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Clemson Reverses Policy; Internet Long Distance OK
Krimsen writes "Looks like Clemson Universty felt the pressure from angry students being denied free long distance. They are allowing access to dialpad.com."
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With Napster blocked by many University networks because of bandwidth concerns, and now Dialpad, who can tell what will come next?
.iso files as the traffic just gets to be too huge? How about a block on freshmeat or /.?
It seems that universities will have to seriously look into current policies for network access as more and more high-bandwidth services become available. I guarantee this is far from the end of disagreements between students and IT departments, and I fear where the next big block will be.
Once Linux gets to be more and more mainstream, can we expect to see a block on
What I should have said was nothing.
I was once a student at Clemson University, and during that time, I edited one of the campus newspapers (the independent one). Of course, I had my own run-ins with DCIT, and from that I learned a great deal about the way that their organization works.
First of all, there's no problem with Clemson's bandwidth. Just a few months ago, I could sit in my office in the early evening (5p.m. EST) and download .iso images at around an average of 200k per second, topping out at 400k per second. Much better than I get at my current job, where our bandwidth comes from a pair of T-1s. I don't know what Clemson has now, but it does provide massive bandwidth. I was in front of the firewall, but I know for a fact that dorm access isn't much slower.
Secondly, Clemson has a contract with WorldCom (formerly MCI) for all of their telecommunications (which I believe includes their bandwidth). If you ask me, them banning dialpad.com (a competitor of MCI) is akin to monopilistic practices.
Thirdly, as some people mentioned, textbooks are sold on campus. However, the University does not directly profit from their sales. Barnes & Noble rents space in their student union and handles all transactions.
These are just a few of the things that I have retained and thought that I would pass along. I do agree that it was quite awful for them to ban any Internet site, especially when they can only benefit from doing so. Chris Duckenfield has been a thorn in my side for a long while. If you pay attention, you'll see him screw up again sooner or later.
Brad Johnson
--We are the Music Makers, and we
are the Dreamers of Dreams
Brad Johnson
These schools are going to learn a pretty basic concept of society. You cannot get together a bunch of independent individuals, then mold them to your will with bans and policies. The only way to do that is to have those policies in place before you bring in the people so they know about them ahead of time and can choose if they are policies they agree with. More and more institutions are beginning to learn that you cannot control society, not on widespread legitimate issues like this.
Munky_v2
"Warning: you are logged into reality as root..."
Jay
The other site Clemson banned was funphone.com. Well, as it turns out that site doesn't even offer free LD. The site is a hoax, a leftover April Fools joke. I guess the sysadmins/administration at Clemson never did their homework.
See for yourself.
Although I haven't tried it myself for overseas calls, Netscape was touting something called Net2Phone. Their site says they do international calls. Domestic calls, while not FREE, only cost one cent per minute.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
I know this is going to seem like blasphemy to some people, but let's think a little bit about 'free' phone service...or, for that matter, 'free' anything. We all know bandwidth is never free - SOMEONE is paying for it, and if it's not you, then the person who IS paying for it is probably looking for a way to bill you for it. Dialpad and other internet telephony makes itself cheap by reducing the amount of bandwidth it uses (by sampling down the conversation to the point where it's almost unintelligible) and by using bandwidth most of us don't get billed for on a by-volume basis. Was Clemson wrong to ban it? Maybe. I don't have any evidence that it was really causing them bandwidth problems. But their most likely next move will be to raise student fees to cover the additional bandwidth expense. Then every student on campus will be subsidizing the long distance habit of the folks who want to call home every night. In this case, the cost may be minor. But the next time this debate comes around, for some other service, it might not be. Think about it. Free isn't always free.
So the net result of this is good: Clemson backed down on Internet censoring, and in the process gave free publicity to the free long distance services. I'll be that many students who had never considered bypassing the traditional phone system are now exploring their options.
I'm a strong proponent of maintaining a completely open network in an academic environment. Obviously key administrative resources, like database servers, need to be restricted access - but you get the idea.
One thing many people never mention is that Colleges and Universities are NOT ISPs. The primary goal of institutes of higher learning is education. While I'll be the first to shout from the towers that the Internet is a great educational resource, parts of it are not.
Do sites like Napster foster educational value? It's debatable, but I'd lean towards ``no.''
High bandwidth connections are NOT free. They're not even close to being cheap, either. A T3 connection for a commercial enterprise is a few hundred thousand dollars per year. Educational institutes usually get a substantial discount on Internet services. However, a T3 is still over $100,000/year.
Your educational resources (buildings, classrooms, facilities, etc) and your internet connection funding come from the same pool of cash. Since the primary purpose of an educational institute is - education - the appropriate use of funds is clearly on resources.
When the pipe fills up, do you just get a bigger pipe? No. Any sane network administrator on the planet will tell you that when the network starts to become overutilized - you figure out why it's overutilized before you buy a bigger pipe.
Is something like Napster a good use of the available bandwidth? Faced with that question, and the knowledge of limited funding - my answer is no.
While I realize that the topic on hand is the dialpad/Clemson case (which I do think is a valid use of network resources) - I've noticed in the past that people throw up their arms in protest without keeping the simple fact that they're not an ISP in mind.
-Jeff
I used it the other day and it worked fine. The quality isn't great, but I'd say it compares well with most digital phones. It's using the same network. There was about a .5 second speed of light delay, but, heh, for free you can't complain.
+&x
It uses "java", but requires Windows and Netscape or IE.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Now with all the publicity over dialpad.com, even more students will be using it than if they had just kept their mouths shut in the first place.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
when the network starts to become overutilized - you figure out why it's overutilized before you buy a bigger pipe.
The problem here is that your technical expertise spans as far as your position - of a college sysadmin. You know how to buy a bigger pipe. You know how to ban. You have no idea how to control and use your pipe efficiently.
I would suggest you go and read about Quality of Service over IP, Random Early Detection, Classed Based Queing, Ingress Traffic Policying, etc, etc.
These things are more than 5 years old now. Van Jacobson (yes the same VJ) and Sally Floyd have started developing them in the mid 90-ties.
Have alook at ee.lbl.gov and learn how to control instead of banning.
This also means that you will have to change your network design quite a bit. You cannot simply slap QoS on an existing network. The result is shit. You have to design for QoS
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
From what little i've read, I basically agree that what Clemson did is unreasonable. However, Clemson was well within their rights. Clearly Clemson's intent was not to "censor" anyone, they were concerned about preserving network bandwidth. Free Network access, believe it or not, is not an inalienable right--restricting it is not akin to "controlling society". You attend an institution, you pay X dollars to attend, out of that Y% is allocated to networking, do you really expect bandwidth to be infinite? Please spare me with your diatribe.
http://www.speakfreely.org
- It is free
- It is open source
- It has strong encryption, and comes from Switzerland
- You can set the UDP port number so it can't be blocked
- It runs on Windows and Unix (including Linux) and I'm tinkering with a BeOS port
- It offers a wide choice of voice compression and transmission protocols.
The only thing Speak Freely can't do is call a regular phone. But if the person you're calling has a computer and at least a 28.8 net connection you're fine.It takes a little figuring out to learn how to use it. It's pretty tricky to get it work on Linux but I understand they've done a lot of work to address that.
Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
Well, if it does why the hell you are not using it? Highly problematic to limit napster to 2400 bits/s and let it use anything more than 2400 bits/s only if noone else wants the bandwidth?
I doubt it...
RTFM (linux kernel docs);
RTFM (FreeBSD kernel docs);
RTFM (Xedia docs);
RTFM (Cisco IOS 12+ docs- there it is actually far from complete);
RTFM... RTFM... RTFM...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
My college avoided the debate over long distance carriers by refusing to allow any toll calls. If you wanted to call long distance, you used a calling card. This discussion has started me thinking, though. I had friends in long-distance relationships who could rack up $100+/month on a 15 cent/minute phone card. The average student probably spent $25/month. On a big campus, that equates to over a million minutes every month. Why haven't universities taken that buying power and negotiated five-cent-a-minute deals (or less)? Fewer people would go through the hassle of using IP telephony to save $3.00 on an hour-long call. Solves any bandwidth-sharing problems and saves the students money.
This was in everyone's mailbox yesterday morning:
Subject: DCIT Bulletin
Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2000 09:37:22 -0500
From: DCIT Publications
To: CLEMSON_STUDENTS-L@CLEMSON.EDU
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.
Clemson student:
"Guess what guys, there is a rival to dialpad. its called http://www.funphone.com/."
DCIT response:
"Now you've done it. I can't ignore such a blatant challenge to our ability to block access to a website whether we agree with it or not."
Well this just means that you will have to do some additional research and design a solution.
Otherwise you are likely to expect the emergence of napster proxies or running napster over tunnels very soon. It is a question of demand. The demand is high.
So in order to control it you will have to use some resources. And it is likely to be more expensive than simply banning it. The difference being that it will last longer.
Overall:
Napster protocol is published and reverse engineered successfully.
So you can actually control it.
Just two words and after that if you indeed have the qualification you claim to have you should go figure it for yourself. The word number one is "divert socket". The word number two is "dynamically change filters/classes".
Ah, almost forgot, you have to be able to speak perl or C as well...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
So, essentially, colleges should pay network administrators to keep up with every non productive, bandwidth sucking application, and how to monitor/limit the bandwidth utilized by these applications?
Colleges are *NOT* ISP's, and do *NOT* provide network connections as a *right*. The students do not own the network. The school does, and they can do pretty much whatever the heck they want to with it. That includes disallowing certain traffic..
Now, personally, I'd bandwidth throttle the guys using g/napster, allowing them to continue using such a system, but at a price that doesn't impeed others who are using it for more legit means..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
As an idea, why not simply identify the high bandwidth abusers, and simply throttle their bandwidth? This would not use nearly as much managment time, and would address the problem on a more local level.
Heck, if you did some sort of measurments of the average usage, etc, you could script a system that could bandwidth limit things at different times of the day, etc..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Take a look at gnome-o-phone. It's a free (GPLed) internet telephone for Linux.
Of course, we have to take into consideration that many schools probably pay by percentage of line used. With this situation, sucking down thousands of mp3's or setting up an illegal software distribution ftp server may cost the university thousands of dollars a month.
I do not see anything wrong with downloading operating system ISO's, but I support the attempt to limit students stealing music and software. Just because some people rationalize, it doesn't make it legal or right.
I was a little unclear about this initially too, but it turns out that dialpad uses a java applet to INSTALL itself on your computer, but the actual application is x86 windows code.
the idea of a java-based installer is pretty cool tho.
I would claim that my University (University of British Columbia) IS my ISP. Although the cost of ethernet access in my dorm room isn't specified, the cost of residence went up when they installed Resnet, and high-speed access was a major factor in my choice to live here.
Since I am paying for it, I believe that I am entitled to use it for whatever I wish. The situation might be different if I went to a public computer lab that is provided for free, but if you don't want to let me use my resnet connection for whatever I wish, give me my money back and I will get the appropriate service elsewhere.
I don't know about ALL colleges, but I'm PAYING MONEY for my internet connection, therefore they're MY ISP. If it were free, sure, they could stick me with a super firewall and only let me have web access. But since i'm paying money out of my pocket to be provided with internet (actually, I'm getting jacked, cause it's not like I can say "oh, I don't want to pay the technology fee, and the athletic fee, and the towel fee") I think they ARE an ISP, and are obligated to service the students as such.
As for the cost, well just with 3000 dorm students being charged 100 dollars (probably small estimate) for "technology fee", gosh that's 300,000 dollars, well over the cost of a T3 for a YEAR, and this is in ONE semester. So much for it being "expensive", the school seems to have made a hell of a profit. Not to mention the subsidies the government provieds, and the fact that everyone on campus and in the labs is able to access this internet that the dorm residents are paying for. Now the way I see it, the school isn't just an ISP, but they're making a good profit of doing so, and then whining when people try and treat is as such.
Now, here we're faced with a different situation. The school "privatized" the res-net with cable modems supplied by the local cable company, and maintained (and bandwidth provided by) the school, and eventually the cable company has taken over more of the operation, but the bandwidth is still coming from the University. And I pay 20 bucks a month for it (cheap for cable, expensive I'd say for ethernet) Now in this case my school IS my ISP, quite litterally. I had an "incident" a long time ago where someone accused me of "hacking" (in reality all it was, was portscanning for BO in an IRC channel just to see if anyone had it) and I was almost even suspended from college for something I'm paying monthly charges on. Where exactly can I draw a line between ISP and not an ISP?
Personally, my thoughts are, if I'm paying money for it, it's mine, I can use it how I like. If they don't like it, well tough.
You make it sound like the choice is between hiring more teachers or building better facilities and between providing more bandwidth to the dorm rooms.
How about instead choosing to have both, and save the extra money by not building that new football stadium?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10