Does MLC filter Internet access?

MLC provides Internet access for all students, staff, and faculty with the purpose of enabling and enriching your academic experience. While it is available for personal and recreational purposes, we contract a service that runs on our firewalls that filters out  pornographic and gambling sites.

The firewalls also filter by port. Ports that are not needed for common web applications are blocked to prevent attacks on your computers from the outside. This may prevent you from playing some multiuser games and other web applications that use non-standard ports in their setup.

Direct outbound SMTP (port 25 mail) is also blocked from the dormitories to prevent computers that have been infected with viruses from sending emails to propagate the virus. Outbound SMTP email is only allowed through MLC's mailhost which does antivirus checking prior to sending. You can, however, send and receive mail though any web based email system that uses ports 80 or 443.