If you use School of Informatics systems you’re probably familiar with computing.help.inf.ed.ac.uk, where you can find the Informatics computing team’s help and advice. In this post I just wanted to mention a couple of its topics which have changed recently.

Firstly there’s Basic Auth. Our University email is handled by Office365, the Microsoft system. Some months ago Microsoft announced that it was going to tighten up the security around logging in to Office365.

The University advises you to read your mail on the web, but if you prefer to use a mail client, you may need to reconfigure how it connects to Office365.

In our page Deprecation of Basic Auth for University Mail we’ve collected together tips on how to do this for a variety of mail clients including alpine, mutt and thunderbird.

Secondly, clean laptops. When you travel internationally, and you take your tech, you need to be careful. Some countries’ border officials may want to inspect the contents of your laptop, and they may refuse you entry, confiscate your laptop or even imprison you if your laptop uses encryption.

Since the University insists that laptops are encrypted – it’s a basic precaution against loss or theft – this presents a problem!

The solution is to borrow a “clean” laptop – meaning that there’s none of your data on it, and it’s not encrypted. You can borrow a clean Windows laptop from the University, or a clean MacBook from Informatics. Our Clean laptops page gives you the necessary links.