Brent Anders, electronic media coordinator for the Office of Mediated Education, has created a new video to highlight the many new features and capabilities of the University Life Café website.
With the help of several actors, green screen / chroma key technologies, support of K-State Communications and Marketing (at Dole Hall), and some creative editing, the following video was created to invite students and staff to participate and contribute to the University Life Café site.
New K-State students, employees, and others should now have an easier time registering for a K-State eID through eProfile. The registration process has been streamlined and has several advantages:
ustom eID.StumbleUpon, a free plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser, enables users to search the Web in a fresh way. This system filters resources on the Web to meet the personalized interests of particular users.
This tool is a recommender system that combines a self-defined user profile of preferences, the recommendations of friends in a user’s social network (as expressed through Facebook connections), and similar users’ preferences.
StumbleUpon then combines high-end search capabilities, social networking, swarm intelligence and crowd sourcing, and popularity ratings — to filter websites to enhance targeted discovery (vs. more serendipitous Web search engine approaches).
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Q. I found a discounts webpage for KU Medical Center employees. Does K-State have a discounts webpage for its employees?
No, according to Human Resources. However, the State of Kansas has a STAR program (State Thanks & Recognition) that “offers State of Kansas employees an opportunity to take advantage of product and service discounts offered by various vendors throughout the state.”
Discounts apply to selected cellphones and computers as well as non-IT products. For more information, see the STAR website, call 785-296-4278, or e-mail star@da.ks.gov.
Faculty and staff can now order a K-State parking permit online using HRIS Employee Self Service. Parking Services announced the upcoming change May 13, and more than 600 faculty/staff permits have already been ordered online since the service went live June 1.
The ordering process is quick and easy. Faculty/staff may reorder the same parking permit as the previous year or select something different. Payment options include payroll deduction, credit card, check, or cash. After completing the online process, a confirmation e-mail is sent to the user.
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The “Traveling Safely” PowerPoint presentation from the IT security roundtable May 7 has been added to the other presentations available on the IT security roundtable website. Harvard Townsend, K-State’s chief information security officer, offers information that’s also good for those staying home — such as the latest security risks and safety guidelines for using:
IT crime statistics
Townsend’s presentation noted that ATM fraud is “rampant in Europe” and is also a growing threat in the U.S., with annual loss estimated at $1 billion/year, or $350,000 per day.
Laptop thefts remain a big concern. Six laptops have been stolen on the K-State campus this year (2010), Townsend said. An estimated 16,000 laptops per week are lost or stolen in airports (U.S. and Europe).
Continue reading “IT security: "Traveling Safely" PowerPoint slides from May 7 roundtable”
For those who missed the IT security roundtable April 9, it’s comforting to know that presenter Harvard Townsend (K-State’s chief information security officer) diligently documents the details in his PowerPoint files. The Safe(r) Web Browsing presentation (50-slide PowerPoint) that’s now online serves as a realistic roadmap of the latest dangers and defenses for K-Staters who want to be safer-than-sorry when browsing the Web.
As Townsend has said before, “The scary thing is you don’t even have to click on anything – just visiting a site with malicious code can initiate a download that installs malware on your computer without you knowing it.”
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Did you know your computer can get infected simply by visiting a website and not clicking on any links? Furthermore, it doesn’t have to be a nefarious site — many reputable, popular websites have inadvertently hosted malicious advertisements. If that isn’t scary enough, one study found that 13 percent of Google searches for popular or trendy topics yielded malicious links near the top of the search results.
Web browsing is now the most popular target used by hackers to try to take over control of your computer, so this month’s IT security roundtable will discuss how to browse the Web safely, or at least lower the risk of infecting your computer, since there is no way to be 100 percent secure browsing the Web these days.
Join us 9-10:30 a.m. Friday, April 9, in Union 213 to learn about:
A four-minute video provides a fast tour of resources available on K-State’s ETDR website and in iTAC for students creating their electronic theses, dissertations, and reports (ETDRs). Created by Marty Courtois, an ETDR consultant in iTAC, the video highlights essential aspects of the ETDR website including:
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Internet Explorer, the most widely used web browser in the world, has often been in the news of late because of its involvement in the recent, well-publicized hack of Google and other corporations, allegedly by the Chinese government. Since a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) is alleged to be one of the ways the hackers got into Google’s network, Google has joined the chorus of companies planning to phase out support for IE6 and are urging users to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). That chorus includes Facebook, YouTube, Digg, some European governments, and even Microsoft itself. There was even an “IE6 Must Die” petition on Twitter.
Now K-State is joining the chorus too. SIRT is proposing that on April 1, remaining instances of IE6 on campus be upgraded to IE8. For campus computers that use K-State’s central WSUS server, this update will be pushed automatically. System administrators managing their own WSUS environment or using some other way to manage application updates on Windows computers are urged to do the same.
If you have concerns about this update being pushed to campus computers on April 1, please discuss it with your SIRT representative or Harvard Townsend, K-State’s chief information security officer and chair of SIRT.
Continue reading “Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) to be updated to IE8 on April 1”
