Information Technology Updates
Information Technology (IT) has been working directly with Adobe to acquire additional licensing for students at the University. On March 19th, 2020, that licensing was obtained and deployed. This licensing is temporary, but allows students to install these important programs on their personal computers. This temporary license will expire on May 31st, 2020.
Please visit our support article for instructions on how you can access and download these applications to your personally-owned device.
Information Technology is providing faculty and staff a number of options for voice services when working remotely. Please see this page for a comparison and instructions regarding how to get started.
Cedar Falls Utilities will perform maintenance on UNI's secondary Internet connection to increase performance and reliability if our secondary connection is needed. No outage to our primary Internet connection is expected.
Maintenance will take place on Wednesday, March 18th from 8:00am - 9:00am.
There are many fake sites and apps out there trying to take advantage of everyone's concern about the covid-19 threat. It's impossible to list all of them, but these are a couple examples. In general, seek news and information from known safe sources of information.
- A malicious website pretending to host a map of Coronavirus cases around the world (corona-virus-map [dot] com) actually contains the AZORult Trojan that will steal information, including sensitive data.
- A malicious android app that pretends to be a “Coronavirus Tracking App” which is ransomware that will infect the phone and lock it until payment is received. The malicious app is downloaded at (coronavirusapp [dot] site).
Information Technology (IT) has updated its training and workshop schedule to include multiple instances of several courses over the next month. These courses include but are not limited to:
- Bb01 - Getting Started with your Blackboard course
- Panopto video content management
- Zoom cloud video conferencing for meetings and course collaboration
For a schedule of all upcoming faculty workshops, visit the Faculty/Staff workshops calendar.
You can also visit the online training course registration page to get registered.
For help deciding which courses are right for you, visit our getting started page.
As fears and anxiety continue to rise over the spread of the corona virus across the world, so do email phishing attempts. Those with malicious intent are known to capitalize on periods of rising fear by conducting phishing campaigns that utilize techniques taking advantage of that very fear.
Information Technology urges the campus community to continue its vigilance when deciding whether to trust an email communication and click on any links held within. The IT Phishing Education website highlights several examples sent out to the university community over the past year and explains in each case why the message was a fake, and potentially, a phishing attempt.
As always, if you have concerns about a certain email message that you've received, you can forward it to security@uni.edu to receive help and guidance on whether or not the message is real.
Information Technology (IT) is constantly working to improve and secure the systems and services it runs. These changes take many shapes, including security updates, upgrades to functionality, and other modifications. These changes are worked on in testing systems and then deployed into production on a regular schedule. Under the circumstances of a campus closure event, IT will change its strategy to allow work to continue and progress to be made, without any changes actually being pushed into production. This may allow progress on system development to continue without introducing unnecessary risk (e.g. system outages, downtime, etc) into an already tense environment where a large number of employees are working from home.
IT continually works with campus leadership to identify those systems and services most crucial to maintaining the University's academic mission and during a campus closure event, our resources will be spent "keeping the lights on" for those systems.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please don't hesitate to open an IT request by visiting Service Hub at servicehub.uni.edu and using the Get IT Help request form.
Information Technology (IT) has stepped up its efforts to ensure the cleanliness of public computer lab facilities, known as Student Computer Centers, around campus in light of recent concern over the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in the United States.
IT has worked closely with Facilities Management to ensure cleaning and disinfecting supplies are in stock and available for our use throughout these facilities. IT is using "Clorox Disinfecting Wipes", on the list for EPA-approved supplies known to kill the virus, to clean keyboards and mice across campus. IT is also looking to make these supplies available on-location for students to wipe down equipment themselves as they sit down to use a computer in a Student Computer Center on-campus.
If you have a question, comment, or concern about the state of cleanliness of any computer lab facility, please submit a request through Service Hub by visiting servicehub.uni.edu and using the Get IT Help request form.
Joe Vennix of Apple security has found another significant vulnerability in sudo utility that under a specific configuration could allow low privileged users or malicious programs to execute arbitrary commands with administrative ('root') privileges on Linux or macOS systems. See https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/sudo-linux-vulnerability.html for details, how to determine if your system(s) is/are vulnerable, and how to fix with a simple configuration change.
The default settings for MacOS and a number of common Linux distributions are such that sudo on those platforms is not vulnerable but the defaults on a few distros are vulnerable, e.g., Mint and Elementary OS. This vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2019-18634.
Update: Pilot program has ended and Citrix is now widely available to students at UNI. See "Getting Started with Citrix" for more information.
Information Technology (IT) is seeking fifty UNI students who are interested in piloting a new virtual desktop service on campus. The service, powered by Citrix remote access technology, will allow students to run applications on their personally-owned devices like the Adobe Creative Cloud and others that are typically only available in on-campus computer labs. These applications would be accessible from on or off campus.
The pilot program will run over the course of the Spring 2020 academic term. IT will work closely with each student volunteer to ensure they are able to connect to and use the new virtual desktop service. Student volunteers are free to use the applications over the course of the pilot program for their academic needs while providing valuable feedback on the virtual desktops to help IT ensure the service is useful, robust, and ready for the rest of campus.
If you are a currently enrolled student at UNI and interested in participating, please fill out the following form to enroll in the pilot program.
Pages
- ITTC 36
- (319) 273-5555
