Got a discussion with Murganandam sir and here is some summarized details…I think it would better be public so I can get more suggestions.. I am still not sure that they are still gonna give gravity to this discussion .. :P In the image I included here, you can see our ‘cultural heritage’ has blocked a ‘games site cum chat room’ according to his intellectualism named http://latex-community.org/ …hmm..Here goes the letter I sent
Here I debriefed the points I discussed with you.
#1 Course Management System – There are several open sources which can be implemented to better course management .Like ‘Efront and ‘Moodle’ – The accounts there will have different privilege and hence a professor when signed into his account will have a different interface like submitting lecture notes with different viewing options, and the students will have account which will have privileges like student.
#2 Login Automation – It is possible to stay logged in a system and running a keylogger (as an instance) in the background process . So it would be a better solution that if anyone logged in the system all the users logged into that system will be automatically logged out. This problem is similar one that persisted in squirelmail some days ago.
#3 Header – It is easy to send a mail by using anybody’s email address using a small PHP script and the fact is none can trace it out unless until the header information is clearly checked. So we can create a filter to check that if the incoming mail ‘ if contains the domain tag ‘@niser.ac.in’ is really coming from ‘@niser.ac.in’ or ‘@gmail.com’ or otherwise it will be blocked’
#4 Gmail – A] Several students use gmail by forwarding squirelmail into it and it is easy and has better security than squirelmail and also has no limitation quota like 5GB or like that. So please don’t block that.
B] There is a feature in google name ‘google app’ which allows users to associate their domain name with gmail feature and it considerably low price like somehow not more than 2K per annum which is always an option of better management as one don’t have to take care of spaces and other things.
#5 Email Filter by Recipents – When an email is being sent to multiple recipents there must be a fishy thing in it otherwise why the batch mails are there.. ? So we can filter out the message if it has more than 3 recipients at a time.
#6 Anonymous complain box – It was a good suggestion came out from our group discussion. Most of the students fear to tell their opinion in public and what about creating a account of anonymous who can only send email to you. So he didn’t have to fear about him and this account’s password will be unchangeable.
#Blocking Sites and Torrents – Blocking facebook and other sites don’t really matter to anyone. Who were downloading are still downloading cause there are certain technologies in recent days which is literally unblockable by firewalls ‘invented’ till date and students here at NISER are highly intellectual atleast to invest their grey matter in these things. So who were doing things are still in the race but who is suffering is common guys as this things make lots of things in the block list cause the firewall the CCguys are using is an old firewall tech developed by CISCO and it blocks sites by URL name which is a quite a joke as if there is any site like ‘antisex.com’ it will be blocked as it contains the term ‘sex’.
#Authorized Login – Like ISI and everywhere else , one has to login by his username and password and then he can access anything. Now you can also monitor them. Atleast one can monitor the log system.
#Intranet – When a game of 22GB is released (Please don’t say torrent is blocked so that none can download. One can also say there is no activity of downloading the torrent by looking at the log details at using the UDP protocol and please remember the fact that everything is possible like channeling it to HTTP traffic to anybody’s account.) at least 15 guys download it and it is inevitable of any forces and so why no creating intranet like the IITs and MITs to share the things amongst the students and professors. We can share ebooks and literally personally I have an ebook stock of 100 GB which is quite quite huge and lecture notes of TBs, discovery documentaries. Those who have been selected to NISER as a majority doesn’t belong to the’ movie watching or game playing’ genre of guys. There are more good uses… far better uses of intranet and in this case the bandwidth will be ‘really’ dramatically will go down.
#Password Policy – It will be a simple javascript to force a user having a password which contains a special character, an upper case letter and a lower case letter. Many fellows have still their password ‘niser234’ or simply their phone number.
#Login Verification – If not logged in from the similar IP logged in he has to give answer to a security question which can a good solution as in now a days every tech gaint is using this policy.
#Database – Please install PHPmyadmin as it will better help customizing the things. I myself have a database as once upon a time I created a forum for Science Activites Club and it’s a real pain to main SQL database by writing codes. Don’t give excuse that you have to give extra privilege for that. It’s not like that and work well in different privileges. Passwords of some database are unprotected and password of them are clearly visible. Please tighten the security.
With regards,
Amit
Leave a Reply