ITS Deserves Respect, Appreciation
By Andrew Haeberlin '05

ITS seems to be everybody's favorite whipping boy these days. An apparently evil organization run by Snidely Whiplash-esque caricatures who enjoy nothing more than randomly disconnecting students' internet and taking far too long to repair other computer problems, ITS would appear to embody both the pointless evil of Germany in the 40s and the pointless bureaucracy of Russia in the 50s. Well, I work for this evil empire, and I want to tell you all to get the hell off our backs.

Let me make this very simple: Every student who goes to Pomona College has a sweet deal. You get high speed internet access in your dorm room for free. You have an organization in place to repair your computers if they should break for free. Also, you have an IT department which is more or less willing to turn a blind eye to all the piracy and copyright infringement that goes on here, something which they are NOT obligated to do. In a world where college campuses across the US are increasingly cracking down on activities like file-sharing, Pomona is content to take a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach. The only caveat is that you don't send excessive amounts of traffic out to the rest of the world.

The people who had their ports shut off violated this last provision. Note that it is only "outbound" traffic. That means information that people outside the 5Cs pull off your computer. Traffic between computers on our network is not counted in this number, and neither are downloads from the outside world. The reason this policy is in place is because of how much slower the network goes if everyone is sharing information with the whole rest of the country. A few people sharing music, movies, and games with people off the 5Cs can slow connection speeds for everyone.

As to the particularly diabolical charges leveled at us, namely that we disconnect people without warning and that these policies have never been posted before, those are both completely false. When this policy was decided on over a year ago, the people in charge of the network here at Pomona sent out many messages, in many different forms, with the Digester being the most commonly used forum. As for this being done without warning, we warn people when we can. The problem with that, however, is that the person who does the disconnecting can only see your computer name and an IP address from his terminal. Most people don't have their computers configured as our help-sheets and posted policy ask you to, which is to have your computer name be the same as your login name. When all we can see is that "Jackass" or "WWF" at IP 134.173.04.143 is over his/her/its limit, there is absolutely no way we can contact them with a warning.

When it comes right down to it, my biggest problem with the charges levied at ITS is just how ungrateful everyone is for the services we do provide. I work as a Room Service Consultant. In addition to my studies, I spend 11 hours a week going out to people's rooms and fixing their computers. I have done this for a year and a half now and have doubtlessly fixed hundreds of machines in that time. I was the person who made most of the calls to people explaining that they had "blacklisted" IPs. And while I get paid, it's not that much and certainly not enough to put up with derision, scorn, and ridicule the likes of which is heaped upon our organization. ITS has a hard time keeping people for more than a year or two, and a lot of that is due to the crap we get from the student body as a whole. Stuff like last week's article and the completely unfair cartoon accompanying it really do hurt. Be a little more grateful people, we do our best, do a damn fine job, and it's free. If you don't like it pay $50 a month for a cable modem and take your broken computer to CompUSA for $200.