New Network Access Control system for students explained
Students question new internet security system
Jessie Cyr
Issue date: 10/8/08 Section: News
ITS assures that this will amount to no more than a temporary shut down of a student's computer to allow ITS to guide a student through removing a virus, to help keep bandwidth use down, and to keep the network faster for all students.
"Although all members of the College have an expectation of privacy, if a user is suspected of violating this policy, his or her right to privacy may be superseded by the College's requirement to protect the integrity of information technology resources, the rights of all users and the property of the College," the policy reads.
This sentence states that one has the right to privacy, as in the right to not disclose what programs they are running on their computer at any given time. This right shall only be violated upon suspicion that the individual has violated this contract.
According to ITS, NAC is being implemented for the sake of preserving internal network security. The college also scans e-mails for viruses, much the same way that Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail would.
"We use a system to filter through the roughly 100,000 e-mails that are delivered to campus every day," Pavlinik said. "We update our virus protection every hour and we have stopped a total of 24,645 viruses and roughly 43 million unsolicited messages from entering our e-mail system."
Those are impressive numbers, and make it seem a little less necessary to force protection on us, but many people feel that there can never be too much security. To some this is reminiscent of Dynamic Rights Management on software - the people inconvenienced most by it are the ones who weren't doing anything wrong in the first place. Students may not like being a casualty to this more zealous security measure, but most certainly don't mind the clean up that it helps provide.
"Although all members of the College have an expectation of privacy, if a user is suspected of violating this policy, his or her right to privacy may be superseded by the College's requirement to protect the integrity of information technology resources, the rights of all users and the property of the College," the policy reads.
This sentence states that one has the right to privacy, as in the right to not disclose what programs they are running on their computer at any given time. This right shall only be violated upon suspicion that the individual has violated this contract.
According to ITS, NAC is being implemented for the sake of preserving internal network security. The college also scans e-mails for viruses, much the same way that Yahoo, Google, or Hotmail would.
"We use a system to filter through the roughly 100,000 e-mails that are delivered to campus every day," Pavlinik said. "We update our virus protection every hour and we have stopped a total of 24,645 viruses and roughly 43 million unsolicited messages from entering our e-mail system."
Those are impressive numbers, and make it seem a little less necessary to force protection on us, but many people feel that there can never be too much security. To some this is reminiscent of Dynamic Rights Management on software - the people inconvenienced most by it are the ones who weren't doing anything wrong in the first place. Students may not like being a casualty to this more zealous security measure, but most certainly don't mind the clean up that it helps provide.
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