On the very first day of school, I got here early to take my sister to marching band practice, and as I sat in the back of the auditorium I kept getting notifications on my phone that said, “the identity of google.com could not be verified.” Which was a little bit weird but I just figured the wifi had decided not to work yet again. By the time I got to my second period class I realized I needed to download a certificate in order to access the internet. There was just one issue with that plan-in order to access the certificate to access the internet… I needed to access the internet. I spent all day trying to connect, granted I did eventually get it. But for the first day I had no internet access. I was unable to download it at all on my laptop, as my computer would not trust the file. 

Flash forward a week or so, I disconnected from the certificate because I had heard the rumors that it tracks you wherever you are. When I tried to redownload it from home before school on the following Monday, the cite that has the instructions to download the certificate was blocked and I couldn’t download it again. Eventually I found a way to get it back but this just all feels like a very convoluted way to access things that are the bare minimum of a day in the 21st century. 

Since last year, I have not even noticed much of a change in the quality of the wifi. My phone is still slow and in certain places in the building, my apps will not load at all. If anything I have noticed that more websites are being blocked than before, often ones that do not have anything that would be considered “inappropriate.” I have a friend working on an art project about hyperfeminine advertising and she could not complete her research in school because the certificate blocked half of the sites she tried to visit. 

I appreciate what administration is trying to do, but for a system that is so difficult to figure out it does not really have the functionality I would expect. I am sure things will improve as the year goes on and we work out the kinks in the system. 

Click this link to get the instructions on how to install the Root Certificate to use CCS Wi-Fi.

The views in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of the HiLite staff. Reach Emily Carlisle at [email protected]