ACCEPTABLE USE POLICY ON COMPUTING AND NETWORK RESOURCES
The Institute provides computing and network facilities to be used by AIT faculty, staff and students as a community service for the purpose of teaching and research, which includes e-mail usage provided that it has no offensive or abusive character. It is not meant for bandwidth intensive use such as is required for the purpose of entertainment, in particular.
This policy provides guidelines for the appropriate use of computing and network resources provided by the Institute, including academic, residential and remote access (dial-up) facilities. The Institute will take disciplinary and legal measures against any user who has been proven to have abused or blatantly disregarded the Acceptable Use Policy on Computing and Network Resources.
| I. Acceptable Use Policy |
1. Access Purposes
| 1.1 | The Institute provides computing and network resources only for purposes directly in relation with its mission, i.e. academic and research activities. | |
| 1.2 | Users are not permitted to use computing and network resources for illegal or unlawful activities. | |
| 1.3 | Users are not permitted to use computing and network resources for commercial activities. |
2. Access Authorization
| 2.1 | Users must not access computing and network resources without proper authentication procedure or intentionally enable others to do so. | |
| 2.2 | A user account must be used by its owner only. Users are forbidden to communicate their password or otherwise give access to their account or any AIT computing or network resource to third parties. | |
| 2.3 | Any anomaly discovered in the authentication procedure must be reported to the appropriate authority so that steps can be taken to investigate it and eventually correct it. |
3. Integrity of computing resources
| 3.1 | Users must no attempt to modify or remove computing/network equipment, software or peripherals they do not own without proper authorization. | ||
| 3.2 | Users must not : | ||
| i. | develop, use or disseminate malicious programs, computer viruses and worms; | ||
| ii. | disrupt the activities of other computers or users; | ||
| iii. | access private data or restricted portions of the computing or networking system; | ||
| iv. | damage the software or hardware components of the system. | ||
| 3.3 | The computing and network resources are shared by all users and are of finite capacity. Users must therefore avoid capacity and performance degrading usage of the system. Such usage includes but is not limited to: | ||
| • | sending of chain-letters or excessive messages, either locally or off-campus; | ||
| • | using an excessive amount of bandwidth; | ||
| • | printing excess copies of documents; | ||
| • | running grossly inefficient programs when efficient alternatives are known by the user to be available; | ||
| • | unauthorized modification of system facilities, operating systems, or disk partitions; | ||
| • | attempting to crash or tie up computing and networking resources; | ||
| • | damaging or vandalizing computing and network facilities, equipment, software or computer data. | ||
| 3.4 | Users are allowed to use the computing and network resources only for work purposes. Users should not engage in inappropriate or idle use of the resources nor block their access to other users. | ||
4. Privacy issues
| 4.1 | Users are forbidden to use other accounts than their own. | |
| 4.2 | Users are forbidden to access files, emails or any form of data not belonging to them. |
5. Email and Posting
| 5.1 | Users are forbidden to create and transmit email as well as post massage on webboards and other web-based discussion forum, containing offensive, obscene, indecent, aggressive, menacing, harassing, defamatory, intimidating, unlawful, racist and other unethical messages. | |
| 5.2 | Users are forbidden to send email and post messages that do not correctly identify the sender, attempt to hide or disguise the identity of the sender or attempt to hide or disguise the identity of the computer from which it was sent. | |
| 5.3 | Users are forbidden to transmit or forward any email intended to encourage the propagation of copies of itself (e.g. chained letter). | |
| 5.4 | Users are forbidden to flood the mailbox of other users with numerous or large messages with the intention to paralyze their mail system. | |
| 5.5 | Users are forbidden to intentionally spread virus or worms or malicious programs. | |
| 5.6 | Users are forbidden to use the electronic communicationl facilities of the Institute for commercial activity |
6. Mailing List
| 6.1 | Official Institute mailing lists (faculty, staff, students) are announcement lists only for the purpose of distributing announcements made by the central administration. | |
| 6.2 | Users should not send any private or commercial announcement to any mailing list. | |
| 6.3 | The unofficial mailing lists must only be used to facilitate communications between AIT community members and no cross posting without the agreement of the original sender is allowed. Unofficial mailing lists, including those administered or maintained by the students (union, committees, associations, etc.) must be moderated. Moderation policy of any unofficial mailing list must be made known to the mailing list members. |
7. Personal and Community Web use
| 7.1 | Publishing personal and community homepages is allowed only on designated servers. | |
| 7.2 | Personal and community homepages must not be used for commercial purposes. | |
| 7.3 | Personal and community homepages must not be used to disseminate offensive, obscene, indecent, aggressive, menacing, defamatory, harassing, intimidating, unlawful, racist, or other unethical information. |
|
| 7.4 | Users are forbidden to post messages in personal and community web fora that do not correctly indentify the sender, attempt to hide or disguise the identify of the computer from which it was sent. | |
| 7.5 | Users are forbidden to publish content detrimental to the good name of the Institute on their personal and community homepages. |
8. Copyright and software licenses
| 8.1 | All software used on any computer must be properly licensed. | |
| 8.2 | Users must not infringe on any intellectual property right while using the Institute’s computing and network resources. |
| II. Operational Policy & Procedure |
| 1. | Upon request and with authorization by his/her parent academic, administrative or outreach unit in the Institute, a faculty member, a staff or a student will be granted the privilege to use the computing and network resources. | |
| 2. | Every authorized user is given an account, and is allocated associated hardware/software resources. | |
| 3. | To defray additional operating cost, outreach units and sponsored projects in the Institute are charged, at approximately cost rate, for the use of computing and network resources. |
|
| 4. | To the extent possible with its hardware, software and manpower resources, the Institute maintains backup of user files and implements system security safeguards as well as capacity and performance enhancing measures. | |
| 5. | When a user terminates his/her account, the account will be kept active for a period of one month during which the user’s files maybe downloaded to another host system. |
| III. Disciplinary Action |
| 1. | The following sanctions in case of infringement of the acceptable use policy will be applied, depending on the gravity of the infringement: | ||
| i. | official Warning; | ||
| ii. | Temporary or permanent suspension of account and internal access in dormitory or faculty/staff housing. | ||
| iii. | forwarding of the case to AIT administration for further action, including expulsion from the Institute. | ||
| 2. | Abuses of downloading entertainment and non academic related materials, or of use of an excessive amount of bandwidth, are handled by the ITSU, which will then suspend the user. The length of the suspension depends on the size of downloaded materials, frequency of abuses, as well as the use of evasion techniques. These are the connection suspension periods for corresponding abuses in using Internet: | ||
| • | More than 1 GB of download in a 24-hour period, regardless of content: first offense will draw a warning without penalty; second offense will result in a suspension of two weeks. | ||
| • | Download of entertainment and non-academic material of more than 256 MB in a 24-hour period: first offense will draw a warning without penalty; second offense will result in a suspension of two weeks. | ||
| 3. | The connection suspension period will be doubled for second offenses and when evasion techniques (e.g. faking computer address) are used. | ||
| 4. | When the abuse is repeated more than twice, the case will be referred to the administration for harsher disciplinary action. | ||
| 5. | Abuses related to ethics (offensive, obscene, indecent, aggressive, menacing, harassing, defamatory, intimidating, unlawful, racist and other unethical messages or information), as well as the use of Institute’s resources for commercial activities and dissemination of information which may damage the good name of the Institute, are directly referred to the Institute’s administration for appropriate disciplinary action. | ||
| 6. | Harassment cases committed through the misuse of AIT facilities and resources will be dealt with the harassment policy stipulated in the Student Handbook. | ||