[4826] in Depressing_Thoughts
Reply from Greg Jackson re: "On being cast out of the MIT community"
???@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (???@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Thu Sep 7 20:02:50 1995
Hi, this message is actually from Ron Newman (rnewman@cybercom.net,
formerly rnewman@mit.edu).
A couple of months ago, I posted a transaction to this meeting containing
a letter that I sent to Cecelia D'Oliveira and Greg Jackson concerning
the deactivation of my Athena account.
Greg sent me this reply about a month ago, and gave me permission to
post it to this meeting.
---------
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 1995 12:39:19 -0400
To: rnewman@cybercom.net (Ron Newman)
From: gjackson@MIT.EDU (Greg Jackson)
Subject: Re: status of my account -- my letter to you and Cecelia
Cc: cec@MIT.EDU
Ron-
Sorry about the delay responding. I wanted first to explore why individuals
with apparently similar status had apparently been treated differently,
which took a while, and then various things hit various fans and now I'm on
the road.
As Cec told you, over the past couple of years we have tightened up
eligibility for Athena guest accounts -- which are Athena accounts held by
anyone not entitled to a regular account. At one time our guest-account
policies were quite liberal, in large part because there were few ways to
obtain Athena-like Internet access, but this liberality ran afoul of many
operational and legal requirements, and in any case there now are ample
commercial ways for individual to obtain access to Internet electronic
mail, Usenet groups, the Web, and so forth. Under the new policy we issue
guest Athena accounts only with explicit sponsorship from MIT faculty or
senior administrators, only for specific purposes that cannot be well
served commercially, and only for specific time periods.
Your account did not meet these conditions, and so we deactivated it along
with scores of others this spring. (This deactivation had been scheduled to
occur much earlier, but complications surrounding the new MIT ID-number
system delayed it.)
As you note, some individuals whose status is roughly equivalent to yours
-- people who worked for Athena early on, but no longer have an MIT
affiliation -- did not get deactivated. The reason for this is simple:
those individuals' accounts were in a Moira class that had been poorly and
inconsistently maintained, and which therefore requires some handwork,
care, and Director-level oversight before deactivation. You were once in
this class, but as I understand it you then worked briefly for MIT later on
which caused your account to be correctly reclassified into a class that we
could and did handle automatically. That is why your account received
different treatment that those of others; your history of connections with
MIT was different from theirs.
Over the next several weeks I plan to work with User Accounts to clean up
the STAFF Moira class -- that is, to reclassify everyone in that class into
current classes, if they are eligible, and deactivate the rest -- and we
will then deactivate ineligible STAFF accounts.
None of this is meant to denigrate any of your long service to Athena or
your contributions to the MIT community. The simple fact is that Athena
accounts are intended for MIT students, faculty, and on-campus staff, and
not as a form of compensation or reward for past service or attendance. The
current guest-account policy is designed to keep Athena focused on its
prime clientele, and unless there is a clear purpose for which you need an
Athena account that is not reasonably well served by commercial providers
AND you can secure faculty sponsorship for your having an account (which
entails the sponsor assuming full responsibility for all use of the
account, and any consequences of that use), I'm afraid the deactivation of
your account must stand.
I'll be back in town next week, and will be happy to clarify any of this if
I've described it poorly.
gj MIT e40-359a 617 253 3712 (voice)
1 Amherst St 617 258 8736 (fax)
Cambridge MA 02139 http://web.mit.edu/gjackson/www/
