If you’re thinking about coming down to Sinclair Community College and using its Internet connection to play World of Warcraft or online poker, think again. The college has blocked those applications, along with a number of others.
“The Sinclair network is provided for students to use on campus for academic use,” said Daniel O’Callaghan, Sinclair’s chief information security officer. “Is it permissible to do other stuff? Absolutely. But when that other stuff starts impacting the academic use, that’s where some of this stuff has to draw down.”
O’Callaghan said there are three primary factors that determine if a website or application gets blocked:
1) If it’s hosting malware or viruses, 2) If it’s mandated by law that it be blocked and 3) If it takes up too much bandwidth. Bandwidth is the transmission capacity of a computer network or other telecommunication system.
“Over the last two years we’ve added more than 4,000 students to our head count,” O’Callaghan said. “Our bandwidth has not grown at that pace. Some gaming and other high bandwidth sites have been blocked for now strictly because of bandwidth.”
Some of the applications blocked at Sinclair include World of Warcraft, Pokerstars.net and Pandora.com, as well as peer-to-peer, illegal file sharing technologies such as Limewire. O’Callaghan said one of the issues impacting Angel this year has been the amount of bandwidth all those non-academic applications were taking up.
O’Callaghan said restrictions to certain applications can be lifted.
“If there was a faculty member that said, ‘Hey, I’m teaching Game Theory and I need access to this and my students need access to this,’ we would do something in the firewall to give those students and that faculty member access to the games because it’s a legitimate academic need,” he said.
O’Callaghan said the final decision whether to block something or not comes from the Internet Technology Services Department and he admits some mistakes have been made like blocking iTunes.
“Flat out, we didn’t realize the extent that (iTunes) was being used and as soon as we had academic complaints from it, it came back,” O’Callaghan said. “We try not to do anything that would negatively impact anybody academically.”
O’Callaghan said anybody concerned about Facebook or MySpace getting blocked have nothing to worry about.
“We don’t block in any way, shape or form Facebook or MySpace because they’re great collaboration tools students use to form groups” he said. “They really are fantastic applications.”