for example was shutdown legally, but although not all content was illegal, the owners of legitimate data may still be up-a-creek: C|Net
Mega Upload data could be erased... C|Net
Judge wants MegaUpload user data preserved for now.
Although what happened with MegaUpload is an extreme case, it shows that if the storage holding the data is not in your or your institution's physical ownership; access, availability and what exactly is done with it is not under your control and likely with extreme minimal influence.
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Parody: GMail Bring Morse Code Back One Tap At A Time
Monday, April 09, 2012
We couldn't help ourselves, but for a Monday, it's a great laugh to start off the week...

GMail Tap
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Major Infection of OSX Computers
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Getting the attention of many in the tech community, a botnet designed almost completely of infected Apple OSX computers has been discovered with an est. of 600,000 infections, almost half in the US.
A Russian company, Dr. Web,
broke the news citing the particular virus as the trojan Flashback (specifically backdoor.flashback.39), method of determination, etc.
It is a modification of an older flash exploit adapted recently to target Apple implementation of Java.
Apple released a patch on 4/4 which can be applied by doing a normal Software update in OSX; however, that doesn't help those who are already infected.
The nastiness of this virus is that it will install regardless if an Admin password is given or not, intelligent enough to identify if it has been given admin priv's and adjusting if it hasn't.
F-Secure has validated the finding and released a
notice on how to identify if a system is infected. Gizmodo gives a
bit more user friendly
breakdown of this.
This is a Major breakpoint in the common miss-perceptions that Mac's are inherently immune to viruses and proves the fact that it's simply a matter of hackers seeing the number of Mac's as worth the trouble of trying to create viruses for. With the boom of the iPhone and iPad increasing Mac sales at home, along with many of those not installing AntiVirus software... well that 'worth the trouble' has just been proved.
Original C|Net Story
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