Why disable access to software features?

[Thomas Dowling]

Ronnie Morgan writes:

<deletia>

>> Blue US Postal Mailboxes dot all across the country. What is to stop 

>> someone from sending anonymous (no return address) racist US Mail? 

>
>Let the US Postal service worry about that, I would be worried about someone  

>doing it from a computer or terminal that *I* was in charge of.

Good point.  And let's not overlook what kind of budget and staff power the  
USPS puts into mail fraud investigations, in no small part because it's so easy  
to mail stuff anonymously.


>...If you have 12 computers, and 6  

>people were using 6 of them to run IRC, wouldn't you think that to be a waste   
>of computer time?  What kind of research could you possibly do in IRC?...

I can easily imagine a professor setting up a guest lecture via IRC, complete  
with question and answer session.  Let's not make this kind of  
overgeneralization.

>> Why would you remove Open Location? That truly baffles me. So a patron gets 

>> a URL out of a newspaper and they want to check it out... 

>
>Yes, but what about that http://www.sex-r-us.com URL?  Would you allow a  

>patron to open up that URL?

Yes, I would.  And in the absence of a clear policy related to your library's  
mission, I have to wonder how you would justify barring it (assuming you could  
do it).

Don't pretend that disabling a Goto command will prevent users from getting to  
any given site.  In fact, some institutions are providing a kludgy Goto form  
just to support users who have to use a kiosk mode workstation.

I'm uncomfortable with the way this argument conflates restricted workstation  
access with restricted net access.  I think the nature of publicly available  
workstations demands that the people supporting them put forth their best  
effort to head off deliberate or unintentional mischief.  At the same time, I  
expect better of the library profession than to use this as an excuse to try  
restricting access to any network site.  Obviously, some librarians have an  
institutional mandate to try to impose such restrictions; those efforts should  
be a result of that mandate rather than an side effect of workstation security.


Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK