Mac Law Students

Macs are showing up on law school campuses at a truly astonishing rate. At least two schools I know of are expecting half of the incoming fall 2008 students to be using Macs. This is a far cry from 2005, when the Intel Macs hadn’t been introduced and Macs were few and far between in law classrooms.

Thankfully law school IT departments across the United States are taking notice of this trend. Yesterday I took part in one of the sessions at the 2008 CALI Conference for Law School Computing. The session was attended by 30+ IT professionals, all of whom work at law schools. The topic was managing Macs in a law school IT environment. I attended virtually, using Skype video via my home iMac. I’m happy to report that it went off without any technical glitches.

I spent a few minutes telling the participants a bit about trends in the Mac law student community over the past three years. Then John Daly, who works at Fordham Law, went into detail about the challenges law schools face in supporting Macs. He also described how Fordham has dealt with these challenges. There were also some interesting questions and back-and-forth after John finished his presentation.

While some IT managers see more Macs as a good thing (less support calls for Mac users), some are still skeptical (supporting Macs requires staying on top of another OS in addition to Windows). But none of them are denying that Macs are moving into law schools in a big way.

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I don’t use a CAC reader, so I don’t know if this will be helpful for those of you having trouble using CAC readers with Macs. As Aaron reported earlier, it can be tricky getting them to work properly.

A contact of mine at Apple passed along this document created at the Naval Postgraduate School: CAC on a MAC: Setting up a DOD Common Access Card Reader on the Macintosh OS X Operating System. Don’t worry, it’s approved for unlimited distribution.

The report was released in March, 2006 and a Security Consulting Engineer from Apple assisted the folks who wrote it. If you’re having trouble using a CAC reader with a Mac, hopefully this report will be of some assistance.

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The Apple Blog has been digging for back to school bargains, and they’ve posted the results here.

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Now that I’m on active duty again, I’m dealing with the compatibility issues of Macs with PCs on a more regular basis. In many cases, I could deal with them by coughing up the cash for Parallels and a copy of Windows (Boot Camp doesn’t appeal to me much). Specialized programs used in niche markets are the only time compatibility issues tend to come up anymore with Mac OS X, and even then, they’re easily conquered by Apple’s ability to run Windows.

Unfortunately, in one particular case, this isn’t true. The Department of Defense has integrated the Common Access Card (which is a type of smart card) into its digital business. In order to gain access to any military computer, one must have a CAC, which is a chip embedded in their DoD Identification Card. Slip your card into your CAC reader, enter your PIN and you’re in.

Some important official business requires a CAC. In order to access “Global” email accounts, the Defense Travel System (which you must use to get reimbursed for official travel) and other online programs from your personal computer, you can buy a CAC Reader and get everything done in the comfort of your home. It comes in handy when the mission or lack of DoD computer availability at work doesn’t allow for the completion of these important administrative tasks.

Most CAC readers are compatible with Mac OS X, or at least they were with Tiger. In the rush to release Leopard, this compatibility became hit or miss, seemingly indiscriminate of model or processor. For some MacBook Pros (for example), you can plug in your CAC reader and it lights right up. Others with the same model can fix it by downloading and installing a series of patches (if they know more about terminal than I). Another person with the same model and mad nerd knowledge of Unix might not ever get their CAC to blink, all while controlling for the other variable: the same model and version of a CAC reader.

What’s worse, Apple has been silent on this issue, as one can tell from the amount of frustration on the Fed Talk Apple email list (Google CAC Reader Leopard). An easy fix could be a ways off.

So, how could this affect you? While CAC is a DoD standard, it is also used by DoD contractors and some other US federal government employees. You never know, it could affect some recent law school grads who want to make working at home a seamless task.

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Apple has made their latest back-to-school promo official. This time around if you buy a Mac before September 15th, you can get a refund on an iPod nano or iPod touch purchased at the same time.

My advice: be sure to keep all of your receipt, packaging, and so on. As soon as you make sure your new Mac and iPod are working as they should, fill out the form, clip out the necessary proofs of purchase, enclose the receipt, and send it all to Apple. Nothing sucks more than losing out on a rebate because you neglected the paperwork. Yes, I speak from experience (Comcast suckered me with a convoluted free cable modem deal).