Academic Information Technologies has made a few changes this year that should increase connection speed on campus and help protect computers from viruses and spammers.

“The biggest change for students in the residence halls is that the students have agreed to a larger bandwidth,” said Frank Poduska, AIT systems analyst. The larger bandwidth doubles the Internet traffic capacity in the residence halls, increasing online connection speed.

“You should see speed improvements, even in the last couple of days,” Poduska said.

Bruce Witzenburg, junior in computer engineering, said he is glad AIT is doing something positive for the campus system.

“I noticed over the summer that it was faster, but I attributed that to the lack of students,” Witzenburg said. “I haven’t really been on a high-speed site, but now that I know that, I’ll definitely try it out.”

Residence hall computers will also be able to run a “computer inspector program” this year. The program will let students know what problems and vulnerabilities their computers might have before they connect to the Internet.

“This tells them what problems exist on the computer so they have a chance of fixing it before they make the Internet connection,” Poduska said.

The program is intended to decrease the risk of viruses attacking a computer.

Another change is the increase in computer space for each student, from 50 megabytes of space to 250 megabytes, Poduska said.

“Basically, you can have up to five times as much WebMail,” he said.

Students will also have more storage space to put up Web sites.

Online space was increased in response to a growing need, said Mike Bowman, assistant director for AIT.

“This should be a significant help in students storing information for WebMail and Web pages,” said Bowman. “This is the first time we’ve increased the space in a number of years.”

Another AIT change that enables WebMail to block viruses and spam more effectively is known as greylisting. Greylisting increases the selectivity of WebMail by delaying each incoming message.

“Whenever some mail comes to Iowa State, legitimate mail is just delayed five to 10 minutes, and then it will just show up,” Poduska said.

“Spammers don’t know how to do that delay, so temporarily, we’re ahead of them.”

Iowa State has provided Internet connections to the residence systems since 1985, Bowman said.

“Iowa State has always been providing good connectivity for the faculty, staff, and students,” he said.

Students can find out more about AIT and its services online at www.ait.iastate.edu.