Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities
From: Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 22:19:57 -0400
On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 15:13:37 EDT, Clifford Collins said:
IT's response was that some thought, planning and a server were necessary to do it right and therefore more time would be needed to provide a supportable solution. Now the faculty member is saying she will just use one of the many "free" ones on the Internet. I'm interested in people's view of any risks or other down-sides to such an approach. Pointers to papers, analysis and whatnot would be appreciated as well. Your thoughts?
Others have mentioned the issues of data exposure - I'll raise a much simpler one. If she uses the free one, and there's an outage, what does she do? Remember there's a lot of failure modes - kamikazi squirrels taking out the power feed to the free provider (yes, it does happen), backhoes cutting your campus off from the Internet, and a whole raft of other failure modes that nobody will be in a big hurry to fix, simply because she's not a paying customer. The *nicest* thing about using a locally-supported one is that there is (presumably) a support structure that *will* at least answer the phone and *try* to fix the problem if it breaks. That's worth a lot more than people realize.
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Current thread:
- Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Clifford Collins (Jun 22)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Cal Frye (Jun 22)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Valdis Kletnieks (Jun 23)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities HALL, NATHANIEL D. (Jun 23)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Brad Judy (Jun 24)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities HALL, NATHANIEL D. (Jun 25)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Valdis Kletnieks (Jun 25)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Brad Judy (Jun 25)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Brad Judy (Jun 25)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Cal Frye (Jun 25)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities Alex Campoe (Jun 26)
- Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities David Gillett (Jun 26)