Does this book exist?
"How Universities Lost the Internet"
or has someone done research on this topic? That is, the fact that many North American universities have ceded all technical capacity to Microsoft, Google, etc?
It used to be students could get web hosting, email, and even some cool experimental online stuff through their schools. Now every online communication channel is locked down.
I think the security landscape we live in today has a lot to do with it also. I work in IT at the University or Arizona, and up until recently we offered basic web hosting and internal email etc to everyone. 30 years ago if a student did something silly with their website that was a huge security hole… nothing happened. Today, within a day that student is unknowingly hosting a bitcoin miner bot and spamming the hell out of everyone. The effort to maintain these systems keeps going up.
@estranged @rwg Aww, I used to telnet from my Rutgers.edu shell account to a BBS hosted at Arizona.edu back in the day!
Also I think you’re very correct about the underlying security costs propelling even larger academic institutions from hosting & maintaining their own technology infrastructure these days.
Robert W. Gehl
Mark Fischer
joy larkin 🌺✨