Library computers flawed

“What are the factors of 336?” I pondered, staring at the KENKEN puzzle on the screen of the computer in the SciTech library I was seated at.

Cursed computer! No calculator!

I’ve been annoyed by how locked down the computers at Sydney Uni’s libraries are for a while, so I set out to find out whether I can, in fact, bring up the humble calculator.¹

There’s nothing more powerful than a fully-functioning programming environment, and to the extent that Visual Basic for Applications is a fully-functioning programming environment, all recent versions of Office have this. So the first step was to fire up Word 2007, open up the Options dialog box and turn on the Developer tab.

Cursed! The system administrator has disabled the Visual Basic Editor via group policy.

But what if I do this?

Tada! I get the editor. It defies belief that the group policy setting would merely disable the button that accesses a prohibited feature as opposed to disabling the feature itself. Now, typing in some code…

Hitting F5 should run Command Prompt.

Cursed group policy again. Remembering the good-old days of MS-DOS…

Success!

Conclusions

Well, now you know how to open up your favourite Windows apps on these retarded computers, say, if you wanted to save a screenshot into PNG using Paint.² But the point I want to highlight is that some of the policies in force on these computers ultimately serve no useful purpose. They remove useful functionality, while those who know how can still access them, albeit it rather clumsily. Locking down a computer for the sake of making it locked down serves no useful purpose. (Raymond Chen says, Shell policy is not the same as security. Indeed.)

The real problem

That was just a distraction really. The real problem is that the library computers use this login system based on your library card number that doesn’t actually log the Windows account on or off. That means that if someone logged into, say, Gmail, and selected the option to stay logged in, if he forgot to log out, the next user on that computer could view his email, as I found out the other day. Also, because the temporary drive where you can dump your oh-so-secret files isn’t cleared between users, you have to wonder what kind of pot these system administrators are smoking.³

Footnotes

¹ The more intelligent option is to use the shortcut to SSH into the undergrad IT servers and use Python, if you have an account there.
² There’s no need to bring up the Command Prompt first. Using “calc” or “mspaint” as the argument to Shell() would have sufficed.
³ The Access Lab computers are thankfully more fully-functioned and require you to log in and out of your own Windows account. Why the university bothers to deploy large quantities of these retarded machines defies belief given that the number of library card holders without Unikey accounts must be rather small.

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