SSL on Blackboard
I found this in my inbox yesterday:
We will be adding a security layer (SSL) to the Blackboard site on Monday to provide greater security. We anticipate that this process will go smoothly.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
I was so surprised I almost fell of my chair. This is very awesome news considering how BB was one of the last services on campus that was happily transmitting NetID’s unencrypted. Most of people in CS dept have been complaining about this for years now. Did we get new management or something?
I wonder if this is going to be a self signed cert, or a real thing. Because I noticed that when students get that annoying “unknown authority” security warning on the webmail site for the first time they either wig out, or just click it off without reading. And then they switch to an unencrypted version cause the secure one is “broken”.
Now if we could only somehow convince blackboard to put in access controls so that students can’t see files that do not belong to them, or ones that are hidden by instructor just by guessing the URL. That and prevent them from or deleting random files from digital dropbox.
It’s scary how someone could nuke the whole BB by deleting all the uploaded files with 10-20 line perl script. Unfortunately, I don’t think MSU IT can do anything about this issues.
What they could do, is to fix the freakin firewall rules so that I could use VPN when I’m on campus. Tunneling VPN via ssh is just beyond retarded - but that’s apparently what they think we should be doing. Sigh…
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