Ian Walker Sperber takes us through the latest exhibit at Hartell Gallery, which gives a retrospective on the formats and features of early personal computers.

Cornell Information Technologies will require Cornell affiliates to sign on with their NetIDs when using CIT-operated computers beginning in the 2011-2012 academic year.

Cornell Information Technologies has developed and introduced a program to clear the University’s computers of the unsecure personal information of students, faculty, and administrators, and ensure that any information retained is secure after the 2009 security breach that left 45,000 at risk of identity theft.

So as many of you already know through reading the Sun or word of mouth, Cornell WebMail has now been skinned with Gmail to form Cmail. Curious, I decided to take it for a spin and try it out.

Once I had set up the account, the resulting page looked a lot like my iGoogle home page, only with a giant banner on the top of the page reminding me that I’m looking at a Cornell-run page instead of my own.

Certainly this is a general improvement over the fiasco that is Cornell’s own server (remember when course enroll started and the server went down several times?), but it’s not perfect, and I’ll tell you why:

Myth: teenager gets accepted to college, buys a new computer, packs things up, and flies out to start a new life.

Fact: teenager gets accepted to college, buys a new computer armed with an atrocious amount of processing power, RAM, and graphics card, packs things up, and flies out to start a new life.

Today we'll focus on the issue of the vastly overpowered PC that has become commonplace by industry standards. Let’s face it, how many of us actually looked at the tech specs on our computers before coming to Cornell? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question.

Firstly, I want to show you the recommended specs for Microsoft Office 2007, which is a staple for most college students:

The Information Technologies sent out an alert yesterday advising all individuals on campus to exercise caution when using University computers. In the statement, sent out by Tom Young of I.T. Security, there are three “immediate threats to our computers and networks” — fake video software, hijacked network connections and a work called Conficker that is expected to undergo changes today.

“The I.T. Security Office has noted a large number of computers that became infected with [malicious software] when fake video software was installed,” the I.T. special bulletin read.

If there are any words that nobody ever wants to hear, they‘re that “you have a virus on your computer”. Just thinking about the word virus sends chills down someone’s spine. While there are genuinely benign viruses that annoy you (the ambulance virus comes to mind), other viruses, such as Trojans that allow others to access your computer, are not so friendly.

So obviously, antivirus programs are a big market that is expected to reach over 9 billion dollars by 2009. However, not all them are the same, and not all of them pack quite the same punch against the nasty little buggers floating around the Internet.

Human rights activists, including myself, agree that the government has no authority to decide what is censored on the internet because this is a constitutionally protected right of an individual. The government cannot decide what another person should be able to see and do on the internet, as this is a personal decision. The internet serves as a vehicle for expression and therefore, limitations other than for criminal activity should not exist. As stated by the Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Steven Shapiro, “the government has no right to censor protected speech on the Internet, and it cannot reduce adults to hearing and seeing only speech that the government considers suitable for children”.

It's well known that software RAID solutions are noticeably slower than hardware ones. Still, when I built my PC last year, I chose to use the onboard G-RAID anyway assuming that at least it was better than nothing. I wasn't expecting the performance to be so horrendous.

More than 1,000 Windows computers at Cornell fell victim to a widespread “bot” infection, the Cornell Information Technologies Security Office announced Friday evening through a University-wide e-mail alert.

A bot is a piece of malicious software, or “malware,” that can automatically perform various tasks that may range from downloading more malware to stealing passwords to attacking non-Cornell internet websites or servers.

None of the infected computers have shown observable change that can be seen by the user, according to Wyman Miles, manager of security engineering at the CIT security office. He explained that the lack of symptoms was probably a “deliberate attempt by the malware authors to conceal an infection for as long as possible.”