Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Strange message
From: Graham Toal <gtoal () UTPA EDU>
Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:28:43 -0600
Looking at the punctuation and spelling errors makes me hope that this is not the individual whom earned the Master's Degree.:-)
Oh, the temptation, the temptation. No, I'll sit on my fingers this time, this group is too well behaved for a spelling and grammar war :-) We see letters like that all the time. Typical disgruntled (and illiterate) student. Interesting if the point of his letter were true; I didn't realise US Universities had lower limits on graduation age. I remember (back some years now) that in Britain you couldn't start University in England until you were, I think, 18. We didn't have that problem in Scotland - every year a few students who were the youngest in their class at high school (simply due to the cut-off date each year) would matriculate at 16, and if they weren't good enough to take an Honors course (4 years), they'd graduate with a general science degree (i.e. no major) instead, in three years at 18 or 19. Of course there was also the occassional child prodigy who would turn up at classes with their parents in tow, who had to be home by 5 every night. They were the exception. But the 18 or 19yr old graduate was quite common. Digression aside, I do actually have something relevant to add... We received an equally illiterate letter once, posted anonymously, from a student who appeared to be very disgruntled at being kicked out of our University. Unfortunately for him his diatribe included some vague threats about how America had not seen the last of 9/11 type activity. If you ever get anything of that nature, you'll find the FBI take it very seriously, and I recommend that you (assuming you're the ISO of your organisation) get to know your local FBI field agent. Very helpful folks. You might ask them if they have a chapter of "InfraGard" (www.infragard.net) in your area. By the way, I did identify the anonymous poster, although it was more of an intellectual exercise than anything else as he's unlikely to be returning to this country to work given his lack of degree :-) I located him by sending a 'cease and desist' message to his anonymous account that contained an HTML image, and he made the mistake of reading it on a windows system that didn't have HTML turned off ;-) G
Current thread:
- Strange message Jimmy L. Fikes (Mar 16)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Strange message Crenshaw, Adrian D (Mar 16)
- Re: Strange message Sarah Stevens (Mar 16)
- Re: Strange message Graham Toal (Mar 16)