The latest week and a big change

When I first started my SRP it was going to be about the IBOSS system and how many websites had been interfered with due to it. Over time though IBOSS seemed to fix many of its own problems with recognizing websites as banned or not banned. This lead to many problems in my research and made me unsure about presenting on it. This caused me to lean towards researching something else. It took me a while to think of a new question and my mentor helped me in the process of thinking up a good question. The new question I will be pursuing is how has IT changed in the last 16 years in terms of sociability. Around the time computers first came out many believed the only ones good at using them were unsociable men who lived with there mothers and did not get out much. This lead to the hacker stereotype of the fat white guy who loves to show off and lives in the basement of his mothers house. This stereotype is on the decline in recent years however and the IT world is becoming a place where where anybody can come to seek help on a variety of subjects and not be intimidated by the fact that have little knowledge compared to the person who they are seeking help from. I will be accomplishing this research by gathering data on tech support and IT types over the last 16 years and comparing them with the modern IT examples.

Current Problems

On my first day on site this week I realized IBOSS was blocking my phone from the internet. It was not long before I found the app that was causing it and remedied the problem by uninstalling the app. Today, however, I have found out that it may not of been the app but a problem with IBOSS itself. It seems IBOSS is currently blocking numerous sites for no apparent reason. As this does not a 3rd party issue the problem seems to be newly blocked websites put on by the system admins. As I have recently found out it appears that the safari browser was blocked due to students using it to torrent things. It has since been unblocked according to the admins but I have yet to verify with the students.

2nd week

The third week is now over and I am still no closer to making progress on my research. I was sick Wednesday and because of that I only had two days to work on my project this week instead of three. The school is also in the process of receiving a big shipment of new computers that need to re-imaged and set up for testing at the end of the year. This process takes up most of the day and most of time on site. Next week I will be coming in early to help with early bird and will be seeking out students to participate in my project as well early in the morning as well as throughout the day.

First Week

The first week of the project has passed and I am gathering data from students during their lunch periods. Many of the students know me already which makes the project easier since the students are more comfortable sharing information with me than they would a stranger. Currently I have not found any students in the 4th and 5th period upper lunches that can participate in my research. In the upcoming weeks I will be asking students of the lower grades as well if they are encountering any problems with the IBOSS System. This will require me interacting more with students both before and after school. My on site mentor also has doing things with the schools computers such as replacing screens and reimaging some of the hard drives. He also keeps me on track with my research as well letting me know when some students have issues and letting me go and try to help those students. I have worked out a schedule that works for both me and my mentor going to the site on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. I show up 8:30 and leave around 5. Being the first week though the schedule may change later on. The first week has produced little results to furthering my research but it is only the first week. I hope to have more to share in the upcoming weeks including details on how my research is coming along.

Creation

This blog has been made for schools' senior research project. Being a senior at my school allows you to join an internship and focus on a certain problem or idea that interests you. I choose researching a way to fix one of my schools' most notorious problems: it's security system IBOSS blocking unblocked sites. This research is to fix the problem with some students are having with the IBOSS system. The problem being that some students can not connect to certain sites like YouTube that are not blocked by the IBOSS system, but are getting the standard IBOSS blocked the site error. This problem is only occurring on the public VLAN that students are allowed to connect to with their own personal devices. This VLAN has been set to only allow two hundred and fifty students to connect to it at a time thus allowing faster speed for web surfing. This VLAN is the most regulated as it is the one students can use without teachers watching what they are doing. This problem is hindering the learning of some students who use YouTube as a secondary learning source and as a source for learning more in depth knowledge about subjects they talked about in class. This blog will focus on how I will be taking groups of students who have the problem and focus on what programs they have installed that could being causing interference with streaming from YouTube. By having a group of ten students that have computers that have YouTube working and ten students that do not I can narrow the problem to a specific program and hopefully come up with solution that does not involve uninstalling the program. I hope to finish this project by April 20th as I will be presenting my findings on May 7th to my fellow seniors and school faculty. In this presentation I will be using the data I collected to hopefully provide a list of programs that purpose a potential problem to the IBOSS security program and a solution on how to deal with most of these programs that does not involve uninstalling them.