Note: This has all been adjudicated by the Deans now;
read all the way to the bottom, or skip there if you've been here
before
If you actually attend Swarthmore College at the time, you might have
noticed that the printers on campus were selectively removing words
from printouts on April 1, 2002.
Being as it was (purposely) made common knowledge that I was involved,
I seem to be taking ITS's
direct ire for this. Their formal complaint to the deans, scanned in
several formats (PNG is prettier, GIF is way smaller; yes, smaller
than PNG would be with only two colors in the palette), is linked
below. I see no statement of presumption of their privacy in the documents
I received and I'm not too concerned about mine, so I see no problem
making this public record.
In addition to the above, I received a printed copy of the Phoenix
article [Internet Archive in case the original disappears] with selected portions highlighted. I haven't scanned
that, since it seems rather silly to do so. Specifically, the
highlighted sections were this:
His program, which he sent to public printers several times Monday,
(which is not, technically, true; someone else, who has good reason to
want to remain nameless at this point, did the loading later
in the day, but that's sort of immaterial as it was always part of the
plan) and this (for which a little context is necessary):
[The problem disappeared when a computer told the printer to
deactivate the preloaded Postscript commands, Rosenkoetter said.] One
of his friends had sent those instructions to all the affected
printers by 7 p.m. Monday night.
Myself, I'd like to draw attention to this passage:
Marc Richards '02, a public area lab manager for ITS, spent part of
his evening reconfiguring the McCabe computers for the new print
server, but he said the switch to the new server needed to be done
soon anyway and was not what really solved the problem. In the end,
"it fixed itself," Richards said.
If you're interested in a bit more background about this whole thing,
you might want to read the explanation of how the
prank functioned that I sent to SLUG,
including corrections by Branen Salmon and the full list of words
censored (which, it seems, ITS didn't actually include in their
complaint or Tedd Goundie, reasonably, didn't forward to me).
Update: as of 20020612 this was
resolved by my paying Swarthmore College $250 US, the sum Tedd Goundie
felt was appropriate. (Remember, the $1600 US figure was just what ITS
asked in their request for adjudication.)
Anyway, I'd be glad to hear
anything you
have to say about it. Note that if you're going to transport that
opinion through Swarthmore's servers, you may want to encrypt it. If
so, you'll need my PGP
public key and an OpenPGP-compliant program to do the encryption. I use GnuPG.
