Bachelor of Computing Systems: Bay of Plenty Polytechnic

Personal Web Sites

The Bay of Plenty Polytechnic encourages the creation of personal homepages by members of the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic's Bachelor of Computing Systems programme and provides facilities on its server through which individuals may publish these pages on the World Wide Web. An account on the BCS server is required. Every student or staff member involved in the BCS programme has an account on the BCS server.

Students have 30MB of space on the web server.

Your personal web page can be found at www.bcs.net.nz/~username (substitute your own BCS server login/username for 'username'.)

The page you see there initially is the default home page created when your account was set up. It's called index.htm, and it can be found in the public_html folder of your account.

Personal web pages are not publications of the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic but are publications by the individual that creates and maintains them. As such, that individual is subject to all laws (including those governing copyright, libel or obscenity). The Bay of Plenty Polytechnic may monitor or otherwise censor personal web pages, but may also report any complaints of potentially illegal activities to the appropriate authorities and may take other actions as noted in this policy.

Permission to publish a personal web page using the BCS server is contingent on the observance of the following:

Contents of the page must not violate any Bay of Plenty Polytechnic policy or the regulations relating to use of the computer systems at the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic.

In particular, content will be considered inappropriate if it:

• is derogatory or libellous
• violates any law or university policy
• is confidential or proprietary and is published without permission
• infringes on the rights of another person
• is abusive, profane or sexually offensive to the average person
• promotes commercial products or services.

Commercial use of the BCS server is prohibited.

Each web page must include the name and email address of the person maintaining it.

Permission to publish personal web pages may be withdrawn if these requirements are violated. The Webmaster reserves the right to sanction homepages that are deemed inappropriate for publication. In such cases, network access to the offending page(s) may be removed. The Bay of Plenty Polytechnic reserves the right of the final decision regarding whether or not to publish a personal web page whose contents is in dispute.

Privacy and Security

Every student/staff using the BCS server has the right to privacy of personal information stored or transmitted via computer. The administration of computer systems must strike a balance between the goals of privacy and information sharing. The health and well-being of institutional computing resources are the individual and collective responsibility of all users, who must guard against abuses that could disrupt or threaten intended uses and operations. In general, users should not compromise personal security, nor others’ privacy, by engaging in any of the following:

• intercepting the network communications of other users
• giving private passwords to other individuals
• gaining or seeking to gain unauthorized access to files and information resources
• altering or destroying software or data
• interfering with the intended use of any resource
• violating terms of a third-party copyright, patent, license, or contract
• using another person's computer account without permission
• intentionally disrupting the work of other people
• using abusive, objectionable, or threatening language in mail messages
• harassing other users through electronic means
• placing unlawful information on the network or using the network to commit a crime

Intellectual Property Rights

In many cases, software and data that reside on the BCS server are owned by an individual, a third party, or the institution, and are protected by copyright law, license, or contract agreements. Users must abide by these agreements. Such agreements may prohibit copying software or data, resale or use of software or data for personal gain, and public disclosure of information without the owner’s authorization.

Logging onto your personal account on the network constitutes agreement to the above guidelines. Remember that as a user of the BCS server, you are accountable for your actions when accessing network services.