How shortsighted is this? UCSB

How shortsighted is this? UCSB (some American university) has banned windows2000 from their college network due to the problems they had last term with security. Instead they recommend replacing it with XP home….talk about crippling your pc! Why they don’t just get a proper policy set up which insists that all pc’s attached to the network are uptodate with patches and kill the net connection for those pc’s which aren’t. Not sure how you’d physically do that seeing as though the pc’s are the students own (I presume) but then again, how are they going to detect what OS they are running? If they can detect that, then i’d expect them to detect the patch level. Alternatively they could do some port filtering – but that could cause more problems….I guess if people use linux, then they are going to have even more problems with misconfigured servers with major security holes in it as its a lot harder to naildown a linux box if you dont know what you are doing….
Ironically the site that hosts the information is running Windows 2000 according to Netcraft

Finally – I’ve worked out

Finally – I’ve worked out what is wrong with Kelly’s website in that it keeps making adobe acrobat launch in the background. She has a counter at the bottom of the page and that is what is loading acrobat for some reason……It is the bit which loads the graphic up (the javascript) that does it although I don’t know why – all I know is that the counter does not load on the screen. Incidentally it also occurs when I visit the counters homepage.

Spent the best part of

Spent the best part of a couple of hours messing around with the comments. I can either give people the choice to allow comments or not, but no search facility – OR I can have search facilities but no comment switching (at least in the archives – it works on the main page for some reason at the moment….but I think that may be ie caching the main page.

My wife got an SMS

My wife got an SMS message on her mobile last night to say that as a loyal vodaphone customer she had won 400 pounds. The first message just gives a phone number (premium rate) to ring to claim. The second sms gives details of who is running it. Checking their website at http://www.4tc.biz its just a con to get your name and address and you get some travel vouchers for Airtours etc. So it is too good to be true. For the benefit of googlers, then the phone number was 09061744130