Last week we reported on a story that a number of universities (such as Princeton, Cornell, and George Washington University) were allegedly “banning the iPad” due to problems caused by the way the iPad handles DHCP (part of the system that governs how wifi connections are made or dropped).
However, blogger Steve Wildstrom points out that a little basic investigation turns up the fact that this simply isn’t true. Princeton had to block some misbehaving iPads were blocked from its network, but not all of them, nor is it disallowing their use as a whole.
At Cornell there never was any kind of ban; at George Washington University, it is true that iPads are not usable on the wireless network but this is not due to a ban per se—GWU simply uses a specialized network client that is not available for the iPad (though the university hopes to support iPads by this summer).
In the cases of Princeton and GWU, Wildstrom notes, the information was readily available through the universities’ web sites—and Cornell never had the problem to begin with.
This should serve as a reminder to all bloggers, including us, that just because a story is widely reported does not mean it is necessarily true.
