In the 90s campus to me was like a small city that was self-sufficient in a lot of ways. The school provided its own services in-house. A prof also told me he would teach us what industry is doing wrong so we can correct it -- that academia was ahead of industry. The school chose the best tools and languages for teaching, not following whatever industry was using.
These concepts seem to be getting lost. These are some universities who have lost the capability of administrating their own email service:
- mit.edu → mit-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
- unm.edu → unm-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
- ucsc.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- ucsb.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- cmu.edu → aspmx.l.google.com
- princeton.edu → princeton-edu.mail.protection.outlook.com
I have to say it’s a bit embarrassing that these schools have made themselves dependent on surveillance capitalists for something as simple as email. It’s an educational opportunity lost. Students should be maintaining servers.
These lazy schools have inadvertently introduced exclusivity. That is, if a student is unwilling to pawn themselves to privacy-abusing corps who help oil¹ companies find oil to dig for, they are excluded from the above schools if required to have the school’s email account.
Schools pay for MATlab licenses because that’s what’s used in industry. But how is that good for teaching? It’s closed-source, so students are blocked from looking at the code. It contradicts education both because the cost continuously eats away budget and also the protectionist non-disclosure. A school that leads rather than follows would use GNU Octave.
Have any universities rejected outsourcing, needless non-free software, and made independence part of the purpose?
- Google and Microsoft both use AI to help oil companies decide where to drill.
email is the original fediverse. Everyone should be able to selfhost it with no problem. If you try it these days, you'll find lots of your sent mail ends up in people's spam folders. It's not because there is anything indicating that your email may be unwanted, it is because google wants (needs) everyone to use their shit instead, so they make it as unpleasant as possible for you to host your own. I've noticed that my emails to businesses rarely end up flagged as spam, presumably because businesses would not tolerate that from google, but "little people" have no say.
I've always thought that universities hosting their own (as they all originally did) would go a long way to repairing this mess. The more providers there are, the less impact Google's fuckery can have.
I have a postfix server that Google rejects. I was told I need to setup DKIM. Then I was told it’s not just enough to have DKIM configured, but I will be forced to solve Google’s CAPTCHAs before my DKIM is accepted. In the end I opted not to ever send email to google or MS recipients.
Perhaps universities could go as far as setting up DKIM but then refuse to support Google’s special needs (such as CAPTCHA solving). If email from the uni to a google acct bounces, no problem because the sender is at least informed that google refused their RFC-compliant message. But what if Google accepts the msg for delivery then files it as spam? Should the university mail server give the sender a notification that a msg was delivered but likely to a spam folder, I wonder?
