NetBlitz, one of five services that allow users to access BlitzMail through a web interface, returned on Nov. 14 after a brief outage. The popular service is currently being hosted on a different server and is available at a new URL, NetBlitz creator David Marmaros '01 said that the current arrangement may only be a temporary solution.
NetBlitz was originally written and supported by Marmaros when he was an undergraduate computer science student at Dartmouth. He now works at Google.
"It was originally on my CS account, so it was deleted after I graduated," Marmaros said. "But I thought, 'well, people seem to want to use this, so I'll find some other place to put it.'"
Marmaros entered into an agreement with the alumni relations office to host the service on a Dartmouth server and was given permission to log in to the server from off campus in the event that NetBlitz needed maintenance. He stated that the service has had very few outages, estimating that, since inception, it has remained functional 99 percent of the time.
NetBlitz, however, did experience an outage on Nov. 13 after Systems Services, a division of Computing Services, upgraded the server's operating system. Although Systems Services staff contacted Marmaros and asked him to log in to fix the program, when he attempted to log in, he discovered that his account had been suspended.
David Bucciero, director of Technical Services, said that Marmaros' log-in privileges had likely been removed as part of a recent general purge of accounts belonging to people Computing Services no longer considers affiliated with the College.
"Improving security has been a focus for about a year," Bucciero said.
He said that his department had determined that allowing anyone whom it considers to be unaffiliated with the College to have any access to other users' BlitzMail logins posed a security risk. While Marmaros himself cannot see the passwords of users who log in to NetBlitz, a program that runs on the NetBlitz server does briefly use this password to connect to the BlitzMail servers. The password is then encrypted and stored on the user's computer in a session cookie, which is a method for temporarily storing information on a computer.
Marmaros said that he asked Computer Services to restore his access, but that the request was denied. Instead, he has installed NetBlitz on additional servers.
"I wanted to set up something for people to use in the interim," he said.
One copy of NetBlitz, Marmaros said, is currently active on a Stanford server that he has access to as a part-time student in the university's computer science master's degree program. Another copy was installed by a system administrator on a server owned by the Dartmouth Institute for Security Technology Studies, according to Marmaros. The version of NetBlitz running on ISTS servers has since been removed.
The "Bring Back NetBlitz" Facebook group links to the version of NetBlitz hosted at Stanford. As of press time, the group had gained 203 members since Marmaros created it on Nov. 14 .
Four other webmail services, WebBlitz, Webmail and two services provided through VanBlitz, are available for undergraduate and alumni use, although only WebBlitz and Webmail were functioning at press time.
Bucciero said that Computing Services planned to form a group to study the current webmail situation, with the ultimate goal of creating one web client that could be accessed easily by faculty, students, staff and alumni.
