Social Media and You

Many readers of this blog are students, they are among the Internet’s biggest consumers and producers of social media content.  They are more connected than any previous generation – with cell phones and other devices keeping them online and interacting constantly.  This has created many opportunities, but has also lead to some new forms of bullying, stalking and other crimes.

Some of you blog, tweet, or at least update your status on Facebook.  Many companies have rules about what can be blogged, sometimes they are quite permissive, other places are very strict.  Be sure to learn about those policies when you are employed.

Schools also have rules of conduct.  More than one student has been surprised to find there can be academic consequences for their actions.  Everyone at UW is governed by Policy 33.  I recommend you read it, it’s good to know what is expected of you, and whom you can contact if you or a friend needs help.

http://secretariat.uwaterloo.ca/Policies/policy33.htm

If you ever experience harassment or other crimes while on campus or the Internet, get to safety and then get help.  I would be glad to assist if your crisis involves computing or networks. 

Erick@uwaterloo.ca

Wifi in classrooms

UW Wifi

The UW campus wireless system is built with technology from Aruba Networks.  There are approximately 1,000 Access Points (APs) in the main buildings and 600 APs in housing locations.

Most campus building use 802.11 b/g, whereas new buildings (e.g. E5) use a/b/g/n, which allows for higher speeds and more channels which can be used with more APs to address more concurrent clients.

Usually each AP can service 10 people well, up to a practical maximum of 20 concurrent users before service becomes too degraded.  To plan the numbers and placement of APs, the intended use of space is considered.

For low density usage, such as offices, 1 AP per 6,000 square foot is about the minimum density and was the standard density used for most of campus as Wifi was not initially used extensively.  To achieve higher density of clients, APs can be moved closer together.  APs function best when each has about 2,000 or more square feet of coverage.

Larger teaching classrooms can hold 120 students or more.  In most cases, we cannot accommodate everyone using a laptop concurrently with the existing deployment.  To make the rooms usable requires multiple APs, one for each group of 20 users packed in 300 square feet.  The approximate cost is $50 per seat assuming 20 users per AP at $1000 for conduit, cabling, AP, etc.

IST is responsible for Wifi.  They know coverage is inadequate in numerous locations based on complaints from users.  You can leave messages about wireless at http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/request

Exciting new technologies using Wifi will help us engage students in the coming years.  That is not fully possible with the current coverage.  But, of course, until the facilities exist it is frustrating to impossible to try these technologies, so they must be a priority.

As always, Email me if you have comments or questions.  erick@uwaterloo.ca

Recent Lab Upgrades

With the backing of our Dean, Engineering Computing renews our nexus labs every few years. 

Last year we added the new Gear lab and the Student Design Centre. 

Last year the WEEF lab was overdue for an upgrade; it was completed by the start of the Fall term.

In January, 2011, an upgraded Helix lab came back online.

We're working to move some labs to Windows 7, not all the software is compatible yet, but we'll get there soon.

Let me know how we’re doing.

Friendly Email Address

The account name you log into when you use Nexus, check Email, or use Ace is usually initial then surname all truncated to eight characters.  And if you are unlucky enough to have a popular surname, you may have a number inserted to make your userid unique, and then cut off at 8 characters.  I count 2,613 people with the surname ‘Wang’ currently registered.

Maybe you would like a more personal Email address, one that doesn’t have a number and doesn’t truncate your last name.  Well, they are available to all members of the UW community.

A feature called friendly Email addresses lets you get Email addresses like Steven.Brown@uwaterloo.ca or Steven.M.Brown@uwaterloo.ca, etc.  It forward Email from this friendly address to your real Email account.  You can tell your mail program to specify the friendly address when you send mail, and users will come to know you only by the friendly address.

To learn more about friendly Email addresses, see http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cs/FriendlyEmailInvitation.pdf

Erick

Moving Email to IST

This post was published in the February 2nd Iron Warrior.

The Faculty of Engineering is getting out of the Email business.  Student Email is moving to IST’s Mailserivces during reading week while faculty and staff are moving to IST’s Connect over the coming months.  Students who use MyWaterloo.ca and let the system auto-select the Email server will be redirected when the accounts move to Mailservices.  Your @engmail address will be valid for quite a long time, we will forward Email to the new addresses.  Your preferred new Email address will be userid.@uwaterloo.ca

How things change.  During the entire month of October1988, Engineering Computing processed approximately 1,000 messages to our undergraduate network from the Internet.  Within two years, we were processing 1,000 messages per day and deploying new systems to keep up.  Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system.  Our Email growth reflected the rising connectedness of the world.

The first mass Internet spam was in 1994.  Spam quickly became a parasite on servers, and attachments added load, forcing us to upgrade to ever more powerful servers every few years.  Now it is pretty common for 1,000 message to blast to our Email systems per minute (or more if they could), and the vast majority of it is spam, much of which is discarded before you see it.  Not only are the spam rates climbing, the spammers are getting more sophisticated and harder to detect.

Today our Engineering users communicate with people worldwide and they themselves are offsite – 65% forward Email to Gmail alone.  This makes sense; Gmail does a better job than we can ever do on campus.  They offer more storage, a better user interface, better spam handling, Email for life, etc.  The days when UW could compete on Email are long over.

For the last few years, Engmail used an open source package called SpamAssassin to try to classify spam using a variety of techniques. It does not catch all spam (I’m sure you noticed this), and it has false positives which may cause some valid Email to be treated as spam.  IST also uses SpamAssassin for Mailservices and Connect.

For added measure, IST use gray listing, which uses a system of delays to try to weed out spam.  Under gray listing, a good percentage of off-campus-originated Email is delivered hours later than it was sent.  Under testing Engineering Computing staff found these delays rendered Email effectively useless.  Worse, several important Emails never made it through.

IST’s gray listing is already turned on as part of the transition.  You can turn off gray listing for your Email account at  http://mailservices.uwaterloo.ca/greylisting-toggle.php

Many are questioning why UW is still offering Email locally.  Google does a far better job, it’s also a lot cheaper and the money saved would be better spent on other endeavors.  IST’s mail clusters consist of more than 20 server class computers; it’s expensive and history suggests it will need constant staffing as well as frequent upgrades and overhauls.

Youth today are relatively unimpressed with Email; they favour other technologies for most of their communications. There are essentially two reasons why people feel students need UW-related accounts (though they could be hosted offsite).  Students need a way to communicate with faculty that is secure and uniquely identifies them (UWuserid) – but Email is still an insecure protocol, anyone can impersonate anyone else - a closed messaging system on Ace would be better.  The other factor is that students prefer to correspond with employers and potential employers with a UW branded address.

Google Apps for education would offer Email for life, calendaring, 7GB of storage, word processing, spreadsheets, sophisticated sharing, all with no ads and excellent privacy. It’s already used by thousands of universities.  Microsoft’s Live@Edu competes with a similar array of features and followers.  

However, there is an impediment to transferring student (and faculty and staff) Email to Google or Microsoft – neither company will guarantee that the data will stay in Canada and be subject to Canada’s and Ontario’s privacy laws.  Most likely it would be hosted in the United States and be accessible under the Patriot act.  WLU got around this problem by suggesting Gmail accounts (with WLU branding), but offering optional WLU locally-hosted Email accounts for anyone who preferred the local account.  100% of the students took the Gmail option.

Graylisting - Why is some Email taking so long?

Effective January 2011, Email to all Engineering students (and many faculty and staff) has been going through IST's mail cluster.  There is an article in the February 2nd 2011 Iron Warrior explaining that in more detail.

The cluster uses a system called graylising to try to reduce spam.  Graylisting uses a strategy of delaying Email to see if the sender is probably more legitiamte than many primative spammers.

In my experience, Graylisting has some limited success but at the cost of timeliness.  Email from an offsite address that hasn't written to you in the last seven days will often be delayed, either minutes, hours, days, or sometimes the mail will be lost due to graylisting.

Friends may become upset they can't reach you, or may make lunch dates that you don't know about.  Several people in Engineering Computing ran into problems when we were first subjected to graylisting.

Graylisting doesn't approach the level of spam control on gmail. 

If you expect Email to be delivered in seconds, you will want graylisting turned off for your account.  You can do that by visiting: http://mailservices.uwaterloo.ca/greylisting-toggle.php

Erick

Putting in the Hours

Some Engineering plans use nexus more heavily than others. 

Here are the median hours spent by people in each department and term during fall 2010.

The chemical numbers are lower than the true values because ChemEng wasn't running the software logging usage on their lab computers, so time spent in ChemEng rooms were not coujnted.

If you have any comments, feel free to Email me at erick@uwaterloo.ca

Giving Feedback

As I write this blog entry, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan are going through major political change.  By the time you read this, I’m sure the status of these countries and probably others will have changed again.  It’s an incredible time.

In most of these recent events, the Internet has played a strong role; WikiLeaks was partly responsible for Tunisia’s demonstrations and services like FaceBook and Twitter helped to fuel the flames and organize protests.

In Canada this year, FaceBook and Email campaigns have had impacts on decisions at various levels of government right down to the uwaterloo logo, lasers anyone?  Or Engineering’s PDEng program – our faculty now conducts student surveys on PDEng every term.

What many people don’t realize is that Canadian governments and institutions like UW actually want your input and are increasingly embracing the Internet to collect your views.  As citizens we often think our only power is to turf the players out every few years and complain the rest of the time, but we can also write email, join facebook groups and participate in online surveys to help get change more quickly.

Savanna, our co-op this term, is conducting a survey regarding computing in the faculty.  You can help us plan for the future by completing the survey online.  It’s anonymous and only takes a few minutes.

http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/computingsurvey/

Feel free to write to me at erick@uwaterloo.ca if you have comments regarding computing in Engineering or at UW, good or bad.

NOTE The survey is now closed.  Savannah will summerize the results shortly. Thanks to the hundred people who participated.