Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

If you check the thefacebook.com for updates, you might notice some “friend details” confirmations waiting for you. That’s because facebook now allows you to define what it thinks are critical aspects of the relationships you have with your friends:

You can specify any of the following attributes:

Lived together
Worked together
From an organization or team
Took a course together
From a summer / study abroad program
Went to school together
Traveled together
In my family
Through a friend
Met randomly
We hooked up
We dated
I don’t even know this person.

Of course, given the facebook’s known CIA ties, you may be leery of providing them with this much information…

Beginning this week, a campus wide “Cornell Unplug!” campaign will raise awareness and encourage users to cut energy use over the winter break. Since 2001, the highest average reduction in electric power use was 4,300 kW (last year was a bit lower at 3,800 kW). Our goal is to cut electric power use over the holidays by an extra 1,000 kilowatts over the high value, 1,500 kW greater than last year. Each 1,000 kW saves Cornell $25,000 for the 10-day period.

The campaign features the “Cornell Unplug!” logo, a rotating sequence of energy conservation facts on the university home page, and a list of conservation tips, together with an easy-to-use check list on the utilities department’s Web site www.utilities.cornell.edu/ .

(From an email sent by Executive Vice President Steve Golding)

I just wrote to CIT because their antispyware recommendation page doesn’t include Microsoft Antispyware:

It’s rather irritating that you push S&D as the solution to spyware when Microsoft offers the best formerly commercial solution now free to windows users:

www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

You should AT LEAST mention it on your spyware page, as quantitative tests show it to be about three times as effective as S&D, a homebrew hack.

This is based on my tests of antispyware products, but since FlexBeta had the same results, I don’t think I’m crazy here.

Update:

Tom Young, an IT Security Deputy Director at Cornell, wrote me back:

We have been keeping an eye on the Microsoft offering and it looks good — carries forward the virtues of the Giant product that MS acquired and new definitions come in via Windows Updates. Our problem with recommending this has been that it’s *still* in beta and we don’t know under what terms the ultimate product will be available, though it will likely not be free.

That said, we’ll talk with our partners at the Contact Center to see what they’d think of formally supporting Microsoft Antispyware.

Thanks for the reminder that it is time to revisit this issue.

It’s nice that they’re thinking of it–I guess Cornell is also called the “big red tape.” Things take forever to move from idea to implementation here.

Update 2:

Alex Koch writes in with this news.com story:

Ending speculation about whether it was shifting to a paid model, Microsoft said on Tuesday that it will provide customers with its new anti-spyware software for free.

The pledge, made by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates during his keynote speech kicking off the RSA Conference 2005 here, comes after the company had been testing its AntiSpyware application–technology it acquired with its purchase of security software maker Giant Software.

Since Microsoft antispyware will always remain free, there’s no reason for CIT to not start using it.