Swartz Incidents Prompt MIT to Boost Network Security

web.mit.edu

7 points·vabmit··3 comments

I cannot seriously believe MIT is going to try to firewall all non-MIT traffic at the edge, to all machines.

I wonder if this includes student machines on resnet, too. I ran a lot of services off an old P90 running Linux on my desktop from a dorm and later FSILG, including anonymous ecash, a remailer, archives of the cypherpunks mailing list (which got me fucking subpoeaned in a federal case, which I fortunately had Jennifer Granick to advise me to get out of legally), etc.

Also sucks for me because I still use 18.72.0.3 as a backup/test DNS when I don't have another option. There are some issues with Google's 8.8.8.8 resolvers at times, and it's nice to have an alternative.

So now I guess I don't get to access my desktop computer with SSH from somewhere off campus? Also, MIT requires us to use the Cisco VPN client, which apparently doesn't work on 64 bit linux. This is absurd.

The Cisco VPN client supports 64bit Linux, now. Just go to http://ist.mit.edu/cisco-anyconnect and get the latest version of the client. You could also hack the 32bit only version to work on a 64bit Linux system if you can't use the new version for some reason. There's a wikipage on how to do it.

You should be able to use a cert based web form to get ssh traffic allowed to your host. But, if you were using the VPN, you wouldn't encounter the firewall.

It does kinda suck. But, the aaronsw hacks were a game changer. MIT became a different organization after them.

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