UNC Shows No Backbone

July 15, 2011

http://tdssupport.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/unc-shows-no-backbone/

In what has got to be one of the nuttiest stories I have seen UNC recently removed all access to University email systems by Elliot Cramer, Professor Emeritus. Why did they take this action? Well it seems they did so because a Joseph Villarosa in New York literally SPAMMED his will upon the Administration at UNC.

The story seems to go that Professor Cramer runs  a non-profit animal rescue or such and in doing so used his UNC email address in some emails related to the non-profit. Villarosa took issue with that and sent UNC a 90 page complaint of how Cramer had violated various polices. Professor Cramer complied with each request by UNC to remove any links from his UNC webpage or UNC emails to the non-profit but that didn’t satisfy Mr. Villarosa who continued email the staff, administration and legal consul at UNC.

At this point is when UNC Administration showed they had no backbone and threw Professor Cramer to the dogs as it were by removing his access to the University system. This sparked outrage by the likes of FIRE, Foundation For Individual Rights In Education, who took on UNC for bowing down to what they called a “heckler” and in doing so violating Cramer’s free speech.

I’m not going to go into every action and reaction but I am going to link to the huge list of emails between the various parties with the hope that you can bear to read the non-stop rants in order to catch a few items here and there. One thing I picked up on is the use of inserting a single pixel image into emails by Joseph Villarosa. This is an old trick used by spammers to check if emails are actually getting read. As a user opens the email in any email client that will display images (Outlook, Gmail, etc) the email client will pull down that single pixel image. The image itself isn’t seen in the email but on the server where the image came from it creates a log entry which you can reference, in Villarosa’s case he does so when apparently not satisfied with the response he got from UNC’s legal counsel he started emailing their IT staff, a Mr. Waddell and Mr. Padilla (about halfway down this huge list of emails).

The technology tie in here? Well we have the lack of a clear and equally enforced IT Access policy by UNC it appears, something businesses need to look at. We have spammer tricks in emails by using the hidden pixel image, hint set your email client to not display images. Lastly I think we have proof that UNC probably needs a better SPAM filter because in this tech’s opinion 99% of those emails should have never made their way to the end user. SPAM is a huge waste of end user time and needs to be stopped at the edge of the network of through some form of hosted spam filtering and in this case the amount of University hours lost to dealing with emails they really didn’t need to see had to have exceeded an entire work week by five or more people. Does your business have that much labor to give away?