Desktop Security (including Wireless "Non" Security)

This Tech Briefing will be on two subjects. In the first half, David Hoffman of Information Security Office Operations covers the current state of wireless security on campus and gives some practical advice on how to secure your connections in the Stanford environment and the world at large.

In the second half, rather than repeat the same advice you can find all over the internet, he will give an overview of the security practices that he employs on his own desktop while still managing to get work done.

You may find this brief look into the mind of a security professional useful, puzzling, or laughable - hopefully all three.

Stanford Integrated Email & Calendar

In 2008, IT Services will provide Stanford computer users with new and enhanced email and calendar services that allow them to more seamlessly use these applications together. To provide this, IT Services must replace pieces of Stanford’s current email and calendar infrastructures with a new “collaboration suite.”

Without a doubt, the primary benefit of this Collaboration Suite to your daily Stanford work is that it will give you the option to use your email, calendar, and contact lists services together through service and feature integration that is not available with Stanford’s current services. Some integration and features of particular interest to the Stanford community allow you to:

• accept meetings from your email or send email from your calendar;
• quickly create or update contact list information from your email, calendar, or contact list services and can easily use that contact information with any of these services;
  
• access Stanford’s campus-wide directory from any of these services to see a global address list of all users;
  
• have more than one calendar, allowing you to customize those calendars by topic or meeting type, or by visibility (privacy) settings; subscribe to external calendars with public meetings/events; and overlay calendars so that you can see all your meetings/events in a single view;
  
• create and manage shared mailboxes, calendars, address books and task lists;
  
• Designate others (“delegates”) to access and administer your email and calendar;
  
• easily search, sort and filter email messages or calendar meetings; and
  
• use Stanford’s anti-virus and anti-spam services.

This Tech Briefing will give you a first look at the technology behind the Stanford Integrated Email & Calendar. You can see what the new system looks like right out of the box. Bring your questions about the project and we'll tour the features.

Google Appliance Tool

Google is Stanford University's official search engine. Google represents a significant enhancement to the University's web environment, providing:

• Better and quicker search results
• Advanced search features, including searching for PDF, .doc and .ppt files, and displaying them as HTML
• Easy and powerful search administration
• Easy integration into web sites

Bringing the Google search appliance into the Stanford infrastructure allows us features that the commercial Google Stanford index cannot duplicate, such as:

• continuous crawling
• managing our own Collections and Front Ends
• customizing Format, KeyMatches (equivalent to the commercial service's "sponsored links"), Synonyms, and Filters of the search results
• as FERPA and HIPAA regulations begin to have an effect on the availability of web content (requiring some pages to be access-restricted, for example), the campus search appliance can be authenticated to crawl and index where outside search engines cannot.

Folding @ Home: An Example of What Distributed Computing Can Do

Using the CPU power and communications abilities of unattended desktop computers throughout the world, the Folding @ Home project studies protein folding and misfolding. In this method of computer processing, known as distributed computing, different parts of a computer program run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network. By harnessing the power of many machines, researchers are able to analyze far more data than they might have been able to do so otherwise. Indeed, Folding@home has recently been acknowledged as the most powerful computer cluster on earth, exceeding a petaflop in performance. The Folding @ Home project runs on any modern computer, including Playstation 3s, and runs only when the computer is otherwise not being used.

Join Professor Vijay S. Pande (Chemistry and Structural Biology) as he details the general history and methodology behind the distributed computing model, how this is a paradigm shift from the mainframe/supercomputer model, and how the Folding @ Home project utilizes this novel technique.

Managing Information Security at Stanford

Managing at Stanford often includes working with computers and sensitive data, or supervising individuals who do. This presentation will cover what criteria to use to determine if you're working with Stanford Restricted and Sensitive data and what steps you should take if you are. We'll describe the most common ways that computers can be compromised and present strategies to use to protect yourself and your computer. Finally, we'll present some case studies which highlight managers' roles in protecting Stanford computing resources.

Tina Darmohray is Stanford's Information Security Officer. Along with the rest of the Information Security Office staff she works to keep Stanford's computing resources safe and reliable. Previously she spent a decade as a consultant specializing in the area of computer and network security. Prior to that she was the lead for the Unix support team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina received her BS and MS from the University of California at Berkeley.

Eric Nakagawa is the Information Systems Security Specialist in Stanford's Internal Audit Department. Eric's primary responsibilities include assisting the University in defining polices and practices to meet and meeting the legal and regulatory information security requirements and the information security practices regarding the University's administrative systems. Eric previously worked at Arthur Andersen and Moet Hennessey/Louis Vuitton responsible for information security consulting and auditing. Eric received his Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of California Berkeley.

Eric Nakagawa, Information Systems Security Specialist in Stanford's Internal Audit Department

Tina Darmohray, Stanford's Information Security Officer

Matlab

This presentation will illustrate the usage and explain the benefits of many of the different function types available in MATLAB 7. You will learn how using the right function type can lead to more robust and maintainable code. Demonstrations will show how to apply these techniques to solve optimization problems and make it easier to program GUIs in MATLAB. This session will also provide you with an understanding of how different MATLAB data types are stored in memory. Experienced MATLAB users will receive the most benefit from this session.

The presenter, Mike Agostini, has a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University and leads a team of Application Engineers for The MathWorks, where he’s worked since 2005. Previously, Mike worked as an Aerospace Engineer modeling disposable launch vehicles for the Analex Corporation, where he held a DOD clearance. He has authored several journal articles in the area of control system design for mechanical systems.

Can't make it to Turing? Join the WebEx session by clicking the following link and then clicking Register on the left-side of the web page:
https://stanford.webex.com/stanford/onstage/g.php?d=925880100&t=a

If requested, the password for this session is "mathworks".

Stanford Integrated Email & Calendar: An Update

In 2008, IT Services will provide Stanford computer users with new and enhanced email and calendar services that allow them to more seamlessly use these applications together. To provide this, IT Services must replace pieces of Stanford’s current email and calendar infrastructures with a new “collaboration suite.”

This Tech Briefing will give you an UPDATE of the technology behind the Stanford Integrated Email & Calendar. You can see what the program looks like right out of the box. Bring your questions about the project and we'll tour the features.

No Tech Briefing -- Memorial Day

Microformats

"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards." -- microformats.org

Join John Foliot as he talks about what Microformats are, how they can be used to enhance web sites, and how he has used Microformats in the sites he maintains at Stanford.

Security Series: Topic to be Determined

No Tech Briefing -- Graduation

LabVIEW

Faculty, students and staff are invited to attend a workshop on National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW, the graphical development environment .

In this session you will:

• See software and hardware applications using the latest features in LabVIEW, including streamlined algorithm development for signal processing, controls, communications and more.
• Learn how to integrate your m-file scripts, created using The MathWorks, Inc. MATLAB® development environment, with LabVIEW MathScript.
• Discover firsthand how LabVIEW can help simplify your design projects for virtually all of your technical computing needs including electronics design, controls and mechatronics, and measurement and analysis.
• Learn how to create complete LabVIEW applications from scratch in minutes with interactive Express VIs and I/O assistants
  
  

The latest versions of LabVIEW, modules and toolkits, Signal Express, and Measurement Studio are available through Stanford's Software Licensing Group.

Visit http://www.stanford.edu/services/softwarelic/labview/index.html for more information.

Green IT

Join us for this Tech Briefing as Joe Stagner, the Executive Director of Sustainability and Energy Management (SEM) discusses the impact of IT energy use on the environment.

Joe will discuss the effect of IT's energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption. He will also speak about the generation of electronic waste and a few other sustainability issues related to IT.

The scale of impact that campus IT operations has on campus energy use, water use and waster generation will be discussed. Some good work has already been done, but Joe will review the major opportunities for reducing energy use and waste generation that have already been identified at Stanford.

Bring your questions about how you can help make a greener IT.