Students almost organized a march on Howe this week after a joke very quickly spiraled into a real movement.
It all started when a brother of Theta Xi (completely of his own volition, not with the fraternity’s official approval) made a wooden sign exclaiming “88 days without WiFi” and posted it on the lawn of the fraternity’s house. Then, someone made a flyer advocating for a march on Howe to demand the return of media network. A few other brothers then went around to the other houses to see if they too would build a sign, but word spread so fast that people had already heard about the movement by the time they reached the last few houses. All of a sudden, talks of the march had made their way to most of the Slack workspaces on campus, the GroupMe chats of the various class years, and even the Instagram accounts which broadcast Stevens-based memes. The original organizers said they were surprised by how quickly the idea spread, stressing that it started as nothing but a joke.
As almost all readers should remember, Stevens was crippled by a widespread cyber attack this past August which brought down countless computers and virtual services on campus. One of the casualties was the old Stevens WiFi network, which was very quickly replaced with the Skyline network currently being used to write this article, and its sister network Stevens Media, which was not restored until Thursday of this week. Stevens Media is important because it lets students use WiFi on certain devices that cannot connect to the traditional network, most prominently gaming consoles. As an anonymous student working in IT explained, “The significance of Stevens Media is the process of MAC registration. Every network enabled device has a Media Access Control address which is hard-coded on it so it never changes. There used to be a link on myStevens for students to MAC register their devices but evidently that’s not an option at the moment. IT employees are still able to MAC register devices on the network which is how most offices have network printers back online. This capability is pretty much ready to be used by everyone but it’s my belief that there’s a number of security concerns that are still withholding IT from releasing this to the whole community. Most of these security decisions for the past few months have been mostly made by the Stevens Emergency Response Team.”
Without the Stevens Media network, the only other straightforward way to connect these devices would be to use Ethernet cables, but the entire wired network of Stevens was also down for the past few months. The organizer of the march, who chose to remain anonymous, explained that this left students with nothing but convoluted options for connecting their consoles, such as hosting a mobile hotspot on their phones, or remotely using the WiFi chips in their laptops. Obviously none of these solutions were ideal, and most of them stopped working after a few weeks regardless. All things considered, gaming consoles and associated devices were practically unusable for the 88 days Stevens Media was gone.
On Thursday, however, Stevens Media and the wired network both returned to full working order, with the sign reading 90 days at that point. The organizers didn’t want to take full credit for the return, admitting that they couldn’t possibly know what was going on internally in IT or when they had originally been planning on bringing back the network, but that it would be an incredible coincidence if the timeline wasn’t at least sped up a bit by talks about the march. They were not, however, sure if the march was actually cancelled now that the network had returned, stating that it could still happen to protest the return of site blocking that also occurred on Thursday. They concluded by saying, “if there’s one thing to take away from this whole thing, it shows that as Stevens students, even when you’re just walking to class or going to get something to eat, you still are the face of the school, and that can be used for good or bad. If you get arrested it’s obviously bad, but if you stand up and say we don’t have WiFi then you just might spark positive change.”
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