[aklug] Re: too quiet...

On 6/12/13 7:57 PM, Christopher Howard wrote:

> Okay, now I'm just going to get annoying /and/ politically incorrect...
>
> But was there anyone else who got a little uncomfortable when UofA
> decided to transfer e-mail, calendar, documents, etc. entirely over to
> Google? Or am I just the lone, backwoods hick who can't see how the cost
> savings justifies complete loss of control?
>
> (Humorously, we /do/ require that Google authenticate against our auth
> system, thus preventing Google from seeing our UA passwords. The idea
> being: a company that has complete and unrestrained access to all of our
> e-mail communication, shouldn't also be able to log into our Blackboard
> accounts. :)
>
It's not just UA - UC Berkeley did it to. Politics aside it's
interesting that Google tries to call all of the shots when negotiating
with a campus that signs on. The campus has to agree to a
non-disclosure of terms agreement with Google that precludes a collegial
discussion in public forums of what is really happening - so goes the
world I guess. See:

"The good, not so good, and long view on Bmail"
Chris Hoofnagle

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/03/06/the-good-not-so-good-and-long-view-on-google-mail/

and perhaps:

"Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/sep/29/cloud.computing.richard.stallman

Stallman's webpage is here: http://stallman.org/

--greg

---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Wed Jun 12 23:03:14 2013