Slashdot Mirror
Clemson University Bans Free Long Distance Sites
Jonathan the Nerd writes "An article in Clemson University's student newspaper, The Tiger, says that Dialpad.com and several other free long-distance sites have been blocked by Clemson's Division of Computing and Information Technology (DCIT). Chris Duckenfield, the vice provost for computing and information technology, said that the reason for blocking the sites was to determine the 'impact on our Internet bandwidth,' as well as to protect the finances of Clemson Telecommunications, which provides long-distance service to students. However, he acknowledged that the bandwidth usage would probably be negligible, which is making students wonder if the University is simply trying to maintain a monopoly on long-distance service. "
Even better: anyone with ssh access to an outside host can use the built-in secure port forwarding to propogate whatever villainous service they want to the outside world. No incoming connections on any port for the firewall people to block, and the data are encrypted while in transit to prevent administrative spying. A little bit processor-intensive, though.
Yes but if the university receives taxpayer dollars, it is a public institution and, hence, their network belongs to the people.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
I go to Miami University in Oxford, OH
:(
The university is in the same area code (513) as Cincinnati, OH which is 20 - 30 minutes from here, but they use a different telephone company (GTE), and part of the town of oxford uses that same company, now I can frankly take a piss as far as it's long distance from here. Last month they made another 30 extensions become long distance.
I'm fairly sure Miami is making a nice cut on that forced long distance they got.
I use my cell phone with "free" long distance, which is registered back in cincinnati of course so I can actually make calls at a decent phone rate.
I'm surprised the university doesn't charge to call 1-800 numbers. Food service is just as proprietary. Internet access, if you want it live in a dorm, if you want adsl run a line from cincinnati cause your not getting it here at school nor are you getting cable.
The university makes sure that everyone except for the big frats pretty much gets stuck living in the dorm due to the costs of cable tv + internet access which is a crappy 56k modem. So instead we live in concrete boxes with desks that force us to hurt our eyes by sitting 3 inches from our monitors.
Universities are out for profit, nothing more. They don't give a damn about student rights or student housing conditions.
The last dorm they built here I think was 1969 or early 70s, they're doing a big remodelling job which involves the grand scheme of lets give them mobile furniture to simulate more space. I dunno bout you but I hate my roommate already and I really don't want a bunk bed so I can sleep underneath the *ucker.
Clemson is doing just what every university is doing, protecting their interests with Microsoft Style tactics, if we can't do it constitutionally well then we'll ignore their constitutional rights and do it anyways.
Notbob,
Ranting and raving all over slashdot again, there goes my karma
Clemson's "customers" are better known as "taxpayers". If they kids aren't paying taxes, then they're not working and their parents are paying their tuition -- and the parents are working, I'll bet. And taxes pay for a big, big chunk of what happens at a state school.
Very different rules apply to a public institution and a private business. A state college is a public trust, paid for by the public and managed for them by the state. A business is owned by and responsible to its shareholders alone, or to an even smaller group if it's privately held. Clemson is the government, and it has no damned business protecting its interests at the expense of the taxpayers' interests, because its only legitimate role is to act in the taxpayers' interests.
But I suspect that you merely guessed wrong about the ownership of Clemson, and the above is pretty much what you'd be saying if you knew it was a state school. Of course, you might also suggest that the state has no business running colleges, and as a matter of fact I might well agree. But that's another discussion entirely.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
Your parents should probably look into getting a personal toll-free number like the ones the folks over at sprint will sell you. It ends up being much cheaper than collect calls, and it's even less susceptable to filtering on the college's end.
:)
I actually don't recommend sprint in particular, and in fact, my stock portfolio would probably prefer it if you went with AT&T, so run along and do that instead.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
I looked at their web site. It said that it's a Java program and you don't need to download or install anything else. From that description, one would ass/u/me that it's platform neutral. But then the system requirements say Windoze and also mention a couple of specific web browsers.
Bah. Sick Sun's legal department on 'em for abusing the Java trademark. ;-) Seriously, there's no denying that their mention of Java is deliberate attempt to mislead people.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I personally don't think that Clemson is doing the right thing in blocking toll free calling sites. On the other hand, it is perfectly legal for them to do so. As the student said, they don't allow mp3's on the network either. Can you blame them? By blocking this one file format, they have eliminated a world of lawsuits and court dates. It might look bad now, but in the long run it is a wise decision for the Administration to make. If Winthrop decided to block Slashdot from it's services, there would be a lot of pissed off compsci's running around here, but at the same time the University would be within it's legal limits. Really it all comes down to aesthetics. Whatever makes the school look good counts best. Student opinions don't usually have that much weight when it comes to Admin decisions, and I don't expect that to change anytime soon. And right now Clemson thinks that free calling sites are hampering it's income, and that lowers numbers for the year. As long as those numbers aren't up to par, you can rest assured they will do whatever is in their power to change that. I think I'm done ranting now, but I think Admin should start doing something more productive than covering their own asses.
NightmareDNS =)
Mr. Duckenfield:
I wish to express my extreme gratitude for your efforts in proving why there needs to be an enforced separation between the lines that deliver internet service to the home and the actual service that is delivered over those lines.
As we watch the market for Internet access dwindle down to only a handful of viable ISPs, your intrusive behavior into the internet usage of your captive audience of students will be a model studied for years to come. Your excuses, your justifications, and your rationalizations for interfering with the free flow of information to those whose pipes you have the technological ability to control will reverberate loudly as large scale ISPs seek to find just how many of their competitor's web sites they can "devaluate" by banning them, slowing them, or just plain redirected them elsewhere...and the fact that you're suppressing a problem that has not occurred yet will be brought up many a time by those who *will* eventually bring the pain of regulation upon you.
As large ISPs make faustian pacts to achieve affordable access to DSL and Cable systems in the face of the end of AOL's Freed Access crusade(they'd rather merge than give tiny ISPs the chance to serve customers that are "rightfully theirs"), the small ISPs who lack conflicts of interest and seek more to provide internet access than restrict, track, and "captively synergize" it will be shaken out. And in their dying breaths, Mr. Duckenfield, your name will come up.
Rather than providing better service, with a flip of a firewall rule, you provided the only serice. Rather than meeting the needs of the students, you made the students meet the needs of you. Rather than trust your product, you chose to trust your monopoly powers.
You won't be alone. There will be scandals upon scandals--maybe AT&T will be found looking at the logs for *@Home to determine what online services MCI and Sprint customers use most. Perhaps we'll start to see exclusivity agreements, where companies will pay to have exclusive access to any customer's high speed networking line--wanted to go to Yahoo? Sorry, we don't serve that, but Lycos is just as good!
After all, when you don't need to worry about your customers having anywhere else to go, you can do whatever the hell you like. That's what you're doing with your students, and that's what more than a few big business, check your ethics at the door types are planning.
What saddens me, Mr. Duckenfield, is that there was supposed to be a higher standard that educational institutions were held to. Perhaps we should fear the next generation of business school students out of Clemson. A school that's working towards The Depublished Internet Regime(where content deemed dangerously competitive is instantly depublished without any feasable alternative access) is not a school whose graduates I suppose I can trust.
So! Have you started blocking 1-800-Collect yet? Oh wait, I suppose that might actually be illegal...
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
We can get both, but then again our machines are always broken, and over priced.
.01% coke and .01% crap that was gummed up in the machine.
The softdrinks here are extremely watered down, when I buy a coke I expect it to be to coca cola's specifications on the percentage of water, carbonation, etc... not 99.98% water and
It would be nice if softdrink fountains were regulated to ensure we get what we pay for.
I have to opt for the $1 a piece 20oz bottles just so I can get something that tastes right.
Stuff like this is going to make students eventually start looking to other companies like earthlink and at&t worldnet to provide internet access. What is the school gonna do then? Say you have to use our network waaaaa waaaaa no fair!
Coke rules, pepsi = sugar water some fat guy took a piss in and slapped a dollar price tag on
Pepsi for the next generation of brain dead idiots, from the same people who invented the crap they call rap.
Think it's all a conspiracy? Ebonics + Pepsi + Rap = The Henchman of the Evil Empire of Stupid People Who Really Need Jobs Badly even though American companies are at a shortfall for labor.
(Come on Someone moderate this Funny)
(Un)Fortunately (depending on your orientation :-) ), this wouldn't solve it at all. I'm ignoring the part about blocking sites, because it's not feasible and you know it... the students would riot, but just blocking all ports except http wouldn't solve the problem either. As other posters have noted, you can:
:-). And demand the cd back, of course :-). While still charging a fee. :D
1) Set up an ftp server to use the http port
2) If they block actual ftp requests, then just send the files via http.
3) If this fails, then grab a cd burner and distribute your mp3s via cd. And charge a fee, of course
void recursion (void)
{
recursion();
}
while(1) printf ("infinite loop");
if (true) printf ("Stupid sig quote");
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Somehow I seriously doubt that you have ever read any part of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.
/. addiction)
Somehow I seriously doubt you have any idea of my reading habits, or any habits, whatsoever. (outside the
from this site
Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech
Now, IANAL ANWTB, nor am I a sitting judge or have experience interpreting 200 year old declarations. However, as a limiting of speech issue, I think this could fit. It could be argued convincingly that the University is abridging this right by requiring students to pay for something that is already offered as a free service using one of the other services they have already purchased. By controlling access to free (beer) speech, it could be argued that they are limiting the *freedom* of speech.
Of course, if the students agreed (After thouroughly reading, I'm sure) to be regulated, (against their best interests) then they have no leg to stand on. And I doubt that Clemson has to follow the same rules as Congress, so the constitutionality of this action in this context is probably not an issue.
I just don't like seeing Internet Providers try to dictate what traffic their paying customers use (outside of spam, and it's ilk). I also don't like seeing captive audiences forced to use passe technology when new, cheaper, and generally better solutions exists, especially with such an obvious profit motive. THe school should be trying to provide the best situation for its students, not trying to squeeze them for every extra penny.
So while it may be Constitutional is this context, it definitely wouldn't be in another, and regardless of either context it can't be defended morally or ethically.
+&x
hehe moderate this one up
Do I really just talk to my screen?
Yes, thanks to the principles of acoustiphotoelectromagnetic resonance. In other words, your monitor screen has certain acoustical properties that vary depending on the hue and intensity of the colors it displays. The variations in resonance in response to your voice is what makes FunPhone possible.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
But what if you chose to live on campus before this happened, like everyone there now? It's pretty tough to find a place, move out, move back in, and let everyone know your new address/phone/etc just to save a little on your phone bill. It's pretty near impossible to quantify moving out just for that. :)
:)
Also there aren't hardly any access #'s at Clemson, and it's kinda hard to convince your roomie to let you tie up the only phone line to your room so you can read slashdot.
X = Bandwidth now
Y = Bandwidth once they block dialpad
X - Y = Bandwidth due to dialpad
Yes, but when Y is much less than X then clearly the profit incentive for protecting their long distance service is a much more probable motive. WORST case low quality voice over IP is maximally 4kbps (thats BITS).
However, he acknowledged that the bandwidth usage
would probably be negligable [sic]
Its amazing i dont see more posts about this particular statement, only naive rants about constitutional law.
Lucky bastard: here we can only buy Pepsi not Coke.
I can't simply believe this mentallity of restricting the competition. Ofcourse the companies want to restrict it so they are free to raise thier prices. The problem is that many people seem to have mistaken the concept of "free market" with the original concept "free competition". Just look at many of the comments to the DOJ v. Microsoft case: "Let the free market decide". It seems like those people can't understand that the first thing a company will do if it optains the opportunity is to quench all competion. In this case it is the universities and Coca Cola or Pepsi that do it together. This can only happen because the market is too "free", i.e. without some governmental interference that blocks these local monopolies.
Therefore: maximise the "free competition", not the "free market", which ultimately will lay all power into the hand of the coorporations.
You can still use dcc voice communications. Also. in the school handbook they site, and I quote, "... unrestricted internet access over multible broadband connections..." Isn't this a violation of something??? I dont use these services. I find a voice to be too distracting, and scary. I perfer irc.cabi.net.
;]
Please moderate +1 informative.
Stupid people do stupid things... Smart people outsmart each other... --System of a Down
Another case of the university acting as a business rather than a university.
It should be helping students not denying them services, which would save the students money.
Students have enough money problems as it is.
Surely any service which saves them money is less stressful for the students.
ObjDisclaimer: Alumnus of Clemson, and DCIT was boneheads back then, even worse. Secondly - they're not all idiots, they've got some really good systems and ideas.
Clemson (and likely every other Univ, and State and Local governments) has an exclusive contract for long-distance. Since dialpad.com and others essentially allow you to connect LD, there could be an issue that its a violation of the exclusive contract.
(side note - Back when I was at Clemson, 89-93, AT&T actually disabled their calling cards from the carrier that had the entire State's contract (including Universities) from time to time - apparently just to cause problems.)
I don't see the real problem here - bandwidth consumed by students is not negligible. I worked for the Univ of South Carolina's CSD, and student bandwith forced one upgrade while I was there.
But I'd be surprised if you don't start seeing more of these blockages, based on prior exclusive contracts - and more strongly worded contracts from now on, for the next few years, while voice/data begin to re-merge.
Addison
hopefully these already pretty poor college kids will get the chance to free long distance again. otherwise, get people to use calling cards and boycott the tel. service.
Hell, next they'll ban on campus pizza delivery in an attempt to make every pay for thier meals at the on campus dining halls.
There's been some discussion during the past week on our local newsgroup, clem.hubcap, regarding dialpad.com and napster. The fulltext of the most informative of the posts is at deja.com at this URL.
Universities are not-for-profit businesses. The chancellor is not sitting in his office, laughing, at all of the additional dollars he is going to make this year because they denied access to the free long distance program. Most likely, the extra money generated by this action will be spent back into increased network equipment, computer labs, possibly classes, etc., etc. This is not a case of making MORE money - it is a case of losing LESS money.
Second, Clemson does not have a monopoly, as far as ISP's go. I do not know if cable modem or DSL services are available in the Clemson area, but certainly other dialup ISP's are. So this is not a case of a monopoly leveraging its monopoly position in one market to gain an advantage in another (e.g. Microsoft allegedly using its monopoly is OS'es to gain an advantage in web browsers). You still have a choice for ISP. Now, if there was only one ISP (AOL-TW, anyone?) and they used their monopoly power to do this to leverage their own phone service, there would most definitely be cause for concern.
Third, you do not have a right to choice. We live in a free market, and you can only buy what people will sell you, not whatever you want.
They aren't using very much bandwidth at all, As I said earlier, Dialpad works fine over a 33.6k modem. I don't know if these guys have Ethernet or not (A commenter from there mentioned that they had pretty fascist admins), but Where I went to school, one paid $7 a month for Ethernet service.
Dial pad is not 'accessing the university network' But rather, individuals on that network are accessing it. What you are saying is that any company that provides a free service supported by advertising are 'hijacking' the networks of people that pay to use them.
Maybe you didn't read the article, The university is blocking access to Dialpad to it's users When I go to netscape.com, or slashdot.org, the bandwidth of My ISP is being used by them. If you don't transfer information, you aren't going to have a very interesting network. Anyone with a brain can see that they are not doing this because they are overloaded with bandwidth, but because they are worried that they'll loose money on long distance phone companies.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Students could still use stuff like Net2Phone, iParty, cu-seeme. It really is a lame excuse to have monopoly over the international calls.
urm in case its not obvious, i meant to say if Y is very close to X... the author made a very bizarre choice for variables :P
surely they can measure the bandwidth usage as it happens rather than by blocking it and measuring the difference. Sounds to me like they are protecting the monopoly.
maybe they should block traffic to slashdot and see how much things improve!
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I was led to believe the above was his office address, and not his home. Anyways, I hope that those who would take the time to write him a letter would have the courtesy to make it reasonably civil, especially if they intended to accomplish anything.
>As for singling people out and posting their home addresses on the internet, perhaps it would be more prudent not to do so. When he starts >getting death threats and package bombs, how will that sit with your conscience?
I highly doubt someone willing to go to that extreme needed my help getting his address. I grabbed it right off of the www.clemson.edu server.
OffTopic, but I would really like to use this service. Has any one used a service like this under linux?
Wirehead dun said:
First off, it may be trivial, but it's also quite illegal. You see, legally, telephone providers (including universities and payphone providers) cannot block access to 1-800 numbers for calling cards, 10-10-xxx numbers, etc. because of several laws (including the Telecommunications Act of 1996, mandating that phone companies open up local lines to competition) and because of telephone companies' special legal status of a common carrier.
This is not to say that phone companies don't do it illegally, though. Many university phone providers illegally block 1-800 access numbers and 10-10-xxx access numbers; COCOT pay phones (COCOTS are small, for-profit telephone companies outside the local monopolies that run pay phone services in which the person who allows the phone on his property gets a considerable cut--in fact, many of the same parties that run COCOT pay phones also run university phone systems) are downright infamous for blocking equal access, as are hotel telephone services; occasionally, one of the "big boy" telcos will do it as well (I've run into GTE pay phones at Bristol Motor Speedway that will not accept access to other phone companies--neither by calling card nor by 10-10-xxx number--though fortunately they've not figured out how to block personal 1-800 numbers yet :).
If your university/pay phone/etc. IS blocking 1-800 access numbers for collect calls or calling cards, and/or if it blocks 10-10-xxx phone numbers, give a call to your state's Public Utilities Commission (it is normally in the phone book in the information section or in the Blue Pages). Explain that the telco is blocking equal access by blocking 10-10-xxx or calling-card access (whichever applies)--as noted, this is flatly illegal, and it is one of the few things that PSCs and the FCC (which regulates the telephone industry) will clue-by-four telephone companies over (some COCOT operators have actually lost their "license" to operate a telephone company because they blocked equal access).
I suspect that most universities that use these COCOT-style services as "dorm telephone service" aren't aware of the laws regarding equal access, and think of it as a "business agreement" much like they'd see an exclusive contract with a soft-drink distributor. Alas, Coke and Pepsi distributors generally aren't subject to common-carrier laws like telcos are :)
You'll also want to contact the phone company you have calling-card access with (or whom you get 10-10-xxx access through) and notify them that your university (or COCOT phones) are blocking access to alternate providers. Many long-distance companies are all too happy to sic the FCC on folks who illegally block 1-800 calling-card access and/or 10-10-xxx access (AT&T among them).
More info than you ever cared to see about telcos, and the laws affecting them, here, and info specifically on equal access here and h ere and even a cute little Postscript complaint sticker that gives info about the laws regarding equal access. :)
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
At clemson they are paying a whopping $30,000+ a year for their Internet access. And then they have to pay for phone calls home now too. Internet access is a privlege, but if Clemson is going to limit this, where does it stop?
Jordan
It seems everyone thinks they are entitled to everything, either for free or virtually nothing. Clemson, and every other University, has the right to ban every site they want, serve the beverage, or charge what they want for phone access.
No, they don't. Not without good reason, and banning free long distance calling so you have a monopoly is not a good reason.
You have 5,000 ports on a network, with lots of bandwidth (I think we have a couple T3's, 2 T1's, and a seperate OC3 to another school), but if everyone starts pushing a gig an hour, that bandwidth is going to be gone in no time.
Again, do you have any sense of proportion? I don't know what kind of compression this site was using, but Roger Wilco uses about 500k an hour for a two person conversation, and its meant to be used while playing games over a modem. In many cases, long distance calling would take up less bandwitdh than ordinary browsing.
Here at my uni they do everything possible to shaft the undergrads and to a lesser extent the post grads. Second hand book store books at 1/2 price: Shut down so waterstones could move in and never have the right books Union shops stuf downs Sandwiches at 30% more than shops off campus. And more on topic: The halls of residence have no capacity to dial out you have the use a 3rd party which surcharged on the cheaper 0800 (free in uk) companies... This has since been sold (i wont say Ericsson) and they are also running the network here. Ill love it when they ban icq and sites they dont want. The idea of putting ericsson ISp cds in every room was luckily veto'd by a person with common sence. ick ack yuk not the view of my uni
There's a way around EVERYTHING and ANYTHING that's done. For this one, just use a proxy. should work.
We shouldn't spam anyone. On the other hand, Clemson is a public university, so a lot more people than just the students have a stake in what Clemson does.
Does this make any sense to someone with legal training? Does Clemson become responsible for other content that isn't blocked once they are no longer a common carrier? Does that affect sites that block Napster? (I'm not saying that banning MP3s would break this, that's a policy issue. They could even say "Don't do that" and it wouldn't break the status of common carrier in my mind)
-30-
Well..
if the issue is bandwidth usage at the university internet gateway, then the university should take measures to regulate it's use, not by blocking certain destinations, but by either capping the bandiwdth, or having some sort of bandwidth-usage regulation, regardless of content.
Negotiating single-source beverage deals is quite common for universities, and even high schools. In Canada, UBC got $10 million from Coke for signing a 10-year deal. A few years ago, my university was negotiating a similar contract, and was expecting figures in the $10 million dollar range. Students often complain that their freedom of choice is being limited... but with so much money involved, universities are eager to sign away freedom of choice.
On my campus, they used to sell both Coke and Pepsi, in the campus stores and all. There was no problem with this. Plenty of both products were sold. There were points of purchase littered across the campus. Then someone sold out to Pepsi, which I think is unfortunate, since I prefer Coke products, on the whole. Now you can't buy Coke anywhere. Is there a possible motivation for this decision other than money?
[We Have No Product] [The Swindle
Maybe this should be an Ask Slashdot question. Is there ANY University paper that isn't written by high school drop outs?
Why does the article link to "FunPhone.com", a blatant April Fools joke from years past? They call it some sort of competitor to Dialpad.com ?
Honestly, this kinda stupidy makes me question the credibility of anything written in student papers. Odds are, the journalism student who wrote the paper probably typed in deyalpadd.com, it didn't load, so he figured the University was censoring him! Must write an article! Conspiracy! Things are a-foot, and we're not just talking about the things we walk on!
Sheesh!
Umm, seems to me that web access and free long-distance are the same thing. I just went to dialpad.com (in win) and called my mom after about 3 minutes of registering and two java applets. We talked for a half hour free and I'll be using it quite a bit since I didn't feel like plunking down a $200 long distance despostic with my local desp^H^H^HHprovider. It's called Voice over IP (VoIP). Voice only takes about 8kbs for good quality so any concerns over waste of bandwidth are a joke.
What they are doing amounts to censorship. "You cannot go to this website because we offer a competing service." This is wrong and should not be tolerated.
+&x
The recent articles mentioning the banning of sites such as napster and now dialpad, coupled with the post about attempts to limit students' freedoms at Arizona State, are setting a disturbing trend of universities trying to dictate to their students what they can and cannot do. A common reason for the censoring is that "it's a privilege to use the network." Well, I don't buy that. Networks are ubiquitous in centers of higher education, and while attending college may be considered a privilege, using the network at such an institution, one that students pay for, certainly isn't.
If my school (Harvey Mudd) were to ever implement a policy as totalitarian as the one described at Clemson, I'd seriously consider a transfer and would tell prospective students not to come here, not just because of the lost services, but also because it shows what the administration thinks about the students. How long will it be before college guides have an IT category listing whether such-and-such school has banned napster, etc?
I suspect that sort of thing is going to go in at universities first. We just had to kill Napster -- it was completely blowing away our T1. Our line utilization was cut in half as soon as we did it. And you're right, it's only a matter of time before the next thing comes along -- and policies (which Lucent, Cicso, and 3com are all supporting or planning to support) are going to take off.
This sort of thing should be illegal. Banning a free service so the school can charge!
I dont think so.
anyone have an email address so I can make the people responsible feel like jerks?
email me
-I go to Rice, so figure out my email address
Y = Bandwidth once they block dialpad
I think it would be very interesting if they found that Y > X. Does that mean they would allow Dialpad though, I doubt it.
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals." -- The Hacker Manifesto
Nobody at Clemson is doing anything illegal. And, by the admission of their own "vice provost for computing and information technology", there is probably no serious bandwidth concern here. Censorship is terrible enough as it is, but it's sad to see it used to help a company try to force people to remain its customers--and pay what is, if Clemson is anything like my school, a much higher price for its services than they would anywhere else.
[We Have No Product] [The Swindle
The Bad:
Dialpad was blocked. The story was published. hubcap (the server holding The Tiger's article) slows down even more due to everyone in the world visiting from Slashdot making life hell in Clemson.
The Good:
Our school gets "recognized" and we get to see how many of us are on Slashdot.
Seriously though, if they wanted to improve the network speed and cut down on potential legal problems, they should have been consistent and blocked all of the porn sites from the freshman dorms. After all, they are technically responsible for all the minors that download porn all day. Though I guess that could be classified as educational for some of them.
Once you start blocking some of it, you have to block everything or you're responsible for what you left out
Routers have weaker CPUs than most computers.
Not all the time - depends what you put in them - I'm probably going ot be setting up a system as a router with a fast pII or pIII in it soon, and it's going to actually need that processing power for what I plan to do...
(if you want to try to guess, here's a clue, it's going to have as many network cards as I can cram into it (at least 5) as well).
If worst came to worst, and you really, really felt the need to use something such as dialpad, you could always just sign up for a local dial-up service (assuming you have a modem) and go about it that way... usually universities have free local calling so all you'd be paying for would be the service, which would be a whole lot cheaper than a long distance bill. I know that this really isn't the issue at hand, but it is a way around it.
As soon as Northland Cable wakes up and gets cable modem's I'm moving off campus.
Wow,
I figured at least some of that money was going towards their education...
Josh
Their is no law against selling competing products from the same vending machine No law, but the contracts prohibit it. Who pays for the vending machines? they don't spring out of the ground. Coke and Pepsi (their local distributer, really) provide the machines and prohibit you from placing other vendors' products in them. That's not to say you couldn't have a coke machine next to a pepsi machine, but having them both in the same machine will cost a lot more money because you'll ahve to pay for the machine yourself...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
How is this block being implemented? There must be a way around it. SSH port forwarding?
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Schools are going to have to come up with per IP bandwidth allocations. Of course, before Napster was banned at AU, I couldn't possibly download an ISO of FreeBSD due to the likelihood of a spike in traffic killing my connection.
.250-255 of every class C subnet, would probably avoid paying in such a scheme, but I digress. :- )
Of course, those of us who realize they don't allocate
What a ripoff! At my school, we pay AT&T 9cents/min for long distance 24/7, 6cents/min in state, and either 3, 6.5 or 10 cents flat fee for a local call (on-campus calls free), depending on the time of day.
Warning: This post is LONG.
As a former student of Clemson, I'd like to share a few unhappy facts about the university's allocation of resources.
Fact #1: DCIT is the Micro$oft of Clemson.
They have traditionally been so clueless that the bigger colleges formed their own computing support infrastructures. A good example is the College of Engineering and Science. They have their own support infrastructure known as Engineering Computer Operations. They have all their own routers, computers, etc... All because DCIT couldn't deliver on competence and facilities in the past. To be fair, DCIT has improved service over the years-Cisco everywhere, for example. Campus-to-campus connections are now nice and fast.
Fact #2: Clemson's administration == clueless and deaf
It is the administration and leadership (Duckenfield included) that live life without a clue.
Just some background, and information, so that everyone has a little history. I arrived at clemson in 92 as an engineering major. I discovered these cool Sun workstations on a network NOT managed by DCIT that I could use to do gopher, and even some web browsing.
I think that sometimes, you could go to a DCIT lab, and the dot matrix printers there might work.
In 97 or so, they started introducing "resnet", which was ethernet in the dorms. It was only available in the two most expensive dorms (20-40% > other dorms), and cost $40/semester. The service was lousy but hey, it was a start. In 98, DCIT completed wiring the other dorms on campus, and elimintated the $40 setup fee. Suddenly there were around 5000-6000 new nodes on the campus network, full-time, surfing, ftp'ing mp3's, etc.
Clemson only had three T1's at that point. You do the math.
You were lucky to get 800 *bytes per second* between 7am-3am. Imagine downloading Solaris patch clusters with that handicap.
Also in early 98, DCIT proposed (and the administration approved) a mandatory $50 "technology fee," to be paid yearly by all students in the interest of improving campus computing resources. Multiply that by 17000 students... $850000/year income from this alone!
Sounds like a great qualifier for funding more bandwidth, right? Wrong.
Everyone from the students to the deans fought tooth and nail to have the pipe upgraded. And in TWO YEARS (think internet time...) it never happened. "Not enough funds." (in the background, CHA-CHING CHA-CHING $850000/year).
Many resnet users switched to faster 33.6k and 56k modems, using local ISP's, just to get better performance than on-campus ethernet.
When I left in may.99, they still only had three T1's. I understand they upgraded recently, not sure to what since I'm not there any more. In the meantime, DCIT has been blissfully upgrading all lab PC's every 6 months. I guess we know where the $850000 goes. Terrible management of resources!
Well I guess I'll end my rant. I'd go ahead and post about Clemson putting the firewall in between the dorms and the internet backwards (protecting the internet from the dorms!) and required all off-campus traffic to be authenticated agains their NDS tree--but I'm sure someone else will do it. If there's enough demand and I don't see it appear I'll post it later.
Thanks,
DragonWyatt
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
You should also read the 14th Amendment and the appropriate Supreme Court decisions (for the First Amendment see Gitlow versus New York, 1925) that prohibit the states from violating individual rights listed in the Bill of Rights. Clemson is a state institution and must abide by these decisions.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
so forcing people to pay for a service that they can get for free by censoring websites is constitutional? Somehow I seriously doubt that.
That's like saying "We will no longer allow people to bath in the river that runs through campus, you must now all pay to use the community showers, thank you." If anyone isn't outraged by this, I just don't see your position.
And I don't see why you need the redundancy of a T3 and $.11/min phone service. One of those makes the other a raw deal.
+&x
winipcfg does not exist on NT, but ipconfig (a command-line utility that does much the same thing) does. Unless it's called ipcfg. Whatever, do dirc:\winnt\ip*.exe and figure it out.
Just because a University receives some government money doesn't mean that every part of it belongs to the people, and it definetly doesn't mean that the instritution cannot say what their network can and cannot be used for.
Your statement is parralel(sp) to saying "The pentagon receives federal money, so i should be able to look through top secret files, because they belong to the people." The latter statement is obviously false, so how could the previous be true?
This'll propably get moderated down, but oh well, i had to say it.
Chrislike
It's not free (as in speech), obviously.
And it's not (free as in beer), otherwise we'd all be drinking beer for free, just for watching the Super Bowl?
So what kind of free is it?
As I'm sure you're aware, your school sells books.
;-)
As I'm also sure you're aware, so do alot of other places on the Internet.
Now, however much students spend on average on phone service, I *promise* you it pales to the sheer amount of cash that flows through your campus bookstore. I also promise you that there are more than a few nervous staff members who are hearing the ads proclaiming lower prices, better service, and higher availability.
Guess who they're coming to, Mr. Duckenfield?
As long as you're blocking sites, you might as well eliminate bigwords.com, ecampus.com, varsitybooks.com, and (horrors!) textbooks.com. Maybe even throw Amazon into the fray--why not? It's your net to do with as you see fit, right?
Oh. I forgot. Your department doesn't sell books. Your school does, but your personal budget doesn't depend on the sale of those books. So who cares if some other department loses out...but as soon as some as of yet non-serious threat to your income opens up, that's something completely different, I suppose?
Since you're a college, you likely have a contract with Coca Cola. Your school saves alot of money by having that contract, which specifically prohibits Pepsi products on campus. I'd say a Pepsi web page is a Pepsi product, no? Poof, off they go. Wouldn't want to lose that contract.
You see, Mr. Duckenfield, there's a concept out there called Content Neutrality. As long as you don't modify or inhibit the data stream along the lines of *what*'s going over them, you're free to forward whatever is handed to you.
However, once you claim the role of gatekeeper, particularly gatekeeper to your captive fiefdom(where apparently people call collect to save money!), you claim the ability, the responsibility, and the liability to evaluate and handle any traffic which flows over those lines.
Better catalog every service your school provides, because apparently you can't handle the competition--not even a little.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. Yes, this is my second post on the topic. So sue me
It does use java, but I think Java is only used to install the Program - probably a Win app. I don't think their service actually runs in Java.
If you load the page under Linux it says something like "Could not find a binary for type Linux ELF 2.2.xx"
There's some sort of javascript doing "sanity" checks. Anyone get around that problem?
Joseph Elwell.
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
As long as you're blocking sites, you might as well eliminate bigwords.com
Mr. Duckenfield,
Don't bother eliminating bigwords. They'll make your campus bookstore look good in comparison, which is just what you want.
(I've had a bad experience with them personally, and take a look at this list of complaints.)
..if quality of and restrictions on internet access and coputer usage soon do become an issue in choosing schools. Apparently appartment buildings in some cities are getting wired for broadband internet, and this is a deciding factor for some tenants.
:-)
In related news...
I just found out that I can get ADSL at home. Currently I'm getting about 26Kbps out of my 56K modem due to being so far from the CO, but it seems I'm just under the 17,500 feet limit for ADSL, and the local telco has just started offering the service. 1.5M max/384K guaranteed down and 128K up for $39.95/mo, plus $10/mo for my ISP. Not bad.
Well, yes, you can already configure the port used for client-to-client data transfers (the actual mp3 downloading), but the actual connection to the napster server requires you to connect to server.napster.com on port 8875, which then passes you off to another napster server on either port 4444, 5555, 6666, or 7777. With Open Source servers using any port and being from any domain, you won't be able to block them (while, now you can just block the 5 ports and/or *.napster.com)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
no we don't.
You seriously think any school would let you install a T1 in your dorm room?
Think again my friend, we can't even install phone lines in our dorm room; instead we get the crappy 'campus voice services'... pay twice as much, get half as much.
"These are so much monopolies as they are licenses. In my neck of the woods, Mariot pays for the rights to and provides the food service for on-campus. This benefits of a system like this typically outweigh any concequences. "
In my college and in others, freshmen and sophomore were not allowed to live off campus. No good reason except the campus made money. A friend of mine was forced to pay for food she did not eat and a room she did not sleep in for one and a half years. She was living off campus with her boyfriend after the first semester. She tried to get out of it, but to no avail. There is no excuse for this, but colleges do this all the time. I don't think the benefits outweighed the consequences.
The freshmen dorms were especially hell holes. Noise, filth, and abuse filled the guy's dorm. The girls dorm was only slightly better. There was no choice for freshmen but to live there.
I was married and so they had to let me live in an apartment. When i lived in the on campus apartment they routinely tried to cut essential services during break even though i rented month to month and not by the semester. One year this nearly meant going without long distance service for december. I threatend to go to the local news and tell them that they were not going to let me call mom on christmas and that got their attention enough to relent and not cut phone service. The did cut the heat during thanksgiving break. They also did not put smoke alarms in the apartment until i called the fire marshall after a grease fire in mine. Oh, that is when i learned you can't dial 911 from on campus. I asked them to do something and they refused until i went crying to the fire marshall. Colleges are corporations and will behave as egregiously as they can get away with. My school was run by Franciscan Friars and yet they put profit over student well being and safety. Last i checked you still could not dial 911 from there.
This is one more example of a college putting profit ahead of all else. I hope someone will do something to stop them.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
I really do see consequences outweighing benefits on my campus. We have four dining facilities all run by the same monopoly, and as on-campus students we are forced to buy meal plans at the beginning of each semester. The cost of these plans is the same regardless of how much we eat, and we get no refunds. Under this system, there are almost no incentives for the monopoly to provide better services. Imagine the level of service we would be given, though, if the four dining centers were competing for our money!
But back to the real issue at hand here.... I agree with you about the phone service, and I can see other potential for abuse. Consider all of the alternative long-distance services (10-10-yadda-yadda, 1-800-CALL-MOM, credit card calling cards, whatever), and imagine the fit the FCC would throw if a college or university blocked phone access to those numbers!
There's also potential for further abuse by other companies here, as well. Imagine if all of your phone service was provided by a single carrier (either your subscribed long-distance service was provided by your local carrier or vice versa), or if that same carrier was your ISP (either through DSL or AOL after they own everything). Is it at all inconceivable that AT&T, MCI, Sprint, or any other phone company might not try to block access to any other similar service?
In these cases, I could see your ISP/phone company blocking such access on the grounds of bandwidth, too!
It doesn't really matter what kind of institution it is, this looks like a case of a monopoly trying to perpetuate itself by blocking access to similar services.
(eg. Microsoft allegedly using its monopoly is OS'es to gain an advantage in web browsers)
Huh? microsoft was convicted, theres nothing alleged about it.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
So what if you have to pay for the machine yourself? Then you can put your own advertising on the case. That way you can subsidize it through the universty's marketing budget, and also sell some outside ads. A vending machine would be a great place to stick two or three ads, especially if you did some research and served the drinks that the students actually liked, and at reasonable prices.
I like Linux, socialism, and guns. Any questions?
Just use a different free isp like thesimpsons.com or netzero.
Try traceroute, it should show you a real gateway somewhere in the list. It might be called TRACERT in NT, I don't know for sure.
In a surprise move, Harvard has moved to ban all use of the "world wide web", claiming that "all these tags are wasting bandwidth that could otherwise go toward IRC chatting".
developing...
The university provides certain services to its students for a fee.
/. page is worth about 5 minutes of phone time. The students paid for thier connection, and while I agree that perhaps there should be limits on the total bandwidth used per individual, I don't like to see selective enforcement of what are "good" and "bad" IP packets.
You mean like Internet access? For a fee, right?
People here seem to believe that the world owes them something -- that unlimited internet access is a basic right, which should be provided free to everyone by "them."
I've seen this lament a number of times, and it's crap. This isn't about unlimited Internet access, it's not even about the bandwidth load. Simple reloading this
The simple fact is that the University is trying to snuff a service that acts in an extremely competitive way (free long distance) with a service that the University gets paid a lot of money to offer through an outside company.
I you feel Universities have a greater olbigation to their business partners than their students (who also pay money to attend school), then by all means support the university in their censorship. Help set precedents that limit consumber choice to whatever the hell they are told to choose. Break the people's will so when their ISP says "No you can't visit that site, it's a competitor of ours, Read clause #12563b of your Contract and bend over", it's taken as a matter of course.
+&x
When schools and other institutions designed to allow free access to materials do things like this, especially when students are paying for access,it is important to point out loopholes. Here at cornell students pay $80 a semester for high speed access. The Fact that the university then wants to limit it's usage is ludicrous, it it a money making project for the school. Students who know anything about computers know how to get around the Sys-Admins defenses, if we are paying for it, they should not be able to tell us what to do with our bandwidth, so long as it is legal, or even in a grey area.
I advise other students to look for ways to use non-standard ports (in cases such as napster) or use proxys. A great site for proxy information: http://proxys4all.cgi.net/
I Hope this helps all of the other students out there paying for high speed connections at University.
- OctaneZ
So you're basically telling me that if I make a recording to which I hold the copyright (like my infamous version of 'Greensleeves' for the kazoo) and make the decision to release it publicly, or to make it public domain (thus relinquishing copyrights on it forever) I can't distribute it over a network as an mp3?
While not all mp3 sites are legal, not all mp3 sites are illegal either. Like any technology it can be used for both legal and illegal purposes. So far the courts have agreed.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
After reading this in disgust once again, a few things to point out... We are a University not a College 40,000 users? Clemson reports about 18,000 students, so we have 22,000 employees here at Clemson? How about canning a few and improving some of the buildings on campus. All dorms have had network service for 2+ years? Mine has had ether jacks for less than a year, Thornhill Village. Free access? What about the new printer quota you have started this year? Not totally free wouldn't you say... All the 'student' you know, represent such a small fraction of the student population. Consider the intake of new freshmen that happen every year, your talking mostly about students that have had no access to an intranet. And another thing, if students are leaving Clemson to go to other Universities that do not provide the latest in technology, what is that saying about Clemson's undergrads? Couldn't get into a better school? What authority did you have to post on behalf of DCIT, you make Clemson sound like a second rate University.. And why should this be integrated into Clemson's existing long distance service? What does a teleco have to do with a tcp/ip stream running across our ATM link? How about trashing the LD service, any one can get cheaper rates through a national teleco. But I guess for you like alot of the "adminstration" that I have meet look for the buck.
My name is Brandon and I'm a sophomore at Clemson University. I have used dialpad quite a lot while I've been here at school, and then one infamous Friday, I wasn't able to call my parents or family anymore.
WHY THEY SHUT IT DOWN
Many of you who do not live at Clemson may not know this, but the University has a monopoly on the long distance services here. They run businesses such as Tiger Tel whose profits pay for different campus services. This is the single reason for their shutting Dialpad down. There have been other excuses produced by the University such as "evaluating the legal and academic nature of the site." First of all, there is NO clause in the terms of use for the Clemson network that call for "strictly acedemic use," despite the fact that Dialpad is indeed used for academic purposes. Secondly, there is NO legal question concerning Dialpad. The Clemson network has made no effort to block illegal sites in the past, illegal pornography, illegal pirating, etc. And of course, Dialpad doesn't even begin to rival these sites in its illicit nature.
THEY DON'T WANT US TO KNOW
Not only has Clemson made a rather socialist move by blocking Dialpad to maintain their monopoly over long distance service, they also betrayed the trust of their student body. The same Friday that Dialpad access was terminated, an email went out to all the employees of the computer help desk that read:
"Access to the dialpad.com website has been blocked until the university can access the situation. We are studying the impact of Dialpad's exploding use on our Internet connection. The Internet connection exists for academic use."
That's all it said. That's all anyone at the University knew for the longest time. And of course the bandwidth problem was quoted as "negligible" in THE TIGER. So what was going on? Many students here would call DCIT, (Department of Communications and Information Technology, here at Clemson) and ask what was going on. I myself called on multiple occasions. Each time I was given a different reason. At first it was that they were "assessing the impact on the university," then it was "it's affecting the bandwidth," then "it's only for academic use." Finally, I was referred to the curator of the Help Desk. I wanted to know who had issued the decision to block Dialpad. She absolutely refused to tell me, citing that she was "not allowed to distribute that information."--I told her it sounded like we were being blocked by the illuminadi. This does not sound like a University that supports the will of its students, nor is it conducive to good student relations. The computer department made no effort to inform students of their decision, and conversely tried to cover it up.
WHAT STUDENTS CAN DO ABOUT IT
Whereas DCIT may do a good job of keeping secrets, they do a sorry job of blocking Dialpad. There is a simple click and type process that any student at Clemson can use to get Dialpad back on their browsers as if it had never been blocked. Please visit DownWithDCIT for simple and very detailed instructions on how to do this. Also, take other's advice and mail the President of the University at:
President JAMES F. BARKER,
210 Highland Drive
Clemson, SC 29631
Telephone: (864) 654-6066
After reading this in disgust once again, a few things to point out...
We are a University not a College
40,000 users? Clemson reports about 18,000 students, so we have 22,000 employees here at Clemson? How about canning a few and improving some of the buildings on campus.
All dorms have had network service for 2+ years? Mine has had ether jacks for less than a year, Thornhill Village.
Free access? What about the new printer quota you have started this year? Not totally free wouldn't you say...
All the 'student' you know, represent such a small fraction of the student population. Consider the intake of new freshmen that happen every year, your talking mostly about students that have had no access to an intranet.
And another thing, if students are leaving Clemson to go to other Universities that do not provide the latest in technology, what is that saying about Clemson's undergrads? Couldn't get into a better school? What authority did you have to post on behalf of DCIT, you make Clemson sound like a second rate University..
And why should this be integrated into Clemson's existing long distance service? What does a teleco have to do with a tcp/ip stream running across our ATM link?
How about trashing the LD service, any one can get cheaper rates through a national teleco. But I guess for you like alot of the "adminstration" that I have meet look for the buck.
IP phonecalls use less bandwidth then web browsing, and don't cost the univercity anything. They certanly use less bandwidth then a switched 64kbits/sec phone call. And the students are paying for phonecalls.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
Does it really seem so unbelievable that a university would want a monopoly? Of course not!
Universities already have forced monopolies in on-campus housing and on-campus food service in most places (although admittedly this isn't universal), and many universities seem to be pretty intent on keeping them.
Monopolies are great business for the institutions that have them, and I'm sure that Clemson (and most other colleges) would love to keep theirs. In this case, online long-distance probably isn't widely used yet, but if they quash it now while there aren't many people to complain, then it'll be easier than trying to stop everyone from using it a few years from now.
When I was a boy, we had to use a red box if we wanted to get free long distance. They didn't have any of this fancy IP telephony stuff!
seriously, why don't the students get a 56k (or 33.6k) for almost no money these days and do stuff like dialpad.com over a local free ISP/phone such as that Simpson's thing? You then get the benefit of screwing the telco by using their lines....:) Roland
Let me guess - you work for Mindcraft? ;)
No, no, no...if more responsible public officials got ten thousand irate telephone calls every time they did something incredibly stupid, such as blocking internet sites, they'd learn.
By all means, call him all you want at the office, but I will continue to assert that he deserves a modicum of privacy in his own home.
Yes, you can get his number out of the phonebook. Heck, you can even get it online. But should the response be "Here's his number; go hammer him!"? Must you employ massive retaliation where other methods have not yet been used and where there's no reason to suspect they won't be effective?
This argument has taken me where I didn't plan to venture, I must admit, since I'm usually the asshole who's fomenting the masses and preaching civil disobedience. By all means, use the system (and subvert the dominant paradigm), but do it responsibly where appropriate (and this is such an instance).
If you want to get back at a University policy, you don't verbally assault its president. You simply aim the media's spotlight at the policy. Just look at the infamous water buffalo affair at UPenn, for example -- colleges and universities simply cannot withstand proper scrutiny. Go about it that way -- if you have to hammer someone, let it be Rupert Murdoch and his ilk.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is terrible. I mean, if the Internet provides such a service to the world, then why must it be silenced by the university? The Internet's purpose is to disseminate information, and Dialpad is part of this information.
I think that the university is overly greedy and needs to open their minds up a little about this, because if I offer free Internet radio on the Internet, then why doesn't the university block my website so that the students have listen to university radio???
Something needs to be done about this, because this is a clear violation of the 1st amendment.
My parents got a 7 cents/min 800 number, so I could call them any time, anywhere-including campus. since I don't make any other long distance calls, that works out great -except dad is always complaining that I call too much...
Fish
While SpeakFreely isn't the exact type of service that DialPad offers, it is a very nice implementation of voice over IP. The only down side to this is that both parties must be online. It runs on most UN*X, Linux and Windows. See http://www.speakfreely.org/ for all the nitty gritty.
From a comment in the iCrave TV article.
>There goes online TV... now let's hope no one goes after Dialpad.com
>-FweE-
Just thought it was interesting.
No one is going to make death threats over phone service but haveing people calling him from all over the country telling him what a bone head he is will be good for him.
If he wants privacy he will have an unlisted and private line for home use. Which I am quite sure is the case.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. ~tricklenews.com
Amazingly, UC Berkeley is neither a Coke or Pepsi school. Each department of the university makes their ownract. For instance, the dorms and on campus restaurants picked Coke, but Pepsi is sold at vending machines in the math department and CS building.
UMass Amherst (and I imagine other large universities) has their own line of Coke machines with the UMass logo on it. Coke foots the bill and the University gets free advertisements. Now why would they want to change that situation?
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This does't make sense to me - surely, if they block the site, all they can determine is how many failed connects there were. If they DON'T block it, they can use packet-checking software to generate a bandwidth_used/time graph for real-world conditions. This smells very heavily of financial interests.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Not allowing MP3's on the network? You should come down here to Thornhill, we have a few servers running on the subnet. I doubt any one on the higher ups at Clemson comes to Slashdot, remember, we run on a damn Microsoft Backoffice server over the network. When I asked DCIT why isn't the network running on a stable system, such as Digital Unix (my undergraduate institution, WPI, ran this way) the only answer I got was "We just don't". That's technical incompetence in my book. I'm surprised that DCIT even know was a website is. Don't get me started on that damn authorization thing, either. Invasion of privacy in my book. I guess next year we'll be looking at a campus-wide ban on sites that the DCIT consider offensive. Luckily I'll be living in Douthit Hills then ;) Clemson DCIT == Big Brother
Any students threatened by such a policy should notify the administration that discount calling card services can be used to the same effect - that is, to avoid the usually high-rate long distance charges brought on university students. If the university is going to threaten net long distance service, the university should be threatened by a mass boycot of the existing service with calling cards, which would, in all liklihood, be more detremental to the university due to the simple fact that many students have a computer capable enough for long distance, but all the capablity for calling card service. My university charges 25+ cents a minute, whereas the local service in the town is 12 cents and my calling card is 8 cents.
I used to go to rutgers. They charged 16 cents a minute for long distance, while legit carriers were charging 5-10 cents a minute. I was spending 200 a month to talk to my girlfriend. One time I complained, and they yelled at me. So then I wrote a letter to the paper, and was yelled at some more. I said "fine, I wont use your stupid phone anymore." Then I dug out the dusty old tape recorder I had orginally been given to tape class lectures(hah). Dropped a few quarters in the phone, taped the tones, and VOILA! Unlimited calling for only 5 cents a call from all the payphones all over the dorm.(if you don't know what the 5 cents was for, you shouldn't be doing this.) Sometimes when people are being assholes, its better to go AROUND them then THROUGH them.
---
"What is that sound its making?"
---
"What is that sound its making?"
"It thinks it has a virus, but its actually just linux."
"I you feel Universities have a greater olbigation to their business partners than their students (who also pay money to attend school), then by all means support the university in their censorship. Help set precedents that limit consumber choice to whatever the hell they are told to choose. Break the people's will so when their ISP says "No you can't visit that site, it's a competitor of ours, Read clause #12563b of your Contract and bend over", it's taken as a matter of course."
This is the great thing about capitalism - if you don't like the service one ISP (or school) provides there are thousands of others to choose from. My school for example doesn't block this service. If students feel strongly about this issue they will consider it when selecting a school and Clemson will lose money.
Well, he's a university president and that means that if he's typical, he gets his university mansion residence -- which suffices as both his official address and his residential address.
Yes, his address is listed on the clemson server and it's even listed in the phone book, and even if it weren't either of those two things, someone with enough dedication could dig it up somehow. But still, you probably shouldn't make it so easy for the undedicated but still obnoxious persons to get ahold of it (especially his home phone number). The risk is largely ephemeral, however, and you can consider my post as mostly humorous (as it was intended).
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
Jordan
This sort of thing will fly for a short while, until most students become cynical enough to realize that academe is competing for students in a market.
Students can help fix these kinds of problems by speaking out, and letting the coveted first-time freshmen find schools that don't perform Gestapo monitoring on their campus networks.
Clemson censors? Write to the administators at South Carolina State and see what they do before you apply for admission at either one. If bright students avoid schools that censor, they'll either stop or see their average ACT score and other measurable metrics go down the tubes.
Get a sense of humor! This was supposed to be funny...
Sheesh I can't believe it. What are we turning into, a mob? Think logically, folks. You don't go to the university. You have no connection to it. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what the IT department has done (read my other post: http://slashdot.org/comme nts.pl?sid=00/01/29/1837209&cid=78). And yet someone says, "Hey, let's spam the President of the school" (albeit through snail mail) and everyone jumps aboard, moderating his points up to 5?!!
This is ridiculous. You should all be ashamed of yourselves.
The finances of Clemson Telecommunications were also considered by Duckenfield.
:P
"The University might see a significant drop in its telephone revenues," stated Duckenfield.
"We'd love for it to be free too, so we have no ulterior motive in blocking dialpad.com or similar sites," said Duckenfield.
So I guess all that money coming from tuitions and donations isn't enough? They also have to gouge students on long distance calls and go out of their way to block off free phone services available on the network service that students pay for themselves? I'm sorry, but I clearly see an ulterior motive here
winipcfg does not exist on NT,
yes it does, it's called winntcfg (IIRC) and is in the Resource pack (or whatever they called the pack of useful stuff that costs extra), although you can find it on the 'net with a bit of googling.
+&x
Here at UCI, we get pepsi in the dorm food places. But then, we have no coke. But you know, thats just like anywhere you eat. How many places do you know that offer coke and pepsi?
Universities are generally considered private businesses. They are not generally affected by consitutional issues that affect the government. In addition, the constitution does not guarantee you freedom of choice. Currently there are a number of laws against monopolies, because currently we do not believe in laiz faire. However 100 years ago we did, and many monopolies existed, perfectly legally. This is not a consitutional issue, it's simply a matter of current laws, and doesn't affect universities anyway.
God does not play dice - Einstein
Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they
Yes but if the university receives taxpayer dollars, it is a public institution and, hence, their network belongs to the people.
Said people being the taxpayers. Clemson AFAIK is a state supported land grant university. Its administrators are probably state appointed, and have as part of their responsibility the duty to insure state (taypayer) dollars are being spent for educational purposes in an efficient manner.
If I was a taxpayer in South Carolina I would take a pretty dim view of the idea that the network my tax dollars are subsidizing is being used largely for non-educational activities like moving around cd rips and providing free long distance service.
The eqivalent program on NT is called winntcfg. Why they changed the name, I don't know...
ufdraco
Why don't they just run on a intranet and have no connection to the net, then this whole discussion would be moot.. After all, Internet access isn't a right at a university. It's a priviledge. The intranet would be web sites for the classes that they take.. No connection to the internet, no bandwidth problems.
Monopoly?? . . . nope, we just get plain abuse on campus here at my college. If you live on, (and you do your first year) you have to get one of about 4 meal plans, and you are basically forced into a certain one because you can't even eat at the only two places worth eating unless you have this plan.
;-) I just want to know why I have to pay 40% more for my food just because I live here!!
But this is the good part. They charge you about $940 for the plan, $600 of which is to cover base expenses. The other $340 goes into your account, and out of that account you buy food for half price. In other words, you can buy about $680 worth of food with your $940 meal plan.
It's not like the prices of the food make up the difference. They are at best competitive. The dining halls are really just open restaurants where faculty and off-campus students (and anyone else) can come in and buy food at cost. The thing is, they do. The food is great. It's just that if you live on campus, you have to pay about 40% more for the food.
Someone please tell me how this could benefit the students (those that live on campus, of course it's great if you live off)?
Honestly, we don't have much to complain about here, great internet access, nothing like the problems they have in this story (for some reason, I'm still not saying where this is though, I wonder why . . .
That "Get a sense of humor" was meant for the moderators... (just to clear things up a bit)
I cannot believe what I am reading. Have things changed that much in the six years since I graduated from college? I had no idea the students were being forced to live in 6x6 cells along side convicted murderers and rapists and take showers with the knowledge that at any moment they could be gang raped! So the university made a bone-headed decision, they usually do ... so you can't get Coke (or Pepsi, depending on your campus) at the snack bar... so what!!!!! It in no way deserves the college-prison analogy. And I quote: "The inmates in both are treated like criminals." .... inmates ARE criminals! Students in no way endure the same fate, the comparison is illogical. "Prisons restrict peoples freedoms and are designed to create people who think and act a certain way. Schools do the exact same thing." People in prison should have their freedom restricted (.. it is a prison)and they (prisons) are designed to punish and rehabilitate people who have failed to live by societies rules. Schools are legally obligated to set forth certain restrictions in order to protect themselves from the stupid things college kids sometimes do. Blame today's "sue-happy" society for a lot of the restrictions placed on the students. I went to college, I did stupid things, I hated a lot of the rules, and I complained about them. Sometimes we got things changed, most of the time we didn't. That's part of life. That's part of the lesson you learn in college.I don't agree with Clemson's decision for a variety of reasons, none of which has anything to do with the poorly constructed comparsion of colleges to prisons.
-cdp
This Post will be long - you are forewarned.
Clemson is a land grant public university.
They receive funding from tuition and from the state. Whatever monies they cannot receive from the state have to be gained from other places, namely the students. That will be the same in nearly all institutions. There is no one that will attempt to hide that from you.
Regarding Clemson and DCIT, I was a CS student and also worked for DCIT supporting the employees for 3 years.
The state of computing has increased by leaps and bounds. From what I last heard Clemson has the 3rd largest Novell network in the world with over 200,000 objects in their tree. Clemson has instituted a program called the "Virtaul Desktop" allowing students to have roaming dekstops and settings that follow them anywhere on campus. They also have created, still in it's infancy, a program called CLE whose goal is to allow students to hand in papers and share materials electronically. They are not just sticking with a minimal network that works, they are trying to push it to do things that will make the lives of everyone at Clemson better.
In the dorms students have been given the abilities to connect to the clemson network.
As for the password protection. Who in their right mind would allow anyone, anywhere on campus to simply plug in and wreak whatever havoc they may from a Clemson connection? That would be ludicrous, hence the pw scheme they have in place.
The 50 bucks a semester students pay does not go all to DCIT. In actuality closer to 5 bucks a student goes to DCIT to pay for all aspects of their computing. That covers computers, facilities and staff.
Regarding the comment about two dorms that are most expensive being wired first. You left out that they were also the most recently built, being finshed in either 97 or 98. Obviously making them the first choice. The others were wired as quickly as possible while also trying not to disturb the dwellings of the students which means only being able to do the necessary wiring during the summer. 3 months to wire 5,000 rooms?
Regarding the college of Eng and Science. That network is worse than that of the rest of the university. For the CS dept there is a mediocre staff of Grad students that fits in network and computer support between finishing their masters. They only recently upgraded the computers in the CS labs from the ones they bought 4 years ago and have only recently changed a program that taught ADA to one that taught JAVA and some other languages that more than 2 percent of the students could use.
The DCIT staff may be considered mediocre because DCIT faces the same challenges that all state run institutions and most all companies face, providing the salaries and benefits that will make computer people happy in their current positions. Having seen it first hand most ppl that will work in a state job like Clemson work their knowing that the pay sucks but also knowing that it is a place to start, that the State is more than willing to pay for training and knowing also that as soon as they have their certs they can leave. That's the computing industry today.
Now all that aside, the internet connection at Clemson was very bad for quite awhile and they knew that. We are talking 100 percent utilization from 9am - 2am everyday of the week. But again Clemson faces beuracracy to get anything done. They can't just spend the money to get things changed. They had 3 T1's for nearly 20,000 people. They knew adding another T1 wasn't the solution but they also knew there was no way they could get approval for $16,000 a month for a T3(that is what they were quoted at the time). Clemson is part of the Internet 2 project and has held up that end with the vBNS connection. As for general Internet access they moved things as quickly as they could. They now have 10mbit with 20Mbit burst access.
Speeds are terrific and Clemson wants to see that it stays that way. To do this, they have to make decisions to protect their best interests, speed and funding. Whether or not they receive funding from TigerTel is irrelavent. They receive funding form the university which is funded patrially by TigerTel. To protect that speed they will take into consideration anything that they consider bandwidth "hungry" such as dialpad. Now whether it uses 10k/sec or 5k/sec, if there are 100 people using it it gets to be a problem. By making the decision early to block the site they are preventing problems down the road. Whether they are actually interested in "evaluating" it's impact on university facilities I don't know.
As someone pointed out earlier, these facilites belong to Clemson and is their concern so they will take the necessarry actions to ensure that they can please the majority of the users.
As a side comment, just as the media has always done, they have brought to light an issue that may have affected a minimal number of people just to make a story. So they blocked dialpad.com. How many people at Clemson really knew about it in the first place? But now that The Tiger has made an issue of it, more people will get on the bandwagon and cry wolf even though they don't really understand what the service is or what it can offer them.
If ther are any issues to be raised, it shoudl be things like the rising cost of tuition at all universities, the cost of books, and dare I say the parking situation? If there is a bandwagon to be started, it should have more to do with parking at Clemson. In the fiscal year(July-June) of '97 and '98, Clemson's Parking Services took in more than 1.5 million in parking fees and tickets. They have a staff of approximately 20 people and say that the rest of the money goes to parking lot maintenance.
Or how about Clemson athletics?
The cheapest tix to a football game is 25 bucks and IPTAY gets nearly all the revenue from that.
DCIT strives to provide a network that is easy to use and can provide the maximal amount of services to the largest number of people.
For all you LAN admins, think of the number of businesses that block streaming audio and video because bandwidth is in high demand. It's simply the same situation.
I no longer work for DCIT so I do not speak on their behalf. I am just sharing what I have been through and what I have seen and heard.
Flame me if you like but believe me, I don't take it personally.
-- Tom
I do agree that blocking dialpad.com is wrong, but I do not think it is a violation of the 1st. I am no lawyer, but I think that ISP/University has the right to cut out content/services that they do not want to be running over their networks.
I'm a student at a University myself, and students have to pay for their ethernet access. This is equivalent to a cable company deciding that you could watch TV, but only if it was the Discovery channel. These sudents deserve to get their money's worth. I wonder what moron thought the idea up in the first place. If students can't do what they want on the internet, they'll just find something else to waste their time with. I've gotten it down to an art =)
Well, you can limit bandwidth by user or subnet, but I'm not sure how well service-based allocation will work. Are you going to do it by port? Since many programs can be configured to use any port they wish, how will this work?
Killing Napster right now was only easy because of the way it's designed. With Open Source napster servers already being developed, you'll no longer be able to just block connections to *.napster.com, and since they're open source they can be configured to use any port.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Do you honestly think that a significant percentage of MP3 sites are completely legal? I think our anonymous coward is perfectly right. I'm not sure I agree DeCSS violates anything, but how long are we going to hide behind the "but these MP3's are legal" charade? You know as well as I that most MP3 traffic is illegal...
Hmm, well, why don't you start using SSL tunnels for connections to the student servers? ;)
I'd like to see their router machine try and see what you are sending through an SSL tunnel
It'd also be wise to use SSL/ssh/etc for connecting to a proxy anywhere off campus/etc.
My email addy? should be easy enough.
Since when does my technology access fee, become a gift to Clemson. I'm paying for service.
Unless your school blocks every port, thus rendering you S.O.L. (ahem, Stetson University). Apparently all the English and Art History majors decided to turn on file sharing on their Windows 95 machines and they had some trouble. Simple solution: block everything. (Doh)
This is completely unconstitutional. Everyone should have a freedom of choice. Entering a dormitory is not the same as entering a prison. Just because university is loosing a contract (which is basically a legalized monopoly) does not mean that it can ban other choices?
I doubt it - if the university chooses to provide one service (web access) but not another (free long-distance phones) you can't really scream that you are being denied a basic right - particularly as free long-distance phones are uncommon in the normal setup.
--
-=DaveHowe=-
Congratulations, you do not know what you are talking about. The expressed written policy by Clemson University does NOT have a clause saying that they can block individual sites. I know the full story because I'm a student here and I've taken it upon myself to find out all about this problem, and even how to get around it. It's cencorship up and down and it smells to high heaven. Plus, if they were going to block a site "for any reason" (as you put it), that means they'd have to have a reason, and so far the administration hasn't come through on that one. Also, this is not a private network in the traditional sense. Much like Clemson's monopoly on their phone services, they have a monopoly on internet service too. If you live on campus, and at least 30% of the student body does, you have to use the Clemson network. You also have to pay for that network. That ought to mean you're not supposed to get screwed by that network too. No, the students here don't like it, but no we cant go pay for another T1 service.
Please write the president of Clemson U. and let him know this is just idiotic:
President JAMES F. BARKER,
210 Highland Drive
Clemson, SC 29631
Telephone: (864) 654-6066
You can get the IP config info out of NT by using... the IPCONFIG command! :-) (Just to be difficult, 95/98 uses winipcfg instead...)
Unless the rules have changed, the FCC prohibits telephone aggregators from blocking "950" and "800" access to long distance carriers. The definition of aggregators include hotels and motels, hospitals, universities, airports, gas stations, pay telephone owners, and others. The FCC Report and Order can be read here.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
As for Coke/Pepsi, that's even more ridiculous. Do you really expect a University to go out and get vending machines from *every* company? It's not like they're saying "Hey, you can't have Mountain Dew on campus", it's just that they won't sell it to you. It's a manageability issue more than anything else.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
It seems everyone thinks they are entitled to everything, either for free or virtually nothing. Clemson, and every other University, has the right to ban every site they want, serve the beverage, or charge what they want for phone access.
My school is pretty leniant in what it does allow on the network. We allow FTP and other servers, Napster, anything as long as it doesn't hog too much bandwidth and we aren't 100% sure it's illegal. However, when someone pushes the limits, we tell them to stop. Was the school wrong when they stopped someone last year that was moving almost 1 Gig of mp3's every hour over the school network, or was he entitled to that bandwidth? He was arrested and convicted since, well, he was breaking the law in a pretty bad way, and was it wrong to do that as well since intellectual property laws are so outdated?
You have 5,000 ports on a network, with lots of bandwidth (I think we have a couple T3's, 2 T1's, and a seperate OC3 to another school), but if everyone starts pushing a gig an hour, that bandwidth is going to be gone in no time. Napster is probably the biggest problem now, as it allows all these people with almost no computer knowledge (considering I setup their ethernet cards, I'm fairly certain I know how good they are with computers) who tie up massive bandwidth, moving illegal files, and everyone here seems to think that's OK since one of the perks of the dorms is ethernet. If it was up to me, Napster would have been gone last fall, but it's not.
Universities make lots of their money off long distance services (I'm sure AT&T makes a killing, even at $0.07 a minute), and off their exclusive deals with vending machine companies (Don't like it? Walk to the store and buy a case of your prefered beverage, there isn't a gun to your head), and many other things. They don't make a dime off providing ethernet I bet. However, if their bandwidth use goes up and their costs rise, they pay for that. Or if you don't call long distance anymore, they also pay for that. They give ethernet for educational purposes, and you can use it for enjoyment, but it's not free for anything, and don't expect it to be.
With the fact that everyone here seems to expect everything to be free, I wonder what you expect to pay for at all. You probably vote for all the tax cuts that strip our schools of money and make them have to charge students so much anyway. Unless you want to foot the bill for the extra bandwidth so everyone can run Napster, or use DialPad, don't complain when it's taken away. Everything in the world has a cost, and that never changes. It might be as small as only giving you Coke as a choice, but would you rather have one vending machine with both beverages that charged you $1.50 for a can to make up the money they lose in their deal? Do what I do, drink Cherry Coke instead, then go buy a case of Pepsi at the store, it's cheaper anyway.
Well, the University could hardly maintain a monopoly due to the overwhelming majority of calling cards that are available, and which I assume the students can use. I do see, however, how this could really be a pain....
Theft.
Plain and simple. This should not be tolerated and everyone at clemson should boycott using long distance services from their university. Unless of course they wish to simply be frisked and robbed by their university.
-[ World domination - rains.net ]-
This is just another example of a big corporation trying to protect its monopoly on a service based on technology that's becoming obsolete. This campus long distance service surely didn't exist before PBX's were affordable, but when they were, the college probably saw a way to lower its staff line costs, and make money off the students, while, in truth, providing a service. But times have changed, and I can't imagine any college long distance service charging less than a prepaid 10cents/minute calling card, so the service they're providing doesn't make sense anymore. Sure it costs money to maintain a wireplant, so charge a flat rate for that. But the people running the service are interested in their jobs, created by the obsolete technology, and rather than move with the technology, they're fighting it. They will loose, granted, but while they do they'll make college students' life everywhere a little more difficult. All for the sake of a few people who fear change.
Everytime you hear someone complain how a technology is putting people out of work, it's an interesting excercise to try to figure out how many years those jobs have existed, based on the technology that created them. Aside from some agricultural work, the number is always astonishingly low from a race perspective (though not always from an individual perspective).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
NOT FREE UNTIL YOU GET INTO THE REAL WORLD!!! That is a joke if there ever was one... The freedom that you enjoy as a student is far superior to the "freedom" that you have as a member of the working world. That is no BS. When I was at Purdue, some of the crap that the administration pulled was fsck'ing annoying, but once you get into the real world, it only gets worse. Now I treasure my time at Purdue. The only exception to this is the way that the administration has cracked down on the greek system. I have become very upset with the way that Purdue handles the greek system (I was on the local board for Acacia after I left school) and as a result they will never see a penny of alumnus money from me until they change their ways. The fact is that money makes the world go round. College is a mild intro to this. The key thing, though, is that you have the power to abstain from perpetuating the sick system that is in place right now. GO VOTE!!! Check out the candidates and TALK to them. Let them know that you are holding them accountable for their actions. Money buys marketing, but money does not buy a vote at the poll. Inform your friends and family about policy. Inform yourself. The internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, but we still need to be heard and seen at the polls. The only bad thing about a community like slashdot is that it becomes very insular, in that we don't hear the opinions of others who are either not as well informed or do not have the benefit of our collective experience. These persons vote too (on average, 50% of the time) and need to be educated on issues that affect them, whether they know it or not. The real issue is whether we as a group are willing to step up and take the responsibility to be leaders and visionaries, not just clones who despise the opression we see around us. See you at the polls.
~Religion is O.K., as long as it gets you laid.
Well, i just got an email from DCIT here at Clemson, and they've given us back our access to Dialpad - just two days after the story broke.
Isn't this a form of censorship? And what can non-Clemson students do about this? Napster will be next with them too, like the Schools in oregon.
Well, the university owns their network, so, yes, they can perfectly well block whatever sites they feel like, legally. Especially since this university seems to be a private one.
;-)
This doesn't mean they should, of course, and in this case I'd disagree with them. How about banning NetMeeting because it does the same thing (albeit both ends need a computer, instead of just one as in the case of DialPad, etc)
As to the Coke bit, some universities are the reverse... I went to visit UCLA, and there isn't a coke machine on campus. It's all pepsi. That annoyed me a great deal, as well.
EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO GET AROUND DCIT's BLOCK OF DIALPAD ARE POSTED AT DownWithDCIT. GET DIALPAD BACK AS IF IT HAD NEVER BEEN BLOCKED!!!!
It seems to me that this is by no means "unconstitutional" ... as the University provides the internet service, and can therefore say what it can be used for. This doesn't mean that its a good thing, but the Universitiy's definetly make more money, what with the agreements they have with large communication companies. As for the predominance of Coke-a-cola products on a lot of campuses, i know that here, at the unversity of oklahoma, coke has an exclusive liscence for drinks, which means even fruit juices are cokacola products.
Yeah! And also, most college students are promiscuous stoners who never study. So lets give 'em all HIV and drug tests, since the majority of them must be positive anyway, right? Oh, and also lets drop cameras in all the dorm rooms, i mean, if they aren't doing anything wrong it shouldn't be a problem, right?
"Those who would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin,
While the students have certain rights one must remember that it is still the universities equipment and is still the Universities choice as to what they can and will block. Just because they are a University doesn't mean they don't have the right to make money and to stop those taking away from their profits.
BUT I do agree that it sucks.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
So...I'm going to be using 2 different computers at the same time? And yes, I do have both a student and an employee account. And if you had read my post, I said "intranet" not Internet. As for my skills....I'll put them up against most of the people in my fellow grad students in the CS department. I came to Clemson due to the reputation of my department in today's technology businesses.. And as such, they are paying me to go to school here, I'm not paying...
And who pays for the networks? The students, through tuition and taxes.
According to the Clemson web site, Clemson is a state supported land grant university. This means a LARGE part of the university's funds come from taxes on the residents of the state of South Carolina. This subsidy is made in order to keep tuition costs down, presumably because educated students are an asset to the state as a whole. It also means that the university regents have some responsibility to the state government to insure that these tax dollars are being spent for the intended purpose, that is the education of the students.
It also means that the taxpayers of the state of South Carolina own this network. NOT the students.
Now if I were a resident of the state of South Carolina I would have to question the use of my tax dollars for any non-academic pursuits, including providing subsidized internet access where any significant fraction of such access is being used for non-academic purposes.
Where Clemson is losing out here as far as I am concerned is that they are not cracking down on ALL non-academic use of thier internet bandwidth.
In this context, I think the students certainly have a right to have a say on the use of this network as far as it relates to their education. Any educator will tell you that the student is as responsible for the quality of his education as the teacher.
The nanosecond the student starts complaining that they are not being allowed to use this network for non-academic pursuits (such as making free long distance phone calls) they lose. The rights of the student at Clemson do not include tax subsidized internet access for non-academic pursuits.
At my university, (if my sources are right) Pepsi has outbid Coke for the drink contract. Sure, we get Mountain Dew, but now we're missing Cherry Coke. Where does the madness end?
At any rate, in the case of food, it's outsourcing to the lowest bidder. But with the phone thing, I think it's more of a profit/monopoly, and a greater problem.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
I saw a vending machine at Sam's today for $1700. Not a bad price, considering it was feature-rich. I don't recall seeing a contract on it, either.
The last quote in the article really stood out to me:
"This is not a permanent and final decision, but it seemed to be the prudent thing to do right now to protect the University and the academic community's access to good Internet service," stated Duckenfield.
So if free long distance calls aren't a "good Internet service", then what is? Honestly, how many college students out there do you think could benefit from the extra cash they'd get by not having to pay long distance to call home? And if "good Internet service" means good Internet connections for the university, he already said that it wouldn't affect the bandwidth anyway, so that's irrelevant.
The whole thing sounds very fishy to me. It truly sounds like the college is trying to keep its students paying Clemson Telecommunications instead of using a much better alternative. I see no reason why the students shouldn't be allowed to use it.
Unless, of course, you can use dialpad.com to make free phone sex calls.
------------
"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
I'm sorry, but this completely constitutional. Most universities have extensive "Rules of Access" you agree to when you plug your computer into their ethernet, including the right to choose the sites you have access to. Theoretically, they could limit their students to just having access to academic sites, but I bet that would drive students off grounds(in the manner of that survey of UCLA students living on grounds for the ethernet).
I'm sure student outcry and public attention to this issue will cause a reversal. And re: Coke or Pepsi, I'm fortunate enough to go to a University that doesn't limit Internet access, or my opportunity to purchase either soda. Coke and Pepsi machines live in harmony (and usually next to each other) at the University of Virginia.Why must everybody jump on a "This is censorship" bandwagon without knowing the full story...
Every student at every major university agrees to a set of guidelines for their network access. One of these guidelines is always that the university reserves the right to revoke access at any time for any reason...
This is their private network that they are granting these students free access to. If they don't want them using it for some purpose that is their right. If the students don't like it they can go pay for a T1 from another provider
Josh
Excuse, me did you actually check the link? It isn't that crappy Don Knotts link; It actually gets you the Sprint Personal 1-800 page.
Put the flamethrower down!
.sig: Now legally binding!
Hey Chris ...
...
/=] (864)656-7556 WILLYS@clemson.edu
I was wondering when you're usually in your office. I would like very
much to stop by so you can "tell me to my face how truely [sic]
incompetent I really am."
Please do let me know when would be a good time.
Thanks
Dan
\
\
\
__________ _________ Dan Schmiedt
| ( / |) Network Services
| oooo -------- oooo | Clemson University DCIT
[=\ oo oo \------/ oo oo
oooo oooo
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Subject: DCIT Bulletin
DCIT Bulletin
Vol. 1 No. 7
Access to voice over internet services is back!
The group of students, faculty, and staff that is looking into how the
university should incorporate internet phone service into its
infrastructure will be meeting next Thursday. The study group will
recommend policies and procedures related to internet phone service and
suggest ways in which the university can optimize its use.
-----------------------------------------------
Seems like the bad press the University has received has made them rethink their policy of evaluating dialpad services.
Well, keep this in mind when they ban the sites again -- you will only be able to receive voice; you will not be able to speak, if you follow these instructions. This is because the server does not know your address. Perhaps future versions of dialpad's software will support proxies.
The Corporations.
What kind of drugs are you on? Can I get some?
If corporations actually controlled government. you would NOT see capital gains taxes, OSHA, Unions, Social Security Payroll Taxes, the EPA, the Taft-Hartley and Sherman anti-trust acts, the DOJ action against Microsoft, EOE acts, Worker's Comp, Unemployment Insurance, child labor laws, age discrimination laws, and any of a million other encumberances on the behaviour of corporations that protect citizens against corporations.
Wow, i never dreamed my school would make slashdot. ;)
:)
Seriously, though, this didn't suprise me a whole lot. DCIT is NOT a very userfriendly organization.... They don't allow mp3's on the network, they put in user authorization and track where students surf, they have frequent network downtime, and worst of all they don't listen to the students when we complain about the poor service. I just hope someone there visits slashdot to see the wonderful reputation Clemson is getting because of them....
I don't even use CU's long distance thing, i just call collect anyway.
According to the Clemson web site, Clemson is a state supported land grant university. This means a LARGE part of the university's funds come from taxes on the residents of the state of South Carolina. It also means that the taxpayers of the state of South Carolina own this network. NOT the students.
Think about it for a second: say Clemson get's $3 per year from the average taxpayer, and $5,000 from the average student(all of whom ARE taxpayers). Damn straight the students own part of the network and should have a say in how it is used.
Now if I were a resident of the state of South Carolina I would have to question the use of my tax dollars for any non-academic pursuits, including providing subsidized internet access where any significant fraction of such access is being used for non-academic purposes.
(vader)I have you now.(/vader) If you were a Carolina taxpayer, using internet dialing would be saving you money. How? Because the University's long distance network is almost certainly subsidised by the same tax dollars that subsidise the computer network. Say the call costs 15 cents a minute: either the University pays for it (through taxes and tuition) or Dialpad can pay it. If Dialpad uses decent compression, an hour long phone call would take up less bandwidth than a typical hour of browsing the web.
The rights of the student at Clemson do not include tax subsidized internet access for non-academic pursuits.
Well, since the vast majoraty of email is probably not acedemicly related, lets ban it and block all access to hotmail or mail.yahoo.com. Yeah, and while we're at it, lets get rid of homecoming and all sports teams. My point is, this is not a black and white issue, and the administration lacked suffecient justification to make such a decision.
In light of the recent blocking of Napster, this seems to be becoming a common practice. However, it seems to me that it isn't really a good approach. Bandwidth problems could be solved by limiting students' actual bandwidth, but blocking known high-bandwidth sites seems unlikely to be very successfull. Sure, it'll cut down on some of the traffic, but it doesn't stop people from running FTP servers (on a non-standard port if you block port 21), and it doesn't stop people from visiting any of the other thousands of high-bandwidth sites you haven't blocked. Heck, it doensn't even stop them from visiting the sites you *have* blocked - they just have to go through a proxy server to get there.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I work in the real world with access to a T1 from my desk. I share it but get about 25-80K/sec...
I shared that to show I have no real identity with what they are experiencing, other than modem experience.
I've worked with modems from 300 baud up to 56K. I can remember the shit-fit I had when I went from 300 to 1200 baud! But enough "old-fart" reminiscing. You're facing a problem with management of the network. You need some OC-3's or OC-12's. (That's the fastest I know of.)
I suggest you use FreeDSL.com to get some higher speed access to the net. (www.freedsl.com) They're similar to AllAdvantage in how they work, but if you have a 19" monitor you can easily forget those ****ing banner ads.
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
Since you mention campus parking...
I read in my campus newspaper (The Batallion @ Texas A&M) a quote from the people in charge of parking. They were discussing the building of another parking lot for students. They said something to the effect of "This will add 1500 parking spaces, since each parking space will be occupied by 3 cars during the course of a day."
They build 500 parking spots and call it 1500!
The university also has a few parking garages which have reserved spaces for students who chose to buy a reserved space. The parking guys noticed that, on average, the garage was at something like 92% capacity, so they proposed triple-booking the spaces and getting rid of the reserved space and moved to just a regular parking lot style (first come, first served) so that the garage could be at 100% capacity all the time!
Try this on your unsuspecting co-workers. HILARIOUS!
My journal has hot
At Miami University we just banned Napster servers for bandwidth reasons. Its worse then it sounds. They were told by our state mandated ISP (orenet) to block the server or we would pay more then we already do (we dont pay that much for our connection compared to my outrageous tuition). Next Im sure comes video conferencing. God fucking forbid they lose there phone monopolies.
why dont we bitch about what Universities really limit. I sit in 400 level math classes and get assignments akin to 6th grade library class (because by the time you are a senior you need to learn to use the library again), I sit im my Liberal Ed classes and get reintroduced to the metric system (biology class), told that being poor and having a close family is more important than hard work (english class idiot reading), told that attendence is more important than your knowledge (96% in a class but too many absences leads to being dropped from the class), and that presentation is far better than content (any computer or business class where the teachers teaching about internet commerce dont know what SSL is), and so on. Universities have a monoploy on knowledge and society. Well fuck them.
Ben
Home distilled Vodka is much better than Coke or Pepsi
I suspect it will go on till that idiots penis doubles it's length to 1/2 inch erect.
Don't take life too seriously. It is only a temporary situation. Usual disclaimers apply.
Dialpad.com is relying on the trust of other networks in order to deliver there packets. They have no right what ever to access a university network that is payed for by tuition and tax payer dollars.
What's interesting is, this trust model persists throughout the net, and is essential to it's survival. When someone abuses the bandwidth without "giving back" in some form, the trust model is broken, and the admin did the right thing.
In the famous words of someone who I can't remember: Internetworking means we're all in this together.
Dialpad.com(and other companies freeloading bandwidth) need to understand that.
_________________________
You tried to draw an analogy between Clemson's treatment of students and GM's treatment of employees. There's one minor difference:
Clemson: students pay to be there.
GM: employees get paid to be there.
Besides, at the end of the day GM employees get to go home and aren't under GM regulations anymore. Clemson students get to return to their dorms and are still under Clemson regulations. Not a rosy picture.
And who pays for the networks? The students, through tuition and taxes. They have every right to have a say in how that network is used. Especially in cases where there is a blatant conflict of interest on the part of the University.
If the school truly needed money for more bandwidth for the school then they should just raise their fees by a few dollars. I know from reading that an OC3 line costs around 130k a year to have, so at a school like mine with 30,000 students all that would be required would be a $2.50 fee increase each semester and then the OC3 line would be paid for. The security with or without dialpad didn't change when dialpad came into existence. The firewall or lack of firewall at the school, previously, was already allowing some ports to be open otherwise dialpad wouldn't have worked in the first place. I know it doesn't go through firewalls unless they have a certain data port open on them. I know this, because I have tried it. The real reason is that the school is mad that students are not using their school long distance cards and paying a fortune for it. In my dorms I have to pay 15 cents a minute to call long distance and only in my own state. Out of state can be upwards of 25 cents a minute. Compare this to AT&T only costing 7 cents a minute to anywhere is the US. The school is losing a little bit of money on poor college students not having long distance bills anymore, what a shame.
X-RDate: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 19:09:36 -0500 (EST)
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Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2000 19:14:01 -0500 (EST)
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X-UIDL: b67b722feb9fbeccfd32605c38f8a208
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From: Dan Schmiedt
To: Chris Freeze
Subject: Re: Post
On Thu, 3 Feb 2000, Chris Freeze wrote:
> Little came of this meeting other than one individual who actually
> communicated to me in a real fashion his thoughts on my post. As I
I'm sorry that we didn't make much of an impression on you.
> reaction of bringing 15+ people with you, I believe that I have acted
> as a catalyst in this change. As technology professionals we must not
> only embrace change, but be the tools of it.
You acted only as a catalyst in that you slandered us in front of the
world. We work hard everyday to better support the campus' IT needs, and
we will continue to do so -- with or without people like you insulting us.
Thank you for clarifying that you did not intend to slander us
individually -- criticize DCIT all you want, but do not criticise me
unless you know specifically what I do and how I do it.
I can only hope that one day you will find yourself in a support position
in a large IT department.
Take care, and have a good weekend.
Dan
By all means, call him all you want at the office, but I will continue to assert that he deserves a modicum of privacy in his own home.
Interesting concept - a man who gets free room and board deserves privacy in his own home. What about the students who pay to be there? Are they fair game for any and all invasions of privacy?
What goes around comes around; perhaps they might see the light and discover the novel concept of respecting students.
The service does run completely in java and doesn't install anything.
Sorry to burst your bubble but state supported schools are subject to every rule and regulation that states are as they are public institutions. Have a nice day
Dialpad works on a 33.6k modem. I seriously doubt that a couple people making IP phone calls could be a serious threat to their bandwidth (They admit as much themselves).
:). But the more I think about it, the more it bothers me. They are censoring the Internet, there's no getting around that. Except this time, they aren't even bothering with the "its for the children" bullshit. They are doing it to prevent access to services that would compete with them. This collage is the only source of telecom for its students, and it's willing to block access to sites that would undermine it economically. What's next? Are they going to block access to Varsitybooks.com and bigwords.com so they can continue to gouge students at the University bookstore? Are they going to block access to other Collages websites so they don't have to worry about people jumping ship (perhaps to somewhere that doesn't bock IP address of its competitors)?
I'm glad I'm not going to that collage
I think this really shows the inherent danger in companies getting to much control of the bandwidth. If this collage can cut people off from sites that compete with its overpriced services, what's to stop AOL/Time Warner from doing the same thing? Supposedly they've block the AOLwatch newsletter because it might have been 'Spam' If all they have to do is make up a bullshit technical excuse to cut access to something, we have a real problem.
I hope the students of this university do something to stop it, or that the administration realizes what they are doing is wrong.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
also lots of people can't be bothered to ever vote or write a letter to their rep and/or senator
then they start shouting about how government doesn't represent them... STFU
Clemson isn't private. It's owned by the State of South Carolina. =)
The only real exception I can remember seeing is with vending machines. You may not commonly see Coke and Pepsi in the same vending machine, but if there are two vending machines next to each other, one will usually have Coke and the other Pepsi.
Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what the IT department has done
There is a difference between what is legal/constitutional and what is right. Clemson may be legally allowed to do what they're doing, but that does not mean it isn't wrong.
And it doesn't mean that people shouldn't write to express their outrage. Especially since, IIRC, Clemson is a state school, and as such taxpayers of that state have an interest in what's happening. People who are prospective students, or parents of prospective students, should also write. Maybe Clemson will realize that this could alienate future students enough to have them choose another school. Clemson may not have any moral sense of what's right, but if they see their bottom line threatened I bet they'll come around.
One other point: writing reasonable letters to someone in power to explain why their positions (or positions of their subordinates) are wrong, and why people are upset about it, is not spamming. It is a perfectly legitimate form of communication (while unsolicited, it isn't commercial, nor does it cost the President anything - all he has to do is throw it out if he doesn't want to read it. If it were email, you might have an argument for usage of his mail server resources, etc, but with snail mail there is no cost to him). And I'm sure Clemson would like to know if they have a PR nightmare on their hands.
Well, this is definitely unfair. We aren't supposed to lose our rights after we enter the schoolhouse gate, but I guess things change.
:)
Universities are big business nowadays. I'm glad that at least one company has been able to provide competing phone service here at NCSU, but by and large we don't have that many choices, AT&T enjoys a virtual monopoly here, and I'd hate to see our few bad choices get limited even further.
...and I'll trade campuses with you. My university switched to Pepsi, and I can't stand it. However, getting Coke from off campus is cheaper than buying Pepsi on campus, and of course Coke is far superior...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think it uses Java, I'm not sure if it requires some ActiveX glue though. Just go to www.dialpad.com and check it out.
:)
Oh, and by the way, it likes to mute the line when you stop talking, so sometimes the beginnings of words are cut off. I've found that's Its a good solution to run a midrange frequency softly in the background to keep the connection open at all times (2600hz works pretty well, ironically
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
No, I said it wasn't negligible - which seems to be the opinion expressed by many, and that the university has no right to restrict the students bandwidth.
Its not a bad thing, its not a good thing. Its a thing, and has to be measured versus other metrics.
But who is paying for it? Do college administrators honestly expect students to just pay tuition and fees and not use any school resources?
I don't know what they expect - but they have to balance demands across all the resources. And tey have to take into account such contracts and restrictions.
Given the attitude of the administration at Clemson and other schools, this out of this world attitude is the norm for all institutions of higher learning.
First, as I pointed out (and you didn't refute, or address), this may be a contractual issue, as well. So it may well also be a forced issue - not one of merely what students are using resources. Secondly, if its the norm for all of them, then its hardly out of the world, is it? :)
Addison
In light of your comments regarding the constitution you couldn't be more wrong. I think you should put down the huka and beer-bong and actually attend a class.
_________________________
--
The shareholder is always right.
I am presently attending Clemson, and I just wanted to point out that the President has just recently become President. The address that was stated above was his former home address, not that of the university mansion. I don't know of the mansion's address offhand but I believe it is on College Ave.
hey, moderate this up, this is good info right here
Unfortunately, private organizations do not need to grant you the same rights when using their services that the government does. So the constitution dos not apply here. One would think that a university would want to protect the constitutional rights of its students though; free speech is usually protected on campuses. I guess this particular university's commitment to individual freedoms ends at the business office though.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
A T3 and a standard phone service provide different guarantees.
Can you be sure that your packets are sent with a regular, non-bursty lag, in-order? Or that your connection quality won't suddenly be impacted by somebody transferring a couple of GB of data for a research project? Or that, in turn, your own connections aren't increasing somebody else's latency?
Supposedly the bandwidth requirements for this service in question aren't too high -- but they do have to measure that to quantify this suspicion.
And, as somebody who's had packets routed to Hell and back -- from Netrek w/ 25% packet loss, to e-mail delayed for a week, to an e-mail meant for me popping up in the inbox of a stranger on a different continent -- I'm not too trusting of the *reliability* of that T3. Heck, the network here has problems rather frequently, and they're not all because some schmo decides it'd be a hoot to flood our network. Hand me that phone, will ya?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
The constitution does not give you unlimited freedom of choice. I can't choose to kill someone and then claim it's protected by the constitution.
On the Coke sidenote, my old school district had some kind of deal with Coca-Cola, and so there was several Coke machines scattered throughout the campus. And yes, this was public school. I prefer Pepsi, but Coke wasnt' too bad. They even told us the money they made from it (and I hope they made some considering it was a dollar for a 20 ounce bottle) would go to technology. Well, when I was there I sure didn't see any new technology. We still had crappy computers. Anyways, at my new school they have banned schools in the county from selling caffinated products like Coke/Pepsi/Jolt (hehe). And at both schools, they've had deals with pizza companies (little ceasers at the first one, now it's Dominoes) to provide pizza for lunch. So you can rest easy knowing that commercialism is alive and rampent in today's public schools. : )
So I see two fundamental questions at stake:
- Are equal-access regulations constitutional?
- To what extent do we wish to have telecommunications precedent applied not only to internet connectivity, but content and application as well?
Practical questions Clemson students should be asking in the meantime:- Does Clemson's contract with their upstream internet provider impose some restrictions which forced this move?
- Are those restrictions legal and appropriate, and does the situation at hand actually fall CLEARLY outside the boundaries of said restriction, or is this "preventative law"?
- Do students have any contracts or other official university documents outlining the terms of service they are offered/guaranteed? Do the university's actions run afoul of those terms?
- Do any terms of said agreement run afoul of any local, state, or federal laws concerning telecommunications and/or information services?
Anyway, just a few pence on the matter...Yeah... it's really about the long distance. Let's just make it MORE expensive to live on campus! *groan*
Can someone explain why colleges are banning all this stuff left and right - seemingly without rhyme or reason? It's as if AOL's "guides" descended into academia and took over....
Actually, as far as freedom of choice, if you don't like the school you're attending, you do have the choice to leave that school and transfer somewhere else. If enough students transferred out of a particular school, the adminsitration would have no choice but to revise their policies to keep the cash coming in.
Everybody at Clemson needs to know their are ways to foil the Universities plan. This site shows users how to easily set a proxy in order to reach Dialpad to spite DCIT's wishes. Real computer geeky stuff in the spirit of Slashdot!
The University/Internet scene seems to be heating up. What do you think will happen when the Whittier administration finds out that a terrorist is masterminding the college newspaper site.
:)
Just for kicks
There is no issue here on constitutionality. What amendment does it break? The 1st? The 4th? It breaks none of these. When you sign a housing contract -- be it with a university, apartment complex, whatever -- you explicitly agree to all the conditions therein. Now, I go to a university (Cal Poly) that is extremely lax in its network usage policies, yet to live on-campus, I still had to sign a contract that said I would abide by them. I suspect all universities have an "unnecessary bandwidth usage" clause that gives them plenty of breathing room. Wake up, folks; This isn't an "outrage", this is business, and while I think that's probably taking it a bit to the extreme, it's perfectly within their right -- and best interest -- to enstate such a policy. Now, having said that, I for one am still glad I live on a campus that gives us T-3 access, Mountain Dew, and long-distance for $.11 a minute.
yeah
Write to his local bagel shop:
Corner Bagel Shop
405 College Ave, Clemson, SC 29631-1421
Phone: (864)654-0045
Or write his local grocer:
Plez U Food Store
233 Pendleton Rd, Clemson, SC 29631-2907
(864) 654-0045
Or write his local gas station:
Cartee's Shell
219 Pendleton Rd, Clemson, SC 29631-2212
(863) 654-5334
This issue is just too important not to be truly thorough!
As for singling people out and posting their home addresses on the internet, perhaps it would be more prudent not to do so. When he starts getting death threats and package bombs, how will that sit with your conscience?
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
All they have to do is not sign an exclusive agreement contract and hire someone to man the machines for them. If they subcontrct out the whole thing they could have Coke and Pepsi products in the same machine with no problems. Their is no law against selling competing products from the same vending machine.
I like Linux, socialism, and guns. Any questions?
Ahh this reaks of the same type of protectionist policies governments all of the world throughout time have laid down upon the helpless consumers in search of lower prices through free markets. On the bright side at least clemson is being honest about why are they are blocking access. I personally was waiting for the arcticle to mention either "protecting the childern" or "preventing piracy" instead they merely gave a real weak cover (bandwidth) and then quickly admitted to pure old greed, it's nice to see honesty in authority figures for a change.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
The same bozo linking to that dumb-ass don knotts page.
But seriously, couldn't some kind of proxy be set up to get around this kind of a block?
W
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The article says they banned funphone.com too... of course, funphone.com is a very elaborate joke...
When compressed, streaming voice data needs like 6-8 kbps. That's less than an average IRC session in a busy channel will cost you.
To say that this will put a strain on bandwidth is absurd.
Hands in my pocket
"The point is that with Dialpad.com and such you can call people and talk to them on their regular phone from your computer. " - The AC who was moderated into oblivion below.
We see this stuff all the time. It is the Slashdot theme. The Internet (notice, capitalized) theme. Some organization tries to block some new technology, and inevitably fails. One day, they will learn you cannot stop the future. Let me clarify:
:)
1) Will they stop ALL the internet phone services as they come out?
2) How about stopping cell phones?
3) And if I decide to provide a proxy that accesses the service, will they ban proxies? Or will they ban my site?
4) So then when a student wants to report on internet phone services for their e-commerce paper, or thesis: Do they ban the student, the class, or the thesis?
None of these examples are outragous. They are really quite reasonable! The ban they have is a single plausable event. But the concept, philosphy behind what they are doing cannot last. There are too many holes.
And Just to put a nice positive spin in this, let me give you some other examples of this concept, that will die for similar reasons:
1) The new "magical" copy protection on audio CDs
2) Encryption to prevent copying DVDs
3) Holding up mp3 players in court
4) Schools and libraries filtering Internet content.
You cannot stop technology. You must EVOLVE it, or USE it.
I know, I am asking to be flamed here, but I think that Clemson, or any university, has perfectly legitimate rights in dictating proper and improper uses of the university network. Even to the extent that this means giving them the tools to wield monopolistic powers. After all, they own the cables, they pay the carriers, they staff the support centers, and so on.
I think it is easy to forget that students living in dormitories effectively lose certain rights, that people living in the real world keep; but they get certain privileges that us outworlders don't have. I don't have to show an ID to get into my apartment, nor am I prevented from smoking or drinking, nor am I prevented from having my girlfriend over. On the other hand, I don't have a guaranteed place to live, I don't have a cafeteria in my basement, and I don't have free or nearly-free high-bandwidth internet access. It is perfectly consistent for limitations to be placed on access through the university network.
This is probably a bad analogy, but here goes anyway: The university library contains a "special collections" department, that is only open during the day, where rare and fragile books are kept. They are open to the university population, but under specific use and access guidelines. Is this censorship because it prevents, for example, a student from picking up a draft copy of "Ulysses", walking out with it and making paper airplanes?
Unless Clemson advertised "unrestricted internet use" in brochures for prospective students, or included such language in their residency-hall agreements, they are completely within their rights. Perhaps they are acting foolishly (which is probably true), but not badly.
winipcfg.exe is the answer to all your questions! Well, at least some of them. And I don't know if its for NT or not. It tells you the IP address, DNS servers, Gateways, everything. You could probably use nmap to look for boxes that can function as gateways, Its a linux/unix program, though.
I don't know if that will solve your problems though.
Amber Yuan (--ell7)
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
There's nothing really "evil" about this. You DO have the choice of not living on campus. Or, alternatively, you can live on campus and get your own ISP access seperate from the school's network.
Ok, so Dialpad's service is not primarily academic, but it sure could be. Consider a recent judgement by a Virginia court that said that state employees could not be categorically barred from viewing pornographic materials, since this could prevent professors at public universities from viewing any manner of art or historical evidence that might be inappropriate in the eyes of some regulator. Granted, that was a case where the policy was much too broad, and I doubt the court would object to a broad, but not complete, ban on sites that are unquestionably pornographic, and have no academic relevance (basically anything with XXX in the meta.) I believe that may have been a state court ruling, but I think it was based on national law.
In this case, Dialpad does have clear academic uses, and less questionable ones than playboy.com. In addition, many university students live on campus, and getting internet access elsewhere is out of the question. While the University has the right to screen out whatever it wants, to limit access to any site that is not patently illegal is a terrible violation of the spirit of freedom that has made most university campuses such an exciting place to live. (Though personally, I don't think that universities should be in the business of censorship at all.)
You have to give them credit though, because at least they admit that they're trying to protect their own telecommunications funding. Still, they'd probably save the students a lot of money by charging them the extra money needed for the switchboard, the campus locator, and the emergency phones, and letting them use a more cost-efficient method of communication.
Just because it's legal, doesn't make it right.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
No, they don't. That's the problem. Ever since I've been going to school, I've been losing my rights at the schoolhouse door. No talking out of turn. No foul language. No hats. No drinking, even off-campus. No girls in the guys' dorms, and vice versa. I could go on, but you get the point. This isn't a change - this is the status quo. At least now that I'm in college things are getting a little better. The point is, you're not really free until you get to the Real World.
Coke is far superior
No argument there. Of course, I'd still rather have a Sobe, but...
--
Think of it this way. If more students use Internet sites to make telephone calls, then it stands to reason that students will be making LESS telephone calls over the campus telephone network. As such, their peak call volumes will be lower, and they can remove some channels from their PSTN trunks. Or, even better, take some of the channels and dedicate them to Internet bandwidth to compensate. When we're talking PBX's and Internet, it's all ones and zeros anyhow. As a matter of fact, it's MORE efficient to use IP for telephone than a dedicated 64kbps B-channel. (My personal opinion: It is the university's right to choose. It may not be a good choice, but it is their choice.)