One reason why Columbia University deserves cheers: starting tomorrow, all NetBIOS traffic coming into or leaving the university’s network will be blocked, preventing denizens of evil from accessing poorly-configured student computers on the network (and preventing Windows Messenger spam).

One reason why Columbia University deserves jeers: in the recommendations for email programs, Netscape 6 is unsupported because it’s “unstable and buggy,” yet Netscape 4.7 is both highly supported and recommended. While I’m not saying that Netscape 6 is a dreamboat, I can’t remember when I used a more unstable and buggy app than Netscape 4.7.

(All this was found while hunting for instructions about setting Entourage up to use secure mail transport.)