Another Educational Institution Surrenders to Fear

Ed Felton reports on the Educause Policy Conference in Washington,

Freedom to Tinker: Penn State: No Servers in Dorms: One of the most interesting parts of the day was a brief presentation by Russ Vaught, the Associate Vice Provost for IT at Penn State. He said that Penn State has a policy banning server software of all kinds from dormitory computers. No email servers; no web servers; no DNS servers; no chat servers; no servers of any kind. The policy is motivated by a fear that server software might be used to infringe copyrights.

Having banned things like student-served blogs and wikis, I hear that they are planning to ban typewriters and pens next. Never know what mischief they might get in to.