BCCES Breaks Ties With CFS

Grant Bachand
Team Member

he Canadian Federation of Students BC is breaking ties

with the Canadian Federation of Students. Over the Edge
sat down with Simka Marshall, the Chairperson of the newly
formed BCFS or BC Federation of Students to learn more
about this break up. Marshall says that the BC branch of the
CFS had some problems with how the national organization
was conducting its business and various situations were
arising, giving great concern to the management of the
national organization. According to Marshall, at the BCFS
annual general meeting in January, a motion passed to allow
local organization within BC to vote on if they wanted to
leave the national organization, CFS, but stay apart of the
provincial organization, BCFS.

The national organization has not conducted an audit of their

financial this year and many students within the BCFS say
this shows a mismanagement of the national organization.
Another area of contention is the lack of a written national
political strategy by the CFS. An example of a previous
campaign run by the CFS is “education is a right,” which
was spread across Canada to help bring attention to the
rising costs of post secondary education here in Canada.

Here at UNBC this is important because the NBCGSS is
looking to join the BCFS, holding a referendum last week.
As of the print deadline for this issue, the referendum
results were not available. BCFS has a lot more resources
and abilities in the realm of advocating for the rights of
students in provincial terms and applying pressure to

Be Smart With Computer Security

Robert Corbin
Guest Contributor

A new students arrive to begin studying at university,
and seasoned students return to continue their studies,
most will exchange stories of what they did while they
were away. Rarely do students exchange stories of mistakes
possibly made while spending time with technology or with
their new computers. Several years ago UNBC used to host
two separate campus specific wireless networks that could
be connected to in any building, a secure wireless network
where students would log in with their username and
password, and an unsecure network that any device could
connect to at will. The unsecure network was only available
for a year or so before it was removed to migrate towards a
more electronically secure campus.

Having accounts on campus requiring a username and
password is a move that intended to make students more
electronically aware of security risks present around
them while using computers. Unfortunately, for the most
part, security at UNBC is treated to a large extent as an
unnecessary requirement that makes the simplest things
like logging on to social media take longer, and requires
remembering passwords and username combinations
every day. It is important that students learn the absolute

requirements of security before they move to bigger and
better things, because the chances of a hacker or even a
coworker gaining access to a private work account is much
higher when security is treated as laughable. Every week,
after most students have gone home, a careful review of the
computers in student labs always reveals accounts that are
still logged on under students’ credentials. Anyone that
wanted to create a little chaos could access the internet
using these computers and could then engage in a number
of shady businesses that would then be linked back to the
account that was logged in. There have been situations
when students have been kicked out of universities

for sending threatening messages to colleagues, made
possible because of a disregard for computer security.

A major step towards reducing the chances of this is
ensuring that when you leave a computer you sign out

or lock the computer to prevent unauthorized access. A
second important step is to never allow someone to access
accounts while logged in as yourself or anyone else. The
third step is to rethink computer passwords. Technology
and arbitrary computer policies over the past twenty years
have made computer passwords extremely hard for users
to remember, but extremely easy for computers to guess. A

UNC Life

the British Columbia government is part of of their core
duties. This division is still fresh and many schools in BC
are still part of the national organization. The transition
from one to the other will take some time and it is unclear
if all BC schools will choose to only be part of one group.

It also should be noted that this is not the first time

a province has showed dissatisfaction in the national
organization.In the past, schools in Quebec made moves
to separate from the national organization. If that had
any lasting impact, it certainly hasn’t lead the CFS

to act any different according to some students.

Time will tell whether this break will be in the best interests
of BC students or if it is just internal politics gone awry.

couple decades ago when computer passwords came into
common use with the advancement of Windows operating
systems, most users would pick passwords they had used all
through their lives that were then easy to remember. The
problem with this is that anyone with enough knowledge of
social engineering could talk to a user, their friends, or even
their family members and put together enough hints and
clues to guess a password. Current password requirements
telling users that they need at least one uppercase letter,

a lowercase letter, and a number or special character

to increase password strength, do not understand how
computers are used to hack user passwords. Using multiple
character sets rarely increases the complexity of a password
to a system that can guess a password trying between five
million and five hundred million passwords per second.

The main decider on password strength is the length of a
password. No computer system will ever be able to guess a
password consisting of three or four words one after another
and exceeding twenty letters, due to the exponential growth
in possible passwords with long length. A bonus for users

is these passwords can be custom tailored to be easier to
remember, simply pick words that make a story in your mind.

Security is in the hands of the user after all.