Over the past year, the ACC has come under a lot of heat, starting at the beginning of the 99-00 school year when students came back to campus finding that the popular ICQ chat program had been blocked. At the end of last school year, students learned that Napster had also been blocked. This act infuriated a lot of students, and complaints continue to roll into the ACC office.

"Now we get blamed if the milk in the caf is too warm" said ACC employee Christopher Hanson.

ICQ was blocked for a security reason. Two years ago there was a major security threat when an off-campus hacker entered the St. Olaf network and broke into the password file list. With that they could access anything they wanted on campus from financial aid records to transcripts. It was thought that the hacker had entered the network through ICQ, so the ACC put up a firewall to prevent further breaches.

Last spring it was thought that Napster was also a possible security threat. Also, at the time, there were several Napster-related lawsuits pending. The main problem, though, was that so many students were using it, thus clogging the network and decreasing its speed and usability. Before the end of the year, the ACC unblocked Napster after they discovered that it wasn't a security threat, but did not inform the students it had done so.

Napster is back this year, but it has taken quite a cut in its allotted speed within the network. Napster has been "package shaped" to 300K which is very slow, almost one-tenth its normal capacity. It is even lower when that 300K is divided among all the students who simultaneously use it. "The ACC puts academics first" said student worker Evan Froderman. "It is ACC policy to network academic support as top priority."