I was getting worried for a while, but now I can now safely continue picking on all the universities losing their data. I feared I might eventually have to target someone around my neighborhood, but as it turns out, Colorado universities are taking the issues pretty seriously. Whew!

I can’t help but think that colleges and universities were under some delusion of being immune to spam and other security issues. The problem has been on our heals for some time, yet issues with these institutions continue to make the news.

Wondering whether I am missing something, I checked back through the Spamroll archives, and found quite a few stories covering educational bodies.

- We find the University of Texas selling their email lists, then blocking the purchaser’s mail - dumb to begin with, and more than a little unethical on the back end; it forced Spamroll to question why some educational institutions were getting into the list business;

- A pack of college students are hit by tech saavy phishing attempts;

- UC Berkeley gets hit by data theft, and it isn’t the first time; and

- A smaller institution spends years and thousands for a proprietary anti-spam implementation that solves a small percentage of the problem.

One group seems to be heading on the right path, although they seem to be a little behind (see UC Irvine sticks with OSS).

And there is some light in the endless tunnel too. If college students are left to their own devices (literally - meaning their cell phones), they are hard to fool.

Why is it that the one place that you would think has so much in the way of technical (and brainpower) resources, has such a hard time keeping the security bugs out of their houses?

Read between the lines (paragraph 2 and paragraph 4, that is), and you might catch the privacy issue (I mean idiocy) of this story (HoustonChronicle.com - Dating site: UT improperly blocked e-mails).

So, it seems (at least LonghornSingles claims) that the University of Texas SOLD the email addresses of staff and students to LonghornSingles, and then proceeded to block the messages they sent.

I’d be pissed off too. But LonghornSingles shouldn’t be the only ones.

UT sells the names, and then prevents messages from the buyer from entering their system. Hmm. That sounds like a darn good way to make some extra cash. Not.

I am not sure if UT planned this little trick, or sold the information and later realized it wasn’t such a good idea, but either way, someone should get canned. If I was a UT staff or student member, I would be raising bloody hell.

What that fine educational institution doesn’t realize is that those email address may leak into “the open”. Furthermore, aren’t there some privacy provisions that staff and students are legally entitled to? Maybe the administration at UT spends too much time in cattle pastures searching for mushrooms, or maybe they actually have the right to sell those addresses. Either way, every staff and student on that campus should get a Yahoo account and then steadfastly refuse to communicate via UT’s dirty little system.

They cut off UT’s cheap trick for putting extra coin in their pockets, AND get a date!

That is, if LonghornSingles is claiming correctly.