Campus Cards, College and University Identification and Security

Emergency alerts good idea if they are timely and accurate

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Text messaging to alert students about emergency events are great, provided they are delivered in a timely manner and aren’t truncated so much as to render the original message worthless. Or, as in the case recently at Florida State University, encompasses more than was originally intended.

Recently, a text message sent out about a suspicious package in a particular parking garage on campus ended up listing just a parking garage, not a specific garage. This could have covered any of the school’s parking facilities. The other problem was that the messages weren’t received by many students until a couple hours after the incident was first reported.

Read more here from the school’s student newspaper. [end] 

Accurate Biometric announced it has been awarded a contract from the FBI for its Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

The contract is a significant one for Accurate as it enables them to offer same-day FBI fingerprint submission services for criminal background checks to clients such as housing authorities, Indian reservations and banks.

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Police are investigating more than 2,000 student emergency contact cards that were stolen from North Miami Beach Senior High School, according to a local news report. The cards hold students’ personal information, some including their social security numbers.

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Tufts University has received a proposed plan to install key card access in all dorm rooms over the next several years, according to a student newspaper for the university.

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Entrust Inc. has made enhancements to its Entrust Discovery digital certificate product by expanding search capabilities for digital certificates residing within Microsoft’s Cryptographic APIs and adding more than 25 basic or custom policy field alerts to ease certificate management.

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The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has certified Good Technology’s secure Android OS-based platform (Secure Android), which enables the Global Information Grid to use Good’s Good for Government mobile device management and data loss prevention capabilities.

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The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) has placed an order with Hitachi Asia Ltd. to supply passive RFID technology that will enable the Singapore Government to track various emergency equipment at all sixteen fire stations island wide.

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