Internet Misuse

It is Sunday evening and you have part of a paper to do before class tomorrow morning. You have to use the Internet to find your sources but it is taking almost 20 minutes for your homepage to load. The library closes at 11 p. m. and you do not have enough time to get your research done with no Internet in your room. Are you frustrated just thinking about this possibility? Unfortunately, this situation has been an ongoing problem for residents on campus and has already occurred at least once since the beginning of this semester. Why is this still happening? This is how it all works. In the dorms, each room and each floor are given certain amounts of access to the Internet. These amounts are more than enough to accommodate those living in the dorms, even when many residents play online games and when they leave their computers connected to the internet for long periods of time. This does little to nothing to Internet availability for the other students in the dorms. The real problem with Internet outage is that some students are taking up too much of the bandwidth (the rate of information transmission), which is meant for all of us to share. What's worse is that it only takes two to three people using more bandwidth than necessary to take out the Internet for the rest of the residence halls. Illegal Downloads As complicated as computer lingo may seem to many of us, the reason for Internet outages is quite simple: the downloading of large files. The majority of these files are illegally downloaded movies and cause more problems than Internet outages for the rest of the students on campus. About once every month the Information Technology Services department receives a notice of copyright infringement from organizations like Sony and the Recording Industry Association of America, or the RIAA. Although it can take awhile to find the student behind the download, it is getting faster and easier for employees like Network and Systems Engineer Travis Skillman to track down the perpetrator. The ITS is also finding ways to deter students from downloading these files. By blocking certain files from being transmitted, "we've done some things to slow that download down," says Skillman. The best advice, however, is to stop downloading altogether.