In his own words, Icarus Sparry tells us how what he is doing at the University of Bath, as well as revealing his own opinions on various aspects of networking, such as firewalls and network charging. Note: the views expressed in this column are purely those of Icarus, and may not reflect the views of Bath University and/or Bath University Computer Centre. This column appears in only the Web version of Ariadne.
What do do you?
My job title is 'Computer Officer', and I do everything connected with
computers. I am essentially third line support, as I was not brought
up to tolerate fools.
How did you get into this job ie what did you do before?
I used to work in Electrical Engineering, working on data transmission
systems over mobile radio links.
Firewalls in Universities - essential security feature or inconvenience
to open use of networked technologies?
Unfortunately they are an essential security feature - the Internet has
2 million plus hosts connected to it, and as I don't know the administrators
of each of these hosts personally, and therefore am unable to vouch for their
good motives, we have to protect ourselves.
Firewalls also help implement policy. At Bath it has been decided that using MUDs is not an appropriate use of our equipment. There are notices to that effect, but without a firewall they are just so much wallpaper. With a firewall the access can be blocked.
Firewalls also help people configure machines correctly or in a more sociable manner. All Bath WWW accesses go through a local cache, which helps reduce international bandwidth requirements. However none of the popular browsers come with a setup file designed to directly fit our needs. Without a firewall someone could just install say Netscape, and start using it. They would get worse performance, and use more bandwidth than if they use out cache. With the firewall in place, it just doesn't work, so they have to make the effort to find out about the cache.
Home pages - should students be allowed to use time and network
resources (is there any significant impact) on creating and mounting their
home pages? And should staff, for that matter?
Well, for better or worse, the World Wide Waste of time is here to stay, at
least for the next few years. It is a very useful source of information, and
even more so with search engines like AltaVista. The problem is that too many
people put up information and then do not spend time keeping it up to date.
The support implications for students creating home pages is fairly small,
so there is no reason why they should not be able to do so. As search engines
like AltaVista exist, staff can justify putting time into creating pages as
it can lead to contacts and ultimately research contracts.
Networking charging - various debates are ongoing onto whether network
access charging schemes for universities should be changed - your views?
I think it would bring back a sense of reality to the use of the
network. While there is nothing wrong with genuinely spare bandwidth
being used for recreational use, it currently impossible to do anything
sensible using the transatlantic links in the afternoon. Because of
this, and the important National services based at Bath, we have
invested in a link to Pipex. Unfortunately this is expensive (12k
per year for a 64k line), but it does deliver the needed bandwidth.
Obviously it is better to buy bandwidth in bulk, but until we have
technologies like RSVP in place to make sure that we get the bandwidth we
are contracted to get, then there is little to be done. Of course, if
the Universities paid 10 pounds per month per student then the resulting
money would solve almost all of our networking problems!
What Web browsers do you use, and why?
Lynx, mosaic, telnet and Netscape. I try not to download the silly pictures
that people tend to clutter their pages with, and Lynx works well for that.
The choice of telnet may surprise a few people, but it is a nice, clean way of
getting textual information, and also shows me exactly what is going on. I
use mosaic if I need to look at the pictures, and Netscape if I have to look
at some Netscape extended site, but I tend to discard those on the basis that
if they are not prepared to make the information available to as wide an
audience as possible, then they probably don't put much effort into the data
either.
How significant an impact do you think that mobile code, such as Java
applets, will have on the development of the Web as an information
resource?
I think it will have very little impact. Obviously it means that you can
have nice pretty moving pictures on your screen, but I have them turned
off anyhow, and more usefully you can have forms verified locally,
rather than having to transmit the faulty data. The network
computer idea, which should enable state of the art small machines to
again become less than 500 pounds (as the BBC micro and the Spectrum were)
is obviously a good. Having machines which you just plug in, and switch on
will make administration simpler. Byte-coded systems are
a good idea, but more work needs to be put into the security design.
Currently ActiveX says allow anything and relies on the producers of
the code signing it to ensure that it is correct. Java allows you to
do almost nothing by default, but users can enable it. This opens up a
whole range of social engineering attacks.
Javascript - what's the point? Is there one?
Javascript only confuses the issue w.r.t Java. Too many people do not know
there is any difference.
Pornography. Much has been made, often hysterically, in the mass media,
about pornography on the Internet, especially on the Web and Usenet. What
steps should or could academic institutions take to prevent students from
choking up the networks by accessing such material
Nothing can be done to absolutely stop it. Reasonable steps need to be
taken to reduce the risks that people inadvertently stumble across it,
so banning people from displaying it on screen in public places is reasonable
and proper. Informed adults should be allowed to view what they wish, but
owners of equipment have a right to say what their equipment should be used
for. So if a student wants to buy a CD full of pictures of Cindy Crawford
wearing little or no clothing that is fine, but don't use our computers
to view it, or our network to collect it - a picture is worth ten thousand
words.
One wish for what you would like to see happen in the world of
networking and the Web in the next year...
HTTP over TCP over IP to be dropped as a protocol, in favour of something
that uses lighter weight connections and a hierarchy of caches.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This article last updated/links checked on 12-Mar-1997