Spot that little book button near the top? Wonder what's in there.

While most of us are enjoying the new email system at Dundee Uni hosted by the nice folk at Microsoft’s Office 365, many of us are noticing something else new… the spam!

I may have a theory as to why this spam has suddenly started pushing its way through to us in loads like we have never had before.  Many of us have chosen to syncronise our online Outlook account with Outlook on our PCs, it’s simple to do and it means our emails are available on our computers offline, but it’s not just syncing your emails.

The complete address book of Dundee University.

If you are using Outlook on your PC right now, click the Address Book button on your toolbar, what do you see?

That’s right, the entire address book including emails of students and phone numbers of staff is synced directly onto your computer, not such a big deal right?  Think again.

There are litterally thousands of people who are potentially using Microsoft Outlook to read their Dundee University emails.  What happens when just one of them gets a virus?

One of the major characteristics of a virus is that it spreads itself.  The most common method of doing this is through spam and if you have a virus on your computer, where’s the first place it’s going to look for people to send emails to?  In Outlook’s Address book.

It just takes one person using Outlook to get a virus and thus give away every single email address of Dundee University Students and Staff.  I’m not just saying it’s going to happen, I’m saying it almost certainly has happened and it’s a fair bet that somewhere out there, there’s a complete list of our email address on someone’s server ready to use for whatever they want to send us.

Just sign up to get your own free sticky notes board.

One of the most basic techniques of Agile is the use of a board with sticky notes on it to represent things that are to be done, in progress or have been completed.

I wanted something that could represent this Agile Board online, something free and simple, so I’ve created www.myagilityboard.com.

To get your own free sticky notes board online that even works on touch screen devices, just go and register and get going.

Update:  I’ve added the ability to change note colours and will soon be launching a feature that allows for you make your notes public to the world if you want.

So this post is more for people at Dundee University.

One of the most irritating things about the email system at Dundee University, is setting it up on your own computer.  With a little enquiry you might find out that this can be done using IMAP and by just Google searching for “Dundee IMAP” you’ll find a page with settings on how to do this.

These settings are wrong!

The IMAP settings on the Dundee University website have been incorrect for the entirety of the three and a bit years that I have been here so to save you some pain, here are the correct ones to be able to receive but also send emails on any device (this includes your email enabled smartphone).

Dundee University IMAP Settings

Incoming

• Email Address: Your dundee email address, i.e. abexample@dundee.ac.uk
• Username and Password:  The username and password you use to log into groupwise normally.
  (this is often the same as what you log into uni computers with)
• IMAP Server: imap.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: SSL
• Server Port: 993
  (This is usually set automatically by your device)

Outgoing

• Username and Password: Same as above
• SMTP Server: smtp.dundee.ac.uk
• Security Type: TLS (yes, TLS, not SSL)
• Server Port: 25

This is what works for me, leave a comment below if it doesn’t for you or to tell us about your other Dundee University Email woes, of which I’m sure we all have many.

Some of you may have heard that over the summer I’ve got an Internship with Tayside Police as part of my degree, helping to improve their online presence not just on their website but through Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to better engage with the community. With that said, I’d like to point out that like always, my views expressed here may not necessarily reflect those of any group whether it be corporation, public sector body or educational institute or indeed anyone. These are my personal ramblings as an individual and a computer scientist.

In recent weeks, a small hacking group has come to light known as Lulz Security. They have gained fame in hacking major internet based companies and releasing information to the public with the aim to highlight, what Lulz Security see as, their flawed security systems.

With hacktivist group Anonymous making headlines on a daily basis, Lulz Security’s attacks are not a new phenomenon however, I do believe their motives should not be seen in the same light.

While I have struggled to agree with some of the hacks that Anonymous have performed, I do agree that they are performing attacks based on a moral objective and I have to say, I have found myself agreeing to some of their recent targets. Anonymous have made great attempts to fraught the work of state run operations to censor and remove the human rights of people around the world, like in Tunisia where the people are being oppressed and are calling for freedom.

“We will not forgive corruption, we will not forget injustice, we will not tollerate the denial of our freedoms and we will not be silenced.” Anonymous Press Release

While I may not agree with every single action that Anonymous take, I do very much agree with what they stand for. I can not say the same for Lulz Security.

There are many suggesting that Anonymous has joined hands with Lulz in what they are calling operation AntiSec however I do not believe this to be entirely true. What we must remember is that Anonymous doesn’t have a leader, really, Anonymous could be anybody and everybody so while many who consider themselves to be part of Anonymous may support AntiSec, it is not my belief that the majority of them do.

Lulz Security is not following a moral purpose, they are not fighting organisations that seek to oppress and while they may be seeking to expose companies with poor security, I believe their targets may be poorly chosen.

Yesterday, the website of the Serious Organised Crimes Agency in Britain had to be taken down after receiving a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack by Lulz Security and government organisation like our police forces have been left worrying about attacks on our own services.

However, while Lulz succeeded in attacking SOCA’s website, what did they really achieve? They achieved the feat of taking down a page that does not hold secure data but rather only offers information to us, the public. If anything, they succeeded in censoring information made available to all of us. Isn’t that the opposite of what Anonymous is aiming for?

Yes Lulz Security showed that this site was susceptible to being overloaded with requests but as someone working on a similar site, I’d be confident in assuming that most public websites of law enforcement agencies are just as susceptible as, in this economic climate in which tax payers money is to be spent sparingly, such protection is afforded only for mission critical systems.

Most websites run by police forces are not on expensive web servers like those of Facebook and Google but in fact, quite ordinary servers, not much different to those used by small businesses as they do not require major processing power to run and they do not hold secure data. They hold data that is online for the general public, to raise awareness of their missions to help the public.

I think Lulz Security, while they may believe what they’re doing is right, has become arrogant and have in recent weeks shifted away from aiming to be a force for good, but have instead moved to only work for fame through their ability to show off as they attack companies, showing “flaws” that are frankly, unimportant when greater issues exist else where in the world and online.

My name is Andrew Paul Barratt, I’m a student of Applied Computing at The University of Dundee and on the 21st of May 2011, I tweeted the identity of a man who has a super-injunction to hide the fact that he had an affair as Ryan Giggs.

There exists a paradox in the campaigns for internet freedom, the campaign to protect the privacy of ourselves and others online and the campaign to be able to say anything about what we want, who we want and how we want. I say this to show that we recognise that respect for privacy is of great importance however, the use of this to put limits of our freedom of speech is a place where the line must be drawn.

In the United Kingdom, an injunction can be sought after by those wishing to keep matters of their personal life private by denying the press from publishing details of said matters. A super-injunction is much the same but goes one step further in that it denies the press from making public the fact that an injunction even exists.

Recently, Ryan Giggs, a footballer who has played for Wales and been honoured as an Officer of the British Empire (OBE), claimed a super-injunction to hide the fact that he had an affair with ex Big Brother Housemate, Imogen Thomas.

After his name, previously known only as CBT, was leaked on Twitter, calls for prosecution were made, igniting a rampage of rebellion with thousands of people, including myself, tweeting and retweeting Giggs’ name again and again.

On the 23rd of May, at least 75,000 had published his name and Member of Parliament (MP) John Hemming stood in the house during discussion on privacy orders and named the footballer, thus using his parliamentary privilege to break the court order. It’s worth noting that parliament is always broadcast live on dedicated national television channel, BBC Parliament.

Mr Hemming asked whether it was right to carry on supporting injunctions that it was clear that the population of the United Kingdom had no support for, referring to them as “a law that clearly does not have public consent.”

And so the key point was addressed, in a democratic country, where the government that makes the laws is chosen by its people, how can a law that goes against our freedom of speech have ever been allowed to exist? I for one, will not support it.

Today, the 25th of May 2011, Twitter’s European boss, Tony Wang announced that they would hand over the names of all those who had revealed Ryan Giggs’ affair and that all of them would be on their own to defend themselves, “whether that is a motion to quash the order or to oppose it or do a number of other things to defend themselves.”

Well my decision is to oppose it. I will not delete what I tweeted and I will not be made silent. It is our freedom of speech and it is my right to defend it. Injunctions that deny our right to say what we like are, in my opinion, illegal and I will campaign to see an end to them.

I hate exams, I fail exams. Well that’s not true, by some miracle, every exam I’ve taken in college and uni I’ve passed but only just.

It’s exam time again, I’m revising but everything I read doesn’t stick in my mind. I can do the work but not the exams but to prove that I can do the work, I have to do the exams. Fuck.

To top things off, this summer I’m meant to take a summer placement, I’ve known for months and months that I want to do my summer placement in one of the internships in the School of Computing that appear every single year, this way I’ll have experience in working in a university role which is where I want to eventually end up. Only, this year seems to be the one year that there are no internships in the school, so I’m fucked there too. From what I hear, the only places in the school this year are unpaid and I need the wage, let’s not forget that student loans stop over the summer period and I’ve got rent to pay.

I think I’m just going to have to do a last minute rush looking for a different summer placement, hopefully people won’t ask why I’ve left it so late. But then, if I fail these exams, which are harder than ever (as you’d expect), then perhaps I’m just wasting my time.

The game that I wrote as a project in third year is now available to download on the software page of my website.

Battle of the Crudely Drawn Dimensions is one of very few games which I believe is designed to be playable by both blind and seeing users. I’d love to know what you think, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

University students are given a time table, these timetables are very carefully organised at the start of the year, making sure classes don’t clash and meeting spaces are booked and assigned to the correct people. But these time tables affect more than just room bookings, a clash can cause more than just the irritation of a few people trying to use the same room at the same time, ignorance of time tabled classes can cause anti-social behavior and even university IT system outage as we have seen today at the School of Computing, Dundee University.

Today is Thursday and as with every Thursday, the entire second year student body of the School’s flagship degree subject, Applied Computing, arrived in the ground floor labs of the Queen Mother Building ready to work on group projects for a client who has employed the help of the university for a new IT system for his business. However today, they arrived to find Labs 1 & 2 both full, an unscheduled class had taken the use of the labs and all the computers contained in them, this left every member of the second year group crammed into Lab 0, the laptop lab. Usually our labs have people working in their own time, these people were also find themselves with no where to sit and so they also were having to use Lab 0, so first, second and third years students were all crammed into one small room.

Now the work issued required everybody to work with code that could only be tested once uploaded to the Schools computers, being forced to use their own laptop computers, students were needing to huddle round tables, with not enough power points for everybody’s chargers, they then had to connect to the VPN, a system that hooks an their ordinary laptop computer into the School’s local network, however, this is not meant for primary use and can only take 24 connections at a time.

With the VPN rendered useless by the large amount of people requiring its usage, the work set out for today’s lab could not take place, frustrations running high, the noise levels of this cramped lab climbed, soon people neglected basic manners and started playing music and videos loudly and thus the people who were trying their best to hold group meetings couldn’t hear themselves think.

We book rooms for a reason, so that when someone else needs a meeting space, they can check and realise which places are available and which places are not. It’s not just a nuisance when people are made to find other places to work, it can effect the infrastructure of the school, today it broke down the schools system so much that the primary goal of education was made impossible. Students couldn’t even work from home because the VPN was brought down.

So please, check the availability of a space before deciding to host your events there. Failure to do so is not just rude but can actually destroy the work of several other people.

It seems that we have become a rather nosy species, we always want to know how each others day was, what they got up to, where they went blah blah blah. This has been escalated to the point of insanity with the dawning of twitter. With twitter, a person may place online exactly what they are doing at any one time, a sort of reverse stalking, forcing public your own private life. The problem we seem to have is what our conscripted stalkers will do when we leave out certain details.

This is shown more than anything in the School of Computing, (see, this is a student relevant blog). Here at Dundee University’s School of Computing, most of us students are tweeters, and yes we realise that tweeting tweeters on twitter use some of the most insufferable jargon of any computer meme. When all of us are packed together in labs and lectures, we know exactly what each other are doing and thanks to twitter, now we can get confirmation of that fact with each others “in the labs” tweets. But now we know what each other are doing when we’re not in the class room. One can sit and say “Hey, Josh is in a Japanese Lecture, he’s bored.” We can say this because Josh tweeted so on twitter. But what happens when we don’t say what we’re doing?

Well i have observed the phenomenon that is “twitter status withdrawal symptoms.” I observe this when arriving to the labs and being demanded of my location and doings directly prior to arriving in the form of the question “where were you?!”

“Where were you?” has become one of my pet peeves. People now rely on twitter for my current activities so much that they simply cannot abide to not know what i’m doing if i do not tweet it. This peeve of mine resulted in a rather vulgar experiment today, what would happen if i did fill twitter in on the missing details?

The occasion that i hate being asked where i was the most is when i am returning from the lavatory. Having only been away for say two minutes, people have been so addicted to my current location updates that they wish to know where i was for such a minuscule moment in time. I threatened several times that i would start posting details of my bowel movements on twitter if they were so very interested. Today i did it.

When i was upon the throne today, i posted details of where i was and what i was doing in the form of “Daily Bowel Movements on Twitter.” Having been so sure that i was filling the final gap on twitter you wouldn’t believe the barrage of unwant i received in response to my tweets. Suddenly it wasn’t “where were you?” but it was “why would you tell us where you were?!”

It would seem that followers on twitter don’t want to know everything, but they don’t know that until you tell them everything, but of course if you don’t tell them everything, they demand to know everything. You see the dilemma?

Twitter seems to have turned us all into socially acceptable stalkers, but even then we don’t want to know everything about a person. Even if we are making our private lives public, it’s important to know what parts should be kept public, if just for our collective sanity. Unfortunately this does not solve the problem of the annoying question “Where were you?” but perhaps this rather nifty response of mine will:

“None of your business!”

I went to a party last night. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy it very much, been going through a hard time recently, my estranged wife left the country with my daughter and I’ve been struggling to enjoy much at all, so having found it rather depressing I ended up going home while no one was looking. Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with personal life, I’m just trying to prove a point. You see there’s a common belief in a stereotype of student. Students are young people, just out of school who want nothing more than to go out every night and get drunk and have sex. Hell it seems obvious that all we do is sex, drugs and rock and roll. Eugh, if only.

As student representative for my year, I’ve got to know all sorts of students and I’ll point out the definitive phrase there being ‘all sorts’.

It’s my belief that there is no such thing as a student stereotype. From what I see, the only thing that makes these people similar to each other is that they’ve all come to study at university. Student’s are from all age groups, countries, beliefs, attitudes and personalities. It just wouldn’t fit that they’d all be party mad kids. To facilitate so many different types of people, The University of Dundee has to be able to facilitate their needs, whether it be through activities, societies or support. See, I am going somewhere with this.

For every student and for every need, there’s a service. For the sporty student, there’s a club for every body punishing desire: fencing, swimming, athletics, canoeing… water polo? Hey you can even join the rucksack club, a club that was named so long ago that its members now live in fear of suggesting a new name.

Sports not your thing? Then how about the politics society? Book club? Perhaps you’d like to meet like-minded people of your religion, Christian? Buddhist? Muslim? There’s even a society for atheists.

This week I discovered that support for your situation can be found anywhere. My difficulties have been causing me to miss several lectures, I thought I’d better inform one of my lecturers why I hadn’t been attending and immediately I’d been invited to attend counselling on campus, an offer I must admit I refused out of my keen talent of stubbornness but it’s good to know that university services go beyond just activities, support for depression, financial issues and even your health exist right here on campus and all you need do is make contact. So what ever your need, or what ever need you find crops up, it’s nice to know that who ever you are, there’s something there for you.

So there is no stereotype of student, there are many different types of people attending Dundee University but this is not a problem, because Dundee University can accommodate for us all. Even boring anti-socialites like me. Now doesn’t that bring a smile to your face.