To the Editor:
Daniel Ng's op-ed ("Network Failure, April 5) and Larry Levine's Letter to the Editor (April 15) both made excellent points regarding the importance of network redundancy and challenges of computer security at the College.
The tragedy in Dartmouth's case has been the shift over the last decade from a mostly Macintosh campus to a mostly Windows PC campus, one that has led to a skyrocketing of support costs (wait, I thought PCs were supposed to be cheaper?!) and network issues generated by peer-to-peer clients, spy-ware, and Outlook-based worms and viruses that run through the campus network like they own it.
Every PC I have seen in the last several years has had a bout with nimda, mydoom, code-red, code-blue, etc. etc., not to mention Gator and other spy-ware programs. On the other hand, aside from Microsoft Office macro-viruses (is there a theme here?) I haven't seen a system-software attacking virus on a Mac since 1995.
Nonetheless, rather than place the network's integrity first, the College itself chose to move administrative departments to PCs and let students bring their home PCs to campus, giving parasites a place to nest and breed at the edge of the network.
To Kiewit's credit (or chagrin), this shift in emphasis was user-driven, largely at the behest of anti-Macintosh bigots in the mid- to late-1990s, when Apple Computer, Inc. had fallen on hard times. Now it seems, that chicken is coming home to roost. Cluck-cluck.
