Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I attended the EDUCAUSE Policy Workshop last week. It was a day and a half long and whereas most of the content that was presented had little to do with policies per se, I learned a few things. Tracy Mitrano, who is the Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy & Law Program at Cornell game a David Letterman like talk where she outlined the 10 most important policy issues that all of us are struggling with starting from 10 and going down to 1.It really felt like a therapy session (I should have a disclaimer here that this is all based on what I know about therapy sessions by watching them on TV or movies). Eight of the 10 issues that she discussed were things that we have gone through in the last year and the pros and cons of each issue hit home right away. For example, the decision to pass along the RIAA notices to the students. The pros are that it is in the interest of the students and institution and may be required by the law. The cons are that we don’t want to be RIAAs handmaidens. I vividly remember that same debate happening at Wesleyan. The only difference was that as per Mike Roy we didn’t want to be “RIAAs lapdog”.

Similarly, the issue of CALEA came up and I remember the differences of opinion on the action to be taken between the library and ITS (we were acting on the lawyers’ advice). She even brought up the issue of Blackboard’s ridiculous patent violation lawsuit against Desire2Learn. The two items that we have not been paying attention to are: making our web site to be accessible for people with disabilities (Section 508) and the response to Breach of personally identifiable information (PII). I will bring these up at the appropriate settings to talk more about them and see how to go about them.

Most of the other talks involved members from the industry and I frankly found it annoying that they used this stage as a way to advertise their products rather than concentrate on policy issues. Especially a session involving music sharing that included bigwigs from Cdigix, Ruckus and the Universal Music Group. All of these companies are involved in alternate form of music and movie downloads at educational institutions and they spent time talking more about why their business model is better. The moderator made a reference to Bollywood music in India and their distribution. I had a question about that and more importantly, I asked the panelists to comment on a piece written by Steve Jobs on “Thoughts on Music” where he argues convincingly why DRM is such a bad idea. It appeared that none of the panelists had read the article. One of them commented that “it really does not matter what Steve Jobs thinks… the content providers seem to feel DRM is the way to go”. We know where Steve Jobs is and Apple is and where these guys are!!!

There was also a technical presentation on how to hide your identity. Tor and Onion ring were discussed in detail. A fascinating technology concept. Apparently a fair amount of universities have agreed to be the intermediaries necessary for this system to work. The true anonymization requires three intermediaries and I believe the universities that have agreed to participate are acting as the intermediaries. Those of us who have tried it find it to be very slow and in many cases unusable. However, if there is a lot of buy in, then speed may become less of an issue. Whereas this addresses the privacy issue, this also provides a platform for misuse. I am not aware of any safeguards that can be put in place that will prevent, for example, a child molester from using Tor! This poses a real challenge for us in that if we suspect any illegal activities on our network, tracing the origin becomes impossible.

This was an OK conference. The only annoying thing was that the Hilton hotel where I stayed was booked solid and I ended up getting a room right next to the freight elevator. The annoying noise stopped around 10:30, but started again at 5 AM. I complained to the hotel manager who was very apolegetic, but that didn’t help much!