TechNews

UPDATE 3/26: The cert update has been postponed until another day. Here's the status page update.

This task might sound familiar, because you've almost certainly done it before.

Phase 1 of the New Gradebook in Canvas, now available for faculty, offers some features that UC Davis instructors have been asking about.

Faculty can use the new features by adopting the New Gradebook. The changes:

Maybe you’ve thought it yourself: That message in my inbox is probably legitimate, but it looks like phishing. Campuses are well aware of the dilemma of sending emails that resemble the scams they often warn against. Fortunately, a few simple measures can help those messages look legitimate.

The annual University of California Computing Services Conference is now seeking presentations for its 2018 meeting, to be held Aug. 13-15, 2018, here at UC Davis.

The theme is “sustainable technology,” and organizers are calling for proposals that fit any of several tracks:

The Information Security Office is distributing this message to the campus this afternoon.

Jan. 31, 2018

Colleagues,

An unusually realistic phishing email has shown up today in UC Davis email accounts. The links direct the user to a fake UC Davis login page. If you receive this email message (see example) or anything like it, please delete it. You don’t need to do anything else.

The campus has blocked incoming and outgoing traffic to locations associated with this scam.

The eLearning Studio in 50 Hutchison, a high-quality, lower-cost recording center that faculty use to make instructional videos, has been refreshed, simplified, and is ready for wider use.

January 28 is National Data Privacy Day. In that spirit, here are five suggestions that can help you to, as the U.S. Senate once declared in a Privacy Day resolution, “respect privacy, safeguard data, and enable trust.” And because every day is a good day to do that, these ideas apply year-round.

“It is important that we think every day about both our own privacy, as well as our responsibilities as employees to respect and protect each other’s privacy,” said Molly M. Theodossy, director of Compliance and Policy Programs for UC Davis.

If you have a 916 area code number, get ready to change your dialing habits and perhaps update your saved or programmed phone numbers.

Starting Feb. 10, when you call from a 916 number, you must include the area code of the number you’re dialing for the call to go through. Instead of dialing seven digits, you’ll dial 1 + ten.

For example, to reach UC Davis Health, you’ll dial 1-916-734-2011. Simply dialing 734-2011 won’t work anymore.

Several important UC Davis services were unavailable starting at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Dec. 20, when a construction project in downtown Sacramento severed a fiber-optic cable that carries network traffic to and from the Sacramento data center used by UC Davis.
 
Computing accounts, Banner, UC Davis Canvas, Final Grade Submission, myucdavis, and Office 365 were among the services affected. UC Davis services were re-established about 2:30 p.m. after technical personnel were able to restore a redundant network access channel.
 
The outage affected much more than UC Davis.

A recent change to UC Davis Canvas makes it easy for faculty to identify wait-listed students in class rosters.

Instructors can see the improvement when they look at the roster displayed in the People tool of their course sites. Beginning with classes taught in the upcoming winter quarter/spring semester, any students who are wait-listed will have “Student_Waitlist” after their names (see example).

Previously, students were listed simply as students, whether they were on a wait list or not.

UC Davis website managers and communicators should be interested in this news: The campus will retire Cascade as a content management system, and cPanel as a place to host websites, in late 2018.

The change comes as more campus units opt to build and manage sites with SiteFarm, a more modern UC Davis web publishing platform, instead of Cascade. SiteFarm is a central service available at no cost to campus units, and includes website hosting.

UC Davis will host the next annual University of California Computing Services Conference on Aug. 13-15, 2018. The theme this year is “sustainable technology.”   

The conference is open to any faculty and staff who work in IT or are interested in information technology. Presentations are generally designed for IT professionals, but some sessions will cover topics that also apply outside IT, such as project management, service delivery and procurement.

The University of California has ordered all UC campuses and locations not to buy or deploy Kaspersky Lab products, including technology that uses embedded Kaspersky code.

Kaspersky’s main product is antivirus software. Based on procurement records and data from managed computer systems, only a handful of locations at UC Davis use Kaspersky products, so the impact here is minor.

Starting Dec. 19, 2017, anyone who still wants to access SmartSite will need to do so from a campus location or, if they’re away from UC Davis, use a VPN (virtual private network) connection.

The change, which essentially limits access to people who have UC Davis accounts, is part of the phased retirement of the former campus learning management system.