ITS Sneaky, Silent
By Chris Meyer
A&F Associate

These days technology problems are pretty much a given. If you manage to survive for a month without having your computer crash, your television reception go fuzzy, your lamp burn out or your refrigerator explode, you're either really lucky or you must possess some kind of machinery healing power like some guy in the X-Men probably has. And since I don't think anyone at this school is a mutant, I'd imagine most of you have had at least a few tiffs with your computer by this point in life. There may have even been a few times when you've wanted to put a fist in the monitor, push it out the third-floor window or strangle it by its own power cords, or, preferably, some combination of all three. I know for certain that a select few of us have had this feeling for the last few weeks thanks to internet woes; the weird part is, this time they weren't caused by a technology malfunction, but by someone's very specific decision.

I'm used to the internet cutting out on my computer from time to time, so when things nearly ground to a halt near the beginning of March, I didn't think much of it for a day or two. The internet was, technically, still working; it had just slowed down to a speed I'd later find out was approximately half of a kilobyte per second, which essentially meant that our Pomona Webmail page would load up after about five to six minutes. Sending an email would take 10 on a good day, but forget about any kind of attachments. Instant Messenger would barely work, cutting me off every five minutes or so, and endlessly reminding me that they were sorry I'd lost contact to the AOL Alerts Server, which I didn't even know existed. Anyway, for a while, no big deal, I could always go to a computer lab, right?

Well, sure, I could always go there; the machines in both computer labs seem to have refined the concept of incompetence to a high art, and sometimes getting them to actually do anything useful works about as well as building castles in the clouds. Printers on north and south campus alike would spite me, zip drives almost never worked, and the system itself had apparently decided to only allow me to log in when the hour of the day was a multiple of seven. Well, that's exaggerating, but the truth is that what should have been a relatively simple process of bringing my Word document to a lab, logging into the network and printing it out almost never went through without some amount of unforeseen complications.

But again, it wasn't so bad at first; things like this do happen from time to time. After three or four days of this (and finding out that most of my friends weren't having this problem) I decided that it might be serious and called the folks over at ITS, who usually help me out of problems like this. The staff member I talked to hadn't heard of this specific problem before, and suggested a few remedies that didn't work. A week or so later a different ITS staffer offered some different ideas, none of which worked; I asked several people on and off staff for opinions and nobody could seem to help. Just after Spring Break my case was then upgraded to a higher level, where apparently the full-time staff would take care of things. I never really heard from them.

This last Monday afternoon saw a familiar scene for me: what should have been a relatively simple printing out of a five-page document up at SACS turned into a hurculean fiasco that made me half an hour late to class (this hadn't been the first time, either). This wasn't due to my own incompetence; I know how to operate computers and I can usually recognize when a system fuck-up is my fault or not. I was relating my own computer's woes to the staffer at the desk when she told me that my bandwidth had probably been blocked by ITS itself because of my file-sharing activities.

What?

I double-checked this story with other staffers, and though no two explanations were alike I managed to discover that I had been "blacklisted" and, in order to get my internet back, I would have to go through something akin to a confessional by removing all of my file-sharing software, calling ITS and telling them I'd done so and then wait around for them to return my bandwidth so I could re-install all my file-sharing programs and resume downloading - as long as I kept my upload rate lower than 2 gigabytes per day (a constant rate of about 23 kilobytes per second). A little ridiculous, but not that bad in and of itself; bureaucracy will be bureaucracy.

What gets to me is that all of this happened without my knowledge. My internet account was, in effect, suspended until I took certain steps to alleviate something I didn't even know I was guilty of. I was never alerted of the blocking, never even warned; worst of all, ITS itself didn't or couldn't even help when I asked for it. Not that I believe it's a fault of the student workers; they honestly didn't find out until just this week, and it was one of them that finally set me in the right direction. Someone in the full-time staff has been shutting off my - and, I hear, at least 40 others' - bandwidth for almost a month without alerting either us that we were at fault, or the rest of the ITS staff so that they could help us deal with it. Maybe it's just me, but that sounds more than a little shady.

My attempts to contact the person responsible for the blocking have been fruitless, and as of this writing no official comment has yet been made on this situation, so sadly all I have to go on are the stories of uninvolved ITS staff and other students in my position. There are indeed others that, like me, found they had internet troubles, contacted ITS and yet received no help; I'm not simply an isolated case. At least 40 people were on this blacklist and I have yet to meet a single person who was given a warning or even a notice as to their blocked internet. For some it's been a week or two; for people like me it's been an entire month, and it's certainly possible others have been blocked longer than I. Thanks to a combination of this blacklisting and computer lab problems, I went through four weeks being late to classes, missing newspaper deadlines and under an extra level of stress that people just shouldn't have to put up with; I can only imagine how it affected the rest of the blacklisted group.

This is the type of fiasco our college simply doesn't need; it's wasted far too much of our time and energy and has only worsened the already admittedly strained relations between ITS and the student body. If there was supposed to be a lesson in this blacklisting, that lesson has been eroded by the ridiculous secrecy and carelessness that went into its implementation; I keep thinking of that spoiled brat in kindergarten that would hide all the best toys so nobody else would be able to play with them, or the unreasonable girlfriend that locks you out of your own house until you apologize for something you don't even know you did wrong. I hope the person(s) behind this will at the very least have the decency to learn from their mistakes, that as human beings we deserve better than juvenile wrist-slap punishments.

What can we do to avoid such a thing in the future? If there still hasn't been an official comment on this by now, we can keep poking around to find out the truth. We can also lobby school administration to do the same - I don't know enough about the structure of ITS to be able to identify key weaknesses, but when things like this happen I feel that some sort of investigation is necessary to find out where things are going wrong. Pomona should also consider hiring more full-time staff to work extended hours, since not all of our big computer problems occur during the hours of 9 to 5 with a one-hour lunch break in the middle. Just a larger staff in general would be great - I realize that keeping a network running smoothly can be difficult, but when things like this start happening and not a single PC in either computer lab knows how to read a zip disk, it's clear that definite changes need to be made. Hiring some sort of ITS-student relations manager (or adding another, if one exists) might help things as well. I don't know what would be best, I just know something needs to be done - though I've tried to think the best of ITS in the past, this entire incident makes me doubt that they have our interests in mind at all.