iPad banned from several American universities over security concerns

   Three high-profile American universities, Cornell University, Princeton University, and George Washington University, have banned the iPad from their campuses. They call the device a “security risk”. So much for the iPad being the darling of higher education - not like it had real productivity an office features in the first place anyway.

     The story, first reported in the Wall Street Journal, notes that the iPad is incompatible with certain security features of Cornell’s and GWU’s wireless network, something that’s not the case when you’re dealing with “regular” laptops and netbooks running full operating systems in Windows or Linux and the more advanced smartphone OSes like Symbian, Android or Maemo/MeeGo.

       It isn’t a case of these universities “hating” the iPad, or unfairly singling it out, it’s just that it’s not compatible. Please put down your pitchforks, Apple fans. Apple will probably release a fix for the iPad and the universities will make sure it works with their networks as soon as possible, maybe even in time for the beginning of the fall semester. These things—apple releasing software updates, restructuring a large network—take quite a bit of time.

       It’s not the first time that Apple products have had a hard time on college campuses. When the iPhone was first released, in 2007, Duke University first complained about security issues.The culprit, it seems, is the aluminum housing which was also present on the first iPhone - however Apple seems to have long forgotten that and placed an even larger interference dish on the iPad.

Via: WSJ