The LionMail Pride is complete

Many of Columbia’s grad students have now joined the undergrads on LionMail. As of about two weeks ago, we’re all one big, happy LionMail family. Here is the press release from CUIT:

CUIT is pleased to announce that many graduate schools are now using LionMail, Columbia’s Google-powered email and calendar solution.

On January 15, over 12,000 members of the Columbia community began using LionMail. This included graduate students from Continuing Education, the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Journalism, along with adjunct faculty from Continuing Education and staff from the School of the Arts.

“The Journalism School welcomes the opportunity to use LionMail, because the convenience and security it offers will enhance the user experience. There has been great anticipation for the implementation of this system,” said Nicholas Lemann, Dean, and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. The first phase of the transition includes students, while faculty and staff will be added at a later date.

(more…)

The new face of Courseworks

The next Mark Zuckerberg works in CUIT, and he’s created a social network exclusively for Columbia students. This isn’t your grandmother’s Courseworks, with its “graphical log-in.” This is a cutting-edge social network.

Every Columbia student now has a profile (just click on “Profile” under “My Workspace”). Here, you can list “Personal Information” (favorite TV shows, favorite quotes, links to other social networks), upload pictures, and post 140-character status updates. You can also add classmates as “connections” by searching their names—but only official Columbia names, so you’re William, not Bill—or shared interests.

Or you could take advantage of the site’s best new feature: “roster.” Roster lets you see the names of all the students in each of your classes—and you can do that now, by clicking “Next Semester.” You can also see their pictures if they’ve enabled that in Courseworks’ privacy settings–making finding your next date that much easier. (Unlike most networks, Courseworks’ default privacy settings are extremely strict: even your friends aren’t allowed to see your favorite TV shows or send you messages.)

Like all good social networks, Courseworks also has games, though there’s only one and it’s only for professors. CUIT says that course instructors can play “Facebook flash cards” (subtle, right?), which lets them view their students’ pictures and try to guess their names. It even keeps score, reminding professors just how many students never went to office hours.

Courseworks is so good that we figure it’s only a matter of time until the playboy venture capitalists come calling, whispering in CUIT’s ear that it’s not cool if the site only goes down a million times during finals. Until then, we’ll be uploading inappropriate pictures and friending everyone we know.

Bwog kindly asks you to forget about our own terrible experience with graphic design for the next two minutes while we rail on someone else for embarrassing design in order to release our finals aggression.

For those of you who haven’t been frantically checking SSOL for your grades, the login page is currently splashed with a gigantic holiday well-wishing from CUIT. The department is apparently staffed with tech geeks from the ’80s, since the design is approximately 100% clip art and eerily reminiscent of CubMail.

While we appreciate the sentiment, CUIT, could you at least have spent a few more than 5 minutes on your ”2012_holiday_card.jpg”?  Maybe throw some gifs in there?  Or a video like when we got our online acceptances?  Better yet, why not a lovely picture of the whole team in ugly holiday sweaters? Then you’d at least be hip with the kids.  We love that you’re sending us these cheery vibes, but it’ll take a lot more than that image to brighten this season.

If finals have you too lazy to hyperlink yourself to SSOL, enjoy the offending holiday spirit:

Update, 1:30 am: Facebook, CNN, and Wikipedia are now back up!

Try going to Facebook. Now try CNN and Wikipedia. If you’re in a Columbia-owned building, it’s likely that none of these websites will load. But the websites themselves aren’t down. If you try them from a non-Columbia IP or from your phone (once you turn off WiFi), they load just fine.

For some reason, these websites (and possibly others) are apparently only blocked on the Columbia network. Since we stopped being able to access them earlier tonight, we’ll assume it has something to do with Hurricane Sandy, rather than CUIT deciding to block a bunch of popular websites for no reason.

We’ll try to reach out to the powers in the morning and let you know what we find out. In the meantime, let us know if you find other websites that are currently blocked at Columbia.

Literal firewall via Shutterstock

UPDATE: Wi-Fi seems to be working in Butler now. Confirmed in Butler Cafe. Rumor has it that all of NINJA printing is down. Tweets suggest that printers are down in the Diana and Barnard Library.

The campus network definitely isn’t working in Butler, and hasn’t been for over an hour; hearsay is that it’s been out at other places on campus.

How are we to print those Courseworks readings off ten minutes before class, now?

(Couldn’t resist.)

The froshpeople seem to have gotten the hang of things already, but you old fogies who still use CubMail directly are in for a rude awakening. Over the last few weeks, CUIT has been shuffling your shit in preparation for the move to Columbia’s new Google-powered platform, LionMail, on July 31st. That’s tomorrow. To avoid adding one more headache to your weekday hangover, here’s what you need to know come morning:

• As many of you who have already evolved beyond the troglodytic CubMail likely already noticed, Gmail users can no longer use their UNI as an alternate e-mail address.
• In a similar vein, those of you sneaky enough to have created a UNI@columbia.edu personal Google account will have encountered the conflicting account alert some time in the last few weeks.
• Any e-mails larger than 25MB were not transferred to LionMail. To move any such monolithic messages to LionMail, sort your CubMail inbox by message size and forward them to yourself tomorrow!
• If you want to set up LionMail access on your mobile device or an external client, you’ll need a special device password (distinct from your UNI password). CUIT has prepared step-by-step instructions for configuring most popular mobile and e-mail client platforms.
• Though LionMail will give you access to a university wide directory of UNIs, CubMail address book entries with multiple contacts will not be copied to your LionMail address book. To re-create them, copy the e-mail addresses into a text file and then paste them into a new contact group in LionMail.
• LionMail comes with the incredibly powerful Google Calendar; check out CUIT’s introduction to the system, including how to import your New CourseWorks schedule (!!!)
• Obviously undergraduates without prior access won’t be able to log-in until tomorrow, but the link for your bookmarks is the ever-straightforward lionmail.columbia.edu and sign-in is with your UNI and UNI password. If you really want the user manual for first-time login, check out CUIT’s guide.

The effect this will have on your life if you already use forwarding

In an e-mail sent out earlier this afternoon, CUIT’s LionMail team informs you that they have their grubby hands on your data and they’re doing some fancy new-fangled shuffling—but don’t worry, they’ll be gentle:

Dear Undergraduate Student,

We hope you are excited about your upcoming move to LionMail @ Columbia.

On July 31 you will be start to use [sic] your new LionMail account. Beginning July 13 your existing CubMail messages and folders will be migrated to LionMail. This process will be transparent and will not affect your use of CubMail or any other email clients.

Before the process of moving your data begins, please review some brief information: <http://cuit.columbia.edu/lionmail-pre-transition-steps>

If you have any questions or concerns about the transition, or any other information, please contact the LionMail help team at askcuit@columbia.edu.

Sincerely,

The LionMail team

Semi-Transparent Square via Wikimedia Commons

This isn’t exactly a novel occurence, but CUIT compromised files which contained the “names, addresses, social security numbers, and bank account numbers” of members of the Columbia community. Oops!

How did this happen? ”A Columbia University Information Technology programmer inadvertently and erroneously saved a file on a University web server that could be accessed from outside Columbia. Unfortunately, that file contained personal information of approximately 3,500 individuals.”

In what may be a clever attempt to avoid this sort of thing going forward, those “potentially affected by this incident are receiving a letter via postal mail.”

Didn’t Columbia already mess up once today?

As we heard in January, Google Apps (“Lionmail”) are slated to replace Cubmail. It’ll be called Lionmail, which is like cubs, but grown up. Everyone will get Lionmail by 2012, but 1000 lucky students will score it in mid-April, as part of the trial “Phase One.” If that interests you, sign up for the lottery that they emailed us about.

And if you want a sneak peak of the future holds, a tipster sent in what may well be the login page. As of now, UNI login does not work.

The future of eight years ago is the end of this year.

Of course, Barnard already has gBear, which means fun shit gets to happen over there. Let’s pray PrezBo ends up replying to a school-wide listserv disaster; it would be nice to hear from him.

Full email after the jump

So that's why it's called NINJA...

The LAPD raided OccupyLA yesterday, arresting 200 and dispersing protesters without much conflict or violence. (WSJ)

Dershowitz believes the key to peace in Israel is Palestinian Chicken — he recommends Prime Minister Netanyahu watch the hilarious Curb Your Enthusiasm episode with Palestinian President Abbas in an interview with the Current. (Tablet, Current)

Columbia researchers believes America is vulnerable to crippling cyber-attacks and exploding printers. HP disagrees. (MSNBC, LA Times)

Transit officials believe haikus are the key to preventing road rage and violent collisions in New York’s most dangerous intersections. (MSNBC)

Unassuming instrument of war via Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve been having trouble loading a page or three, you’re not alone as it seems that Columbia’s internet is down just about everywhere.  Which, of course, makes us wonder how you’re reading this in the first place… (Yeah, yeah, smart phones—we know.) No updates yet on the situation, but you can check for the latest on the CUIT alerts page.

Update: The internet’s back…

Update 2: … but Courseworks is down—hope you didn’t have anything due at midnight!

More Updates: A little big of digging around led us to this, suggesting that CUIT might have rebooted their systems ahead of schedule. Still, a bit odd that Courseworks is down also; it’s not yet clear if the outage is at all related.

Final Update: Courseworks is back up, hopefully marking the end of the Great Internet Blackout of 2011. Still, don’t be surprised if there are more sporadic blackouts throughout the day (particularly between 6 and 7 am) as CUIT reboots its wireless around campus.

Or just ask your local neighborhood SEAS kid

After you’ve bounced around College Walk amiably signing up for several dozen club listservs, there comes a point when you regret reckless innocence. Now you have 40 extra emails a day that you might have read during NSOP, but now you just don’t have time to care about capoeira or Parliamentary Debate. Department listservs can be even worse (looking at you History Department). Sean Zimmermann reports on how to file for divorce.

As some students may have noticed, CUIT has changed the system that manages club mailing lists. Because the system has been upgraded, the old system for subscribing and unsubscribing from mailing lists around campus, majordomo, is no longer supported.

What does that mean for me? Well, it means there is a new way to unsubscribe from all those mailing lists you signed up for during that activities fair. Here’s how you can manage your mailing lists:

1. Go to lists.columbia.edu
2. Find your desired mailing list.
3. Follow the instructions to (un)subscribe.

So simple!

This also means that there are a few changes for clubs which manage listservs. Now there are no more approved codes, and you can no longer subscribe students by email. You must manage the email lists from the new mailing list admin website here: https://lists.columbia.edu/mailman/admin

Because there are no longer approved codes, clubs have two methods of sending messages to a moderated list. You can either send messages to the list, and use the web interface to approve them manually, or designate specific members of the list to be able to send messages without moderation (in the list website, find the person in the member list, and uncheck the “mod” box).

Note: This only works for mailing lists that end in @lists.columbia.edu. If the mailing lists ends in @columbia.edu, go here: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/email/maillist/

Unsolicited!

Amid those emails from your TA and that club you went to once just for that cute girl, you may have noticed messages from mysterious aliases, lists-cc@columbia-listserv-cc.listserv.org or columbia@lists-columbia.listserv.org, inviting you to join an even more cryptic “Columbia Listserv.” While these emails may appear to be legitimate and the site claims to be “institution-sponsored,” CUIT gave us the following statement yesterday:

Columbia University Information Technology is aware of unsolicited emails received by students that promotes ‘Columbia University listserv’ or Columbia-listserv-cc’. This company has no connection to Columbia University and has now been blocked from contacting students via email.

If you have created an account on this site thinking it was Columbia-affiliated, we recommend you delete it immediately. That is, unless you want to grant Listserv.org the right to “use, copy, reproduce [...] stream, broadcast or otherwise exploit” what you post. Remember, not everything that claims to be true on the Internet is actually true! For instance, here’s a video of a recent statement President Obama made on the POTUS Project.

What was that assignment again?

No, it’s not just Butler Wi-Fi… Courseworks is down! According to CUIT, they’re doing “emergency work,” but everything will be back to normal at 11pm. So hurry, that’s about 22.5 more music videos you can watch guilt-free!

Update, 12:36 AM: Relax and go back to work!  Courseworks is back up.

The latest from the world of student government:

• As part of the push to open more rooms for student use (after the giant disappointment that was the opening of Lerner 6), the four councils have secured space in Broadway and Schapiro for future student group use.  To help determine the best use of the space, students from all four undergraduate colleges are being asked to fill out a “Campus Space Survey.”
• University Senate sources tell Bwog that any Senate action on the smoking ban is “a long way off,” and the ban is not popular with many Senators.  As for the survey, student government members tell Bwog that the release of students’ UNIs requires signoff from a dean in each school, which has slowed the release of the survey.
• After last week’s passage of the resolution on “gender-neutral housing,” the various Deans are now “in conversation,” and said conversation should finish before Winter Break.
• Both ESC and CCSC passed a resolution creating a Varsity Show Technical Fund; the show ended last year with a large surplus, and hopes to use the money to help other arts groups. The fund will be administrated by CCSC, ESC, and GSSC (which is voting on the resolution tonight).
• In today’s most ironic development, CUIT has told CCSC that it is open to switching to a Google App for that mail system you forward to Gmail Cubmail. Ever better: CUIT claims it’s always been open to switching, but students just forwarded their email to Gmail instead of complaining.

- MMT, photo via Flickr