Durham University IT services regulations

[fanf]

Some amusing or odd features:

• Blasphemy and racism are forbidden, along with the usual porn. This probably covers some fortune(1) jokes.
• You can get permission to look at porn for research purposes, but there is no such exemption for reverse engineering software (so no software security research).
• You are not allowed to "access, download, store, or process" comercial spam, or anything that causes "annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety".
• Durham ITS takes a cut of research grants which have provision for computing costs.
• Durham claims all "intellectual property" you create and must be involved in any commercial exploitation.
• For the purpose of these regulations, "any remote IT facilities are deemed to be [Durham] University IT facilities".

Comments

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

Their process for allowing Internet access to guest computers seems a little odd, too. It appears that they have a magic intercepting proxy that waits to see your computer update its antivirus definitions before you are allowed unfettered access. Bit of a bummer if you're using Linux!

[stephdairy.livejournal.com]

Presumably you could wget http://www.norton.com/virusdefs or similar...

(S)

[dave holland (from livejournal.com)]

yep - there was a list of "approved" antivirus products on the wall, but life was too short for me to guess URLs, and I had a temporary login for the university's terminal room PCs, so I used that instead...