Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brachiosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!romig From: romig@brachiosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Steve Romig) Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy Subject: Re: Ohio State University CIS Policies Message-ID: Date: 4 Jun 91 15:04:18 GMT References: <1991Jun3.173731.14094@eff.org> <1991Jun3.195222.16317@eff.org> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 73 In-reply-to: kadie@eff.org's message of 3 Jun 91 19:52:22 GMT 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