Safe blogging

I have been going back and forth on a possible job change and a few months ago I mentioned to a friend that I was considering working for Microsoft. To which she responded, in all seriousness, “I don’t know if I could be friends with you anymore. I mean, they read people’s blogs.” There are a lot of issues with her (and everyone else’s) issues with the mega-company, but I don’t understand why anyone would think that blogs were outside of the purview of standard NDAs and other employee contracts. Or your responsibilities to your employer in general. It’s said that every blog entry is the start of a conversation. Personal blogs are often used to have a conversation with the world about whatever is on your mind or going on in your life– you post your thoughts and then through posted comments, emails in response, spoken comments when you see your readers in person, etc., you get feedback and the conversation begins. In some ways, it’s just like striking up a conversation with a friend, an acquaintance, that guy sitting next to you in the doctor’s office waiting room or that girl you meet at the bar. Except, of course, your voice’s reach is magnified infinitely and your words are recorded for all of posterity somewhere on the Web (I’m convinced that nowadays, you just have to post something onto the Web once and it will live on in one form or another for the rest of time). So this means that you should only be that more careful about what you say– you wouldn’t (or at least shouldn’t) tell just anyone confidential information or announce corporate secrets loudly in a public place, so why would you do it on the Web where it’s that much easier for someone to “overhear” your words? And you probably wouldn’t trash talk your company in front of your boss, so why would you do it in such a public forum?

Granted, your personal blog is just that: personal. But it’s not like your employer is tapping your home phone or digging under your mattress to look at your pink Hello Kitty diary. They’re simply going to the public place in which you have posted your words. I mean, by posting on the world’s giant corkboard, you’re kind of asking for it. And if I were running my own company, I would certainly have people surf the Web for references to it, whether it be a news article on a major news site or an entry on an employee’s blog. It’s essential to know what others (and your own) are saying about your company, good or bad.

Of course, it’s a little hypocritical for me to say all this considering how often I vent about the downward spiral of university policy on this blog. But that’s one of the nice things about working for a university (at least for now)– you’re given more leeway when it comes to freely expressing your opinions, at least compared to a corporate environment. But even under the protection of academic freedom, as a University employee (and specifically not a faculty member), I do have restrictions on what I can and cannot talk about and as hard as it may be to believe, I do follow those restrictions here. And as acerbic as I might get here, I never say anything that I wouldn’t say publicly, especially considering my boss has told me that he’s read my blog. I mean, hell, I admitted in the first sentence of this entry that I was considering a job change. And for Microsoft too!

When good computers go bad

So, I mistakenly thought I was qualified to install a CPU fan by myself. Silly me. My friend built me a custom computer about three years and it has been chugging along great all this time. However, the CPU fan was loud, so I bought (with his help in selecting one) a replacement with a “silent” rating. Now, I had early misgivings about whether I would be able to pull this off or not, so I was going to wait until someone could help me. But, in a fit of misguided enthusiasm, I ended up trying to install it myself. In the end, the only thing that was still working in that stinkin’ computer was that fan.

There are probably a whole handful of things I could do to try to fix it, but in an effort to find a quick solution, I threw money at the problem and went and bought a cheap replacement tower that was actually better than the old one. I figured I could just grab the data off of the old drive and then sell the parts from the original computer to make up most of the cost of the new computer. Ah, silly me. In the end, it was probably good that I bought the new computer because I can’t even get the new computer to see the main partition on the old drive, the partition filled with my old email, gigs and gigs of mp3 and video, photographs and more.

I’m still holding onto some hope that I might be able to grab some stuff off of the drive, but I’ve slowly started rebuilding my life. Thanks to things like Ofoto and Plaxo, I’m able to recover some stuff. But alas, I doubt I’ll be ever to recover over six years of collecting digital music. Especially since iTunes doesn’t have a data-in-the-sky model. Or just a download-as-many-times-as-you-need model. The record companies win again.

Educational freedom

Jason Schultz, an EFF attorney wrote an entry in his blog about Penn State’s presentation at the EDUCAUSE policy conference on its ban on students running servers and their new Napster program. Schultz gets it right when he points out the problem with Penn State’s approach to copyright problems– they’re simply taking computing tools away from their students and hindering educational experimentation. If anything, computing has become that much more essential to student life and having computing resources not only available for use, but also for experimentation is an integral part of the educational experience today.

I recently went to a presentation/panel discussion on computing resources at Stanford during our Admit Weekend. Our department has been doing this for years and one of the main “frequently asked questions” we answer during our preliminary spiel is “Do I have to have my own computer?” We give our usual answer of “no, you don’t have to have your own computer” and point out the many public computer clusters available in every residence and in central locations all around campus. And while this answer may thankfully comfort the one or two kids who can’t afford their own computers or who don’t want to get their own computers for whatever reason, the reality is that the vast majority of students today are digital natives (see Rich Holeton’s presentation on “Generation Keyboard”). Most of the students in the incoming class we spoke to (Class of 2008) were born in 1986, some in 1987. That means that they have never known a world without the personal computer and few of them can really remember a world without the Internet. Despite all the talk about the Digitial Divide, even if some high school students don’t have computers of their own, they often have at least a “family” computer in their home or have access to computers at their schools. And no matter how old those computers or how slow those Internet connections might be sometimes, nobody is writing their papers by hand anymore like we did (remember “cursive”?) and nobody is using the five-year old encyclopedia in the library for the research either.

So, when these digital natives make it to college and are often presented with, more often than not, technology resources so much greater than they previously had, isn’t it natural to allow them to experiment, to explore, to learn? College is huge step in the pursuit of learning– young people are making the decision to be full-time students, (hopefully) committed to pursuing their course of study. Students who live on campus are even more immersed in the educational process and, as the residential life programs on many campuses reflect, their entire lives, not just the part of it they spend inside the classroom or doing classwork, is an educational experience and universities who choose to embrace this can give their students an incredibly rich and valuable experience. As Schultz mentioned in his blog, both Google and Yahoo! were started by Stanford students running their own servers. Stanford has always had a relatively liberal network usage policy specifically to encourage that type of entrepeneurship, self-learning and initiative. And it doesn’t just have to result in a multi-billion dollar IPO– there are countless ways in which students have experimented with computing resources to do great things and learn important skills, such as setting up and running a server, creating and running a Web site, learning about networking or security, and more. And the rewards we reap aren’t always through enjoyable experiences. Getting your server hacked is a valuable lesson learned early for any budding system or network administrator. When mp3 technology first became popular and students suddenly began sharing files through Windows networking, IRC and FTP, the huge bandwidth and network usage was an early lesson all those years ago to students and university staff– digital music would be an important issue in the future. We all know Napster was the work of a college student and spread like wildfire first on college campuses and while the RIAA and the MPAA might think that this is the very argument against letting students experiment, I disagree. Napster and everything like it has revolutionized the way music is distributed and sold and, more importantly, has made us stop and reevaluate unfair and, in the light of digital technology, obsolete copyright laws that have gone unquestioned for so long.

Some have responded to Schultz’s article and many university system and network administrators, not surprisingly, have commented that they believe Penn State’s policy to be fair and reasonable, citing liability issues. Some (in not very nice ways) try to argue that unlimited and unrestricted network usage is not a right and students should be focusing on their studies, not running servers out of their rooms or downloading music. But university policies should not be driven by fear of liability, but desire to fulfill the educational mission. And to think that coursework is the only venue in which learning can and should be pursued is shortsighted and narrow-minded. While universities, of course, may not be able to outright ignore complaints accusing students of breaking the law, they can avoid implementing policies that will, instead of protecting them from possible liability, more likely only hinder creativity, innovation, and ultimately, learning.