CAT Prints - the online newsletter of the Department of Computers and Telecommunication Services
VOLUME 5, ISSUE 3

JUNE, 2004

CATPrints goes online-only

The CATPrints newsletter first appeared in March 2000.  Fifty issues have reached your mailbox printed on a single sheet of paper since then, representing some 52,000 sheets, or a hundred reams.  This sixteen foot-high stack of paper has brought you many informative and interesting articles over the last four years, and we have now decided that it is time for the newsletter to go paperless.  This will give us the opportunity to give you direct links to other websites, it will allow us to insert images of very high quality, and most importantly it will remove the self-imposed restriction of a single sheet of paper for the content of our newsletter.

This newsletter will come to you each month as a web-formatted email message.   You receive it because you are subscribed to an email listserv - catprints@listserv.oneonta.edu.  You may choose to unsubscribe from this listserv by clicking on this link and sending the resulting message to our list server.

Student Interns creating virtual campus

Since January, two student interns from the Computer Art major have been working on a digital model of the Oneonta campus.  This model will allow the web development team to make animated flythroughs of the campus, create realistic illustrations of campus scenes from any vantage point, and can be extended to make renditions of proposed changes to the campus.

Mike Stavrides, who graduated in May, has completed the central quadrangle of the model.  Terry Brosseau is picking up where Mike left off and plans to rough out the rest of the campus by the end of the upcoming semester.  You can see samples of the model at this page (QuickTime is required to view the video animation).


Digital model image of the central quad

What our staff is up to...

Joe McMullen and George Couse are doing part of the wiring job that will bring telephone and network access to Higgins Hall in time for its first residents.  "We are assembling three hundred pair to supply connections to that building, in addition to the fiber optic cable that runs through the ground conduits." Joe explained. The work requires a great attention to detail and a methodical approach.  Each set of four wires must be wrapped around the correct set of terminals in the campus switchroom to ensure that signals take the correct path.  The work is also being done on a fairly tight deadline.  "We have to have basic service to the residence hall before a certificate of occupancy can be issued," says Joe, "so we plan on finishing the job before the end of July.  Coworker George Couse is handling the splicing of the fiber optic cable that has already been run in segments from the switchroom to Higgins Hall.
If you have a question for Computer and Telecommunication Services about:
  • Computer or network problems - x4567
  • Telephone service or problems - x2577
  • Directory assistance - x3500

College Email Broadcast Policy

An email broadcast is a mass email sent by Computer Services to all students, all faculty and staff, or both. Messages will be approved using these criteria:

  1. Messages must be approved by the President or his designee.
  2. Broadcasts are made in case of emergencies: urgent messages of general concern.
  3. Notification of campus network or other computer related events that affect many users.
  4. Last minute cancellation of campus-wide events

See the entire policy at this link.

New College Virtual Tour

The Web Development Office has been working away at creating a Virtual Tour for the College.  The tour is online and contains images, text, video, virtual reality sets and audio recordings.  You can now browse through the completed sections of the tour.  Audio and video requires QuickTime. Check it out!

Hardware for the Blind

Researchers at Wright State University have developed a system that uses a camera, a headset and backpack computer to help a blind person navigate their world.  Slightly more far out are experiments being done to create implants that will take a video image and transmit it directly to the optic nerve of the blind person.

Outlook Mail Tips

Making an advanced graphic signature for your email messages

We all "sign" our email messages - usually with text.  Many people use Outlook's Signature settings to create a custom text block that is attached to every message they send.  Some people go so far as to use Outlook's Stationery settings (Tools- Options- Mail Format- Stationery and Fonts) to create colorful messages with different fonts for the body and the signature.  Recently we were asked about the possibility of appending a "real signature" to an email message; it is possible, but pretty involved to set up.

First you have to sign your name on a piece of paper, preferably with a fine-tip marker.  Then you scan the piece of paper and save the image as a gif or a jpg image file. Incidentally, once you have this scanned image you can use it in word-processed documents like letters - the signature will look just as good as a real one.

If you create a simple little webpage and insert the image of your scanned signature (and other imagery or text, for that matter) into the page, you can then copy and paste the contents of that page into the signature box in Outlook and/or Outlook Web Access.  Then any message you send will have the contents of the little webpage appended to the end of the message.

If you are interested in doing a customized signature file, or in learning how to make a website generally, your best bet is to sign up for a training session in Microsoft FrontPage.  Call Phil at the Web Development Office (x 2710) or Jiang Tan at the Teaching, Learning and Technology Center (x 3520).

A discussion of non-legitimate email (spam and virally-generated messages)

Non-legitimate electronic mail has become a global problem, far outweighing the total number of legitimate messages sent across the internet. These unwanted messages fall into two broad categories: Virally-generated messages and Spam messages. Virally-generated messages are created by computers that are infected with various examples of computer viruses, trojans or worms. Spam messages are generated by entrepreneurs using mass-mailing software.

Costs of bogus messages

There are significant costs associated with both kinds of unwanted email messages. The person receiving these messages has to spend a fair amount of time sifting through their inbox, looking for a relatively small number of legitimate messages. This process is complicated by the ability of spammers and viruses to masquerade as senders known to the user. It is also quite common for desired messages to be discarded by mistake among the many false messages received on a daily basis. In addition to lost productivity and missed email, there are costs associated with efforts made at the server level to stop incoming bogus messages. There are also real costs and lost productivity resulting from infected machines on campus that require service from desktop support offices.

What we are doing to reduce unwanted email

Virally-generated messages

Computer Services attacks the virally-generated message on two fronts.

First, the Administrative Computer Service’s Secure Desktop Program is a largely successful effort to make computers invulnerable to infection from known viruses, trojans and worms. Any new computer, and any computer brought in for service is automatically converted to a Secure Desktop configuration, which requires no further user intervention for the application of patches, updates or other maintenance. The Academic Computing Service’s ASCI program offers similar protection to Faculty users. The College also switched to SOPHOS antivirus software, which is freely available to all faculty, staff and students. This greatly reduces the incidence of bogus email generated from within the campus.

Secondly, if an infected message arrives at the College’s email server, McAfee’s GroupShield software strips the viral content from the message before delivery. Messages that appear to contain viruses are the leftover husks of messages that have been stopped by GroupShield. More than two thousand such messages have been stopped in the week ending June 22. In the near future the College will be upgrading from McAfee’s GroupShield to Sophos to take advantage of the industry leader in antivirus software.



Unsolicited commercial email (Spam)

Spam requires a different approach. Computer Services uses two additional methods of reducing the total amount of spam arriving in users’ mailboxes. The College subscribed to a service a year ago that tracks known spammers around the world. A second list was added about six months ago. This allows Computer Services to block messages originating from those senders at the mail server. An average of forty thousand such messages each day are being blocked from arriving on campus. A second line of defense that has been successfully tested and is now available for users is SpamBayes, an application that resides on the user’s machine. SpamBayes learns what the user considers bogus email and actively filters every incoming message based on those learned criteria.

These efforts have resulted in a significant reduction in the total amount of unwanted email arriving in College users’ inboxes. For some users the net result may be less impressive – we are stopping an increasing percentage of unwanted messages, but the total volume of bogus email out there is also increasing at an equal or greater rate.


Communicating with the user community

Computer Services has had a continuing strategy to communicate the nature of unwanted email and ways to deal with it. New threats posed by viral messages are frequently announced in broadcasts and posted on Help Desk web pages. Information about all kinds of bogus email has been communicated in the Computer and Telecommunication Services Newsletter, CATPrints (January & July 2002, April & November 2003, March 2004) and repeatedly in other I.T. newsletters from Academic Computer Services, the TLTC and even the State Times.


Pursuing New Strategies

There are additional technologies available for further reducing the amount of unwanted email – but it should be understood that implementing them invokes an increase in cost and a decrease in privacy.

In-depth scanning

Stopping unwanted email messages is a balancing act between intrusiveness and privacy. If users are willing to tolerate the automated scanning of email for specific key content, a much more thorough job of filtering spam and viral messages. The ultimate fate of messages is also debatable – they can be automatically deleted, or can be dumped into a special folder on each users’ account for later review and deletion.


Message signing and encryption

Another possible strategy involves the use of electronic signing of messages. This technique can guarantee that a message from an individual is really from them and not spawned by a virus or a mass-mailer. Signing can also be used for message encryption, greatly enhancing privacy for internal email communication.