The successful rollout of WiFi 6E has led to a new pilot project. This summer, the University of Michigan will be the first academic institution in the world to offer WiFi in space: MUniverse. Students, faculty, and staff will soon be able to take remote learning and working to a new level. Plans have begun for building a… Read More »
Lark Springtide is a networking administrator with Technology Services West. Based in Honolulu, they specialize in networking smart appliances. For fun, they enjoy underwater basket weaving, volcano surfing, duck herding, and carving soap art.
Michigan IT is pleased to announce that a new randomizer feature will be available on April 1, 2022, for both the U-M Google and Outlook calendar applications.
The Michigan IT Steerage Committee is happy to announce that the university has signed an enterprise licensing agreement to use slacks. Effective April 1, 2023, only khaki slacks will be allowed for all faculty and staff on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, Flint, and Michigan Medicine campuses. Dresses, jeans, kilts, shorts, skirts, and swimsuits will no longer be considered… Read More »
The Michigan IT Steerage Committee is happy to announce a new, high-end desktop workstation for use in both the academic and medical center environments across the university. Introducing the Future Object-Oriented Laptop, a brand-new technology designed to be more “green”—sustainable, biodegradable, and using fewer heavy metals and less electricity to create and to operate—than contemporary workstations. Included in… Read More »
The amount of potential misinformation was impacted on at least one social media platform following actions to suspend or shut down thousands of accounts following the Capitol riot Jan. 6, according to a University of Michigan measure of iffy content.
In a new Center for Academic Innovation Teach-Out, Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, an online social media monitoring company, outlines tactics everyday people can use to anticipate, spot, and react to disinformation from potential “threat actors.” He calls it the “Four D’s” — Dismiss, Distract, Distort, and Dismay. The Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News Teach-Out helps people understand the… Read More »
We all know that two-factor authentication (2FA) adds an extra layer of security to computer systems, applications, networks, and servers. It combines something you know, like a password or PIN, and something you have, like your 2FA token (either a physical item or a smartphone app). Well, if two-factor is good, then three-factor must be better! U-M has… Read More »
Hafiz Malik, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UM-Dearborn is developing tools to detect and fight against fake multimedia. He has already created a method that can detect computer-generated audio at near 100% accuracy and is now turning to fake multimedia detection in real time.
With the continued success of the two annual Michigan IT events — the IT Symposium in November and Hacks with Friends in March — the Michigan IT Steerage Group has decided to expand its scope. First, because the main goals of the IT Symposium are collaboration and conversation, the standard presentation approach will be replaced with a more… Read More »
A study conducted by U-M professor of public policy Brendan Nyhan suggests that the effect of fake news on the 2016 election has been overestimated. Using laptop/desktop web traffic data from a nationally representative online panel allowed Nyhan and his colleagues to measure who visited fake news sites before the 2016 election with unprecedented precision. “Relatively few people consumed this form… Read More »
In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, concerns about hacking, transparency, and the influence of “fake news” on election outcomes garnered unprecedented coverage by news organizations. Both national and local media often reached out to U-M experts in cybersecurity, social media, and data analysis to provide perspective, interpret research, and explain the challenges of our current electoral… Read More »
Make plans to join us on Tuesday, November 27, at 6:15 p.m., in the Rackham Assembly Hall on the UM-Ann Arbor campus (915 E. Washington St.) for an exciting Dissonance event: Catching Fake News. There is no charge for this event and no need to register. A panel of experts will explore, two years after the 2016 election,… Read More »
An algorithm-based system that identifies telltale linguistic cues in fake news stories could provide news aggregator and social media sites like Google News with a new weapon in the fight against misinformation. Led by computer science and engineering professor Rada Mihalcea, the U-M researchers who developed the system have demonstrated that it’s comparable to and sometimes better than humans… Read More »
Last year, Michigan IT News reported that ITS and HITS were doing away with uniqnames and re-implementing Computing Center IDs (CCIDs): All access to computing resources will be via CCIDs, the 4-character mainframe login ID. More details on the transition from uniqname to CCID will be announced in a future issue of this newsletter. The future is now! Work… Read More »
School of Information experts are sounding the alarm on a potential information apocalypse, a state when fake news and altered videos on social media and elsewhere effectively end social reality as we know it. To address this growing concern and bring some of the brightest minds together to brainstorm creative solutions, U-M has formed the School of Information… Read More »
Aviv Ovadya, chief technologist at the School of Information’s Center for Social Media Responsibility, cautions that technology and social media that can be used to enhance and distort what is real is evolving faster than our ability to understand and control or mitigate it. “I’m from the free and open source culture,” he says. “The goal isn’t to… Read More »
Social media is an ever-changing landscape of exciting options. There’s Friendster, Orkut, Vine, and Yik-Yak just to name a few. But no social media platform is as leading edge, new, and cool as Myspace. That’s why the Michigan IT Steering Committee has created a Michigan IT Myspace account! Some of the standout features of Myspace include: Friends — Connect with… Read More »
Some people have email requirements that don’t fit neatly into the university’s two solutions, Google Mail (for the academic side) and Microsoft Exchange (for Michigan Medicine). To address those needs ITS has brought up an instance of the long-retired Michigan Terminal System (MTS), and provided access to its email tool $MESSAGESYSTEM. MTS is one of the first time-sharing computer operating… Read More »
Recently, BBC Future Now launched a series about the grand challenges we face in the 21st Century. Many on their panel of experts named the breakdown of trusted sources of information as one of the most pressing problems today. Among them was Paul Resnick, professor of information at U-M. Working out who to trust and what to believe has always been… Read More »