The STA technology department will be getting rid of Smoothwall Sept. 16 and 17.

“Smoothwall will be removed from student machines,” Tech Support head Jeff Zimmerman said. “We will be going to Securly, a new filtering service that is done in the cloud so computers won’t be crashing everytime you go between classes.”

Around 15 students, including the Students Working to Advance Technology, or SWAT, class and four or five others students, have been testing Securly for about two weeks.

According to SWAT member and STA senior Maggie Hodes, “the internet stays connected and it doesn’t make you log in and restart as often.”

SWAT senior Caitlin O’Toole feels the same about Securly, stating, “So far, Securly is working pretty smoothly. We are having to restart the computers less and they have altogether just been working better.”

An additional note from Zimmerman comes regarding a printing issue with some versions of Google Chrome.

“There is a certain version of Chrome floating around that when it self-updates, it doesn’t like our printer authentication so it doesn’t register,” Zimmerman said. “It says your ID is not correct when it actually is.” If students have this issue, Zimmerman recommends they download the document out of Chrome in order to print it.