05.10a University Wireless Security. I've not been posting for a few days because of grading here at IU and because I gave talks at DePaul University and the American Law and Economics Association. I discovered that Northwestern, like Harvard, has the bad policy of setting up a VPN network such that only people with the college's own computer accounts can use the wireless service. Neither university seems to have conceived of the idea of short-term guest accounts, such that a visitor could log on. There were email stations at the conference, but no way to upload and download files. This not only made it hard to update my weblog; it reduced the quality of my comments on conference talks because I couldn't look up the papers being presented, other papers I thought the presenters might want to know about, or people's email addresses. If we ever have a conference at IU, I had better make sure we have a more sensible policy. Actually, I had better start now-- it can take many months to get this kind of thing done. Network administrators are like librarians. Librarians hate for people to actually check out books, and network administrators hate for people to actually use the network. [in full at 04.05.10a.htm]

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