UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

I have recently learned that CCA is not compatible with screen reader software, which is often used by vision-impaired people.
Since, in a former life, I helped develop screen reader software and other software for vision-impaired people, this topic is of great interest to me.
The particular software that Cisco personnel tested is called JAWS.
A Cisco employee stated on a CCA mailing list:

CCA Agent is not JAWS compatible yet (verified).

I am wondering if a vision-impaired student who is forced to use the CCA client agent could sue the university for violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)...

Instead of harassing people who exposed flaws in CCA, Resnet should have done their homework before buying such flawed software...

In the last couple of days, there has been a lot of news about a certain hexadecimal number, starting with 09-F9.
See, for example, this story on CNet, this one on Slashdot, or this story on the BBC website.
The story nicely shows the power of the Internet. Once a secret is on the Net, it can not be suppressed. As Lauren Weinstein notices, "you can't effectively censor the Internet."

Wired collected some creative responses to the crackdown attempt.
Another one is this artwork using Google Earth.
I also like this letter, since it shows the absurdity of the whole thing: the number is quoted in a legal letter...

In early November of last year, I found an interesting letter from the Office of the UCI Dean of Students in my mailbox.
With that letter, I was informed about a complaint that alleges that I violated "several University of California, Irvine policies."
A scanned-in copy of the letter is here. Besides me, two other individuals also got such a letter. We apparently were named as "co-conspirators" in the complaint.
The following day, I got a copy of the complaint. It was about my involvement in exposing security flaws in the Cisco Clean Access product, and writing about it, on security mailing lists as well as here on my blog.
Reading through the complaint, it very quickly became clear that it was frivolous and utterly bogus. Besides attacking my free-speech rights, and my rights to freely perform security research, it also contained sections I consider libelous and slanderous.
Subsequently, we informed several UCI School of Information and Computer Sciences faculty, including the school's graduate dean, about this complaint. They then had meetings with the person in the Dean of Students office responsible for such complaints, in an effort to dismiss the complaint. Other administrative personnel also intervened on our behalf.
And quite frankly, the complaint is so obviously bogus that it should have been dismissed immediately. It seems that the Student Judicial Affairs people at the Dean of Students' office mostly deal with cheating undergrads and the like, and not with graduate students who perform legitimate security research. Freedom of research is a hallmark of a university, and administrators in an auxiliary service like UCI Housing do not have any rights to limit research just because they don't like the outcome
Fact is that it is not possible in this Universe to reliably detect the operating system of a remote computer. If Resnet personnel thought otherwise when they bought CCA, they obviously didn't do their due diligence. And when I point that out, they react with bullying... Too bad for them that I am not intimidated by bullying
Anyway, after a meeting in December with the Acting Director, Student Judicial Affairs, in the Dean of Students' office, it became clear that they wouldn't be going forward with the complaint, and a couple of days ago I got the official word:

Due to our discussion last Fall 2006, I determined that in the interest of all parties, we will not pursue a violation of university policies.

That was of course the only outcome possible, and I hope that in the future, the Dean of Students office dismisses such obviously frivolous and bogus complaints right away, without the need to have students and faculty spend a lot of time explaining the bogus nature of such complaints.

I have noticed that apparently, the weekly CCA database cleanup date changed.
Usually, this was done at 8am Monday morning, with everybody required to log in again. But that didn't happen this morning.
Instead, I got logged out on Saturday afternoon, with my login script picking that up and logging me back in at 3:15pm.

As I mentioned earlier, Resnet has started updating the network infrastructure in on-campus housing.
One of the touted improvements is supposed to be a faster speed:

The new switches will increase port speeds from 10Mbps to 100Mbps

So, yesterday was the big day of upgrade at my place. But alas, while there was a speed increase for a short time, they went back to the old 10Mbps speed, as the logs from my Linux box show:

bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Down
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 100 Mbps full duplex
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Down
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 10 Mbps full duplex
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Down
bcm5700: eth0 NIC Link is Up, 10 Mbps half duplex

I got a new IP address, but other than that, everything is as slow as always. Not much of an "upgrade"...
I do know that the wiring to the box is not CAT5, so it is probably the wiring that needs to be updated to get the faster speed.