American colleges and universities are institutions with some of the weakest cybersecurity where you would expect better. This makes them easy targets for hackers. The reason is they don’t have strong incentives to do better. Unless having poor cybersecurity is going to lose money, business as usual will continue and unauthenticated email servers will stay online.

Networked EV charging stations are a threat to democracy and national security. Collecting the locations on millions of law-abiding citizens is a capability no government or private entity should be allowed have. When I was attending SIUe in October of 2019, I emailed the parking services staff about the privacy concerns I had about the new Chargepoint stations that were being installed and encouraged them to install non-networked stations instead.

This is the story of how I learned about free software, wrestled with my conscience and ultimately quit my job as a labs and classrooms technician at SIUe because I couldn’t justify supporting the proprietary software anymore.

Somehow SIUe can’t create a decent looking webpage for managing your own university account. It should undergo a complete redesign, but that probably won’t happen for a while since it isn’t losing the university money.

Every SIUe student, faculty and staff member’s full name, year, address and phone number has been available through the university search engine for years. It could facilitate stalking and it’s a huge data privacy concern. It should at least be behind a login portal and remove phone numbers and addresses.

This is my free software story. This semester I took Intro to Artificial Intelligence at SIUe. Artificial Intelligence is a senior level course. I’ll call the professor, “Professor X” to preserve anonymity.

This is my free software story. In the spring of 2018, I took software engineering at SIUe. Software engineering is a junior level CS course. In my view, it serves as preparation for the more demanding two semester development effort that is the senior project. I’ll call the professor, “Professor X” to preserve anonymity.

This is my free software story. This semester I took Deep Learning at SIUe. Deep learning is a senior level CS elective course. I’ll call the professor, “Professor X” to preserve anonymity.

This is my free software story. This semester I took networking at SIUe. Networking is a senior level CS course. I’ll call the professor, “Professor X” to preserve anonymity.