On September 29, the Head of the Information and Communications Team (ICT) posted an announcement on the change in the KAIST Patch Management Service (PMS). However, after many students complained about the new PMS Agent, the KAIST Undergraduate Student Council, PUUM, contacted IT-related student organizations regarding the PMS, conducted a survey on PMS in order to fully understand the problems of student use, and held a meeting with ICT on October 17 to discuss the problems this new agent is causing for the students. Although these discussions did not result in the complete abolition of the PMS Agent as KAIST requires some security measures to fulfill its responsibility as a B rank major information infrastructure security facility, three problems were resolved.

The first complaint that was resolved was on the lack of an “Install Later” option. While accessing a website, if the user’s browser requested them to install the PMS Agent, they could only refuse at the cost of being unable to access any further website. Thus, the ICT has agreed to allow users to not install PMS by creating an exception process that will be accessed through the “Install Later” option by mid-November.

The second complaint that was resolved was on the considerable decrease in the speed of the school’s Internet. However, this phenomenon was explained by the coinciding of the installation of PMS and a Windows update. Furthermore, another reason students saw a decrease in speed was the cross configuration of the PMS Agent with the campus network and the dormitory network. This problem has been recognized by the ICT and is currently being fixed.

Finally, possibly the most disturbing complaint from students was on the collection of internet access logs and miscellaneous data from student computers. However, after confirmation with the ICT and Cert, the student securities team, it was found that student internet access logs could not be collected by the PMS Agent. Although the PMS Agent was able to check the list of currently installed programs, through the discussion with the ICT, this functionality was agreed to be removed.

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