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What's Banned On Your Campus?
Going through the Slashdot submission bin, one story has been popping up over and over again over the past few months. Every few days, someone writes in to tell us about yet another university that has banned Napster, the popular mp3 distribution tool. From Indiana University to Seton Hall, there are over a hundred colleges and universities that have banned its use. It's not just Napster, either. DeCSS and internet telephony are being targeted, as well. Some people say it's censorship, others say it's just a matter of reclaiming the university's bandwidth.
We wanted to give the Slashdot readership a chance to talk about this issue. The 'Students Against University Censorship' have set up a site chronicling the day-to-day Napster battle, listing every school they know of that has banned the program. What's going on at your school? What are their policies regarding Internet usage? Have you had a run-in with the collegiate authorities over something you were trying to do? Let us know!
Uh- can't the university just use some Quality of Service controls to limit bandwith and avoid blocking access altogether... of course I'm assuming the NetAdmin at those universityies could figure out how to do QoS limiting....
I guess I'm just lucky Purdue hasn't banned anything yet.
Why haven't universities attempted to limit access during "business" hours. I would imagine that most kids use Napster and games at night, which shouldn't interfere with research traffic.
... the average CS major's GPA would probably go up by 0.5 - 1.25
Now all of a sudden, the vast bulk that is the rest of the campus is suddenly jumping on the net and saturating it.
Who should pay?
Who's using it that was not using it before?
Seems pretty simple to me.
Actually, our problem here is the exact opposite of what most of you are describing. Our problem is that we have a very tight firewall, and before this past semester, ICQ packets wouldn't even come in. Right now, our firewall is rejecting Quicktime TV and Dialpad, among a few. We have talked with information technologies, and are working on getting DialPad working. I personally haven't tried Napster, so don't know wheater or not it will work, but I doubt it.
I go to the University of Iowa, seven out of the eight dorms here don't even have ethernet access. Are we the only major public university not wired?
I didn't know Bob Jones University banned Linux! :)
When I went to U of I, almost everything in the Engineering school was paid for by grants. There was an article in the DI (DAily Illini) that said that the engineering school was spending about 15,000 dollars per student, whereas, all the other schools only had 1 or 2 thousand per student. So not every school gets its funding equally.
Fact: Napster is a program that enables people to exchange songs in the form of MP3 files for no cost, meaning that one can get copyrighted music for free.
Fact: There is currently no set of rules or regulations (short of one's moral conscious to observe the musics copyright) to prevent one from downloading whatever song may be posted on Napster, whether you own the artist's CD/Tape/LP/whatever or not.
Observed: Many people who share files on Napster have in excess of 100 MP3's, from perhaps 30-40 different artists. Those are low-ball numbers for some: I've seen people with as many as 2,000 MP3's. Common sense will tell you that not everyone owns the corresponding media for those songs they have.
I look at it this way: If I were to buy a copy of a movie (say, Austin Powers), make 50 copies of it on VHS format, then set up a table outside my house with those 50 tapes piled on it with a sign that said "Free Austin Powers VHS Tapes", I would be guilty of copyright infringement, no questions asked. So, if I buy a copy of the Austin Powers sound track, convert each song on there to MP3 and post them to my Napster directory, how is that any different?
Of course your allowed to make MP3's of your music collection for your personal use, but that doesn't give you the right to make those MP3's freely available to anyone.
But that's okay, because it gives us more time to read the Bible and learn about how rootin-tootin evil the Catholics are! Now, if you will excuse me, my roommate Clem Joe-Bob Billy-Joe-Bob and his sister-wife Betty-Jean-Sue Joe-Bob have to get cleaned up and into our best Sunday pants! It's time for the potluck and a speech by George "DUBYA" Bush! YEEEEEEEEEE-HAW FOR JESUS!
Read all about my school's polices at this here link!
Another person who thinks the internet belongs to AT&T.... .gov and so on. This is the internet. You do not PAY for this, you PAY when nobody will give you a link and you need a provider (ISP).
A university connects to another university and this to all the universities in US which in turn connect to the universities in EU and to
All they ever pay for is the physical link but no providership.
Once again I have to mention that nobody owns the internet and thus nobody takes monay for "letting you in".
c-ya
So, following in your Napster-should-be-banned-because-it-lets-you-pirat e-MP3s line of reasoning, the following items should also be banned:
And that's just off the top of my head. Feel free to punish people who use Napster to pirate MP3s, but people do have legitimate uses for it. As for why they don't rip the files themselves, on most computers ripping a single file of decent quality ties up almost all resources for about 30 minutes. (In my experience, anyway).
"A friend is like a parachute ... if it isn't there the first time you need it, you'll probably never need it again."
UIUC is a large network with 27,000 computers...when Napster was in use, I experienced noticibly diminished download speeds. If you know enough to get around the blocks of Napster you also know enough to find what you want without Napster. I say if you need to find an MP3, find another way...
While I don't agree with censorship of any kind, I really don't think that this is really what it's about. I know that the University of Western Ontario has also banned Napster. But think about the reasons - bandwidth costs a lot of money. I'm looking to run my own business on the web and I'm a bit freaked out by how much it costs, especially if you run up several GB of transfers. Usually a commercial pipe comes with a per-GB bandwidth limit and extra charges if you go above that. If every student transfers even a few hundred MB each month, not only will the pipes have to be really fast (who the hell can afford that?!?), so equipment costs alone will be huge, but the bandwidth charges will be massive.
That being said, most Universities I've looked at give you the internet connection for next to nothing compared to what it costs to maintain it. Western gives you the connection for a whole year for less than I'd pay for a single month of equivalent service from a commercial ISP.
My thought is that if you want the bandwidth, stop your bitching and get a real ISP. Your campus network is for your studies, and the universities are not in the ISP business - they provide the network for your convenience. Napster is being blocked because enough people using it are hogging the resources, which are meant for EVERYONE to share! If you want the bandwidth and unlimited access, you can pay the price like everyone else. Get a commercial cable or DSL connection, and stop your whining. Bandwidth isn't free, and campus network access is a privilege, not a right. If students had to pay the per-GB charges that most people do, they'd quickly realize that it's not worth it.
Yes, I am a student and I don't work for any university and I'm also a programmer and I also like Napster so don't think I'm conspiring. I'm just seeing how this is from their perspective, and I understand why they'd want to do this. A better solution on their end, though, would be to limit bandwidth on a per-student basis. I know some universities which did that, and it seemed to work, and no one complained.
All though you implicitly acknowledge it, I want to stress the point that the fact that the music is copyrighted does not necessarily mean that the distribution of the MP3 is illegal.
To counter that argument, you ask why, if I have the CD, I don't just encode my own MP3 from the CD. Simple answer: time. If I have a collection of tens or hundreds of CDs (as many people do), it's much faster to download MP3s for those that have already been encoded by someone else.
While I acknowledge that some of those people using Napster are infringing copyrights, I really get tired of people who cop a holier-than-thou attitude and try to argue that there is no legitimate use. That's total bunk.
It's quite easy to tell the difference between a legal and an illegal MP3. If you own the CD that the MP3 was created with, then it's (in some people's interpretation) a legal MP3. If you used Napster to acquire it, then it's an illegal MP3 (because you don't own the original CD). Now, what were you saying about Naptster being used to share legal MP3's?? (go ahead and record your parrot saying clever things, with a microphone, and encode it, if you want a legal MP3 you can "share" with Napster. O).
Back in the Internet Dark Ages, around 1982 or so, the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) had a problem: Their screaming hot 56kb pipe was getting filled to capacity quite often each day.
Back then, the reigning Unix was BSD 4.1 running on screaming VAX 11/780's accessed via terminals on 9600 bps serial lines, and the primary Net applications were mail and news. FTP existed, but its use was not very widespread. To transfer files, we primarily used Kermit.
And that was the problem. All those Kermit transfers were maxing out the 56kb pipe. One of the largest downloads were vector files for Tektronics 4014(?) graphic terminals, the only network connected graphical displays we had access to. There were some very nice drawings available, including a stupefying number of teapots.
Rather than totally outlaw Kermit, or try to filter the more popular image sites, the operations staff at UCSD elected to cripple Kermit by forcing it to generate an error whenever a transfer above a certain size was attempted.
It worked, for a while. Then we students hacked our own version that would transfer files in segments, just below the threshhold. But it still worked, since there were now gaps between the transfers, and the 56kb pipe was not slammed to saturation as often.
The next year the entire issue was made moot, since the San Diego Computer Center (SDSC) was created on the campus, and brought with it God's Own Bandwidth.
I'm certain Napster will return as campus connectivity is improved. Then an even more bandwidth hungry app will arrive, probably MPEG video transfers, that will also be banned until connectivity again leaps higher.
It is, I'm afraid, the name of the game. Demand outstrips resources.
It isn't censorship, at least not in this instance. But Napster does appear to encourage violation of existing copyrights, and I would not be surprised if measures were taken to enforce those copyrights. That's not censorship either.
Two years ago I was involved with a company that was contracted to develop methods for detecting and blocking the transfer of MP3 files over a network. The intended target was college and university campuses, and ISPs. The customer was the "Recording Industry".
That product never made it to market, mainly because the Recording Industry was completely unable to convince (or intimidate) campus net administrators to install "foreign" monitoring software on their systems. The system administrators were 100% committed to open and free Net access.
But they are not able to support "unlimited" access.
yes, you are an idiot, but that's not my point...
john katz should be banned from every college in america. if ever censorship was the way to go, katz is the reason.
for the love of god, jon, please die!
Hey ShortyMc Here, Yea! We pay out the a$$ for school here in Tennessee and we should have the right to do what ever we want on the networks that is legal. Napster is not breaking any laws, but some of use have yet to see the broadband window be opened up abd the only way I can get Linux CD's and the such is to dl here where it is fast. To bad living near the lake has screwed me from ever get'n a cable modem... I pay alot of money for net access and school and not one person can say that you can't do that... Only the Govt. can and they don't know what they have dug themselfs into.... shout outs to NLUG... http://www.nlug.org l8rz shortymc
This was done at sheffield university (UK) a few years back for online games.
Apparently some people were playing doom 1.0, a very network hostile version of the game, which flooded the lan with broadcast packets & caused various problems including an embarresing faliure of a demo of this "new web thing" (it was '93 or something)
anyway it was announced that networked were banned, any student caught playing them would be expelled, any staff member would be dismissed. After the first couple of people were thrown off their courses the games magically stopped.
It works.
That's the point....not the illegality, but the fact that it takes up an enormous amount of bandwidth, at least proportionally.... here at my work, a small office, I've been asked not to use Napster so as to avoid clogging up valuable (and i might add insufficient) bandwidth... I am more than happy to oblige....there's better sources of mp3s out there than Napster, anyway!
Are you trying to tell me that you believe that the majority of Napster users are downloading mp3's that they *do* have the CD/record/tape for, it's just that they don't want to tie up their resources to encode them?
What kind of bullshit are you trying to peddle? Do you take everyone for a bigger fool than you obviously are?
Please, everyone knows that yes, some people are using Napster for legal distribution of legal mp3's... but the *majority* of the distribution violates copyrights. Stop trying to blow smoke up people's asses you retard.
When Doom first came out, it hogged bandwidth to the extent that IT had to ban it from large networks. Then someone got the bright idea to use UDP packets and backoff the transfer if something 'more important' needed to use the bandwidth. Couldn't the same be done with Napster? Make all MP3 downloads a "low-priority" transfer that drops as soon as someone else wants to use the bandwidth for "educational" purposes.
The link's real, everything's real.
Bob Jones University is just like he says, and GWB did give a talk there (to demonstrate that he's got more religion than McCain). Scaaaary. Especially considering the amount of funding GWB has behind him.
How would this work?
1. Download the mp3
2. Play the mp3
3. If you recognize the song, find out who owns the copyright.
4. If the owner of the copyright has not authorized it, distributing the song is illegal.
I find it interesting that most network admins are screaming bandwidth consumption. Fine, then why do you allow Real Player and StreamWorks through ? Educational reasons you say, fine.. So does more bandwidth suddenly reappear when it's intended use is Educational ? (If so, you've got a great product, lemme know when you IPO) Banning streaming products (napster,videocam, etc) is not the solution. Bandwidth throttling with QOS is more practical. Net Admins, dig out those router and switch books and turn on priority routing and priority switching--You paid for the features, use them. Univerisites forget.. For the most part, it's CS/CIS majors that want to do the streaming. You don't think those same people (who want to making computers their living) won't be resourcefull and setup a tunnel through port 80 ? All it takes for one person to setup a tunnel and let everyone through it. Then you've got a real problem. -Iota God is real unless declared integer
Is the West Virginia University? Heh. One of your network admins runs a 140GB warez/iso/mp3 server off the University computers. Its nice and fast. I'm in Minnesota and I can usually get 50-150KiloBytes/sec from it. You guys must have tons of bandwidth if even your network admins run warez sites!
You fail English? That's unpossible!
College students, at least the ones here, don't like being told what to do. The bottom line is that sometimes us IT people just have to be totalitarian pricks.
;-)
You are quite right about the college students. It would now be wise to keep a low profile on your campus and not let many people know you are the one who is implementing these unpopular policies.
You have already answered the problem to your question. You have over 50 ROUTERS. Replace your routers with SWITCHES. This will allow you to keep your multiplayer games from killing the rest of the campus, and isolated to the dorm or the hall (depending on how your campus is configured). This will DRAMASTICALLY decrease your local traffic
Well, I'm from Ireland, guns are banned here in Europe, crime is lower, but you're right, that's another story. Not a good analogy with MP3s I believe though. ;^)
... but unfortunately, you could also use it to kill your mother, so no more knife for you. Anything can be used for illegal purposes, be it gun (shoot them), knife (stab them), spoon (scoop out their eyes...maybe), cricket bat (bore them to death for 3 straight days), or chicken noodle soup (drown them). Should any of these be illegal? No - that's ridiculous. But take one away, and whatever's next in line is now the most readily available criminal tool, and now stands to be taken from you as well.
*cough cough* IRA *cough cough*... actually, you said Ireland, not Northern Ireland, but still - there's the point. Lack of guns != safety. For example, this article talks about the big Aussie gun-grab that happened back in September. Guess what? Criminals didn't turn in their guns, and the number of gun crimes actually rose within a year (in Victoria, for instance, homicides w/ firearms rose 300% - no, that is not a typo). That's kind of the point - banning something doesn't change things. Ireland is by no means crime free - crimes that would have been committed with guns might now be committed with knives or cricket bats. Also notice the US, where guns are legal, we have no soccer riots. So to restate... Guns != Crime. Guns == Tools that can be used in crime. (I also figure the difference in gun laws in US and UK has more to do with the American Revolution than crime rates, anyway.
You cannot condone freedom to commit illegal acts.
You sure as hell can - anything that has a legitimate use should be legal. Hey, you have the freedom to use a knife to cut your steak
illegal activities on their network are, you guessed it, ILLEGAL.
As they should be. Napster is not and should not be illegal - piracy, on the other hand, is and should. Know what I've noticed a lot of people downloading? Songs they heard on the radio. And I'd say this is a completely legitimate use - if you can tape it from the radio (where you probably heard it to begin with), I see no reason you can't download it from the internet. I'd say this qualifies as fair use and probably justifies the highest percentage of Napster's use. The other thing people download? Rare songs that aren't being published, which the record companies aren't making money off anyway. That's another good chunk. I admit it's been used for quite a bit of illegal use as well, but like a lot of people have said, if it has any legitimate use, it should not be banned.
I like to use a lot of toilet paper. Like, a whole roll at a sitting. And, sometimes, it kinda clogs things up.
Now the university is complaining. They say I'm wasting TP that the other people in the school could be using. And by rendering the toilets unusable, I'm infringing on the ability of my schoolmates to use the bathroom. And they're upset that the occasional overflowing toilet sort of gets into the nearby rooms and get through into the next floor down.
Well screw them, dammit. I pay a lot of money to attend college, and I ought to be able to use as much toilet paper as I damn well please. If the other students can't find any, then the school should buy more. I mean, hell, what are we paying for, if not toilet paper? And I'm certainly not going to pay for my own supply, or limit my usage when I'm not on my own personal privvy.
It's CENSORSHIP, I tell you. They're infringing on my rights.
.. that the guy is trolling, anyway. That type of backwards thinking and Bible-disguised bigotry is not commonly found on Slashdot anyway.
sorry can't remember my account name :p Napster is banned at U of West Alabama.. Jay Crampton
It's a ban, but it's not censorship...
And when I started using the USENET back in 1988, that was a colossal waste of CPU and disk space. Face it, if it weren't for people fucking around with university/government/company equipment, doing things they *WANTED* to do with computers, regardless of the *INTENDED* purpose (my university unix shell account was meant for programming classes), there WOULD BE NO INTERNET as you know it. No IPO frenzy, no Silicon Valley. So learn to cope with it and quit whining, you moron.
Bandwidth throttling is an appropriate measure. Censorship is not. Banning students from running servers does them a disservice and prevents them from learning valuable skills.
:-D
They do indeed pay for the physical link. They pay for a point to point connection - thats the first layer, they dont however pay for "Internet access".
Theoretically they can throw their own cable to the nearest univ and even rent some bandwidth to MCI.
Some people believe that their university connects to an ISP as they do and it pays lots of monay so they'd better shut down napkins because they won't have monay to buy the new Strusdtrup unreadable book. I dont care if they shutdown napkins BTW, just saying...
The fact of the matter is that an educational institute does not need an ISP, ISPs would beg to connect with an institute though...
Anonymous Howard
I know, I know, this suggestion is abused far to often on /. however, it makes sence here. If you already started the project, see if you can tar it up and provide it as an open source project under the GPL license. It sounds like there are plenty of other universities that would be very happy to see a tool like this mature.
By the many arms of vishnu man, It's CENSORSHIP! If you ever forget again, just remember the dead milkmen song and change the T to a P!
IP's can change, and napster.com's IP DO change. it is easier if your DNS servers don't allow lookups for napster.com and if your network only allows your DNS servers for lookups. Takes care of the problem nicely.
LOL first off.. I'd love to know what www2 is? I think you might be refering to the Internet 2 project.. Anyway.. napster and other means of getting mp3s.. and priated games.. along with many students playing Quake and such.. take place every day here at Penn State's Main campus. I must say.. with 40,000 students on campus.. 1500 dial in modems.. etc.. with napster running and all that, there's hardly ever seems to be a hickup (unless a router dies). Maybe the schools just need to revamp the network situation instead of blocking access to things.
Question: How many students are there at IU? I couldn't find any information on that on their web pages from a brief look. They did have a page that talked about the size of the university, but there were no actual numbers, they did describe the university as large, however. I'm going to underestimate and assume that means that there are 5,000 students. So, if the state is paying 300,000 dollars per year for IU's internet connection, then they are paying 60 dollars per student per year. Now, that 61% percent figure, is that 61% of total bandwidth, or is that 61% of used bandwidth? Also, does the university pay a flat rate for its bandwidth? Well, anyway, as far as I can tell, it's very difficult to put an actual price tag on the bandwidth being used for downloads from the Napster network without more information. Maybe a pricetag can't very easily be put on it. Or at all provided that there's a flat rate on bandwidth and Napster usage never interfered with anyone elses work. In that case it would simply be a case of using a resource that had already been paid for and would have otherwise gone to waste.
Funny, those recruiting brochures where they talk about dorm ethernet in the same paragraph where they talk about dorm cable TV don't seem to talk much about how useful the net is for academic purposes.
Seems that people must host sites on the same local network. I'm wonder at what point does it start taking up to much local bandwith? Are most areas using 10 or 100? It seems having that many people in one area should decrease the need to go out onto the net for many MP3's if it's really as widespead as everyone says....
Well then my grits-less friend, this changes a lot! If my college has banned pouring hot grits down your pants, then pouring hot grits on your un-covered crotch is acceptable!
HAHA! I have found a loophole that lets me enjoy my favorite pastime.
So hold on emmett, 'cuz here come the grits!
What the hell? Are you some kind of retard?
Sorry stupid question, you're statement alone shows that you aren't quite functioning with the rest of the evolved primates.
How can you soak one portion (convientently in your case, the non-hard science majors) That's like saying "I'm taking my ball and going home!!"
Geez, grow up.
I was once proud to be an NYU grad... I'll have to mention this the next time their Alumni dep't tries to get money from me :P
OK, i thought i was alone ;) ...interpretation of the network use agreement, has disallowed me from using almost any good advantage of a decent os:
:)
my network admin, who's a pretty cool guy except for his
telnet - only with tcp wrappers to one box and one subnet(school mail server and subnet at work)
MySQL - I have no idea why...
httpd/ftpd - traffic sucks here anyway
Samba/NFS/appletalk WTFN!?!?!
...plus anything else. we _can_ run:
napster
gaming(including ysound)
hotline
smaller svcs: time, X11, auth, ssh, etc.
to add, the admin mirrors a couple popular Linux ISO's internally for us
what ticks me off is the inability to LEARN by using this software. Being a person who is very interested in both Perl/cgi and SQL, I am unable to run this, except in out linux network, which I'd have to be CS/IS to get into...which i'm not.
Otherwise it's pretty good here
at my former university:
ICQ (or any other instant message format)
Network Gaming
Napster
internet phone
any internal or external FTP services (not setup by I.S.)
I've not been back in a while to visit, I'm wondering of they have banned IRC yet...
The school I am at has port filtered all the SMB ports at the router level. We can connect on the LAN over SMB, but I can't connect to my home computers via SMB over the DSL line. Comes in really handy for makeing offsite backups.
My thinking for this is that since the school runs NT Server + IIS, rather then implement a real security policy or use a real operating system on its servers, they would rather just restrict the ability of students to operate in the most efficient manner.
Also, we have to authenticate to an NT Server which means alternative operating systems don't work to well here.
I left Ga Tech about 5 years ago, and its been 8 or 9 years since I was in a dorm, (before the web took off). I recall that each student was given an account that allowed only a set amount of usage. This is based on server-side storage, time connected (we were on dialup), process power requirements, and maybe even bandwidth. They gave us plenty of usage - I never had any problems. Once the user exceeded their usage by 10%, their account was disabled. In order to reactivate the account, user either had to wait until the quarter rolled over, or fill out some forms to request more usage. Is 'usage' still implemented in schools? Why isn't this a solution to control bandwidth?
We have many interesting things here. Our network people charge 250$ for 10Mb and 500$ for 100Mb. They'll kill your port for using any proxying or ip masq'ing. They also filter incoming port 25, all email gets filtered (at least not RBL'ed since we went on the RBL a while back :). They have a seperate subnet for students, force WINS server, disable Multicast, will shut you down for running promiscuous mode drivers (odd since the network is fully partitioned), hourly check everything to see who's running web servers, occassionally look through any anonymously accessible SMB, WWW, and FTP shares. Check everyones machines for vulnerabilities "to keep the network working", but will disable your port if you check for them. They ban security auditing for any reason. Oh, and if your unfortunate enough to have two ports in your room, but you didn't end up with a roommate, or a roommate that doens' thave a network connectino, you have to pay another 250$ to get that port turned on if you want a second computer, instead of 20$ to put a hub on your port and get a second IP. But only if that port isn't being used. And if you do try and sneak a hub on without their "permission", they'll shut your port off if they detect it.
To make things worse, they also charge academic buildings 200$ per port, but one time, not yearly like the students. Wouldn't be too big a deal, if the school didn't already pay for all their equipment, salaries, and $20,000 desktop machines.
Of course the 100Mb access is worth crap, since we have five T1's to the internet because of some idiot agreeing to a ridiculous contract. Maybe we'll get a T3 soon... I love my DSL line having more bandwidth than my college. Course the bright star that got lines from different vendors must feel real smart, they had to disable one of the T1's because it had a shorter route than everything else. I love the average 20K I get off their network, compared to the average 70K I get at home.
Really sad that such a "prestigous" university has such crooks running it's campus network. $250 a year for restricted, slow, unreliable service... and you can't get a DSL line, since the same deptartment runs the telecom too... and they wouldn't like you undercutting them. 90$/mo, totally unrestricted, for just over half of the entire campus' bandwidth... hmm... no that wouldn't go over well.
Banning Napster in an attempt to stop mp3 trading is like banning guns and knives to stop murder. It will still happen. The tools may change, but the act will never stop. I have never used napster, but I have had more than 1GB of mp3s because I have access to a file transfer program. To stop trading any type of file, the only solution is to remove the network connection and the drives from all computers. I forget my username. pi@kcolbmaps.kidneypi.cx remove the kcolbmaps
Im currently a student at Western Washington University, but I also work for the school in their computer support department. The number of students living on campus is somewhere around 2500. Recently, a network bandwith cap was placed on the residence hall network...this cap is 1/3 of the total campus bandwith, so its about 3mbit/sec. Although one would think that this would be an OK solution to bandwith consumption, it it not. 14% of all outgoing and 30% of all incoming packets are lost, which will utterly destroy all but the smallest downloads. Network speeds are slower than modems (around 800bytes/sec in the afternoon) and there is not a thing we (students) can do about it. DSL and Cable modems are offered in Bellingham, but for everyone living on campus, this is not an option. Also, the 56k dialup modem pool (which is faster than the ethernet port in your dorm wall) for students is limited to 2 hours. I know that bandwith is finite/expensive, and that through excessive use we as students have brought a network cap upon ourselves. I see our network sysadmins fairly frequently, and they have a saying "demand will grow to meet supply". This is true. So what should be done? No one is quite sure and in the mean time, everyone is suffering.
"By the many arms of Vishnu" (sp?) is a favorite
saying of Apu from the Simpsons. The Dead Milkmen
reference is obviously to their song "Taking Retards
to the Zoo". So, in your case, it would be "Paking Repards
Po Phe Zoo", which is Swahili for "Your mom's coochie
is stuck to my face". Hope this helps, faggot.
So let's not hear all the SA's and SE's out there who've forgotten about their college experiences back in the early 80's bitch about it!
Pulease! Anybody who went to college in the 80's and is now just a measley System Administrator has some sort of weird priorities. A Sysadmin is just the computer equivalent of a custodian.
When you go to college, it's to become more than a computer janitor. That's what the kids who went to trade school do.
In the old days it wasn't much of an honor to be a "Computer Operator." I used to be a tape-mounting-monkey in the early 80's, BTW.
Stop worshipping SysAdmins, kids, or you'll end up being one.
Also, I was stealing projectors.
(Name the source: five points.)
I like your attitude. Give the little brats each their own DecWriter terminal. If they promise to be extra well behaved, give them fast 1200 baud DecWriters. If they're jerks, they get the regular 300 baud variety. And they have to pay for their own paper and ribbons.
I've often used to wonder...Why is Seton Hall is the "#1 wired Catholic University" in the US according to Yahoo's poll? It's because of the partnership with IBM. This university provides all freshmen, starting with the class of 2002, with IBM Laptops. It's like having your very own computer in your dormitory or something. Not many people in public universities have a computer in their dorm, but here, the issuing of laptops by Seton Hall fixes that problem. So this would explain the number of "PCs" on campus. Next, almost every single person that I have encountered has an mp3 on their laptop. Some students have over 2 gigs of mp3s on a laptop that only has a 2.9 Gig hard drive. Doesn't make any sense how the laptop is used Academically when most of the time, it's used as a resource to play games, download files (Mp3s in general), and other resources. And since Napster is the best source to find Mp3s, Napster will be on almost every single laptop. They've tried to close down the ports but as the saying goes, "where there's a will, there's a way." And if it's not Napster, then there'll be other Mp3 finders that will work almost as well. But then again, there's always Warez.
As a sidenote, i would also like to point out that while all the workstations are WinNT, all of the servers here run FreeBSD. Woohoo!
Sounds good to me. The workstations have probably always been NT or DOS based. Cutting Sun and SGI out of the equation entirely by using FreeBSD at the server side is great.
After the Freenixes are finished killing off Commercial Unix, we can pull the plug on the Freenixes.
Anything that kills Unix can't be all bad.
Look - we pay out the ass to the so called inst. to do what for us? educate us? prehaps. but that should go no further than in the classroom. who the fuck is xyz university to exercize this much control over us anyway. AND FURTHERMORE why wont anyone take a stand - WE OWN THEM. just think - if all students at a university where this happened DROPPED. Dont you think they would reconsider. hell yes. i just get so pissed off that we have become a society of complacent fools. we must fight - or there will be nothing more to fight for! Remember berkely in he 60's! i want to start a NET-WIDE organization to fight Universities flexing their Powers. anyone interested write to jsinglet@jaguar.ir.miami.edu thanks
Because TCP/IP Quality of Service systems cannot be implemented quickly. First Universities need to set policy (who controls what, and how much) and then standaardize on hardware and software. When you had to authenticate to use a modem, they had control. When you have 100s of times more connections, distributed, and designed that way, you aren't going to find many places doing capping.
The use of Napster is not yet prohibited, but the possessionl of MP3's (if you are caught and/or reported - ie you run an FTP, or have SMB shares) will get you send to the school's judiciary board. I suspect that when a certain network administrator (*cough*karensturgeon*cough*) figures out that dozens of computers in many labs have Napster on them, it will be banned rather quickly. Besides that, the Computer Technology Service (CTS) tries to prohibit students from using Linux on residence computers because it "threatens network security". They don't like the idea of student's running a telnet, ftp, http, etc. daemon(s). If that wasn't enough, the school's unofficial standpoint is that DeCSS is also banned. Fun, huh?
are you a Idiot? PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES ARE FUNDED yes by the state. BUT have you ever heard of OUT OF STATE TUITION. And furthermore you twit, where does the state get that money - from its ass!? TAX DOLLARS - and yes thats right where does THAT come from???????? i will let you figure it out college boy. (think hard......)
This is basically what is being done at the university for which I work. A (Linux!) traffic shaper is being set up between the dorms and the rest of the campus network. Between 8 A.M. and 5 P.M. weekdays, the traffic shaper will throttle bandwidth down to 10Mbps. The rest of the time, it will be open at the full 100Mbps.
This way, during business hours faculty and staff get an increased share of bandwidth to do their work and research, and outside of normal business hours students get high speed Internet access. No blocked ports. No banned sites.
Students are even free to run their own servers, so long as they don't cause problems. Those who do cause problems are contacted by the networking people and often hired.
5%? Thats not too bad. I am at Carleton U and our bandwidth has always been a bit limited as
we host a low bandwidth free ISP (NCF) and have
a modem pool of >500 28.8 modems and have our
residences wired to 10baseT. The bandwidth
here is 5 Mbs, and before they filtered napster
I could not even telnet out to a computer on the
otherside of Carleton's gateway without a > 3 second lag. That was pathetic. Our intenet link is always saturated except between 4 am and 8 am, but normally you can have a responsive telnet session through it.
Basically most universities can't or don't want to buy the network/compute power on useless (from a university standpoint) activies. All the binary (porn) newsgroups were filtered years ago, as the amount of diskspace needed for the nntp server and the bandwidth (50% for news!, back then Carleton just had a T1 = 1.54 Mbs) it was consuming bringing in all the posts was just too much. Oh, and the T1 cost Carleton $4k a month, with an education discount! Of course they didn't want to buy 4 more T1s at $4k a pop per month to keep up with all the porn. What would they get in return for their investment? A bunch of students wacking off in the library. There's an asset for a university.
So I think the universities are being reasonable and correct in filtering their limited and expensive resources. If someone wants access to everything the web has to offer, cough up and get an ISP. The universities are here to educate and to do research, not to provide unlimited web access.
So, from my point of view, I think the universities are well within their rights (and are being reasonable) to filter out aspects of the web.
In reality, at my school at least, porn, specifically to guys dorms, has saturated far more bandwidth than other above mentioned uses.
Oh Yuck! At the university I work for (which I will leave unnamed) Linux is unsupported but allowed. We haven't the resources to provide support and figure that most people who decide to use it should have enough technical know-how to do the job themselves. We will allow it to be on our dorm network, though, and if they are having connectivity problems we will ensure the network is functional to their wall-port.
We have *few* linux users, and most have no problems. Usually when they do, it's an issue affecting more than just them (sometimes dorm-wide, sometimes campus-wide, etc.)
The only thing we don't allow is for servers to be setup and that's mostly because our network cannot support it (yeah, one or two wouldn't be bad, but once one or two are out there, one or two more will be added, and so on.)
Would we ban something: I won't say an outright no or yes. We try to head-off problems before they become ones, and generally try to give our students some credit. Basically, our point is: if we see a problem, we're going to deal with it, but, often, the first step is to make people aware and ask them to self-regulate a bit. So-far, this has worked fairly well. Before a decision is made, a fair ammount of discussion is had. On decisions of that magnitude, a small committee comprised of faculty, staff, and students is formed to discuss the matter. Usually, there is an IS staff member or two, but in a non-voting position. The purpose of the IS staff member is to be a technical resource for the committee. Professional opinions are only offered if solicited (often asked for, though.) The director of the IS department serves as a facilitator - again, non-voting. FWIW, there have been decisions made that were against what the IS director felt they should be, but professional respect was maintained.
To use someone else's example, we're not worried so much about the difference between 100kbps and 50kbps, but more the difference between that and speeds that a 28.8 modem could run circles around.
Disclaimer: I am not a spokes-person for my employer in any way. I am presenting a viewpoint and the opinion that schools could do well by involving students and trusting them to be at least somewhat mature.
that analogy died a painful death
So have you considered the QoS possibility mentioned in an earlier post? If so, what made you decide against it?
State School = Subsidized Education...
anyone got a url where i can nominate a 'worst network admin of the year' ? if none exists... who's on for creating a page?
Actually, on most majorly released audio cds/records/tapes, there is usually a disclaimer to the tune of "you cannot publicly broadcast, distribute, or copy this recording". This law holds true for software as well. Albeit, no one is too terribly concerned about you making a copy of your Alanis Morrisette CD for your walkman, or "backups" of their windows 95 cd's, what they get pissed about is people who copy their cd collection, and sell the copies, or freely distribute them (ala mp3). This does not mean this practice is legal. This holds true for most formats, this is why movie rental places have to purchase special copies of the movies they rent, and music store owners (like me) have to go to great lengths to be able to buy new recordings from distributers. So yes, mp3 is illegal according to the agreement on the cd, no it isnt going to be held up (or even challenged) in a court of law.
As much as I use Napster, which is pretty much every time I hear a new song that I like, i know it is a network killer at my school. I go to Embry Riddle Aeronautical U. in Daytona Beach and we have 6 T1's coming in to the school with about 1000 to 1500 students living on-campus. My average download speed is around 20 K/sec...Now I know thats a lot faster than 56K, but i'm used to a 6MBps Cable Modem, and I know Napster is the reason for the slow speeds.
..."Happy Birthday Euclid"
I was here after out mid-semester break began a couple months ago, and being one of less than 30 people on campus, I was downloading at 200KBps+ Now I understand that Napster isn't the only problem, and there were only a few people on campus then but i know there would be a huge jump in speed if it was banned.
I know last year, before Napster was around, people were downloading much much faster with just 2 T1s on campus. Last semester I was downloading slower than in my 14.4 days... now with the addition of 4 T1s in the past 3 months speeds are higher, but still sub 50k/sec... Banning Napster would be an improvement, there is no doubt of that, whether it will make the difference between 50k and 100k/sec has yet to be seen...
Binx
--
i think you can just change the port number on the napster client and you should be able to get that 200k/sec back.
At this university the users signed a contract saying they would not run a server on their computers and napster is such a device. As such they have violated their terms of service with the university. Currently our residence halls have a very fast connection to the rest of the campus for sending internal data. However our gateway connection is no where near that fast. What is happing is napster is accounting for 3/4 of all traffic from this university and has taken down the gateway a number of times. They are also slowing down the entire rest of the campus network and this is on 1 Gbps lines. We are also running right now at about 8% packet loss through the gateway due to the obscene amount of traffic generated by napster.
Realistically the admins here don't care about napster because it is used to trade mp3s they care because it is damaging the integrity of the network. Any other program that used up that much of the campus bandwidth would be nailed also.
Bandwidth is not free and no one has the right to huge amounts of bandwidth, especially when that impacts the educational services a university is trying to provide.
They block Napsters servers IP address. Easy.
Students caught associating with imaginary rabbits over 6 feet tall are in violation of the housing contract for using illegal drugs (which are illegal anyway), and should be reported to your RA.
They should ban AllAdvantage, GotoWorld and all those other shitty things too. Half the Stevens students I know have AllAdvantage running in the background with mouse-jiggler software to make it think there's activity when there's not.
J Lessl
Yep - Napster and Internet telephony has been banned here too. The University here in Galway added a new firewall, which was *so* effective that it wouldn't even let through mail for two days!! At the moment mail and HTML is allowed, and it was a battle to get back FTP. Telnet and SSH has also been disallowed. I mean, there are over 7000 students here, each needing the internet for project research, which sometimes requires more than what is allowed, especially within the Computer Programming and Electronic Engineering faculties. Also there are many foreign students whose only method of communicating with their families was through internet chat. The problem here is that the firewall (and the entire college network) is been run by people who are not qualified to be network administrators. There *is* a fine line between so called security, and supression of basic rights, but thay seemed to have crossed it. It's the students' money that pays for the equipment, shouldn't we have a say in what happens??
Here at Tennessee Tech they banned BattleNet and Unreal T. Napster is still going strong though.
.. we aren't allowed to run any other OS other than Windows on our systems.
And are these systems that you own? If so, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves with a shovel. If they don't want to support it, fine. But they can't tell you what you can and can't run on your own goddamn computer.
Napster is now banned at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I was taking up 30% of their bandwith. Luckily I have a private DSL provider...
oh, you DO pay for it. unless you go to school for free. every student pays fees that cover internet access. universities never give anything out that isn't paid for one way or another.
Boy, there's nothing better than people keen to give everyone access complaining about that access being used. These bloody Us were so damn axious to win a few PR brownie points, they should've been ready for the consequences.
By your argument then, it would be alright for AT&T to listen to your private phone conversations...because it is, after all, THEIR network. On banning Napster from Uni students... if there is an identifiable problem with bandwidth usage, and in this case a problem with a non-academia related application, then it is a no-brainer, ban napster. Its not a question of ethics, it a question of bandwidth and proper uses of it.
You want mp3z, I got your Napster. Full length movies or games, try mIRC on for size. Anything else? Cliff notes, porn... try ftp... works for me! Napster's just been banned here, and I'm still getting the worst connection rate through the network today. Maybe Napster isn't the problem, it's PeopleSoft.
Sure, legal mp3's could theoretically be shared but I'm sure the actual number is so minute that it is dwarfed by the illegal users. If this system were used to distribute software people would be in an uproar if 95% of the software being distributed was pirate and only 5% were shareware and freeware. Essentially that is what is happening! Besides, like another user pointed out, the security implications of this thing are enormous. There ARE other reasons to ban an application and even entire protocols if they pose a significant security risk to an environment.
Thats because your girlfriend doesn't have one.
We were having serious problems with napster using upload bandwidth, so we banned it. My whole take on the situation is that it only really affects the dumb or lazy. If you want mp3s bad enough to write letters to your state congressman, you could just spend that time using FTP search engines to find the mp3s you want, the way people did it before napster existed. You could also use a proxy server, but most people are also too lazy/ignorant to do that. Of course you will never stop it completely without some seriously draconian controls being instituted, but no one really cares to stop it completely. The whole goal of banning it was not to evilly stop people from getting mp3s, it was to free up bandwidth. It accomplished that by weeding out those unable to circumvent the ban. Of course, once a university bans it, they cant really go back on their decision. That makes them look really bad to RIAA.
the pouring of hot grits down our pants !!! We shall revolt, as any honest, grit loving collegian would do.
thank you
Setting up an ipchains rule to reject the traffic from that IP or even on that port should send out an ICMP unreachable message immediately instead of waiting for it to timeout. Sounds like their application blows.
is stupidity.
At least at my college (UMaine @ Orono), this practice violates the user agreement in effect for any "users" of the system (whose definition actually extends to the service provider as well). We've witnessed several instances of port scans and exploit attempts from some hack-in-a-box software by the organization two layers above us (still a campus business). We're working to put an end to this as it is an invasion of privacy and demonstrates malicious intent on the part of the University. Suppose I had a particularly nasty exploit open on my box and I was just putting the finishing touches on my next paper, due the next day, and alluva sudden -- POOF! Done for...
It's digital trespassing with criminal intent, and it's illegal.
Lime
jeez... we have 20 people on a T1 at my living group. try going to a real college sometime.
Sorry that won't work. That would take human resources from napster. And napster is looking for free money, not to pay out of their pockets.
So what you're saying is that if your network connection is being flooded by pirated mp3's, get more bandwidth? How does that solve the problem? The problem SHOULD be solved by tracking the people doing it down and then kicking them off campus or removing their net access in ADDITION to filtering access to napster. We have 5000+ users on 2 T1's and it works just fine. Though, 75% of the bandwidth is probably web browsing.
Well at University college suffolk (england) YAhoo.***, slashdot.org, freshmeat.***, and anything remotely useful has been banned. but only through DNS so if you know the IP address you can get round it!!
I think these draconian measures are a violation to our rights, myself. We pay for these connections with our own money, and get no say or information about decisions such as this. Unless the site gets shut down by a law-suit or is causing severe problems for the server, there should be no reason to remove it.
subsidized education? By whom? I dont get *one penny* from anyone outside of my immediate family for education. Not one. The government gives me $0, I get $0 in federal aid, $0 in state aid, I get $0 total. Subsidized my ass.
I think by the time you reach college you should at least know what's good for you and what's not. If you want to use Napster to grab the hottest tracks...then that's you're choice...you may get burned, you may not. But when you are paying rediculous amounts of tution and room & board fees...it would seem that the university should let you do whatever you want with your connection, you've earned it (and you've paid for it).
Blocking services by port number is not a solution to excessive use, nor is it a solution to bootlegging or other "contrabandwidth".
I'd agree that wholesale blocking services isn't a solution to excessive use. But isn't that what you're doing with the SMTP? Since you can already drop out selected violators, why not do the same for those running open relays?
Automated process sees SMTP connection into a system. So, connect to that system, check if it's an open relay. If so, drop it out, otherwise add it to a list of 'safe' mail systems and let the student get his mail. Recheck periodically. Maybe be nice and have the automaton email the person with the open relay and tell them why they're blocked off.
QoS requires that you control the router where the bottleneck is. Unless you're a major ISP, you don't.
To have any real meaning, the throttling would need to happen on the ISP end of our T3. GTE Internetworking won't even put antispoofing filters on their side of the link, let alone CAR. Same story with UUNET. There's no point in dropping packets after they've transited the T3. We have no shortage of on-campus bandwidth.
Throttling bandwidth on port 6699 does not work. Current versions of Napster adapt to traffic shaping by switching ports.
If common desktop operating systems and applications implemented RFC 2001, then we might be able use exclusive rather than inclusive traffic shaping rules, i.e., guarantee bandwidth for telnet, smtp, ssh, mail, http, https and leave *all* other protocols in the gutter. But Napster doesn't do slow start when you drop packets. Yank and restore the network cable while sniffing, you'll see. Hotline actually has the gall to tout its noncompliance with TCP/IP standards as a feature. "Proven faster then FTP!!!"
Since other alternatives have failed, we feel we have no choice. We block Napster to stop a few greedy people from effectively censoring all Internet content.
Heh, I'm glad that I go to a shitty state school and can simply live off campus in my apartment. ISDN right now but DSL will hopefully be installed shortly. ;-) The education sure sucks but hey, it's just the piece of paper people want to see. Skills are learned on the job.
My campus has banned me from pouring hot grits down both my pants, and emmett's pants. Please, somebody pour some grits down my pants...and fast! I can't take much more of thiss
I currently attend the state university of NY at
albany. On nice days, I could walk around the podium and listen to the sounds of bongo drums being played. Most of the people who played these drums were, admittedly, very stoned at the time. Last semester, the administration placed a ban on playing music anywhere on the podium. They said that it was because the drums were loud, and distracted people in classes. The week after the ban, I was on campus and noticed a christian rock band playing(with amps and everything). It was then that I realized the truth:
the administration at my school hates "hippies."
Anyway.. I guess I'm just adding this `cause I was alot more upset by this than my school's recent ban on napster. Granted, napster makes it easy to get tunez, but really.. If you're living on campus, you probably know someone that owns the song you're looking for.. Just copy it from them. This is how you can pirate music without
drawing the attention of those dorky RNCs.
thank you very much.
Sieg Heil!!! Mein Fuhrer!!!!!!
So, if the public is paying they'd rather see a bunch of college kids not using the bandwidth for long distance calls to their mothers and instead racking up large bills to the phone companies or not calling at all? What's wrong with you? The bandwidth is there and being paid for even when its not being used. My dorm, while housing 800, has a quad T3, I know all the bandwidth isn't used, but its fast. They banned napster on my campus recently, not that proxies weren't the five minute fix, supposedly because it ate bandwidth. There is no difference in how fast anything loads now after the ban. I'd be pissed if they banned dialpad. Thats the way I can afford to call my parents and keep in touch with them while trying to pay for an education. Let the people that have the bandwidth use it. I'm not saying all schools should upgrade for napster, and bandwidth throtling, if there isn't much bandwidth, is a good thing. But please don't say because you pay taxes you want to see bandwidth unused.
Especially when you've got MODs as good as the one by Purple Motion from Second Reality?
Listening to it right now, in fact.
Wow that's good.
So, instead of getting use out of the bandwith that they are paying for, it's better that that $12,500 is just being wasted? Brilliant reasoning.
Turning on multicast in your routers might help a bit, if people are getting streamed content [hmm, that sounds kind of kinky] from the same source.
>Boy, there is nothing better than people who are getting a subsidized
>education complaining about what they can't do with their subsudized
>internet access...
Agreed, and it's these people who bitch the loudest whenever the subject of providing subsudized internet access to the people (who live in the inner city and rual areas) who really deserve it.
My school has put a ban on "mp3 technologies"- I really do not know what that means. I could mean mp3's and any software used to create and or obtain mp3's. I have not rocked the boat and asked because I live off-campus and do not deal with that stuff on campus.
Real men dump cores! Read my journal, I am neat.
I work at one of the state universities on the list and here's what's happened to us:
We used to have a T1 that all our traffic went through. When the prices of T1s started dropping, we got another (also because our state-sponsored T1 wasn't performing too hot). But that's still another $20k (or so), about 8-10% of networking's total operating budget.
At the same time, we've been aggressively upgrading dorm connections (about 2500 students live on campus), putting two (and sometimes three) ethernet jacks in the dorm rooms (still one-per-person, though). All the hardware/infrastructure for that comes out of networking's budget (about 80%).
About a year or so ago, students in the dorm rooms discovered MP3s and started downloading them full-time (and serving them full-time) from their dorm rooms. Where MP3 servers were discovered on campus (it's pretty easy -- the T1 saturates fully), they're shut down. BTW, students are made aware that they're not allowed to run servers from their dorm connections.
Oh, btw, that second T1? It's given over to serving student traffic... all our "official/administrative" stuff still goes out over the not-so-hot state-sponsored T1.
Anyway, then came Napster... and saturation on the student T1 peaks, constantly. To the point that anyone trying to use the net for non-Napster stuff suffers pretty severely. So the networking folks found out how to block it... and they're working on the proxy thing too...
But they also discovered packet shapers. Currently, all our traffic now goes through a packet shaper, which gives high priority to http and pretty low to ftp/telnet/etc. Generally, this isn't too bad, except when I need to telnet in from my off-campus provider to do work.
Regardless, this sort of thing is an on-going battle and it raises the question of what's appropriate use of the network. At our end, we're concerned about the student's ability to do academic work on the network. And we're also not too thrilled about the implications of copyright compliance... we don't want to get a letter from the RIAA like CMU did. And we don't have infinite amounts of money to provide infinite bandwidth... not that infinite bandwidth would solve the problem.
As someone who works closely with students, I understand where they're coming from on this. But the majority of arguments I've heard (censorship, freedom of speech) point more to the individual's misunderstanding of those concepts than to their understanding of the issues of network health.
Thanks for posting that informative (but disturbing) link. Among other things, the Bob Jones University page says the following:
The one-world principle--every effort man has made, or will make, to bring the world together in unity--plays into the hand of Antichrist.
This is why Christian fundamentalists are so extraordinarily dangerous. Normal people would want to strive for a peaceful world, where we could bring up our children in an environment where they are free from the threat of war. But as the above line shows, fundamentalists want nothing to do with such a world. It would mean that they would have to co-exist peacefully with Muslims, Hindus, atheists, and yes, even Catholics.
At the Tower of Babel, God used language to disrupt man?s plans for a one-world government. As a result of this disruption, the people were scattered, and the races were polarized. One thing is clear: God wanted a divided world, not a federalized world.
Yes, that's right. "God" wants a divided world. These people are completely fscking insane. And these are the people that want to gain control of the government and establish a Christian theocracy in its place. When they start painting crosses on the nose-cones of America's ICBM arsenal, it will be too late to complain: they would most likely execute you if you tried, anyway.
The rest of the page is a mishmash of homophobic, xenophobic, and racist rhetoric. I'll fight to the death for their right to say these things, but I certainly don't agree with any of it!
Well you lot are lucky, not only do we have to live behind a damned proxy server this year, but we aren't allowed to run any other OS other than Windows on our systems. Unix variants such as Linux are specifically banned and they port scan our computers to enforce this, although I don't first hand know of anyone being thrown off yet. I think this is a shocking state of affairs for an educational establishment, given the undoubted value of running your own Unix box for most CS students. See: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/acs/sns/unsupported.sh tml" for more info
The medium is the message, and the message in this case is, "Quit hogging the pipe, luser!". Would you accept getting a chilly trickle of water from your showers all winter because some twit down the hall got a giant pump called SPAster and was holding hot tub parties all term on the U.'s dime?
If you like your MP3's so much, do what everyone else has done for years; set up a download and retrieve the file all night at low BW, then replay it at your leisure. If the tool doesn't allow that, use another or write your own.
Oh, and BTW you're asking for death unless you live in detached housing during finals week with your mega-amp. Try getting wasted instead, it can be more educating at times than studying ;). Or at least use headphones and a chest-mounted subwoofer.
Posting without contributing is a sign of a small dick.
And jiggy jiggy jiggy jiggy smalls is da smallest.
University policy prohibits "servers of any kind" within the dorms. This is a slap at desktop Unix, then, 'cause X is a server.
Cornell is hooked up to Appliedt!H * * * just like Clarkson, RIT, Columbia, and basically every other university in the state of New York (as well as ith*.twcny.rr.com, but that's another story). They most certainly DO have a bandwidth problem...traces regularly jump to 500ms without even leaving their network. And that $80 a semester you pay Resnet is for access to the *campus network*. It is not a license for unlimited upstream to the Internet!
Personally, I think students should be allowed to use whatever upstream they want - if they pay for the bandwidth. Let's see how many Napsters are running after those running them start paying $100 a month for the bandwidth they're using.
At the Rochester Institute of Technology, they have just recently banned the ability to set up one's own mail server, i.e. - They block all incoming traffic to port 25.
;o) and the legal issues are present, of course.
/can't/ do this? It really irks me that I can't use my own mail server!!
I can, of course see good reasons for this. We've had problems with spammers using the school's OWN mail servers (Rochester Inst. of what?
Does anybody know if there is any legal reason they
Fortunatly Udel has not jumped on the censoring bandwagon (yet). Either they're too behind in technology or they're just apathetic to this issue.
The school has dual DS3s to the Internet and a DS3 out to Internet2, net bandwidth is not a problem. The biggest problem is that here on campus the housing segments are all on 10BaseT hub based LANs with old CAT3 (4 maybe?) wiring. Not only can you read what your neighbors have to say in their e-mails and grab their usernames and passwords, but one big file transfer across network neighborhood will jam up the network solid.
Every night everyone fires up their favorite client of choice (FTP, Napster, AIM) and uses some of the bandwidth (this segment goes across several hundred rooms) and all night long I won't even be able to code in the EE department from my room because my ping time is 1sec to the local router.
Despite this, I still use the bandwidth for my own purposes too, and I don't want to see the University cracking down on "illegal" bandwidth usage because then when I want to get my MP3s, ISOs, etc... I won't be able to any time of the day.
So in summary, I don't know about other schools, but if this University would upgrade to 100BaseTX/FX or at least put in some switches instead of hubs, we wouldn't have these kinds of bandwidth problems. Some of the better housing complexes on campus have switches already (when will they upgrade the other parts? Who knows) and only the departments are lucky enough to get 100BaseTX/FX.
While blocking sites and services by Universities is censorship, censorship is not the issue for them. Their main concern is keeping bandwidth open so that students can access the information that they need for classes. So if certain programs are hogging the bandwidth and keeping other students from getting their work done, then the school's are well within their rights to stop the programs. The only conflict with that would be if whatever is blocked is needed by the students for their work.
Just for the record, The Ohio State University and Ohio University both banned the napster.com domain. Clogging the network I suppose, it had nothing to do with mp3s.
At my school, we can not use QoS because our router is too slow and old. On top of that, we can not afford a new router (private school). So, we are pretty much left with blocking Napster, et. al. based on ports (I think that is the way they did it, might have block the Napster servers as well).
Until school's have the technology and knowledgable administrators required to implement QoS, these issues are going to be a problem. Just my two cents.- ----------------------------------
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"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain." - Phil. 1:21 (KJV)
I'm quite aware, in fact I'm doing it now (in win2k)
It's icq in linux that has the problem.
My university (Henderson State University) has not banned Napster yet, luckily. However, while last year we were openly networked (I had a static IP, for instance, and a linux server under a domain name from a friend) this year they put the dorms behind a Microsoft Proxy Server firewall. In other words, you have to use their Winsock Proxy Client to use anything besides HTTP proxying on the network. It blows if you use Linux. They did it in response to rampant IRC serving last year by a few of my friends. They sucked up major bandwidth :) Now if our college had installed SOCKS 5 I would be perfectly happy, however MS Proxy only supports SOCKS 4 (no UDP, thus no ICQ) but I have a plan. I've put up a Windows SOCKS5 server in my room on an old P100. The SOCKS5 requests from my box go through the winsock proxy client on the Windows box and out through the proxy to the Net. Thus I can use Linux through this hack for just about anything.
I can think of hardly anything that has been *banned*.. we still play Halflife, Starcraft, etc on the Net. Napster works. ICQ works. Pretty much just doing the serving thing has been banned, since we're firewalled. Our Computer Services department also has some sort of contract with MS.. so NT goes up more and more each day.. luckily Computer Science just moved the entire programming curriculum over to Unix....
I hate it when people misuse that "censorship" word. People just love to toss it around, cuz it conjures up images of "nazi".
Your school can't very well censor you. They can stop you from using resources THEY OWN to do things they don't want you to for reasons they decide. But you can always get a modem and use napster that way, and I'm sure they'd have no problem with it. They aren't trying to run your life, just their networks.
censor: To examine and expurgate.
expurgate: To remove obscene, objectionable, or erroneous material from prior to publication.
You will probably find that your subsidized mp3 money is just a drop in the bucket of the university's anual budget.
Actually, at the local University in my city, a friend was doing analysis on web caching techniques, using the university caches for the research. A very large proportion (>20%, IIRC) of the traffic was porn - and the same year he finished his degree, the university had announced it had blon out its budget to the tune of something like $20-$40 per student due to unexpected Internet traffic costs.
The next year, they had to implement a user-pays scheme for students, which had not been the case previously. It made no difference that students were accessing study-relatred material, they now pay for it.
Now, it may well be that some small portion of that porn could have been relevant to the academinc work at the University, but I doubt it was. And the extra costs of adminning user pays, the loss of no-cost access for students studying stuff, and the blowouts were the result of people looking at what, for the most part, is rubbish. So it does cost the institutions.
They have reasons for these rules, and there are reasons for service restrictions, but the two together are fairly procrustean. Not that they're out of their rights to do so. But I think students always have the right to be outraged at the restrictions placed on them by administration.
Hey, students can be outraged about whatever they feel, so if they don't like how they are treaated, well, there are thousands of other universities to choose from, some of whom don't care about things like Napster and Dialpad. This is just one of the many criteria that should go in to your decision on what school to choose, and be weighted appropriately.
Here at Texas A&M we thankfully have a rather unrestriced network.
We are *officially* allowed to run servers of any kind on our computers. Most students have their drives shared through SMB, and so the flow of information is excellant.
The one problem is that the firewall around ResNet is rather prohibitive. It allows any ports in but only 80 (web) out. Because of this I have to initiate Netmeeting (Openh323) calls and I can't receive audio from them, but that is the only problem I have had. They say they may soon be setting up a proxy to take care of this too.
So that's how it is here. Gig'em.
Good point. The details I've read at one school (which actually hasn't banned anything, yet) was that the problems weren't at the uplink or the school backbone (if they have someithing like a FDDI ring) but particular subnets gettings swamped by individuals. Sometimes it's been so bad even telnet is unusable.
Also, if you're talking about ethernet networks, at 30% capacity you can already have enough collisions to really notice problems.
Wellll, bandwidth is limited, and if certain persons are making it a problem, then attack the problem, not the symptom. Insist limited resources be shared responsibly.
Set bandwidth limits on usage, just as timeshared systems have disk-, CPU-, and other resource-usage limits. Banning DeCSS, Napster, etc. is treading too close to (if not over) the censorship line; obscene for an educational institution. They shouldn't even need traffic-shaping capability---just publish an acceptable-use policy, monitor usage, and every {day, week, month} let folks know if they're not playing nicely. When necessary, drop their connection until they figure out how to stay within the limits.
Then, students can use anything they want, publish (i.e., run servers) as they like, and the (alleged) real problem is taken care of.
Of course, if requests for reasonable policies are rejected, we'll have a clue to underlying motivations :-(.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
I'm glad I don't go there anymore.
yadda
When I was at Uni, I got into some moderate trouble for mailing on a copy of the 1000 question Purity Test to a few friends. I didn't object: those computers, that network infrastructure, they were paid for so that we (the students) could use them for education -- not so we could exchange lighthearted smut.
I can understand getting in trouble for forwarding crap (the usual spam, chain-mails, etc.) - but only by those who you forward it to. If you didn't send the purity test to the admins and none of your friends complained to them about it, how did they find out? If they read your e-mail, then I'd say this is something you really should object to!
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Uh there are some MP3s on CDs which are not held under copyright. Though Napster would not really be very useful for trading them. Actually Napster isn't very useful for much at all :)
The web is also a pain in the butt and a resource
hog. Let's ban HTTP and HTTPS, and that'll save
*TONS* of bandwidth..
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The majority of Universities, I believe, are
public institutions.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
At the University of Waterloo, nothing specific has been banned -- instead they just give us bandwidth limits for resnet (in dorm rooms). For a four month term, we are limited to 2500 MB, with a daily limit of 150MB and a daily average since the beginning of the term of 25MB a day. Apparently, these limits are due to one person who, just after resnet was installed, used 5 gig in one day. I can understand the bandwidth concerns of the sysadmins, but this is a little excessive.
Friendly servers are nice. Good thing I conned a friend into paying for a cabinet, only he conned me into working for free... I guess it works out.
Last year, at Ohio State, was the first year that every single dorm room had Resnet access. I believe it's a little under 10,000 ports, spread over 27 buildings, which are all connected to switches, which are connected by full duplex ethernet wiring to its own backbone...completely separate from the rest of the university backbone.
First, in comparison to previous years, a firewall had been established preventing server services on dormitory computers. Before this occured, at one time, one dormitory with 500 people was consuming more bandwith than the entire Computer and Information Science department.
While that made a few people unhappy, most non-tech people were ok with that.
This year, however, so many people came with computers, plus napster, that a lot of bandwith resources were devoted to Resnet. At it's height, 27MB/sec were being consumed. What has now been done is to limit day time usage to 16MB/sec and night time to 22MB/sec (which, without napster, is not being reached.)
I find myself ambivalent, but generally supportive of the university situation, since Ohio State students do not directly pay a Resnet fee, most of the money for the infrastructure and bandwith is paid by the good people of the State of Ohio. Should that change, then I think students have a greater voice in helping decide how resources are consumed.
The issue is that most College and University staffs are so over worked (and underpaid) and budgets are so tight that we don't have time to implement QoS regardless of how nice it is.
-jay
Block the standard ports it runs on....
Heh. When I was at uni I specifically requested the only freshman dorm with coed halls.
And I ended up living on the bottom floor (affectionally refered to as the Dungeon) which was all male. Now while this might seem to be in order to achieve the same type of thing that your school was doing, the building was built into a hill. The floor above us was _also_ partially at ground level. And it was all-female for some reason.
D'oh!
-- 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.
I'm surprised that there has been any form of uproar about this so-called "censorship".
The fact is, the university networks are provided as part of the academic support for your studying. The key point is that the network is for academic use only, typically.
Taking advantage of the "free" network to download many megabytes worth of MP3s is simply taking the p*ss. I severely doubt that there is any "academic use" involved in 99.9% of cases.
As such, universities stopping this from happening are doing the Right Thing [TM]. It's not censorship, it's a case of freeing up the bandwidth for legitimate uses.
I for one don't want to suffer when working on my project due to someone sitting next to me downloading the latest Madonna album.
It can be argued that if the sysadmin isn't up to putting the effort into it to get an acceptable solution (ie, not treating the symptoms by blocking all ports, just "because it's easy"), s/he prolly:
- is underpaid
- is overworked
- if neither of the above, should be fired anyway
Maintaining the network is fun, yes... however, to do it right takes a lot of effort. I should know; I'm in it.--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
www.napster.com (208.49.239.246) (208.178.175.134) (11/12/99) (22031)
www.jcrew.com
www.oneandall.net
www.savetrees.com
www.telepacific.net
www.imesh.com (216.35.208.157)
The updated list can be found here.
Life sucks, get a helmet.
Subject: Policy change: Permanent prohibition of Napster application
The following is a notice of a permanent prohibition of the Napster application, effective immediately.
Date & Time: Effective immediately and indefinitely
Affected systems: This prohibition will effect all University of Minnesota network-connected systems.
Impact: There will be no impact on those not running the Napster applcation. Those with Napster installed on systems under their control should remove the application as soon as possible.
Description: The Napster application, which recently has represented as much as 30% of the total network traffic across the University of Minnesota's border, has been identified as violating the University's Acceptable Use Policy, by "overloading ... networks with excessive data." It is therefore prohibited on computer systems connected to University of Minnesota networks. The application must be removed from such systems; any further use of the program, or attempts to circumvent enforcement of the prohibition, may result in disciplinary action.
-30-
And you would be seriously outraged if the asshole next door had a warez server running full steam and your daughter couldn't get her bio-psych homework. Please tell us, how much bandwidth is enough? Take into account the DDoS attacks on Amazon, Yahoo, etc. Is it Yahoo's fault that they didn't have enough bandwidth to fend off the attacks? No, just like its not the college's fault for blocking something taking 30-80% of the total network capacity.
The usual prohibitions: nothing illegal, nothing that violates university policy.
But the one that hurts most is no telnet from outside campus network. Combined with no dialup to the UN*X, this makes reading mail painful and compiling/debugging/setting permissions positively excruciating.
Your school may or may not have a policy, but there may be certain expectations that are unwritten but made relatively clear to faculty, that the school considers class material (of all genres) to be property of the institution.
--mandi
i really feel like i have to comment on this. i'm on several key networking mailing lists, and one of those has repeated discussions about napster. the issue is more bandwidth than anything. our university has a fat pipe to the world, but a lot of places have only a T1 or not much more. when you consider that the traffic from napster consumes over 30% of that pipe in most circumtances, you'll quickly realize that there's not much room for anything else, be it pr0n, mail, w4r3z trafficking or whatnot.
whine all you want. really, go ahead and do it. "but this is infringing on our freedoms!" the reality is you're hogging bandwidth. and until you pay for that bandwidth, please don't talk about freedoms being infringed upon.
here's a typical school's item on why they banned napster: http://www.grinnell.edu/resnet/announc e.html... while copyright issues are of course taken seriously, it's *bandwidth* folks...
jose nazario jose@biocserver.cwru.edu
Most multiplayer games are meant to support atleast 4 people over a 56k modem, and EVERY real game takes up less than 33kbps for a single player, because that's what a 56k modem is limited to in upload. Meaning not much, miniscule, really. Using the 33k number, that's 303 people playing on a 10Mps network. Well, that's just a guess, but it's obvious a worse case scenario.
The only exception to this I found is xkoules, which clogged my 10bT internal network with a mere four players! It's called peer to peer networking, and network updates based on screen refreshes. Or in other words, sh*t. But it's adictive, and it works in Linux. Oh well, time to upgrade to 1Gbs.
I go to ISU (Illinois, not one of the inferior 'I' states)
They just banned Napster about 6 days ago for taking 60% of the bandwidth. I didn't get the full facts, but I hope this number refers to 60% of the total used bandwidth, not the total available. We have a T3, and another partial. Up from 1 T1 plus a backup when I started school 3.5 years ago.
We can run any servers we want to, but the port may or may not be blocked (pcAnywhere doesn't work)
Outgoing connections to FTP servers on non 21 ports are blocked. Big nuisance, but possible to get around if you try hard enough.
ICQ and AIM work fine and probly will always work, except we have hiccups on our network fairly frequently that kick us offline. AIM much more so than ICQ.
Some of the most popular gaming ports are disabled for either incoming or outgoing connections, I can't remember which. One of them's disabled, but I don't remember if students can play on internet servers, or if they can host them. I think hosting is banned. Examples of this are Quake (all versions).
IP telephony works, I have yet to find one of those free sites that has non-laggy service, so I doubt that many people here will start using it.
A lot of stuff just doesn't work right to do what seems to be continual faulty router settings, but they aren't specifically disabled.
We get the alt.binaries newsgroups, but each one has about a 1.5MB limit, so they're useless.
They're running out of IP's right now, so all the students have internal addresses and are temporarily assigned 'legitimate' addresses when they go and contact the internet. The instant messaging clients probly screw this system royally, cuz they're always connected.
Hotline works. I'm not sure if the powers that be know it even exists. Not really a mainstream app yet.
Our local mirror of Redhat Linux disappeared a while ago, yet it's still listed on Redhat's mirrors.
More things that I can think of that DO work: Samba, webservers, ftpservers, internal gaming on any port, telnet, port scanning internal and external (which means that we get hacking attempts frequently)
Until last year, there was a maximum of 235 or so student connections to the LAN. This was in the ACS house (5 floors of one of the dorms). Last year they started wiring more dorms, with a plan of wiring every single dorm room eventually. The ACS house is still on 10Mb, while all the new ones are 100Mb. Understandable when you see the state that the dorm it's in is in. It was meant as temporary housing, and has existed for over 20 years. The buildings are all interconnected with OC48's (pretty schweet, if they had hardware that could run fast enough)
I can't think of anything else that's weird, but gimme five minutes......
Sure it does. There's always something that can be done to minimize network usage. The most obvious (to me) & most drastic would be to implement some server side compression. Mp3's are compressed already, but they can still be compressed farther to facilitate transfers. The protocol can also be rewritten to be less 'chatty' with the servers. Instead of refreshing itself every so often, make it every not so often, or only on connect/disconnect. I'm sure there's more they can do, I'm not a programming genius, I despise programming. But there are definitely options to decrease bandwidth utilization.
Those that claim that banning non-educational uses of school networks is acceptable should consider that academic freedom is almost universally considered to completely encompass and extend the freedoms provided for by the First Amendment. (Yes, I realize that these are cross-domain (academia vs law) concepts.)
Given that the First Amendment doesn't require that speech (or listening to speech) serve any useful purpose before being protected (modulo wrong-headed obscenity exceptions), it doesn't seem possible to claim that banning Napster is anything but censorship.
The correct answer, as pointed out in other posts, is to use bandwidth limiting methods and prioritization techniques on the routers, so as to provide the maximum freedom for all users.
The school from which I graduated last year still does not provide any network connection from the dorms. They also have declined to allow any student content (publications, student home pages)on the school web site, or any student-run UNIX boxes on the network. Although, I don't think they've banned anything coming through the T1 to the porn theaters^W^Wcomputer labs.
So don't complain too much about not having napster in the dorm.
People sending email >15 megs are abusing the protocol anyway. SMTP isn't designed to send messages that large. Lots of servers will have trouble with that, lots of message storage formats will have trouble, email clients will have trouble...it's just a Bad Thing(TM).
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Have you ever seen mp3.com?
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Welcome to the real world. Academic networks are there for exactly that, academic use, and when the agencies that fund these networks find this out, they're going to be questioning whether access to infinite quantities of dodgy MP3s is really academically related or does much to further the institutions' research mission.
"I pay for it!" isn't a good argument. You're probably paying for access to the campus network in order to do your work more conveniently - from your room rather than from the workstation clusters - rather than specifically for access to the Internet. That's how I'd look at it, at least - most connections of this type are to the campus network primarily, and the fact that you can reach the Internet from it is a perk. Napster IS a huge bandwidth hog, as are most streaming audio/video telephony applications. These systems aren't good network citizens - they munch excessive amounts of bandwidth and make the shared network slower for everyone else on campus who has actual work to get done.
The long and the short of it is, that universities are generally now having to provide the same level of IT support, under different and generally more difficult circumstances and conditions, than in most corporates. And they're expected to do it on far smaller budgets. The academic networks, at least here in Europe, are government-funded, and if they see they're just being used primarily for stuff like exchanging copyright violations instead of bona fide academic work, that funding might well disappear. Abuse the networks like this and you're endangering the very existence of the academic portions of the Internet. Think about it. Use it properly or it just might not be there any more some day.
Calling this censorship is abuse of what the term "censorship" really means. This whole argument just strikes me as uninformed whining. Academia was the birthplace of the Internet, and has been using this kind of technology since before a lot of today's students were born. It would be tragic if wider restrictions, maybe disconnection from the general non-academic Internet, had to be put in place just because a few selfish students couldn't live without their MP3s.
(Speaking for myself, not my employer, obviously - this is not an official statement of policy, etc etc)
Don't feel to bad. Although I can't pin it specifically on Napster the network at the University of Washington has gotten much slower since it was release. Although we can't serve data out from the campus network due to security already in place we can of course download. The network here grinds to a halt quite frequently and it's literally impossible to get out. And the UW mind you has multiple OC-3 lines out and in.
It's now not uncommon for me to be unable to get out of the campus network during certain times of the day. *sigh*
There is nothing wrong with banning Napster. It violates almost all regulations that any university has in place. It would not even be unfounded for them to ban Unreal or other games because it would be non-academically related which violates most policies.
On the RIAA's part, this sounds like China's policy of "let's make up as many vague, unreasonable, and borderline enforceable laws as possible, so that if we don't like you, we can always bust you for something!"
I'd be inclined to put a bunch of MP3's on a 486 (or whatever cheap box I could get my hands on), all of which were demonstrably composed by me, and see if anything happened.
"I have no objection to the college banning me from using Napster (Or wouldn't have if I was still there). It is after all THEIR network. What would worry me is that someone was looking at what I was downloading."
Um, let's take two parts of your post here.
1) It is after all THEIR network.
2) What would worry me is that someone was looking at what I was downloading.
In response to number 2, see number 1.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
If the trade of pirated/illegal MP3's is so rampant on a college campus, why not monitor the traffic, collect data, and then bust the offenders? You do this enough times, and people will start to realize they are being watched and will be caught.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Well the newest thing here at the University of Minnesota is that the University Seate is considering banning students selling class notes. This ban is mainly aimed at stopping students from selling their notes to sites that would put them on the web.
I guess that I don't really understand the point. Sure I can see why some professors might not like seeing there stuff online in a form that they can't control, but I can't really see the harm.
If they're putting up verbatim copies of handouts that's one thing, but if the notes are taken by the students, it seems like fair game.
Sure sites like these may make some students think they can get away without going to class, but if online notes are enough to allow that to happen then the course needs to be redesigned anyway.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
Are technically banned and Manchester University, England. Which is bizarre, because the University itself hosts a talker-conferencing thingy.
-- I reserve the right to be completely wrong --
My school (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) does ban FTP and HTTP servers, but they check for them by port scanning on ports 21 and 80. So, if you really want to run a server, run it on a different port and it's all good. Hotline, telnet, and other such things they basically don't even know about. The computing department put out something in the news a few weeks ago saying how bad Napster is, but I don't believe they actually are cutting it off. I could be wrong though; I don't use it.
The best part is that the amount of bandwidth used is practically zero. My subnet, which serves half the building (about 400 students) lights my hub up about once or twice a second, no matter what time of day or night. I easily see 400-600k/sec from well-connected servers even in the middle of a weekday. Multiplayer games are commented on as being potential bandwith wasters, but the contract specifically says that they're just fine unless it starts causing problems for more educationally-related uses of the network. Which hasn't been a problem in the year and a half that I've been here.
They do handle enforcement poorly, though. About a year ago, I tested their ban on HTTP and FTP servers. My connection was cut off several times with no explanation over a course of weeks before they bothered to call me and ask me to kill the server. The sad thing is when I asked for an exception and got to talk to a very important guy, he said that the only reason they have this ban is to stop MP3 pirating, and they only reason they care about that is because the RIAA leaned on them. It's sad to see a university have to give in to corporate pressure like that, but for the most part they're pretty good about such things.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
That's right kids, ALL mp3s, regardless of the legallity, because all mp3s are illegal, didn't you know that? This one kid here was forced to delete all of the mp3s from his box and write an 8 page letter of appology for his evil actions. The university of course ignored the fact that many of these mp3s were completely legal, infact I think he composed some of them. And why is Drexel pulling this crap? You guessed it, because the RIAA sent them a scarey letter threatening to sue them for up to $150,000 for each mp3 found on Drexel's network.
Also, somewhat amusingly, there was an article in the school newspaper about some kids who got busted for running a "fake id ring" out of their dorm. In addition to selling fake ids, the school busted them for drug dealing, and....owning mp3s. The kiddies' boxes were stolen^H^H^H^H^H^H confiscated and they have lost their network privlages. So remember kids, dealing drugs is bad, but if you own mp3s, we're gonna steal your computer.
P.S. I'm not usually this sarcastic, but I'm about to go to Humanities 102, my least favorite of all classes. Have fun y'all.
-matt
Man when did you go to drexel? Tutution is something like 26K now for the 5 year program (30 something for 4) and i think they are looking to pull in 1500 freshmen alone next year.
-matt
But they can still measure volume. Most of them don't care what you're doing, they just care about how much of it that you're doing. With VPN, you fail to hide the one thing that annoys them the most.
Maybe it's best if everyone VPNs, though. That will force the universities to truly address the problem and implement the one and only fair solution: to lift all restrictions and charge users by the amount of bandwidth that they use.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Your argument is logically flawed. Just because 'damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes' disapproved of coed dorms does not mean that they are automatically wrong about anything else. I would go further, but I think that what I have written is sufficient explanation for thinking persons.
I haven't talked to anyone at my alma mater, Wabash College, in over 10 years, but without even checking, I know how it would be handled: a simple application of the Gentleman's Rule, which is the only code of conduct for students at Wabash College.
:-)
(Before you knee-jerk post that calling it the 'Gentleman's Rule' is sexist, let me point out that Wabash College is an all-male institution, thus the name is accurate.)
The Gentleman's Rule is easily stated, and I can probably even quote it verbatim just from memory: All students of Wabash College are expected to behave like a gentleman at all times.
That's it. No lengthy list of what constitutes proper conduct, what is verboten, etc. It's worked and worked well for over 150 years.
If a student or group of students were taking up a significant chunk of the college's bandwidth, what would likely happen is that they would end up meeting with the Dean of Students, where after some discussion it would doubtless be hashed out that using up that much bandwidth (thus denying bandwidth to other students and college professors) isn't in keeping with the Gentleman's Rule, and the students would be expected to find a way to make it so that their activities were not being detrimental to others.
Simple, effective, and no censorship involved.
I do find it amusing that DePauw University, arch-rival of Wabash, has found it necessary to ban napster. But then again, their most famous alumnus is Dan Quayle, enough said.
Brad Elmore, Wabash '87
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Fantome wrote:
Most multiplayer games are meant to support atleast 4 people over a 56k modem, and EVERY real game takes up less than 33kbps for a single player, because that's what a 56k modem is limited to in upload. Meaning not much, miniscule, really. Using the 33k number, that's 303 people playing on a 10Mps network. Well, that's just a guess, but it's obvious a worse case scenario.
---------------------------------------
I stringly suspect that this ain't necessarily so; games performance on a network is radically different from playing on a modem. Quake on my home 100Mbps LAN has no comparison to modem play. I would strongly suspect most games consume more bandwidth than 56k/ four players if it is operating on a better network. 'course, there's less latency on a network too.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Banning Napster is NOT censorship. In my campus, ITESM Monterrey, was recently banned because I took about 45% of the total bandwidth, and we have www2 down here.
Now the network works a lot faster and I also think that any campus network should be used for academic purposes, not for people who are looking to increase their collection of pirated MP3's.
I go to Carleton University, and have paid $100/year to use the university internet connection.
Just last month, the university banned the use of Napster. They say it was taking up too much bandwidth. I'll agree; I couldn't get a decent transfer speed on a kernel tarball before 3:00am.
Here, they have looked into what it would take to do traffic shaping. The argument they've made against it is that they can't afford the type of system they'd need to do the traffic shaping. In order to do packet shaping, the box in the middle has to actually pull apart the headers for EVERY packet going through; you need a really hella-fast machine to be able to do that on the speed of connection we have to the internet. Since they don't seem to have the money for such a machine, they're going with the tried and true method of just banning it.
This is one of the reasons I'm moving out of res next year; they've essentially banned all the ports! I can't do a file transfer through ICQ, because that's blocked. The FTP port to my own computer is blocked. The HTTP port to my system's blocked, and I have to use a proxy to connect going outwards (so they know where I've been..!). IRC? Ha! They've blocked ident, so I can't even get onto a decent Efnet server, and even when I do, I can't SEND files, only recieve through there.
Essentially the only way I can semi-discretely share information with the outside world is through email..!
Like I said, moving outta here next year. University connections suck ass, especially for the amount of money you have to pay for 'em.
James
--
http://chat.carleton.ca/~jhelfert
I rember universitys trying to ban any computer running Linux.
:) Still I have read a great deal about it over usenet and on IRC... Is this still happening?
:)
The basic argument was that it could be cracked (rooted) (they'd use the word "Hacked") and used to send spam or distribute porn. However there was a long list of strange arguments based on the idea that computers have elfs living in them and Linux makes them evil elfs.
Users would disable/remove sendmail, telnetd, ftpd and apachy nullifying the "cracker porn spam" argument.
In many cases they would scan for Linux systems. Not for server ports or services they were worryed about just the operating system. As a result they would miss all the Windows Website/FTP servers serving off porn and shut down anyone running Linux.
Now I don't know much of anything about it personally becouse I never had that problem
Did it ever really happen? Are the Linux elfs still evil?
Anyway it came down to bandwith use. I guess they could blame bandwith waist on anything someone dosn't like. I don't like Windows.. it waist bandwith.. we ban it.... I don't like AoL websites.. they waist bandwith... we ban them.... I don't like (insert software title here) it waists bandwith... we ban it...
I don't like anil admin who band software becouse it's on the populare ban list... anil admin probes and notices waist bandwith.... you get the picture
I don't actually exist.
> and has some pretty bad security holes that
.mp*. look for mpeg headers).
/own/ client into sharing, say, sam._, provided you stego the thing with a valid mpeg header and give it a .mp* extension. But it's /your/ data, you're not tricking anyone, you're making yourself vulnerable.
> means that potentially the client can be forced
> to serve up any file to a malicious Napster
> server.
So far noone has offered up any real evidence that this is actually the case. Just a bunch of FUD.
Here's how the client works:
1. build a file list. add only files that constitute valid content (currently
2. when a request comes in to the client, match that request against the file list.
3. if it is in the file list, accept the request. if not, then don't.
It's just that simple. There is no complicated key exchange, no extensive encryption calculation, no tedious obfuscation algorithm. Just your basic plain old strcasecmp() on a list.
Can you trick a client into sharing content it shouldn't? Sure, you can trick your
So far everyone thinks there is a security risk in Napster, but noone has offered up proof. I purport that there isn't anything to attack; the algorithm is so simple and effective that there isn't much place for loopholes.
Try a competitor program, like Imesh, and search for "sam._". You will be surprised at the results.
--jordan
What I see the problem rest on, is there's no cost for you to use up more bandwidth than others. Using those bandwidth hungry software at the same time is typically a rent seeking behaviour: there's bandwidth left over from normal usage, people are hurry to take that over for their own good coz' they don't have to pay a cent for it.
3 years ago when my school implemented a 40 hour limit on dialup access, I objected the idea. People won't limit their use at peak hour. A more practical way to redirect bandwidth usage to non-peak hour is to "charge" differently on different hours. For the normal users, they don't care their office bandwidth being taken over for Napster usage at 3:00am or 4:00am, so, let's put a high price on daytime usage and low price at 3:00am.
Unfortunately, when I talked to the sys admin, they just think it's too trouble to implement and forget about it. Maybe it's because sys admin are too lazy these days to write some decend code for doing such easy job.
A sig is redundant.
I went to a school like that for one year. Actually it was worse. No females in the dorm EVER. MAYBE your MOM could help you MOVE IN! Know what I did? I left. I decided to say "fuck you" to my parents who basically blackmailed me into going by threatening not to co-sign any loans. I went to a State School, graduated, and got a great job.
Leave now my son...
Blar.
I know some students were either suspended or expelled a year or two ago for having an MP3 server (FTP), but I think that was in response to a complaint from the RIAA. I think there is a de facto "Don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding MP3s. If the school finds any MP3 servers or whatever, of course they take action. But they don't have anybody hunting down the MP3s. Dartmouth is a registered ISP and so is covered under the "ISPs are not responsible for content hosted by their customers, but must act when a complaint is filed" law (the name of which I don't know).
In general, the "administration" is pretty tolerant of the network activity. Then again, it is not their job to sit around and police everyone's computers, nor should it be. There are a few hotline (imho, the worst program ever -- "Go to page blah.com/~pronlinks and your login is the second to last word on the page ALL CAPS, go to bobo.com/~mypr0n and click on the vagina banner, the password is the blinking word ALL CAPS. Password is changed every 5 seconds.") servers operated out of here but unless bandwidth (or mpaa/riaa) becomes a problem, I think we're pretty safe.
PS: Dartmouth was the #1 most wired college in America in 1998 (not that I put much stock in Yahoo's opinions)
_________________
rooooar
Of course your challenge was to show that more than 1% of mp3's traded are not copyrighted. Do you know of ANY mp3's that are not copyrighted? Many mp3's are freely distributable, but that does not mean they are not copyrighted. It doesn't make sense to ask about "non-copyrighted" mp3's. It only makes sense to ask about copyright violations. I challenge you to show me an mp3 song that is not copyrighted.
Nathan Whitehead
I'd guess that universities and such have a lot of people in the USA. So, why not Napsterize MP3s locally, ie. inside the campus LAN, only to and from machines connected to it?
That's not how Napster works. When you start a Napster client, it goes out and automatically connects you to the least loaded server available. There's no way to point it at a specific server, and since Napster has not released any of their server code, there is no way to set up your own server.
Hopefully, some of this will change now that people are developing some of their own free, open-source Napster tools.
The University of Illinois banned me due to my outspoken views on personal freedoms and censorship. I also had a 1.2 GPA, but I don't think that was the main reason.
-B
At my university, an entire hall in a friend's dorm was blocked out of the campus network for bringing in their own computers and putting them on a network with a hub.
The system administrators here are the biggest bunch of idiots since that guy that hit his head with cheese to find out if it tasted good.
For example, a friend was in a lab and changed the refresh rate to 80 (not knowing that the monitors only went to 70.. he's got bad eyes and he says that 80 is easier for him to read). So of course the screen went skitzo (WinNT.. the screen never came back.. seems like it should have after the autotest *shrug*). The head lab guy came over, looked at the computer, and proceeded to get a ghost disk and rebuild the whole machine. My friend told him "you know you can just boot into VGA mode and fix it.. you don't have to rebuild the machine". The admin then told him that "these machines can't do that" and got pissed off at my friend for being such an idiot.
My school is not without it's saving graces, though. I'm convinced I have the single greatest CS professor in the history of existence. He's totally fscking awesome.
Mog
Boy, there is nothing better than people who are getting a subsidized education complaining about what they can't do with their subsudized internet access...
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
taxpayers like me asshole, that's where... all this so I can fucking subsudize your fucking mp3 habit.
go fuck yourself.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
Oh really? Go to a public college? They are paid for by taxpayers... Got any federally guaranteed student loans? Low rates on those are subsudized by taxpayers. Most private colleges take some government money too....
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
It's stupid, yes. The only thing I can point to is that DeCSS *does* attact a lot of visitors to your site.
Most likely they are banning DeCSS not becuase of bandwdith, but to limit the colleges liability in the DeCSS trials.
My copy of DeCSS is (was, actually, I'm a defendant) located on *my* web server, not my college web site. CalPoly would be seriously pissed at me if they were caught anywhere near a legal battle cuased by DeCSS.
-John
I eat dog. Free DVDs. Horray!
in my apartment. I don't want my roommates tying up the DSL with thier sick sick rapping music. I much prefer polka.
I also ban porn sites. This is a masturbation-free apartment. I have a web cam in one room, and I plan to add more to all of the other rooms to keep them honest about their masturbation.
Everynight I ask them, "Did you masturbate today? Could you turn down that filth?" and then they beat me, but I think I made my point.
I'm happy that I control the throttle to their internet access. It means that we get 150k-bytes to all that is holy, and 0k-bytes to all that is sinful and evil. Our apartment is truely becoming a lovely place to live.
-John
I eat dog. Free DVDs. Horray!
So the real question for many people: is there a list of proxy servers anywhere? I've searched quite a bit, but can't find any. I'd host one, but I'm banned from napster as well.
It looks to me like to crucial difference here is that the RIAA isn't saying ban illegal mp3s from campus,well they are, but they're also saying to ban napster totaly becuase it is used to transfer illegal mp3s. What ywwg said is that univerisities should acually _check_ to see in the content is illegal before taking action *gasp* what a concept. Taking action against known illegal content is quite different from simply saying mp3s are illegal and should be banned.
Our university is connected to the internet through a link provided by GoodNet. GoodNet took it upon themselves a few days ago to just disable all access to Napster's servers without notifying anyone. My university is for the most part ok with Napster and got it turned back on, but the question is why didn't GoodNet notify anyone. Real good way to lose some customers if you ask me...
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
While I am not familiar with the policies on other campuses, I can speak to the policy regarding Napster that recently went into effect at my school, the University of Minnesota at Morris. According to school officials, as much as 30% of our bandwidth (which is a healthy DS3) was being taken up by Napster traffic. It was decided that this was a violation of the school's Acceptable Use Policy since it "overloaded... networks with excessive data."
While it is possible to argue that the act of blocking Napster traffic itself is an act of censorship, the school hasn't stopped there. In trying to accomplish the stated goal of reducing network traffic, they have blocked all access to the Napster domain. The University of Minnesota has four campuses, but all must send their data through the Twin Cities campus before it is sent out into the world. Traffic to any Napster servers is blocked at the Twin Cities' router. This includes access to the Napster web server.
If this was a private school, the matter might be closed. However, as a public institution, the University is an extension of the state, and any action taken by the University constitutes State action. The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution forbid the states from abridging the freedom of speech. In preventing access to a website whose nature and purpose is to convey information is a violation of said amendments. It can be argued that there is a compelling governmental interest in limiting network traffic, but that does not allow for civil rights violations of this sort.
I am not familiar with the various blocking options on a router. It seems to me, however, that it should be possible to simply limit traffic to a certain amount of bandwidth. That would alleviate the Napster issue as stated in the policy.
For those that are interested, the school's Napster policy can be found at: http://www.mrs.umn.edu/cs/general/n apster.shtml
My thoughts exactly - you beat me to it. But how much of this is really in place? IANANE (I am not a networking expert), so I haven't the slightest idea if this can be done.
See you, space cowboy...
Quote: Think about guns - guns are made to kill people. They are used in crimes every day all over the nation. But still, they are legal, because we recognize that they have legitimate uses. You can restrict the use of guns, and you might even reduce crime, (I don't actually believe that, but that's an entirely different story)
Well, I'm from Ireland, guns are banned here in Europe, crime is lower, but you're right, that's another story. Not a good analogy with MP3s I believe though.
but you'd be giving up a portion of your freedom to do that. Similarly, you can ban mp3s, and you may reduce the amount of IP theft, or lower your bandwidth utilization, but you're giving something up. Namely, the positive aspects of downloading mp3s, and also, the students freedom to be in an environment that allows them to expand themselves as they see fit, not as the university sees fit.
You cannot condone freedom to commit illegal acts. You've already given up your freedom to kill your fellow human beings, and indeed, be protected againts such harm, by living under law. Are you the worse for it?
I can kinda sympathize with the bandwidth argument, but I really hate it when people change things midstream. If you come onto the university network, and sign an agreement saying "by signing this you agree not to do x, y, or z" then you have a choice, and you can go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you invest in a NIC for your student network, and then have regulations piled on you never agreed to, that's different, because you weren't given a choice.
The agreements haven't been changed at all. When I got net access from my University (Imperial College, London), there was a very very clear AUP that stated that illegal activities on their network are, you guessed it, ILLEGAL. Of course, uni's do overlook a number of illegal activities, but when those activities start to compromise your bandwidth flow, how can you expect them NOT to take action?!
Yeah, the 5% comment came from a random statistic thrown out by one of the major UC colleges, for whom that is a hell of a lot ... smaller colleges will suffer more obviously.
Quote: And another point. Banning Napster doesn't prevent people from pirating MP3's. Banning illegal MP3's will ban illegal MP3's. Funny how that works. It takes vigilance to stop crime, not another line in the old port filter.
There's principle, and there's being practical.
Me standing up in University and screaming "I BAN MP3S!" wouldn't do shit. Me blocking the tool that a lot of students use, which would cut down the usage drastically, would. And remember, almost all acceptable usage policies ban copyright infringments and other illegal activities using that network, so illegal MP3s are banned from the start.
I just can't see a line of conscientious students poring through their AUP's and then saying "Sorry Jim, I can't accept those files, they're illegal!"
Ban the popular tool. Easy enough to get around of course, but it would stop the 95% non-tech-savvy ones anyway.
Check www.bilkent.edu.tr, what is it? It's a campus network that is firewalled to every known port in the Universe. And why? Security? Why do they need security through banning everything? Because they have no clue about security.
I can't use telnet or ftp to reach my account from outside. Why is that so? Because the crappy Solaris and Windows are just so incredibly insecure, and people are so stupid that it's only a matter of time before ppl from outside could crack Univ's network.
And boy, do they think they have some classified stuff. I'd love to see *my* university's net brought down by immense DDoS attacks. I mean it.
Err, but my univ's admins aren't stupid. We can run ICQ, we can run napster here... They're just a scared crowd of NFS slaves.
--exa--
Are the Imaginary or Invisible Rabbits being banned? There is a difference, even if the difference is not visible to most people.
Define "banned on campus".
My campus had lots of computing environments. Unix, VAX, in-room ethernet, campus labs, dialup, etc.
They banned IRC from dialup and then from shell in 1996. We weren't happy. Then they banned MUD from the shells too.
They banned student-run web servers on the shell, but luckily at the same time they decided they would run one for us.
They blocked off-site telnet from the resnet, but accidentally forgot to turn that off for the first three months it was active.
They blocked almost any network game they could find the port or protocol for. They've also blocked all UDP to off-site on the resnet and in all labs for ever.
They don't ban any INCOMING connections on the resnet, just outgoing ones. Just in case you thought it was to protect US. It's just to protect THEM.
They probably do ban napster now, which would be a kick in the pants, seeing as the kid who wrote napster GOES there.
This neu.edu, btw.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
Unfortunately, that argument doesn't always apply.
Originally, I was a journalism major. And I took classes like Press History, Press Law, and Press Ethics (hold the laughs, please).
So, it falls on me to note that, as an example, colleges are NOT allowed to censor, limit, or otherwise infringe on the expression of student-run publications, even if school and/or student funds were used to make the publication.
I'm not going to go into the arguments for or against that. Were that I had more time I could look up a reference to the original SC case that brought it about.
The point is that in that case, it would have been an easy cop-out to say "We're not stopping them from using their own money to print their magazine." It didn't fly.
Perhaps a better argument for the conservatives, and libertarians with internal conflicts, would be that, since the students are paying for the school services, and the students want content X to be available on the network, or protocol Y, or servers of type Z, then the college should offer the services (and modes of expression, etc.) which the students are paying for.
Colleges have also since quite far back in history been places of open expression, including offbeat creativity, crudeness, vulgarity, and shady practices, whether we're talking about naked wintertime runs through the neighborhood, or binge drinking, or making and selling blue boxes (mr. wozniak?), or running Napster.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
The use of Napster is inherently illegal.
not by a longshot. I use it to find Phish and other live recordings of jam band tunes. Oh, and once I got a copy of a song from a CD I had, but scratched. Saved me $15, which I would rather burn than give to the RIAA. (oops, my bias slips out.)
--
+&x
Where I am (UK) the computer techie uses napster, but the students are not even allowed to use java chat sites. So, where's the good example setting there?
---- Robert Anton Wilson: "Belief is the death of intelligence."
Actually, I would go even further. Even if it has no legitimate use, it should still be legal; make the illegitimate uses illegal and ban them. But there are any number of reasos that people may want to posess things. Collectors, say, or movie studios which need props.
Napster should not be banned. Piracy should be; if a student is offering files which he has no legal right to offer, then he should be prosecuted. Actually, he should be warned, which is what schools generally do with violations of the law. A few more troubles and he is reported to the police, which should knock the fear of God into him...
Of course. But, as a libertarian (i.e. and advocate of freedom) I don't care about what someone is probably doing; I care about what he is doing. That's why I'm for drug legalisation; I don't care if someone is possibly or probably driving high, but only care if he does and causes harm thereby. It's one of the many reasons I am opposed to any form of weapon control (e.g. guns, knives, baseball bats); I don't care what someone can do to me or anyone else, but only what he has done.
This is very related to computers. Certain products are used almost always for illicit purposes: password crackers, network scanners, credit card number generators, DeCSS, the MP3 format &c. These all have legitimate uses, but I think that we all can admit that they are mostly used improperly, by which I mean almost all the time. Yet to ban them would be sheerest folly, not simply because it detracts from legitimate usage, but also because posession of a tool does not equal use of that tool. I may like to collect thumbscrews; it doesn't mean that I plan to torture anyone (I don't actually collect thumbscrews, but...).
What right does society have to limit an individual's freedom, provided he has done naught wrong? None at all. That's the whole point of freedom. Now, once he has done wrong he may rightfully be punished, as he has given up any right to security by his action. But there must be an action.
Punish copyright violations. Like it or not, an author has a right to his work. If he wishes every purchaser to stand on one leg and hop in a circle chanting `ohwa tana siam' that is his right. Punish those who are actually doing wrong, but don't punish the innocent. Tough luck if it's hard to figure out who's doing wrong; that's the job of law enforcement. It's not our job to make things easier for them.
Actually, it's not legal to do that. I don't think that it's even legal if the person already owns copies of that music; one could not, for example, set up a publisher who sells copyrighted material to those who already own it. I may be wrong on this.
However, the fact remains that it is normally illegal. It's just one of those things which are rarely prosecuted. The police have better things to do with their time. Not that they actually do; they seem to spend most of their time chasing after speeders who have hurt no-one, but cannot find a murderer given any length of time. But that's another argument...
Okay, I'm not on ResNet here at USC, and dialup 53k isn't exactly the prime medium for trading around MP3s so I mostly don't, but... I do read the campus newspaper, so I know what's going on regarding Napster here on campus.
According to this Daily Trojan article, USC is planning to limit bandwidth rather than block any particular site. The really great thing about this is that after ISD (dept. in charge of network) let it be known that Napster was going to be banned outright, they actually paused to listen to the students (who were admittedly outraged) and sought the advice of the university's legal counsel. Not only did they listen, they changed their position and relaxed a bit, took a deep breath, and reevaluated why they were trying to ban Napster. The final decision was to:
automatically shut off the ethernet connections of students who use more than 40 percent of their allotted bandwidth - 500 kilobytes per second - for more than two consecutive hours
It is difficult to argue against that. I mean, really, when do you need that much continuous bandwidth? The only things I can think of are for uses that ISD probably bans already (like personal web servers).
."I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
If you want to run a bandwidth hog on a network that is owned by someone else, the owner of that network has every right to filter/censor/curtail its (and your) use of it. You might feel that you have 100% rights to use the network however you like because you somehow pay for it through your tuition, but do a little bit of math first. If a university has a T3 line and each student in a..say.. 20,000 student body pays an equal network use fee, then each student is allotted approximately 2250 bits per second, which is about the speed of a 2400 baud modem. If your 24/7 running network processes don't exceed that bandwidth, and your activities are 100% legal, then you have every right to bitch about it. Somehow, I doubt this is the case.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Well, the first problem is the QoS is VERY propritary and few operating systems have the hooks to talk QoS. Those that do are limited. So to get around it, all you would have to do is turn off QoS on the workstation or server. All traffic would get pumped through the first pipe anyway. Seems about as effective as port blocking.
The throttle on my car has a "setting" of zero. Sounds like a reasonable setting for napster traffic.
Solution? Get a bigger pipe....
Actually I've heard some IATS people talk about limiting all personal use of the computers.
The problem with Universities is academic freedom...anything you ban might be necessary to study. (analyze protocal for a networking class, trying to implement a client for a C class, study effects on the populace for sociology, the legalities for law...etc.)
Actually Brent I've come up with a better idea!
Limit the campus's ability to SERVE mp3s in napster. Let us connect as clients all we want.
Since the biggest problem is having unknowing people whose computer is actually a server sharing out all their MP3s. (outgoing bandwidth is the main problem right?)
Well just this year the $20 fee was cut. (University of Missouri - Columbia) Now it's included in everyones default room fee whether or not they use the network or not....I'm not sure what the exact dollar amount comes to though.
We pay for it so I think we should have some say.
- Universities usually do things "properly" -- contractors paid "progressive" wages, room for future expansion, good quality materials, etc.
- Maintaining the physical infrastructure (wires, conduits, routers) is expensive.
- The "wet" infrastructure (aka "people who take care of the network") has to be paid, and their offices have to be provided.
- Finally, the bandwidth has to be paid for. While this has been going down a lot, T1's still aren't cheap.
All of these things add up to substantial costs -- far more than $20/month.I suspect that if your university provided no connection to the outside internet and only offered a connection to the internal network, it'd still cost at least $20/month. They're probably subsidizing the cost considerably, and making people pay $20/month as a way to limit the number of people asking for connections.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
"For example, this article talks about the big Aussie gun-grab that happened back in September. Guess what? Criminals didn't turn in their guns, and the number of gun crimes actually rose within a year (in Victoria, for instance, homicides w/ firearms rose 300% - no, that is not a typo)."
.25 /100000).
Hmmm. Firstly, an 'article' from the NRA is hardly what I would call objective. Lets take a closer look. My sources are the Australian Institute of Criminology and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, whom I find somewhat more authorative and objective on the subject of Australian criminal activity.
The combined number of deaths by murder or manslaughter (excluding vehicles) of any cause in Victoria in 1998 was 50. National figure was 333. The national murder rate fell 12% to 1.5 per 100000. The percentage of firearm related homocides in Australia was 16% (54 homocides involved a firearm). Assuming that was the same for Victoria, that makes 8 homocides due to firearms. An increase of 300% would be accounted for by a single Port Arthur (or Columbine) type event.
By comparison, gun related homocides in the US make up 10,976 out of a total 16911 (65%!!) of which 8816 were caused by handguns (Source - US Bureau of Justice Statistics). So the US has a 4 times worse homocide rate than Australia (6 vs 1.5 / 100000), and a 16 times worse homocide rate by firearms than Australia (4 vs
In robberies, only 8% involved use of a firearm, vs 23% in the US (1997)
Be careful of whose 'facts' you choose to use.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
over here at uc berkeley, the use of such programs as napster have not been prohibited, but rather about a month ago, the network got slow as hell. they sent out a campus email saying they did not know why the connection was so slow, but that it was not caused by any computers on campus and that they thought the problem was from an outside source. then recently, the connection got slightly faster, but not even close to what it used to be. they sent out another letter stating that they had been intentionally capping the bandwidth allowed to outside sites and the previous level of transfer rates (between about 25 and 40 Mbps) was cut to 15 then nearly zero. it was worse than a 56k modem. then they acted like they were doing us a favor when they agreed to let it stay at 20 Mbps max for the time being. personally i have used napster in the past, but i would much rather have that banned so that our network connection would be as fast as it used to be. plus even if napster gets permanently banned people can come up with other programs that do the same thing. uc berkeley is still a very liberal place where the rights of the individual are constantly being fought for, yet it seems that the residential computing facilities are run by a bunch of ultra conservative bigots.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I take issue with your statement that sex is necessary for life. An enormous amount of life (think bacteria) has existed on this planet without sex. If the human race really cared about God and good, decent, Puritanical morality, we'd learn to live without it too. Thank God for cloning.
Punk rock band. I don't know what T to P menas, but the Ramones made a song called Censorshit and it's from around the same era as the Dead Milkmen.
Hands in my pocket
I say lets elect Harvey for College president at UC. However, since we do not get a vote on that issue. I will just sit with Harvey and have a few drinks.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Other universities have taken the same steps. The question is, will the schools that ban Napster also ban alt.binaries.sounds.mp3? Are they worried about the legal risks in allowing students to use a program or are they simply trying to limit the incredible amount of bandwidth that movies and MP3's eat up?
We have loads of bandwidth, and no protocols are banned. But there is talk of our contract with BBN Planet expiring, and the cost of our bandwidth next year will be in the millions....we'll see what happens.....
My campus recently banned the feeding of stray cats. It's a shame, a bloody shame I tell ya. What's next?
At Teesside Uni in the UK, if it ain't http or ftp (assuming you're on a Windows box... the Unix machines (RH 6, SG etc) don't even have ftp!), forget it; everything is firewalled to hell. The Unix boxes are behind a "deny everything" firewall and a http proxy, and the Wintel boxes are behind a "deny everything except ftp and http" firewall.. I'm not bothered about the lack of Napster, but I want ssh, telnet, IRC and ftp access at least!
Right before he started his conquest, he took everyones' guns away. In this fashion, the discontented, starved, and oppressed people of Germany couldn't fight back.
I would have thought that the lession would have been learned...
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
My friend had his quake servers shut down. I guess that's understandable, but I still think it's lame. They have a 'no gaming' policy...luckily, it isn't enforced, and my friend has run public servers for the last several years, until he pissed someone off and they turned him in. I just worry about a time when people won't be able to play games, or do anything, and won't have any recourse, since, at my school, Columbia University, outside isp service is difficult because of the phone system. You have to pay an extra $15 a month to get an analog phone line. Anyway...having free access to the internet has been a defining experience of college...I'm sure it'll disappear with the rest of the digital frontier, and turned into a homogenized shopping mall with no sharp edges, inappropriate content, or harmful ideas. It's unfortunate though...american censorship authorities do a good job of enforcing the status quo while allowing material that is truly objectionable to be seen.
I'm a student on our Information Services Advisory Comittee, and this came up at a recent meeting. It seems out bandwith use for Napster was up around 25%, way too high. We put out a plea to the students to cut it down. Amazingly, for the next week, Napster bandwidth use has hovered around 9%. It's still a lot, but as long as it stays low, we're not going to do anything about it. Out school policy is to only do something if an outside organization approaches us with proof that a student has illegal material on his computer, so for us, it really is a bandwidth issue.
To call this censorship is laughable. From what I saw of Napster, no legitimate use actually existed and it served to do nothing more than suck up bandwidth. Universities pay large amounts of money to provide the fast connections they do, and if something like Napster is sucking up large percentages of that bandwidth for far-from-academic purposes, they have every right to block it.
The question is when they'll block imesh (http://www.imesh.com).
My university just blocks all traffic to Napster's servers. This can easily be gotten around with anonymous web browsing services and an off-campus proxy.
This I completely agree with.
College may be a bastion of free expression, but growing your personal collection of music, most likely pirated, is not a valid expression (if you think music is, then buy the CD- no one stops you from doing that).
Censorship is not an issue.
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
I'm not even sure why you would ban a piece of code in the name of bandwidth.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
As far as I know, they havn't blocked any specific software here (yet), although change is in the wind. However, one interesting thing that they started blocking a few years back is pings coming onto campus. While not exactly the end of the world, it can be an annoyance at times.
Napster is a distributed application for sharing mp3's over the internet. It really is a fantastic idea in that there is only a centralized database listing who has which mp3s. When you want to download an mp3 your client negotiates a connection with the other client who has the mp3.
You can log on and find more than a collective terabyte of mp3s being shared by hundreds of users. I really think that this is the future.
Its rather simple really.
I also work at NDSU (see Paradox's post above), and the scheme they have implemented here works surprisingly well. All they do is remove the data portion of all incoming and outgoing packets to napster.com. It creates a basically working version of napster. It thinks that it is connected but you cant do anything. No packets are blocked, ICMP is still in place. It's pretty. It's effective.
And I find it troubling. I can understand why it was done, but I hope that it was an exception to the rule, and not the start of a new policy.
The thing I don't get is that there are packet queue management algorithms out there that make it impossible to monopolize the bandwidth. So are the schools that bitch about this being a bandwidth thing too lazy to install a packet queue ordering algorithm? Most cisco routers come with them now.
Here at UC Santa Cruz, they filter ports 25 (smtp), 111 (sunrpc), 135, 136, 137-139 (netbios), 143 (imap2), 777, and 2049 (nfs). Don't ask me where they came up with that set.
To the best of my knowledge, Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, OH) only has Doom 1.0 banned (thanks to the network traffic it creates) and Windows 2000. Well, let me correct that. Windows 2000 hasn't been checked out by the Network Service department, so students/professors/etc. are highly discouraged to use it.
Did I mention my university is baptist?
No need to. I graduated from a Baptist university (Mercer) and those rules are very familiar.
It's a dry campus, but it's a little moist in spots.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Though I have been a user of Napster in the past, I would have to say that I agree completely with the above comments. Campus resnet's aren't only for education, but that is their primary purpose.
I attend Montana State University and recently tried to use Napster only to find it blocked. Due to the fact that our admins can't seem to keep the network running for more than a couple weeks at a time, I thought this another problem and called in to complain. The response that I got this time though forced me to grudgingly agree. I was told that following a few complaints about slow Internet access they began monitoring traffic and found that during peak evening hours one-third of the bandwidth was being chewed up by napster, so they shut it down.
Can you believe one-third! That is amazing, and being a former napster user, I can gaurantee that few of those were not copyrighted. I loved being able to get those, but I would rather be able to access the rest of the online world like I had access through several T1's, rather than paying for T1 access and longing for the days of my 56k modem.
Seems that Napster and the like have taken the role of scapegoat in this situation. Try this analogy. Imagine traffic on a rather busy urban street. How many of those folks out there are speeding? How many do not have insurance...etc..? The point is, how many are illegal in one fashion or another. Now we come to an intersection..holy cow , what a traffic jam. Is the solution to try and remove the illegal drivers from the road? Not really, even though there is a marginal force in place to curtail it. The solution is to widen the intersection, make new lanes, find new ways to route traffic. Actually, to really nail this home, in Tucson where I reside, there is a busy intersection that was actually *reduced* by two lanes, because the local police department is unable to control speeders through the intersection. I do not fully understand this rationale, but it does show that even police departments realize that the absolute ideal of a crime free society is just that: an unattainable absolute ideal.
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. " Ben Franklin
I work for a local ISP. I wouldn't really mind a ban on Napster. Yes, I do use it, yes I enjoy the heck out of it. The majority of our users are older retired folks who are *barely* able to retrieve mail, much less operate an mp3 player. So , go ahead, block the port. Really won't stop my friends and I, and who knows, it might just speed things up for us. We also have a cap on our monthly unlimited dial ups. 175 hours is the limit, with an additional charge for hours over. This is a tough selling point in the days of unlimited access. But once again, I love it. Lots of people do not like the idea of 175 hours , so we only sign up a few real dedicated users who have the brains to realize that 175 hours is still a good amount of time for the average user. We not claim to be the ISP for everyone, thus we preserve the limited IPs we do have for our own users.Point here being, the only reason this cap works, is because our customers have accepted it. If not, we would be out of business real fast. Until the hardware backbone catches up so to speak, with the boom we have in consumer participation in the Internet as a whole, we will probably have to put up with caps and limitations of all sorts. How long the caps and such continue is pretty much up to us, as we are the only ones controlling our wallets. If there becomes(is) a need for higher speed (broadband), higher bandwidth providers, it will not be long before some enterprising indiviual with some money to spare starts providing this service( for a fee of course). But as long as people are willing to pay for capped or limited usage, I am afraid that the almighty dollar will continue to speak for us.
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. " Ben Franklin
But you don't understand! That would require WORK! Why should the poor 150K/year admins sprain their brains for lowly students shelling out just a few tens of thousands a year for an education?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Being an IU student, I'm one of those affected by this kind of stuff. When they banned napster here, it was a big deal. It made the front page of the school paper, and there were a LOT of people petitioning the university to get it back. I used napster, and so did all my friends. But, when this service starts eating up 55% of the bandwidth, it HAS to stop. The bandwidth provided to the students by the university is supposed to be used primarily for educational use. Of course, they expect a certain level of personal use, but it shouldn't be so excessive as to be using up 55% of the bandwidth. What's more interesting, is IU was ranked #3 most wired university in the country, last time I checked. So, whatever connection we have to the 'net (not sure, I think a couple of T3s), it's gotta be pretty beefy. Napster just got WAY out of hand. I mean, when someone increases their MP3 collection from a hundred or so to over 1000 in a couple days, it's a little excessive. Not to mention, that most of these transactions are illegal.......
:)
Of course, I still use napster with one of the opennap servers, and gnapster
Snorp
3k per sec doesn't make it ineffective to do so, rather it makes you seriously consider what you are going to download, and probably stops external users from using your files. I think it is the casual nature of downloading files that is the real problem with napster.
I go to American, and while I am a polisci major, OIT won't explain what packets they are filtering out. I don't use Napster, and support their decision to ban it, but I wish they would come clean as to what they arefiltering out. haven't had to time to ping out Naptster's class C, and such.
matt
First of all, we made the decision to block Napster when our T1 became unusable. We're adding a second T1 soon, but the characteristics of what happens when Napster is used would cause the same saturation. Another reason is that all of our students sign a network agreement that prohibits running servers (which is what a computer running Napster is) and also prohibits the use of excessive amounts of network bandwidth for extended periods of time, which clearly was happening. There's not a lot of wiggle room here. I've got (and will always have) a finite pipe to the Internet, and if one thing is filling it disproportionately, I'm not meeting the needs of my user community if I allow that to happen.
The other big issue about Napster that I haven't seen anyone mention in detail is that this is a COMPANY, with a lot of venture capital, forcing a closed (reverse-engineered, certainly) music distribution system on an unwitting public. Their revenue model is dependent on having a system that creates a large, distributed music library, that someone will think is worth buying. I have little faith that the Napster team has any interest in designing their software to limit bandwith use on its own, or shut itself off automatically or anything like that (the behavior of the Windows client where hitting the "X" doesn't really close the program is evidence of that.) Their existence and what they're selling requires as many people be on as possible, and in fact, that the people with large music collections be on very fast, unrestricted links, which right now means universities. Basically, the very foundation of the company depends on a big music library be available on very fast links, on bandwidth that is not theirs, and that other people are paying for.
One final thing to consider is that we're all complaining about Real and what it did, but Napster has the largest catalog of what MP3s are on whose computers. Such information is a marketing bonanza, and that may be the main reason for Napster's existence. They may not be doing it yet, but really, how long can that go on? This company will need to make money, and probably soon. At that point, the same people screaming for their "freedom" from "censorship" will be screaming about the unauthorized use of their personal information. I can't wait.
This is not a case of the wholesome, righteous freedom fighters defending the rights of the little guy--this is a company seeking to make a buck on the backs of others.
--Mike
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
I'm not very thrilled with my University's network admin, (well, the way it's being run in general) I suppose. Considering there have been at least 2 warez sites that were finally taken down (at least 2 years after the student had already graduated. There are been several hacking atempts, most of the CS computers were formatted, and ECN has also been hacked into before.
Also when the FBI were investigating a couple of years ago, the student admin policy was changed a bit. So if you have a serious email problem and you go to an SA (whose job is to help you), they can't do anything about fixing it, other than say "rebooting the lab computer". About all they can do overall, is reboot your computer, give you a new username, reset the printer settings, fix printer jams, and reload the printers.
The lab computers aren't that great in general. They break down and then stay broken for a least a couple weeks. It's not the lab SA's job to fix the computer, just help people with problems.
I could go on about what I think or I could further describe the situation, but that's not the point here.
I love deadlines. I like the "whoosh" sound they make as they fly by. -- Douglas Adams
Here at Cornell University we pay over $80 a semester for access to the Campus Network, it is in fact a money making endevour for them.
Money making != profit generating. Have you considered that the ResNet fee exists to help the program breakeven? Do you know how much it costs to run fiber between buildings on a large campus, then wire several thousand rooms, and have to provide constant support for what you've deployed? Answer: it isn't cheap, either in equipment or personnel costs.
If you want to use ResNet, you have to pay for it, just like you have to pay to get on meal plan or to use the Cornell Fitness Centers. Is it right to make students paying $24k or so a year in tuition feel like they're being nickeled and dimed? No. But it's also wrong to expect things that are complicated and expensive to provide to be given to you for free.
There have been threats of crack downs on programs like Napster and sites like DialPad, but nothing yet. As I also work for the campus computing center running the email system, I know that we in fact do not have a bandwidth problem, however that is an easy excuse for them.
Where have the threats of crackdowns on Napster and DialPad been posted? The Daily Sun, or by CIT somewhere, or is this just FUD that you're spreading based on rumor? Do you see the bandwidth utilization reports for Cornell's Internet links and know in fact that we're not maxing our connection out, or is this just more FUD?
As for bandwidth problems, there are indeed problems that exist between Cornell and AppliedTheory, frequently at AT's Ithaca gateway. Just because the campus network can throw files around without trouble doesn't mean that things off-campus can cope as well. If Napster is generating 20 or 30% more traffic that normal, and that traffic is clogging connections to the outside world, then AT has to fix the problem, Cornell has to fix the problem, or both of them do. AT's fix lies in a bigger/more reliable network for a small service area (costs money). Cornell's potential fix could be to limit or kill Napster (free, but pisses students off). Which one do you think will happen sooner?
This is another bad example. The meal plan is a very profit making enterprise: it costs something like $10 to eat a meal at the dining hall. And there's even been talk of shutting down the Balch dining hall because it isn't making enough money.
The reasons for shutting Balch down are related to the fact that the number of people using the facility has steadily decreased, to the point where the university is (nearly?) losing money just by keeping the doors open.
It's bad practice to keep a dying business alive with resources from a successful one. At some point, you have to stop throwing away money. If consumers aren't buying your unsuccessful product, then you need to change or kill that product. Throwing away money that could be better spent on successful existing (or new) products is stupid.
Of course ResNet exists (anywhere) to help attract students to the dorms. That does not change the fact that it is an expensive and difficult service to deploy and maintain properly. Charging a fee for those who wish to use that service, in order to recover initial and ongoing costs, is totally reasonable.
It's called IP over IP, or Mobile IP, or even VPN.
All you need is someone who is not blocked. And with VPN they hvae no idea what you are doing =)
The ban of Napster shows the lack of comprehension of the Internet by the universities. It is not the universities job to act as police, and they should not be held responsible for student's actions because of the provided Internet access. Furthermore, Systems Administrators should be more prepared to explain the legal issues regarding Internet law to the suits.
If anyone has free time(or remembered what it felt like), I'd love to see a web site geared for computer law, for SA's.
Personal notes on college life, pass your classes, do lots of drugs, listen to loud MUSIC, and have plenty of sex.
Without computer security, there would be no hackers.
Well, my campus hasn't had too much of a problem with these things. It is written in our UA that we can't run any kind of file sharing server, but nobody cares if you do. The catch is that at least 75% of the time the other things on this list don't work if you're behind out firewall. So I don't think that my college has anything to fear about net2 phone taking over their monopoly phone service (rates just lowered to $0.15/min ohhhhh), and napster is just a joke when you're behind a firewall everytime you find a song you really want you get the "both parties firewalled" error. grrrr
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
It isn't only about the dorms; in fact, I'll agree that students living at a university might have a legitimate gripe about network restrictions. But then again, you chose your university!
However, there is the issue of "legitimate use." The original poster is right: these networks are installed for educational purposes. I teach CS part-time at a California State university, and we have several labs that are "open," where students will from time to time install these tools. Bandwidth issues aside, serving MP3s and the like are not what these systems were put in for, period. They are hardware and software for use by the classes we teach.
i have a friend who talked to someone who works at NTS who said they monitored Napsters port was using more like 50% of the bandwidth so they had a choice, ban Napster or bandwidth limit the dorms, i agree with their decision, i can get mp3s elsewhere,
I pay for it all thank you. FU
Thats right...and if you think about it alot of your tax money goes places you don't wnat it to. Defense budget, farmers (to encourage them too keep food supply high so its cheaper for us), and here's a good one, ROADS. These people that say i don't want my tax dollars going to that should think...i could just as easily say i don't want my tax dollars going ot any roads near YOUR house. Or subsidizing YOUR electric (check your elec bill, i bet the govt was involved in lowering it for you).
This fee is purely for access to the network, this is on top of everything else we pay for. If you want ether in your room, you pay this charge.
That doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense, the only way to limit the amount of bandwidth it uses is to only download 1 file at a time or make it so it only transfers so fast, say 10k/sex or less.
Quid rides ignare?
Wow. Guess you can never stop a determined thief.
How many mp3s do you have where you own the CD?
All of them, except the freely available ones from MP3.com. How do 99% of the people who use Napster justify the IP theft? I guess maybe they're just greedy and don't care because it's not being enforced.
I think you've actually invalidated your own point here. You've shown that 40% of your collection is illegal. I presume you're implying that you could easily give up that 40% and stick with the stuff you own legally. But you haven't. You've done quite a fine job, actually, of demonstrating that Napster is indeed a popular "tool of piracy."
If it is truly fine, then why are you publishing information on how to use anonynmizers on your web page? Maybe it's not so fine after all and you are indeed misrepreseting yourself, against your own wishes.
I agree that it is legal to make my own CD's and MP3's from originals that I own. But do you consider it legal if I made a mix CD for a friend for their birthday, just as people have made mix tapes in the past? If you believe that is legal what is the difference in giving out that same music free to anybody? Isn't the real illegality in profiting from redistributing copyrighted material?
As far as I know, everything is allowed here at University of Pennsylvania. I'm a bit concerned about all of these universities getting upset about the amount of bandwith that Napster and the like use. Do they not see that this is only the beginning of some very high traffic applications? At Penn, there is a lot of work being done with Internet 2 research, and applications that use ungodly amounts of bandwith. If these universities can't keep up with the increasing bandwith demands, how do they expect to keep there researchers? And if the researchers and professors go away, so will the students.
--
Donald Roeber
Donald Roeber
Generating 2048 Bits of Randomness...
However, couldn't the way that colleges are banning Napster be considered a breach of contract? Maybe I'm mistaken, but if I sign a contract to pay for services offered by the colleges, services including internet access, doesn't that mean that I am entitled to those services? Mid-semester, why can one party of the contract change "internet access" to "internet access, except for stuff that uses a lot of bandwidth, which we reserve the right to block whenever we want"?
Is there something in university internet access contracts that allows universities to do this? If not, then savenapster.com may have some real ammunition.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
I wish my University would ban the network-clogging Napster as well...my rail in quake 3 is hurtin' cuz of my 300 ping!
I won't comment on your abilities as a system administrator. I do say that your use of English would be grounds to fail you at any accredited college or university. College should give you a well rounded education and show you how to think. Specialists are trained in technical schools.
Just wanted to be the first to coin that phrase:
"BannedWidth"
I like the sound of that.
24-hour banking!?! I don't have time for that.
-- Steven Wright
FIrst of all I think people who are claiming this behavior of disallowing these services is a form of censorship have absolutely no clue what so ever of the meaning 'censorship'. If you are in some strange environment you act according to the so-called house rules. If these rules are not to your liking you should not enter the environment at all.
You can compare this with being at work. Most people are not allowed to download porn and such from the Internet during working hours. Censorship? "I don't think so Tim."
The second option which I sort off missed in the whole thread below; security. Napster, like many other programs around, is using a variable portnumber. Reason for me to ban it completely from my homenetwork. Call it whatever you want but I don't trust programs who seem to be incapable of using a fixed port adress. The reason is very simple offcourse; I'll be happy to open up a fixed port on my firewall in order to use the program. But I'm not opening a very wide range in order for one stupid program to actually do something.
Allthough the topic is all about napster I think its no more then fair to state that I feel completely the same about programs like icq and dcc transfers on irc networks.
I go to Penn State and they have a policy that does not allow links to commmercial websites. The policy when it was originally written made it sound like they were not going to allow anyone to link any commercial website, ie. I wouldn't have been able to link redhat.com from my personal website. But they revised it and made it so that only official Penn State webpages could not have commercial links unless approved by the Executive Director of University relations. Supposedly pages were being corrupted with too many commercial links that did not have anything to do with the university.
I think it is a stupid waste of time. Anyways here is the url for the policy
Ben
Hey all you computer users reading this,
Wouldn't it be great if someone developed some type of protocol where any file could be transfered from one computer to another. A protocol that would become so imporant in the academic and business world that the mention of closing it's ports down would mean riots out on the streets. A protocol that could get adopted by everyone who makes operating systems. OH WAIT!!! They already do. ITS CALLED FTP.
Do you guys think that a school would actually ban the use of FTP, common give me a break. Leave using napster to all of the script kiddies and come back to the real world and use FTP, because that is what napster is, a stripped down version of a ftp client and server rolled into one with a thread sending out a pulse to one of napsters servers saying "here i am, i'm still here and alive."
FTP FTP FTP FTP FTP it's the way to go
My university (Ohio State) has banned Napster traffic, but (and I know this from talking to the as-of-yesterday former CIO, and new Vice Chancellor of - I think - UCLA) it was due entirely to bandwidth concerns.
Looking at a single data packet, it is impossible to determine if it is copyrighted or not. Any university that bans Napster on copyright concerns has no leg to stand on.
Napster eats an incredible amount of bandwidth, mostly because people don't know the most efficient way of using it. You don't leave it up 24-7, for example.
As an aside, OU ran a recent experiment where they temporarily expanded their pipe by a factor of 4, and it took 12 minutes for traffic to expand and fill the new pipe. 12 minutes. It was nearly ALL Napster traffic.
Students will take as much bandwidth as is available. It's just too expensive for universities to attempt to keep up. And simply banning services is - at best - a temporary fix.
People need to learn how to responsibly use network resources, for the betterment of ALL.
Cheers,
Brian
As far as I know napster is banned here (as I couldn't connect to the registration server when I initially ran the client).
So speaking for my school, it appears to be a matter of bandwidth rather than a matter of legality.
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
I've been working with my campus's networking team, and using network analyzers all semester to try to determine why the network seems so slow at times. It turns out that things like Napster, Telephony and a lot of other "Bandwidth Hogs" are really not the source of the bottlenecks on campus. On my campus, at least, it turns out that the majority of bandwidth is actually consumed by multiplayer games like Half-Life, Q3, Unreal Tournament. I run a dedicated HL server off of my machine for my clan, and it often times has 20-30 people playing at once. This makes for some huge consumption. Although this is not outbound traffic, as all the guys are on campus, it does tie up the local network, choking out outbound traffic. My one server can consume up to 90% of total traffic on my network segment. Although my network segment itself doesn't get to more than 20% or so, it all bottlenecks up in the routers with traffic bound for other dorms, or other network segments within my own dorm. For all the dorms and computer labs on campus, there are over 50 routers total. My guess is that inter-router communications are the real bottleneck here. The actual outbound traffic rarely is very high, and local traffic makes up probably 99% of all traffic.
So to all those campus officials who say that things like Napster are consuming all the bandwidth, they're just simply wrong. My campus has seen it. They need to also.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Is it really that much to ask for? Hit this for my story of late. Our network now is so slow (the WAN itself, outside traffic is even worse) that people ping 150+ between dorms in the evenings. Students recently send me an email to pull down my dedicated servers because *cough* they were wasting bandwidth. I'm appalled by the idea though. I did so much as to speak with the dean and he assured me that the problem would be fixed by next semester. The real issue though is some professors assign homework which requires things from off the web, and in the evenings, trying to navigate the web is just too frustrating. I'd rather dial into where I work and be on a modem but the ghetto phone setup does not even allow that at present. I'm paying for this why?
B1ood
Note to self: pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours. -- John Carmack
Over here at Seattle University we've got a whole lot of crap for network access. First, we had two (or three) Class Bs that were given up so we could run NAT long, long ago.
Up until this week, our Internet connection was a pair of Frame relay links (barf) and we now have a pair of T1's for the staff/faculty, and a single T1 for the student dorms.
ALL of the dorms run on hubs (10bT, that's approximately 2000 students.
Earlier this year, Instant Messaging was banned in the name of "bandwidth consumption." Some of the staff noticed that nothing changed, so they turned it right back on.
Lately, several ports have started to become blocked, but I have been too busy to find out which (need to nmap an AOL server.) Likely canidates include:
In short, I am very displeased with how the network is run at Seattle University. I like the CSSE program they have here, but this kind of crap REALLY starts to piss me off.
Up until last friday my average download speed was between 1.8K/s and 2.1K/s which is really very sad for a school of our size. That damn NAT box pisses me off the most. I would really like to have the opportunity to run a web server/mail server, but no dice.
marotti.com
Me too! ;-)
It seems NYU has sent out an email last night regarding Napster, as mt girlfriend also asked me just last night "if I know what Napster is". But I'm not sure in how far it is really banned, I believe the email just said something along the lines of "discourage the use of Napster" or so...
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
I don't know the details, but... what are the universities saving the bandwith for? I mean if the students' usage is causing problems for a ongoing experiment (video conferenced classes) I could understand banning certain services. But they're using 5% of the bandwith... what're they saving it for? A rainy day? Again, I don't know the details, but I guess it's good for people to get used to it since they'll be spending the next 30 years trying to do the same thing from their cubicles.
Don't ever forget you're still young. Last time I checked no one wanted to sellout at 22...
-- taking over the world, we are.
Thanks for the info. I never really thought about subnets, or problems with collisions. You learn something everyday ::)
-- taking over the world, we are.
Napster is trouble. Plain and simple. Banning ICQ, or AOL may be censorship, as these programs have legitamate uses. If the music industry starts looking to college campuses, they had better have their asses covered. People on an individual scale can commit small illegal acts without people noticing, like littering. If New York dumps its trash into canada, then people are gonna get pissed. Point is, you're not stopping the free exchange of information, you're covering your ass against the music industry. Sure, you can run napster, if you can afford the 50K a year to go to a college after they have been sued. --jay
Rice University banned Napster a few weeks back citing that it was sucking up as much as 15% of network traffic. Am I distraught? No. I look at the bright side...that's 15% more bandwidth for Quake3! :-)
IU banned Napster, yes, but they've also been working with Napster on helping them develop a Napster that eats less bandwidth.
Believe it or not, IU actually facilitates MP3 distribution by not monitoring scratch drives and FTP sites run out of the dorms.
It would be helpful to university students-to-be if you can tell us the name of your school...it really helps when it comes to making a decision!
Here at the University of Winnipeg - ConEd Campus, the students in computer-related courses have quite a bit of freedom over what they can and can't do. We're free to play with Napster, sit on the various instant messangers, etc.. As long as it isn't illegal, and it isn't consuming too much bandwidth, the admins here are ok with it.
As a sidenote, i would also like to point out that while all the workstations are WinNT, all of the servers here run FreeBSD. Woohoo!
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| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -
Exactly.. I live in an engineering dorm even and I am amazed that like only 3 people (two of which use Linux) even know what ftp is.
--The Groove
If a piece of software such as Napster was proved to be hampering the network and the work of others, why should it not be banned? Napster itself has nothing to do with the free-speech issue. It is a tool used for ripping CD's, nothing more. How exactly is banning it infringing on anyone's right to free-speech?
Also, keep in mind that this might not be a malicious action by sys-admins, it could be that they are doing this merely to keep the bandwidth clear. It does not necessarily have to be to supress anyone's fun.
Ciao
nahtanoj
I go to a local community college, it's one of the few colleges if not the only one that not only bans use of email (hotmail, etc.) on it's computers (i'm not sure about this but i've been told that none of the computers in the library are not to be used to check email), but it doesnt have any student email services!!!
They also have a firewall that's restrictive as hell. Basically when you're on campus you can only use ftp, http, and telnet protocols to connect to anything outside campus. Also you cannot connect to any but a couple of computers from outside campus(www,mail,firewall, and ??)
"5% of university bandwidth is a hell of a lot as well."
5%? More like 35-60% at the university I'm at goes to Napster's ports. Personally, I'm happy they blocked it (as of a week ago)... it not only keeps my roommate from downloading more god-awful music, but, judging from download throughput (d/l'ed kernel 2.2.14 a week before and a week after the ban, since I knew in advance when it'd happen), the network connection to the outside world is roughly 25% faster than before.
The statistic given by the person in Networking & Telecommunications Services (whom I know and trust for reliability) is that the bandwidth eaten up by Napster was costing the university over $1,000,000 a year.
To those who are against banning Napster, I ask if they would say that their university has a responsibility to hand out $1,000,000 of free CD's to its students... 'cause that's essentially what would be happening here if they hadn't just blocked Napster.
On my campus there is not too much that is allowed. I haven't tested many internet programs, but from what i have tried, ICQ, Napster, IRC, even ftp is banned. Telnet is "sometimes" allowed when the server has a hiccup, newsgroups aren't allowed, etc. so what are we allowed? The web, plain and simple, even porn. What kind of campus allows its users to not access FTP or even newsgroups to gain information that may be needed, but does allow its users to download various types of porn. There is definitly something wrong around here. Btw, i'm located in Newfoundland, Canada. And this is the only college that disallows these types of internet programs, we're pretty much restricted here, however, a few advanced users have been able to get around it. One really weird thing is that we are allowed access to a Linux shell that the webserver is located on from anywhere in the world OTHER then on campus itself. You figure it out, cause i'm boggled.
tourettes
As a student at the University of Connecticut, we experienced an unannounced Napster ban on Feb 1st, and since then, bandwidth has increased (a reported) 90%. Besides the Napster IP ban, UConn had a 5 GB per calendar month limit, which I feel is pretty good. Sure, the network is for learning, but residents live on campus, and the network should serve as a net access for their personal lives as well as their learning. 5 GB is fine, since it allows the user to select what they want to spend it on. What do you all think about a traffic limit?
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Why do some people have to turn everything into a conspiracy?
Life as a University sys-admin is a constant battle to squeeze the maximum possible performance from out-of-date and underpowered resources.
Students who complain because they are suddenly being denied the opportunity to use equipment, often bought by taxpayers who have no right to use it, to effectively steal copyrighted material should brace themselves for the impending impact of Real Life.
To cry censorship and claim rights are being abused is ridiculous and frankly insulting to those genuinely denied free speech and movement.
University resources are bought to aid research and learning. If you want to download mp3s, run off back to your parents and do it on their phone bill. (Which I suspect is what most of those complaining have done.)
It would not be terribly challenging from the IT perspective to set up a schedule whereby students could use Napster, voice over IP, etc. only at certain times of the day. Times when usage is generally low anyway. Like 10 pm to 6 am. Most college students are awake at those hours anyway, and most faculty and other university employees or daytime users would not be using campus bandwidth at that time. Having recently matriculated, I can clearly recall our T1 (we were a small school) being grossly choked out during the day, but at 3am I could suck up all the bandwidth I ever wanted. It really wouldn't be all that tough to set up a scheme whereby certain subnets, such as dorms, were limited during the day, and opened up at night. In any regard, anything is better than censorship (aka net serfdom).
Windows is going the way of phlogiston...
I have seen university officials state over and over that the copyright issues are not their concern, that they simply want to maintain bandwidth for other users who might be doing something more academic than downloading the latest Eminem single.
That said, I have to give my own $0.02 on the bandwidth issue:
Academic pursuits typically use very little bandwidth. I doubt that many research articles one would find on the web are anywhere over a few thousand bytes. I'm currently a senior at my state's university (which incidentally is also grumbling about Napster), and in all the research I've conducted, bandwidth has never been a problem because nothing I have looked for has ever been much more than a simple text file.
The bandwidth problem is more imaginary than anything else. I doubt that some graduate student is scratching his head over why he's only getting 50k/sec instead of 100k/sec (still ten times faster than I get at home!) because some frosh is sitting in his dorm smoking pot and downloading Puff Daddy.
The problem is that neither the engineers who see the bandwidth problem nor the officials who are told about it really have any conception of what is going on. The engineers don't know the students and the officials don't know the networks. So people jump to confusions and we get actions such as the banning of Napster.
*sigh*.
ZP
ICQ: 49636524
snowphoton@mindspring.com
Got Rhinos?
I'm guessing from the way Emmett worded it, I'm guessing that Universities haven't banned DeCSS due to bandwidth issues, but if they have, they sure are braindead.
I mean, how many people out there use DeCSS to rip DVDs and then post them for DL, and also, who in their right mind would spend the time to DL a DVD image?
It may happen sometime in the near future, but I don't think it's happening now. (now, is someone going to prove me wrong?)
It seems to me like the banning of Napster would violate the common carrier status of the university. (I.E., like phone companies, ISP's have a limited responsibility for what their users do). I.E. If I have a account on someisp.net and I use that account to download MP3's , I'm the one breaking the law, not my ISP. If this is the case, then it is ironic that by blocking access to napster, the universities actually open themselves up to lawsuits from the RIAA for allowing students to distribute through other means. It seems like a smarter solution would be for colleges not to block napster, but to simply limit its bandwidth. If the bandwidth limit were incredibly small, it would have the same effect as a total block, without violating their common-carrier status.
at my private school, keith, almost everything that is visited too much (eg, takes up too much bandwidth) is banned. stuff like TCP/IP chat programs, winzip.com, quake games... its terrible. theoretically, everything that isn't "For Educational Purposes" should be banned(under the school's net doctrine). However, our admin (NT network... booooo!) is 26, and really doesnt care. He allows illegal MP3 download if he likes you. I run debian, so he thinks im cool and lets me do anything.
I am also at a small liberal arts campus (oberlin) and I think all they have here is one or two T1's for all 3000 students plus faculty. I have also been told they banned napster here but I don't know cause I never used it anyway. It seemed like a big security risk to me and I have other ways to get mp3's if I want them. Anyway for a small campus a couple T1's is fine. I get pings of about 120 to most quake and unreal servers and files download pretty quick. Not every college has the money or need for TREMEDOUSLY fat pipes...
At my school (Macalester) we're getting close to banning it. We already have a saturated T1 running at 80%-90%, then add Napster on to that. Preliminary estimates had badwidth utilization showing 25% napster. After warnings that napster would be cuttoff, and better measurements, Napster is down to 9%. The issue is still that it is soaking up bandwidth that is not being used to fulfill the mission of the college. There is no reason prof's and students should be inhibited from doing research because students want to download free music (much of which is illegal).
Ok, I just have one thought. If they are banning based on bandwidth problems, what are they going to do when value added services are available, such as TV over the net (ex: IcraveTV.com) and so forth. They won't be prepared because they are crying that ... "We can't handle the big stuff". Open your eyes Sysadmins, (like myself) you're going to have to adjust somehow, sometime!
I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE EET!
yeah, they don't call it God's Concentration Camp for nothing. you gotta love it K-Tel
My school, Grove City College, has banned pretty much everything but http and AOL instant messenger. That includes: ICQ, Napster, Usenet, FTP uploads, telephony, gaming, etc... You name it, we don't have it. We've also got Surfwatch going for us, blocking half the net. I've totally been brainwashed at this point :)> K-Tel
If the school could organize itself and educate the student population on the problem, the issue should be easily fix-able.
These are institutions of learning, banning something because its problematic should not be the primary method. Education is the most powerful tool.
My school managed to pull off not-banning napster through educating the students and faculty on the problem. They only busted one student out of the masses that were using it, because he was sharing over 20 gigs of mp3s 24/7 on napster. Follow this link to read about how skidmore college dealt with napster.
Banning napster likens to burning books in my head.
no
I'd guess that universities and such have a lot of people in the USA. So, why not Napsterize MP3s locally, ie. inside the campus LAN, only to and from machines connected to it?
It wouldn't hog bandwidth of outside connections, Napster needn't be banned, RIAA would get screwed and everyone would get music. Positive in every aspect.
Or is there some intrinsic need to fetch MP3's via the net from the geographically farthest place one can think of?
--
>(8< ~ we come in peace
http://oppression.n erdherd.org/Stories/1998/9810/ucla/ucla.html
That school left a definate bad taste in my mouth, the only redeeming quality is the co-op program, which allowed to get some schweet jobs and get out of there.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
The issue with educational institutions banning Napster, Hotline, or any other server type apps is not sensorship. To try and twist this into a sensorship issue is ludicrous. Plain and simple, it's a bandwidth issue. It's wrong for someone or two or three someones to use 90% of the bandwidth meant to serve 1000. That's what Napster does. Quit trying to change the issue here. You go to school to get an education, and to some degree, to learn social skills. Napster, by hogging as much bandwidth as it can get, hurts your fellow students by making their internet access slower. The lesson learned here? It's mine! All mine! You can't have any, because I'm using it right now. Too bad if you've got studying to do, and need the internet to do it. I'm using all the available bandwidth to get my illegal MP3s! ::shakes head::
See, this is exactly what I'm taking about. Anonymous Coward posted a reply to my post which is totaly incomprehensible to me. This makes me think that Anonymous Coward is one of the selfish and antisocial users of Napster. Now, I'm not saying all Napster users are selfish and antisocial, just the ones who glom up their schools' bandwidth so that their fellow students don't have enough left to carry on with their studies on the 'net.
I study in a university here in Brazil. Whenever I connect from home (dialing to a paid ISP), I start fetchmail -- configured to poll my pop account at the university every 5 minutes.
Other students have Quake servers running at the campus, use Napster and download porn all day. Our network is a real lag, and you can only use it on Sundays or after midnight.
So what happened: one day I received an e-mail from the network administrator complaining that I was wasting the university's bandwidth! Come on, ICQ is much worse than fetchmail.
-- .sig?
Have you seen my
This space left intentionally blank.
As a dorm resident as well as a student employed to help manage the (1000-node) labnet, I see both sides of the situation. Dorm residents are generally benign web surfers, but a select few truly understand the massive bandwidth available and have capitalized on it. A few examples of what goes on here:
In short, what does my campus do? Nothing. They are painfully unaware of hacking, misuse, and abuse. Anything goes here. Policies are in place, but the only time action is taken is when a dire emergency occurs.
University of California San Diego can be added to that list, however I earlier stated that my school is making an effort to fix this problem. They are actually increasing bandwidth and said they are going to allow Napster's use next year, guess we will just have to wait and see.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
In this case, the "fun" uses of audio-IP and network games will be supplanted by (say) virtual collaborative environments that actually work. These become serious academic research tools, and suddenly MP3 bandwidth is all in the noise. (No pun intended.) I remember (long ago) trying to explain why I needed to modem through a phone line that wasn't screwed up by our campus PBX, explaining to administrators who couldn't understand why anybody would want to "modem" to anything. What's wrong with snail-mailing floppy disks?
* FADE IN *
Prospective freshmen are toured around a college campus with their families. The alpha high-school geek asks the lovely tour-guide coed, "Does this campus have a snack bar?"
"Yes, but it closes at 9:30 each night and all it serves is pre-packaged food."
"How about soccer fields?"
"We have two fields, but they're not co-located with the main campus. You have to drive five miles to get there."
"Are the dorms wired?"
* dramatic pause * "Every dorm is connected to every Unreal server on every planet in the entire universe."
"How is that...possible?"
Qwest -- Ride the Light
* FADE OUT *
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
Never in my life have I seen the social cesspool of society swirl down the toilet like the preverbal brown log skidding in a downward spiral streaking the sides of the white bowl of life. To those that responded with intelligent comments, thank you. Kudos to Taco - great post! Idiots, I am disgusted by the lame comments - bring me your finest meats and cheeses next time. Thanks, The Central Scrutinizer
Slirp is banned at the University of Ottawa.
Internet access at my university was a huge, powerful campus-wide network that only ran Pine and a FORTRAN compiler - not much good to anyone. I used my account to run SLIRP to create a dialup ppp connection to my home PC, but the sysadmins had a fit. I tried just renaming the binary and that worked for a while but then they booted me off for good.
What a waste of resources that was - all this hardware and effort to maintain a big expensive e-mail machine. In the end it worked out better for me, since I discovered cable modems and Linux masquerading!
Here at Northeastern (where napster was created), we had to petition to get the ICQ ports opened. I have to tunnel (via SSH) to check my non-university POP accounts. Oh, and games seem fully blocked so that we can't play them except with each other.
...at the same time, I can get a free copy of ms office 98, norton antivirus, adobe photoshop, and countless other useful programs from our Department of Academic Comupting! Clearly, this is a bandwidth issue.
They are considering blocking Napster, which would be the one thing I'd approve of - it eats more bandwidth than games would. Those of us who _really_ want mp3s will use alternate methods, such as hotline or carracho, ftp, or http. There are no restrictions on the Network Neighborhood, and now that ICQ is open, I do a lot of file transfers over that. There are a few proxy servers out there, and some game servers with different port addresses - find them or make your own.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
excuse me??? your whole campus has one t1 line? like quit yer bitchin' and some real bandwidth. no wonder napster is using 25% of it.
Like as I said in like my post I am like on a small liberal arts campus with like 1000 students which are like all under-grads. Like A T1 is like plenty of bandwidth for like that few number of people. Like this isn't like Ohio State with like enough people to like be a small city.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
excuse me??? your whole campus has one t1 line? like quit yer bitchin' and some real bandwidth. no wonder napster is using 25% of it.
They were secretly randomly monitering here (University of Wisconsin - Superior)not to stop Napster, but to stop students from viewing porno. If a student was caught, his/her account was frozen until they went to the computer office to justify their actions. This was halted just yesterday. It turned out that the head of the labs had made taken these actions on his own without the knowledge or OK of the chancellor or provost. A few students found out and brought this obnoxous practice out into the open.
My old man's a webgeek for the main library at Boise State University, and their PCs only have web browsers on 'em. They blacklist about 2,000 sites at the proxy server because they're games and/or web mail. The library doesn't say "You can't do those things", only "You can't use the library's scant PCs to do it."
I think ultimately this gets back to the issue of rights vs. privileges, which historically geeks have a rotten history of looking at realistically.
This is an easy one. All Universities Public and Private (like companies) protect their assets on campus from people who aren't students. I'm not allowed in the U of M library because I'm not a student. Now, if students want to download Mp3's, that's their business. But you could probably cut the traffic in half if you cut off the "Server" function of Napster outside the campus. If you don't let non-students pull your bandwidth from the Napster "servers" on campus, you'd probably get some of your bandwidth back. And most students wouldn't care as long as they can steal their mp3 from offsite. Just set up screening for a protocol or port outside the campus and ban the traffic going out the router.
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
A good friend of mine is a network admin for a small campus. On a campus with 700 users, 90% of the traffic was being used by 2 users via Napster.
Now, this is just rediculous.
As I understand it, they are currently looking into setting up some bandwith throttles. However, in the mean time, they banned Napster. What it flat came down to was people using Napster were bringing their Internet access to a grinding halt, and it was this guy's responsibility to insure that the Internet connection could be used for academic related purposes.
It is worth noting that this is a campus that has never banned any other sites. I also suspect the ban will be lifted once bandwith throttling is in place. However, I firmly support any network admin doing what is necessary to prevent a handful of users from disrupting service for everyone.
All operating systems suck. Some just suck less than others. (and some are virtual black holes)
audiogalaxy has a cool client which does bascially the same things as Napster. Their service is small enough that it hasn't been banned yet.
Also note that they are still in beta and searches can take awhile at peak times.
I wonder if when public libraries started popping up if book manufacturers complained that they would go out of business because noone would want to buy books anymore.
Even with easy access to a library, I still tend to buy a fair number of books, sometimes just as a way to say thanks to the author.
Here at UCONN napster has been blocked due to bandwidth and 'potential legal issues.' And, yes, my pipe is indeed even fatter now that it has been blocked. I havent heard about decss being banned, i honestly dont think they even know what it is :(, although i am working on setting up netBSD on some old mac hardware i picked up in an engineering department hallway (i find hallways are awesome for hardware salvage - why bother with dumpsters?) for the purpose of a deCSS (etc) mirror.
However, even worse things are afoot around here... They're changing the student conduct code to include language that allows the university to literally take whatever disciplinary action they want for whatever reason they choose against any student. One of the key changes is a section that allows them to 'discipline' (read kick out) students caught violating the conduct code off university grounds.
The language has been kept purposely vague in order to allow them complete freedom to interpret students actions and punish them any way they see fit. It wasn't even done in anything remotely approaching a subtle fashion - the only thing that kept me from laughing when i read it was the sheer feeling of horror rising in my gut.
For years universities have been bastions of freedom and learning. Lets not allow that to change.
That's quite possible the silliest thing I've ever heard. Ideally, it's a beautiful idea, but let's face it; if people have (previously) banned things that have no legitimate purpose, they're probably using them for illegitimate purposes. That's why there are things that are illegal to own now.
--
--
It's not the rambling I object to, so much as the mumbled incoherancies...
uuencode the text. problem fixed.
-------------------------
Stupid people suck.
I go to University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I guess I'm not an admin, but I do work for our campus network. Our concern is mostly bandwidth. If you're running a server (proxy, web, mp3, etc.), legal or illegal, that is interfering with the ability of others to connect, or slowing them down considerably, you will be asked to take your server offline. If you do as they ask, no problems. Only if you're being a jerk about the whole thing would they consider any type of disciplinary action.
If your activities aren't bothering anyone else, you can pretty much do as you please. Not a bad deal.
The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.
I hope the banning of napster diminishes. The truth is copyrighting music isn't helping very many of the millions of musicians who play music becuase they have a passion for music. Music copyrights help primarily a small handfull of already rich music industry investors and executives, and a tiny pool of over-hyped, extremely lucky, often mediocre musicians. I firmly believe that musical creativity will surge as a result of the ability to freely trade songs, just as the open source movements explosive growth has been made possible by the internet and its effects on the difficulty of trading code. Unfortunately those with the resources to effect new legistlation to make it legal and simple to trade music are those who have the most to loose. The music industry has many millions of dollars to spend on lobying and increasing the lenghts of copyrights, where as are brilliant societal visionaries like myself tend to have very limited resources. The continued use of napster on campuses will make is much more difficult for the music industry to shut it down. The more widespread, popular and accepted napster is, the more people will understand its incredible benefits. If universities are having banwidth problems its becuase they don't have enough bandwith. As more and more high bandwith applications become important fixtures of our day to day life, bandwith will have to increase. Napster is one of those applications.
Two issues. Implementing a QoS solution might be too costly for people (Yes, even some universities) to create. Maintenance? Don't even get me started on that one. Lastly, even after working in a QoS solution, wouldn't newer software be able to circumvent the protection supposedly offered by QoS by diverting network traffic to a higher priority channel in a static QoS structure?
-Caracal
"There is no snooze button on a kitten who wants breakfast!"
"If I own a CD, I can do anything I please with it, short of redistributing the music."
Alas, not true. You can SELL that same CD to any potential buyer. What are the legalities, for example, of selling a "used" CD to a buyer for more than the price YOU paid for it? Assuming of course, that it was a rare/out of stock item...
ti_dave
Something tells me they won't enjoy this. Anyhow, for your education, and enjoyment:
u ).
.
TO: The NYU Community
In order to ensure NYU-NET availability is sufficient for NYU work,
Information Technology Services (ITS) has been forced to take steps
to restrict traffic related to an outside service called "Napster," which
enables distribution of MP3 music files over the Internet.
In addition, in order to protect the security of NYU systems, we require
that Napster software be removed from any NYU-owned machine on
which it is installed. And we strongly recommend that it be removed
from personally owned computers that are connected to NYU-NET.
The surging increase in Napster traffic on NYU-NET and with the
Internet during recent weeks indicates that this service has become quite
well known and popular at the University. However, it seems much less
well understood that, because of the way the Napster service works, using
it conflicts directly with the agreement an individual makes when:
(a) You register for an ITS account or any school or department account
permitting network access (see "Responsibilities of All NYU Computer
and Network Users," at http://www.nyu.edu/its.standards/respon.nyu);
(b) You connect your personal computer to NYU ResNet in the student
residences (see "ResNet Accounts - Specific Policies and Information,"
at http://www.nyu.edu/its/standards/resnet-policy.ny
NYU's "World Wide Web Policies and Procedures" also applies (see
http://www.nyu.edu/its/standards/webpolicy.nyu)
Two main issues force ITS to highlight these policies and take steps to
restrict use of Napster: network availability and computer security.
In addition, individuals who have been using Napster need to be aware of
some further considerations.
1) Network Availability
Traffic on NYU-NET increased dramatically in the past few weeks.
Our analyses show that this increase is due largely to surging
use of Napster, particularly on and from the ResNet leg of NYU-NET.
Last Thursday night, for instance, before we put emergency restrictions
into place, NYU's Internet connection was operating at a dangerously
high 98% of capacity. After the restrictions, traffic on the link dropped
back to the more typical 60% of capacity.
It's not necessarily apparent when you're using Napster that you're
generating much network traffic. Once you've downloaded your MP3 files,
you might think you're done. But Napster in its default mode makes it
possible for everyone else on the Internet to download files from your
computer without your awareness or approval. Depending on the
popularity of your collection, this feature can multiply many times
the network traffic generated by your machine.
This Napster traffic surge has already interfered with the availability of
the network for normal NYU work-related connections, which include
University projects that require consistent network availability. NYU-NET
resources exist to further the academic mission of the University. Though
these resources are substantial, they are not infinite. Given the Napster
surge, ITS has no choice but to restrict the Napster load on NYU-NET,
so that the network remains available for NYU-related purposes. ITS had
been planning to upgrade our link to the Internet as soon as the next
generation of capacity comes online, later this year. That planning
continues. In the meantime at least, these restrictions are essential.
2) Computer Security
It's not readily apparent that, by running Napster, you can introduce
serious security risks to your machine and the other files on it, as well
as to other computers on the network. Napster disregards the security
of individual computers in misleading ways that are unprecedented.
In the default configuration, when you download your first music file from
Napster, you automatically also download Napster software that turns
your computer into a file server. This software allows any other machine
on the Internet to connect to your computer and download copies of your files
without your knowledge or approval. Triggered by a request from the other
machine, the Napster software on your computer then searches your hard
drive and any mounted network drives for "music files to share."
Unprotected file sharing and file scanning create significant risks of
compromise to your computer and your privacy, as well as to other computers
on NYU-NET. There is no way to tell what malicious functions may be
performed by the software you automatically download with the music or
what modifications may have been made to the music files themselves.
This security issue is further complicated by Napster's decision to release
the source code for the software it downloads onto your machine. The
resulting proliferation of authors and versions makes your machine even
more vulnerable to unexpected intrusions.
Further considerations for those using Napster
Because Napster can automatically turn your computer into a server, it
increases the possibility of automatically turning you into a distributor of
music files without the creator's permission. Distribution is a step more
serious than simply copying these files and can be a violation of U.S.
copyright laws. In this regard, it's worth noting that Napster keeps a
database of the IP addresses of all the individual computers that use
Napster software to distribute MP3 files.
Thanks for your cooperation in addressing what so quickly became a serious
threat to both network availability and computer security at NYU. We will,
of course, continue to monitor the situation and may take further steps
as they become necessary.
Marilyn McMillan
Chief Information Technology Officer
New York University
Here is a copy of the email that NYU sent out 02/29/30 at 1:03 AM. The language is sort of weak but it's obvious that they don't want napster being used. They claim that one night the network reached 98% capacity:
u ).
.
TO: The NYU Community
In order to ensure NYU-NET availability is sufficient for NYU work,
Information Technology Services (ITS) has been forced to take steps
to restrict traffic related to an outside service called "Napster," which
enables distribution of MP3 music files over the Internet.
In addition, in order to protect the security of NYU systems, we require
that Napster software be removed from any NYU-owned machine on
which it is installed. And we strongly recommend that it be removed
from personally owned computers that are connected to NYU-NET.
The surging increase in Napster traffic on NYU-NET and with the
Internet during recent weeks indicates that this service has become quite
well known and popular at the University. However, it seems much less
well understood that, because of the way the Napster service works, using
it conflicts directly with the agreement an individual makes when:
(a) You register for an ITS account or any school or department account
permitting network access (see "Responsibilities of All NYU Computer
and Network Users," at http://www.nyu.edu/its.standards/respon.nyu);
(b) You connect your personal computer to NYU ResNet in the student
residences (see "ResNet Accounts - Specific Policies and Information,"
at http://www.nyu.edu/its/standards/resnet-policy.ny
NYU's "World Wide Web Policies and Procedures" also applies (see
http://www.nyu.edu/its/standards/webpolicy.nyu)
Two main issues force ITS to highlight these policies and take steps to
restrict use of Napster: network availability and computer security.
In addition, individuals who have been using Napster need to be aware of
some further considerations.
1) Network Availability
Traffic on NYU-NET increased dramatically in the past few weeks.
Our analyses show that this increase is due largely to surging
use of Napster, particularly on and from the ResNet leg of NYU-NET.
Last Thursday night, for instance, before we put emergency restrictions
into place, NYU's Internet connection was operating at a dangerously
high 98% of capacity. After the restrictions, traffic on the link dropped
back to the more typical 60% of capacity.
It's not necessarily apparent when you're using Napster that you're
generating much network traffic. Once you've downloaded your MP3 files,
you might think you're done. But Napster in its default mode makes it
possible for everyone else on the Internet to download files from your
computer without your awareness or approval. Depending on the
popularity of your collection, this feature can multiply many times
the network traffic generated by your machine.
This Napster traffic surge has already interfered with the availability of
the network for normal NYU work-related connections, which include
University projects that require consistent network availability. NYU-NET
resources exist to further the academic mission of the University. Though
these resources are substantial, they are not infinite. Given the Napster
surge, ITS has no choice but to restrict the Napster load on NYU-NET,
so that the network remains available for NYU-related purposes. ITS had
been planning to upgrade our link to the Internet as soon as the next
generation of capacity comes online, later this year. That planning
continues. In the meantime at least, these restrictions are essential.
2) Computer Security
It's not readily apparent that, by running Napster, you can introduce
serious security risks to your machine and the other files on it, as well
as to other computers on the network. Napster disregards the security
of individual computers in misleading ways that are unprecedented.
In the default configuration, when you download your first music file from
Napster, you automatically also download Napster software that turns
your computer into a file server. This software allows any other machine
on the Internet to connect to your computer and download copies of your files
without your knowledge or approval. Triggered by a request from the other
machine, the Napster software on your computer then searches your hard
drive and any mounted network drives for "music files to share."
Unprotected file sharing and file scanning create significant risks of
compromise to your computer and your privacy, as well as to other computers
on NYU-NET. There is no way to tell what malicious functions may be
performed by the software you automatically download with the music or
what modifications may have been made to the music files themselves.
This security issue is further complicated by Napster's decision to release
the source code for the software it downloads onto your machine. The
resulting proliferation of authors and versions makes your machine even
more vulnerable to unexpected intrusions.
Further considerations for those using Napster
Because Napster can automatically turn your computer into a server, it
increases the possibility of automatically turning you into a distributor of
music files without the creator's permission. Distribution is a step more
serious than simply copying these files and can be a violation of U.S.
copyright laws. In this regard, it's worth noting that Napster keeps a
database of the IP addresses of all the individual computers that use
Napster software to distribute MP3 files.
Thanks for your cooperation in addressing what so quickly became a serious
threat to both network availability and computer security at NYU. We will,
of course, continue to monitor the situation and may take further steps
as they become necessary.
Marilyn McMillan
Chief Information Technology Officer
New York University
christower
I'm tired of bombing the universe
i know it won't make much sense to some of you, because it's "EVIL CENSORSHIP BY THE MAN" as you claim. However, napster is just a huge bandwidth hog. At the "request" of THE.net (Texas Higher Education network) my school banned napster. I personally am glad. In the first 5 or 6 weeks of this semester we were getting awful transfer rates at any given time below 1k/s. Since napster has been banned our bandwidth has gone to the point where at any given moment you can have (at the worst) 3 or 4 k/s, and at the best, 150k or so. I for one am glad it's gone.
This sig intentionally left blank.
at my college (it's a suny) not only have they banned napser, but they've also banned a program called imesh (www.imesh.com), you can't play certain games on off campus server. ALL campus FTP activity (upload and download) is limited to 800kbps. Of course, our main problem is the fact that we have a t1 for about 4000 - 5000 users, they still seem to limit us on almost anything aside from viewing webpages. It wouldn't be so bad if this was a free service, but i have to pay every semester for my internet access (don't have a choice). I guess it just really bugs me because sometimes i download ISO's (legal ones, linux =) ) and it takes me a century and a half. Then again i guess that's just me abusing my internet privlages at college.
Just thought I'd let you all know about http://www.napigator.com. It allows you to use Napster without going to 208.184.x.x. Most servers still use 8888, but they don't have to. Heck, people could put up a whole distributed Alter-Napst if they wanted to.
Just wanted to illustrate that where there's a block, there's incintive to find a way around it.
viva la resistance...
You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.
Hmmm...something interesting about those graphs...once Napster was banned, incoming traffic got cut by roughly 60%, but outgoing traffic went to zero! (No, of course, it only went near zero, indistinguishable from 0 on that scale.) So can't universities just set some sort of per-capita per-diem upload cap, and free up all of that outgoing bandwidth? Or just go asyncronous (i wish I could spell) somehow? It wouldn't cut down on downloading, or recieving any illegal material, but it would sure go a long way to solving that bandwidth problem...
--Josh Rosenberg (Colbey)
You know, other than First Person shooters in general, I can't think of any that's as technically dissected as Starcraft... So I can say with honesty, if everyone on my campus was playing Brood War over the Lan, it still wouldn't take up as much bandwidth as a half dozen people downloading 128-bit four minute songs off napster...
Eh, who am I kidding? Everyone wants to play Nox, not BW...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
I agree, the universities do have a right to curb the usage of Napster to allow for the equal usage of their bandwidth. I'm a CS student, and in the computer labs, I think we have a T3 connection, I'm not certain, but I know its a hell of a lot faster than a T1 connection.
But anyhow, sometimes during the day, when I sometimes need to log on the net to do research on one thing or another, or to even check my mail, it feels as if I come across a bottleneck. I'm pretty certain that students aren't checking their emails every microsecond, so it lead me to wonder if one or several of the computers are running a Napster server. Either downloading music to the computer or uploading it to another.
I don't think that the right thing for the universities to do is to completely block these Napster servers, since that would be the same thing as censoring it. But I do agree that they should curb its usage to a certain percentage of their bandwidth so that everyone can have equal access to it, in order for them to get their work done.
My opinion might be redundant on this message board, but when you're on a high speed ethernet connection, and it sometimes feel that you can connect faster on your 33.6 modem at home, you do get a little annoyed.
_________________________
_________________________
This comment was cybernetically engineered from 100% recycled electrons.
NO. Throttling doesn't work, especially when you have institutional policies almost guaranteeing as fast a connection as possible. At my university, where I work as a sysadmin while in grad school, we are getting ready to pull the plug on Napster. A two day test showed a 45 to 60 percent drop in bandwidth usage when access was gunned. We have a Technology Fee which forces the students to pay 100 bucks more a semester for high-speed access in their dorm rooms. When the bandwidth dries up and the helpdesk phones call with students screaming about the fees they pay, then drastic measures should be taken. Of course the irony is that they are the ones hogging with Napster. Napster is not content to a user anymore than some cat using the phone book to find your house to rob it is content. As a musician, I have deep problems with people stealing music from artists and their investors and I have a problem with a service that tells them which house has its doors unlocked and where the silver and china is.
In an article in our campus newspaper, the head of the OIT stated that the reason was purely bandwidth-related. While I'm sure that this did have a large impact on the decision, it made me a little suspicious to see that the bulk of the article was talking about why mp3s are illegal, and how our college had received "friendly" letters from the RIAA asking us to stop certain students from running MP3 servers. I would be surprised if this didn't factor into the decision as well.
You have a few good points. But what you fail to realize is that the "wet" infrastructure is basically comprised of other students. Our SA's and SE's were nothing more than sophomores willing to take $7 an hour to troubleshoot connection problems. I'm not sure where you live, but in most areas a T1 is approximately $1000 a month (no, not frame relay). Considering additional bandwidth and the cheaper cost of buying in "bulk" bandwidth - I think a dorm could very easily afford this by charging $20 a month. The cost is SIGNIFIGANTLY reduced when you have about 5 or 6 thousand people sharing the cost of the bandwidth.
As for the professionals needed to keep this network up and running (yes, i realize that there ARE real life Engineers mixed in there too), at Mizzou our phone and ethernet charges were both regulated by Mizzou Telecom; Basically a company within the U. Being that we had additional charges and such for this Telecom service it probably averaged out to about $30-40 a month for ethernet access when it cam down to it. So...if USWest (here in Denver) can charge people $30 a month for DSL and still operate at a signifigant profit, i'm sure a federally subsidized college can accomodate its students rather well.
BTW - i was paying $18,000 a year to go to that hole of a school...i feel damned well entitled to at least a little friggin' bandwidth.
-FluX
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Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Like this is a new thing. I can't believe no one else was around when SysAdmins were going crazy from all the mudders and ircers back 10 years ago.
Just another example of purpose or resources vs. free speach and people wanting something for nothing.
My school has about 25,000 people attending, and maybe 10,000 on campus. I haven't checked recently, but as of last year we were at 7% bandwith utilization. I can only assume that we are much higher, maybe 20 or 25%. Still, that's a lot of room to grow.
I found yesterday that our school had not banned napster (I don't personally use it, but others do, and they come to me with their problems), but limited the speeds to under 3k/second, where once we would get 100-300k/second.
Most of the people here don't like it, but I think this is an excellent solution. It doesn't deny us any "freedoms", we can still download mp3s, but it essentially makes napster ineffective as a means to do so.
And if it means more bandwith for me, then I applaud my network administrators.
But if they were to ban dialpad.com (or related services), they'd find me at their front door, ready to whoop some ass. Let's just hope it doesn't come to that.
Synergy is your friend
Give this boy a moderation point, he's right! Aah, bandwith, and it's all for me! -a CU student
Synergy is your friend
apparently, ICMP blocking was the route taken by the noc at my school. all of a sudden, no more ping or traceroute outside our class B. It sucks that i have to pay for others' actions.
Any illegal activity done using University property should lead to banning of usage or expulsion.
Working for the (other) man
Actually I work in the real world now and I regulary check the network drives. In my last company we were having space issues and I took 100's of MB worth of porn off the network and informed the people who had put it there that if they continued to use company facilities we would inform their relevant managers and directors and the MD.
Working for the (other) man
Games were banned, pornography banned, materials in breach of out equal opportunities and dignity policies were banned, cracking banned, all illegal activity banned.
Sounds draconian? We also had the right to throw people off terminals if they were not working and we needed to work, as often they were taken up by people e-mailing or surfing when there were no terminals free (although I just used the x-terminals that we had as no body touched them.)
I think the policy was right. I was there for an education and the pc's had been brought to educate me. If I want to do that stuff I should pay for it, buy a pc and get on line.
People who are whinging that they can't use Napster at uni. Well, I would allow it, but charge you for the bandwith used on an account basis, and anyone abusing the system would be banned. Sound tough, well universities are there for education, not for you to get a free ride. And to those wo pay fees, well the fees are paying for your education, not for you to have free access to p0rn.
Also badwidth is an issue, the majority of bandwith that universities use isn't legitimate edcational use (unless you are playing guess the cup size....) and this has to be paid for by the university and therefore by the taxpayer (in the UK) and the fee payer in other systems.
As for the UK, JANET is a joke as firms con a link by funding university projects...... But that is another matter.
Working for the (other) man
When I was taking the tour of my University, WVU, they touted the computer networks as a way to cut down on long distance phone bills. They said, with the computer labs and the in dorm network access you can avoid having to pay long distance to call home. Hmm... billing it as a communications tool... Now admittidly (spelling?) they havn't banned it, but I imagine the same practice occurs at the University you work for. So that seems a little unfair that you would claim a use for the network and then ban that use!
Billy Transue
bill-transue@NOcoolmailSPAM.net
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
Thank you for you enlightened views. You are 100% right on the "students will find another way." Recently WVU banned Napster, a friend called me and told me, I was working on a paper at the time and I dropped everything and found a working public proxy for him to use. Took maybe 10 mins. We then spread the word. Resulting in that proxy being found. But rest assured we found another one and kept it secret, I've told people of other proxies, just not the one I use. The point is you can't stop the flow once it goes. I guess....
Billy Transue
bill-transue@NOcoolmailSPAM.net
Open Source, Open Standards, Open Minds
I'm not sure how much bandwith multiplayer games actually take up. Does anyone know how much bandwith do multiplayer games actually take up? I wonder if it depends on the game? :-)).
Generally, MP games take up a bit (but not a whole lot) of bandwidth, on the serverside. Clients don't really use up that much bandwidth (in my personal experience, I can play UT while I'm downloading stuff w/ Napster and host a webserver...all on my cable modem
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
Hell, while we're at it, let's ban the biggest bandwidth hogs of all:
Banner Advertising.
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
It come right down to who's paying. At a private school, aren't the students who pay their lab fees and tuition buying the bandwidth? In those cases, it's a matter of how to distribute the cost of additional bandwidth. In government schools, WE are paying for the bandwidth (at least subsidizing it.) and I can think of better things to pay for than some college kids IP Phone calls.
"Last I checked, ripping a CD (you owned) wasn't illegal"
;-)
The point of Napster is to get MP3's when you don't own the CD's. But you knew that. The use of Napster is inherently illegal. I only use it to download files I'm to lazy to rip from CD's I already own
Psst. Wanna buy some ocean front Kansas property?
I went to a private school and they only had a T1 connection which they recieved an "education" discount on from the phone company. Back before the web exploded that was enough, but today if just half the student body is running a server of any type full time, it dosen't take long to soak up that connection. Yes you pay for your education, but convince the administration that running Quake, Unreal, Napster, etc. is part of your education. Convince them that paying for high bandwidth access is more important then paying for good academic staff. Money is a limited resource, if they have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to increase bandwidth or restrict the use of their current bandwidth, the choice is pretty obvious. Universities are connected for academic purposes first, is it really suprising that they are trying to preserve that purpose? Banning network games, mp3 and IP telephony is not censorship folks. Calling it such is like saying the government censors your right to ride a tricycle down the middle of a free way. You can ride your tricycle, but not on the freeway.
"The avalanch has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote." -Kosh
In the US, the freedom from censorship protected by the first amendment only relates to censorship by the government. A University is a private institution.
Second, I can really feel for the sysadmins running university networks. Their servers are already enough of a headache: Insufficient hardware and meatware resources, many MANY accounts to administer with *high* turnover, complex mixed environments etc.
Napster's security implications are a little frightening. Auto-configuring proxy settings to set up *any* computer on a network as a file server?
Plus, the fact that it has *no* justifiable redeeming qualities as a *legal* tool means that I don't think they should have to take the risk to have it running and chewing up their bandwidth. Anyone who's ever seen the software knows this. Illegal music outnumbers legal music by some ungodly ratio.
University internet accounts are provided FOR EDUCATION PURPOSES. They're subsidized by the tuition fees, which are in turn, subsidized by the government.
If you want to download Warez, Mp3z and pr0n, go do it on a personal internet account.
I don't beleive that a user of a network has 'rights' to completely open, uncontrolled access to do whatever they want with that network, especially when it's still kind of gray where the responsability of the service provider ends in terms of the actions of the service users.
*IDEA* based filtering, forbidding access to, say, a website about interracial marriage, or the Democratic Party's home page or stuff like that is a whole other barrel of fish.
-Greg
My university has banned at least one student from running a netcam out of his dorm room. Also, windows file sharing. All computers infected with Back Orifice (found using a port scan), have their connections deactivated. ICQ has been turned off before. Ident is blocked. Also, running a server of any kind is not allowed on the campus network.
Eh...
Isn't it interesting that in the "porn in the library" debate, the posts moderated most highly were basically of the form "I can do it if I want to." No mention or concern with reagrd to the fact that the library's computers and network resources belong to the *library* - not *you* - tax dollars be damned.
In contrast, in this napster debate, the moderators have honored a 5 on posts that point out that universities have every right to dictate what happens or doesn't happen on *their* network backbone. Like the library, some of my money goes toward this stuff, why can't I use it the way I want to (for *both* public and private universities, tuition *and* tax dollars)?
Its time to put up or shut up Slashdot. People care what you think. Don't allow the popular press to label us as a bunch of whiny hypocrites. Either the people who own that computer can tell you what to do or they can't - and it shouldn't metter if those owners are librarians (who we are not) - or university network admins (who many of us are). Which is it?
-f
Aren't the results for the number of Colleges banning Slashdot going to be a bit skewed?
And who exactly is banning those Rabbits? Can't we get them under Heightism laws? Or Speciesism laws at least.
Well, I agree. There does seem to be a contradiction there, so I'll change my mind about what I'd approve of.
I think I'd be quite happy to have them monitoring every packet I send and receive as long as they make it quite clear exactly what they are going to spy on in advance, and made sure that the same rule applied to everyone.
I can understand banning Napster.
I can understand banning Gaming.
I can even understand banning Telephony.
But isn't the purpose of Usenet meant to be for experts to exchange knowledge. Thats what a schools all about isn't it. All they need to do is set up their own NNTP server that doesn't handle any of the binaries groups. Its not like it will take up a huge amount of bandwidth.
Where is the student input on these issues? Don't we live in a democracy. Sure, it's annoying if the badnwidth is being hogged for one purpose, but aren't there some compromises? How about if universities set up a few official Napster servers?
I suspect when universities object to this obvious compromise, the true nature of their reasoning for banning Napster will come to light. Simply, concern over lawsuits from the RIAA mafia.
Quite frankly, I don't pay taxes so that my local university can act as a policeman for some industry group. Let the RIAA thugs come after people pirating crappy pop albums.
This takedown of Internet tools also amounts to an infringement of academic freedom. Who's the university to decided what is an appropriate intellectual or entertainment interest of the student? Perhaps the widespread use of Napster servers is akin to somebody checking out half the books from the library. The solution is to put a reasonable limit on the amount of books, not ban them entirely from the library.
The real alternative to the RIAA and their heavy-handed tactics is for people to support truly alternative bands, who aren't on major labels. Think about the alternative zines provide to those slick corporate magazines and you'll see what I'm talking about.
It isn't a violation of rights. The college owns the network and as such they have the right to ban anything they don't see as fitting into the academic mission of the college. Because we _could_ ban Napster does this mean we _should_? This is the more difficult question. The reason Napster is so powerful is it sets up users who would not normally serve out information to do so. This drastically increases the amount of people serving information clogging network lines. Before Napster, mp3 servers where so few and high volume they stuck out and were easily found and corrected. What we as admins of a college network have decided to do is scan our network for napster servers and email users educating them as to the bandwith and legal concerns with running the software. This alone has drasticaly reduced usage. I was shocked to find most people did not actually know many of these issues. The next step is to look at top bandwith users and put bandwith caps on machines. This is a very time consuming process on a large network and something that costs a decent amount of time and money. Most Univeristies merely block napster because they would rather spend their time dealing with improving services rather then become the copyright/bandwith police. Although I understand this view many new napster clone programs have begun to emerge and it seems important to attack a bandwith concern by limiting bandwith abusers not all users of a program (be it questionably legal or not). I just don't see it as a violation of rights. The college pays the internet line bills and owns the network, they can do what they want with it. It is important to keep in mind that college internet services are provided for academic purposes, it is NOT a right.
$80/semester is a fantastic deal for high-speed acccess
That's how I usually look at it (I'm also from Cornell). I think they're changing to dynamic ip's next year, though, which really irks me. I like knowing I can ftp in and host web pages. Now I'll probably have to find work-arounds... uhg.
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
I just got this in the inbox from the folks from the CU admin.
-----------------------
MESSAGE SIZE LIMIT Beginning Monday, Mar. 6, 2000, you will be unable to send or receive very large e-mail messages between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., Monday through Friday. During those times, both the Postoffice1 and Postoffice2 mail servers will reject any individual message that is larger than 15 MB (megabyte) in size.
Please note that the message size limit is increased to 100 MB between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. Monday through Friday, and throughout Saturday and Sunday.
The 15-MB daytime, weekday limit is a permanent change. It is intended to ensure that a very large e-mail message sent by or intended for one user does not adversely affect service for the rest of the community.
Fifteen MB equals 15,360 K (kilobytes). To reach 15 MB in plain text, you'd have to type over 15 million characters, or 6,500 pages in Microsoft Word (12-point Times and 1-inch margins). On average, only 1 percent of e-mail messages handled by the servers exceed this limit.
When a message does exceed the 15-MB size limit, it is almost always because large files have been attached to it. If you never send attached files, it is extremely unlikely that your messages would ever exceed the size limit.
The limit only applies to the size of an individual e-mail message. For example, you could send one 3-MB message to five people. But if you tried to send one 15-MB message to even just one person, your message would be refused.
The limit also affects messages sent to Cornell e-mail accounts from outside the university. For example, if a person from another university tried to send you a message that exceeded the 15-MB limit, the message would be bounced back to the sender and not delivered to you.
-----------------------
Well, that's just great... >8(
.sig last updated Jan. 14, 2000
I quite agree although I personally think that it is not unreasonable to charge for access, especially outside the university. Currently my university's policy for Halls and Colleges is that they can only access the outside world via http and can only download text. The reason for this is alledgedly the cost. Since the digital phone network does not allow the hall and college residents have a dialup account elsewhere this esentially means that most hall and college residents have very restricted home (ie from their room) access. Unfortunately the clowns^H^H^H^H^H^H ladies and gentlemen who run our net access have decided that making a user pays system sufficiently secure is too hard so the college people can't buy what those of us who live off campus routinely buy. To address the arguement of free access for study purposes - remember that those who live off campus don't get free home access for study purposes and that (here at least) all students regardless of where they live can come onto the campus and use a lab for free although even here the access is somewhat limited. Translation note for speakers of American: college != university college ~= hall ~= dorm
The last three lines should read:
Translation note for speakers of American:
college != university
college or hall ~= dorm
I attend West Chester University in Pennsylvania as a CS student. WCU has approximately a 10MB connection to the net that it essentially shares with all the other SSHE schools (State System of Higher Education), of which there are something like 10. They are all connected via ATM and then go out to the net from WCU over a 10MB connection provided by VoiceNet (ich!). Personally, I believe the internal network here sucks. Aside from that, the University is very open about what it allows/doesn't allow to go on with the campus network. Basically, you can't run any money-making scheme from a server hosted in your dorm room. Further more you can't use the university network to break the law, and you can't host a porn site. I know a bunch of people that run Napster and a few that have used IP calling. The problem with those two as I see it, is that there is only so much bandwidth to be used. I don't know a single person using Napster for research, nor do I know anyone using IP calling for research (if you were doing research and needed to make a phone call, you'd use a university phone anyway, since they'd be funding it). Anyhow, the purpose of a University network is education, not playing. Education comes first. If a University has limited funding for it's network connection, then it has to prioritize. Personally, if WCU were to ban Napster and IP calling on the grounds of preserving network bandwidth, I would support them. I would also begin a campaign to try and get better bandwidth. However, if they decided to do it for other reasons, I would oppose them, as would every other student. Luckily, this is one thing our administration is very much in tune with. Sam Wilson
My uni (www.essex.ac.uk) decided to stop all the elite script kiddies and ban "www.hack.co.za". We were foiled for all of about 1 minute, before trying the IP (212.186.238.95) and realising that Internet Explorer's content blocking really isn't up to all that much... So, looks like we can go back to 0wning the c4mpu5 once again!@#$
I think that it is important to remember that the internet going into a dorm is not just for school use. Students live in the dorm and I think that they have the right to view what ever they want to in their own homes. They pay taxes too you know.
Here at PSU Napster consumes an extremely large amount of bandwith. However, PSU CAC represenatives have decided to buy more bandwith for the campuses... I don't really like the idea of Napster, but I don't beleive it should be banned. It is rather annoying, as I have a kid sitting next to me in the lab using the thing... Ugh... Anyways :)
------- What exactly is real?
I worked as a student in the adminstrative officies at UC-Davis. I got a chance to look over some budger figures. In 1992, 3% of the college budget came from federal and/or state money. There was grant and subsidized loans given to students, but tuition only accounted for a total of 20% of the budget. The majority of the budget came from private donations. Further, the IT access for the student residence halls is payed for out of the fees they pay for housing.
Fight Spammers!
What's banned on my campus? Sex, booz, drugs, women and men alone in the same room, living off campus and getting scholarships, did I mantion booz? Did I mention my university is baptist? BTW, Napster isn't banned...
At West Virginia University, the internet access is included in our tuition, whether we like it or not. Only recently the University began blocking Napster without any warning or announcement. Also, the web site of the company that provides their access states that it is against the rules to run any Unix computer as a server. They say it is a security risk. They do provide support for setting up several *nix type OSes though. I wonder if they realize what a security risk all those windows computers can be?
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Dear ,
I wrote to you two weeks ago regarding slow network connections in the
Residence Halls. I am writing you today with an update. At present,
residence halls have high speed connections (100Mbs) to each other and to
all resources located on campus. Transfer rates to servers outside of
campus, however, may continue to be slow at times.
The amount of traffic from the residence halls to the outside world has
increased dramatically over the past few months. Residents who are using
large amounts of bandwidth to the outside world, by running the popular
software Napster or popular FTP and web servers, are greatly diminishing
network transfer rates for everyone else with a residence hall connection.
The residence halls share bandwidth with all other campus users, including
ongoing research projects which rely on consistent connection rates. To
ensure adequate bandwidth availability for all campus uses, the department
of Communication and Network Services has restricted the total amount of
bandwidth available to the residence halls for communication with the
outside world. The e-mail below from the Director of Communication and
Network Services provides details on the actions they have taken.
Residential Computing is continuing to work with Communication and Network
Services to achieve a balance between competing demands for bandwidth
throughout campus. We understand that current transfer rates from sites
beyond campus are slower than they have been in the past. If you are
currently using Napster or running a web server, we strongly encourage you
to stop. If you have a friends who are running Napster, we encourage you
to ask them to stop. Through increased resident education and ongoing
discussions with Communcation and Network Services, I will do my best to
improve network connectivity for all reshall students.
Please read the message from Communication and Network Services below for
more information.
Dedra Chamberlin
Manager, Residential Computing
***********************************************
>From Cliff Frost, Director of Communication and Network Services regarding
network connections in the residence halls:
Background:
The Berkeley campus pays approximately $600 per megabit/second/month for
connectivity to the worldwide Internet. (There are start-up costs not
included in that figure, and a base cost below which the total cost cannot
go, but that is a good approximation of our current cost.)
The Residence Hall networks are very well-connected to the rest of campus,
and to the Internet in general. This is accomplished via a 100
megabit/second connection between the residence halls and the rest of the
campus network.
Up until approximately November, 1999, the sustained use of the
Residence Hall network connection was approximately 15 megabits/second.
This was for all traffic--both with other campus sites and with the
Internet in general.
Recent History:
Coinciding with the tremendous popularity of "napster" (which is a very
nice tool in many ways) there has been a tremendous and rapid growth in
the campus's traffic to and from the Internet. This growth also
coincided with a similar growth to and from the Residence Halls.
In looking at the traffic patterns, and concerned about how we would
pay for the exploding use of the Internet, CNS staff noticed that traffic
across the 100 megabit/second connection to the Residence Halls had sprung
up to peaks of 40 megabits/second and a sustained level of 25. At that
point, CNS put a cap onto the traffic that the Residence Halls could
exchange with off-campus sites, at 20 megabits per second. Note that this
cap did NOT apply to traffic with other on-campus sites.
The effect of the 20 megabit/second cap was immediate. Traffic across
the link dropped to peaks of 22-25 megabits/second, implying that most of
the traffic across the link is with off-campus sites.
CNS later set the cap at 15 megabits/second and then to 10. From the
data gathered it appears that the Residence Halls exchange between 2 and 5
megabits/second with the rest of campus. All the rest of the traffic is
bound for the Internet.
Current Status:
At the request of Housing & Dining Services, CNS has temporarily raised
the cap to 15 megabits/second while we try to work out ways to manage
the explosive demand for Internet bandwidth from the Residence Halls.
Housing & Dining has asked for CNS's assistance in analyzing the situation
and developing potential solutions.
I don't think this was the particularly BEST way to get around Napster. Actually, I find this method grossly useless. Exactly HOW does this work to effectively distribute the load? The cap of the internet connection went on throughout finals over a period of 2-4 months.
I forget that Berkeley has an extreme dedication to their grad students by which all other students come second. This happened to be another fine example where by cutting of all the undergrads, they'd preserve the connection for the research labs.
From the numbers alone, I'd think that cost was as well a very large factor. *sigh* The latest cap was probably to average out the the active months and thus fix the budget. I can't help but feel a bit cheated for those students. If this is the method of our more prestigious schools, what will happen to the rest?
I know it has something to do with MP3s but what exactly is it?
I think you have mistaken routers for hubs. Routers do everything switches do and more. It might decrease delay slightly (if they have cheap routers), but the broadcast storms would suck. If they were in fact using hubs, it would 'DRAMASTICALLY' increase the local traffic, as you said.
I think most us (Napster users) forgot about the most important issue in this whole debate. All over the world, including here, colleges are the breeding pits for new ideas and movements for social reform. All the revolutions and civil rights movements started by students are too long to list here. What the hell does that have to do with Napster and MP3? very simple...
It was students who almost single handedly brought mp3s to everyone else's attention. I am willing to bet 50 years from now when people ask where the exchange of audio and video between people really took off MP3 will certainly be mentioned. And now Napster is fast becoming the model for rapid distribution of media. The overwellming demand for Napster will certainly lead ISP and backbone providers to restucture their networks to allow for Voice, Audio, and Video over IP. Who wins: everyone, and if it is at the expense of of a few bitches, so be it.
Why such strong language? These people think their use of the bandwidth is somehow more noble or more productive. Well, for the reasons stated above I think they are wrong. And should somehow this nee jerk reaction spread, universities will have a revolt on their hands.
What's the point of having all that bandwidth if you won't let people use it!?
If you actually get the filter up and running, would you mind letting me know? I'm a student here at Univ. of Maine Farmington, working for ResNet. The network admins got really sick of one or two people out of 2000 using 60% or so of the bandwith. Not that i blame them, we only have a fractional T1. This has stopped all the non-technical students from using it, but a good portion are still using it. Killing the napster protocol itself is the best solution.. maybe then we'll get to play some network games again over the internet. As of Monday, port 27015 was blocked incoming and outgoing... default server port for half-life. *sigh* there goes my stress relief. At any rate, my email address is ericw@nowonder.com .. Thanks in advance. ericw. "Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
at the risk of a "me too", my wife just asked me last night if I knew what Napster was...It's now banned from NYU
http://zonedefense.dhs.org
No sig is worth reading.
Well, first off I have napster plus I am a student. I like music alot, its main purpose is relaxation for stress. I understand that it is taking up to much bandwidth but we have to come to a medium somewere. Expecially, when finals come around and I get some new mp3's put them through my 300 watt amp its is like I am in another world. Would you perfer me to jump off of a building or get wasted! (music calms the savage beast, remember!)
Actually, I think you will find that at most Ineternet 2 institutions, any traffic to another Internet 2 institution will go over I2. So, if you have a file transfers between Napster users at different I2 institutions, you have a sigificant amount of I2 bandwidth being sucked up.
You can add NDSU too your list... The reason floated through the IT dept where I work: Regain control over the bandwith...there was a marked difference in outgoing vs. incoming and overall useage (or so we're told) though I do think that because of Napster's main use (easy access to mp3's) the ban passed much more easily and quickly than if someone proposed a ban on somthing like Spinner or some other streaming media service...
We haven't banned Napster but @ KSC Keene State College, aka Kinda Sorta College, we have banned Coke products. It's 100% pepsi. We haven't yet banned platforms other than windows but that is on it's way. If you use a mac you are treated like crap. I made a lot of money going around my dorm and getting windows to work. We have also banned thinking here @ KSC. In my science class we leared what an atom is the other day. I have been asked by people the amazing complex question of where and what is the UK? A popular bumper sticker here is "You can send me to collge, but you can't make me think!" So the question is, what is worse, banning thought or banning napster?
Gordito
I feel that I am in a fairly unique situation, as I am Brigham Young University, which is run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). On our campus, quite a lot of stuff is banned, such as alcohol, tobacco, even caffine. As far as the internet goes, I pay 12 bucks a month to get a 10m/sec LAN connection to multiple T1s, which is nice. The downside is that there is an extenive amount of filtering, under many categories, such as: sex adult nudity comedy (?) e-commerce -- This one just came on today, and I'm officially pissed. I can work my way around it by using my parent's aol account, but it's a pain. why should I not be able to buy things on the internet? Anyway, there are about 20 other categories, as near as I can tell. We can still use napster, though, and it's not hard to find mp3s, or even bootlegged versions of the matrix floating around our network. I wrote IT services a complaint about the ecommerce stuff, but have yet to reply. I think I'll write the president of the university if this doesn't get fixed. -Jonathan W.
I'm a sysadmin on Monmouth University (NJ). We've blocked Napster here in a futile attempt to alleviate internet congestion. We have a singleT1 with C&W which is saturated almost 24x7. However, this was a stab in the dark. I've come to find out that approximately 99.07% of our traffic is due to [adult] streaming live-video into our dorms. This is a little more difficult to tackle as there is "academic freedom" -- and looking at nude women qualifies as that.
Anyhow, we're currently in the process of getting two more T1's with C&W. Also, we're getting some heavy duty packet-shaping equipment and several cache engines. We still won't allow Napster though. If somebody complains loud enough, we'll turn Napster back on and then raid their dorm room the morning after for pirated music. Hey, they did it at CMU (was it?)
Well, here is something to think about... In a network situation, average delay can be calculated as: 1/( mu - lambda )
mu = bandwidth avaliable
lambda = average bandwidth used
As lambda approaches mu, ( mu - lambda ) becomes really small. In fact, when lambda is even 60% of mu, the delay starts to get huge and unbearable.
For an example of the effects of stopping napster, take a look at this:
http://www.uri.edu/mrtg/jvnc.html
Note how at week 8, outgoing traffic drops to nearly zero.
So, even sucking up a percentage of the bandwidth can really slow down access for all users.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
This is how you ban napster (assuming your firewall uses ipfwadm)
/sbin/ipfwadm -I -i deny -P tcp -S 208.184.216.222 8875
What concerns me is how the Internet it going to react to this. The age old saying about the Internet and routing around censorship seems to apply here.
From reading briefly about Stacheldraht it hides some control information inside of innocent ICMP packets. I see a future where things like napster get smart and start moving into protocols and traffic that are both general required not to be blocked (certain types of ICMP), and also very common (HTTP).
If we could piggyback napster into HTTP and have enough distributed servers that IP address blocking couldn't work how could you tell napster use from regular HTTP at the high traffic levels that we are seeing.
Sprinkle in the use of encryption and I think that in the future nothing will be sacred, in terms of reserved ports, and that whatever traffic is important to the masses will get through whatever is implemented to block it.
Already there are some concerns regarding the feasibility of IDS's in 100Mbit and Gigabit networks. Are we going to start needing dedicated Beowulf clusters just to analyze network traffic in close to real-time.
Once IPsec and IPv6 come into the picture will network censorship will probably become even more difficult.
In most cases, zero.
It may of course be the case that they are just worried about their bandwidth getting chewed
Bingo.
With respect to research: much of the time research use of education networks tends to take up tiny ammounts of bandwidth so why not use up the rest :)
Perhaps you attend a well-funded small private university or one like Northwestern, which can be heard on CNN complaining about how much of their 622-Mbit connection is being consumed by Napster. (sarcasm) My heart goes out to them (/sarcasm). At most universities, strictly educational/research uses are sufficient to saturate inbound links. Your post indicates that you don't grasp the severity of the problem. In our case at least, the network is UNUSABLE during "business hours." If I can get modem speeds (2-3kB/s), it's a good day. Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by poverty.
--TM
That's one way of looking at it. There's also the opportunity cost of NOT installing high speed networks. Leave aside the value to the institution as a whole and consider only the residential networks. Universities which don't have Ethernet in every dorm room and a decent backbone connection will lose applicants. Sure, it can enhance the educational experience but it's also "entertainment," in the same category as cable TV (which I think should never be installed in dorm rooms but that's another issue).
I think all schools have some document which students must agree to to use the network; they're probably pretty much all the same and the ones I've seen are reasonable. If your use of the network isn't illegal, doesn't violate other university policies (cheating, harrassing, etc.), and most importantly, doesn't significantly interfere with the use of the network by others (every use could be considered interference so it should be "significant interference"), then it should be okay. If Dialpad was causing a problem I'd say there's something wrong with the network they're running. Napster, or any other program that deals in large amounts of data can be a violation if it gets a lot of use. I hope that schools blocking Napster first checked to see if there was a small number of students who were using it really heavy. Actually I bet it's often the case that it's not the widespread use but the abuse by a few that causes the problems.
This kind of stuff is similar to carrying the binary newsgroups. I think it's better if they basically carry the "full" USENET groups but it's not censorship if a school decides to not carry any binary newsgroups because of the bandwidth and system load they require.
I don't ban it for that, I ban it because Napster wastes precious bandwidth for the company I work for and has nothing to do with solid state motor controls. There isn't another single application which wastes so much bandwidth on my networks. pr0n is bursty. FTP war3z I stop too but it's not quite so easy. Napster is an easy target and after nuking it I see an immediate increase in available bandwidth.
It's the university's bandwidth, they can say what does and doesn't pass through it. Personally, I feel the same way to "censoring" things in libraries. It's the library's computers, they can say what you read or don't read on it, the only problem here is the censorware's blacklist, and it being abused
Not the same thing at all. (1) A library is supposed to be a "common carrier" of information. They should provide you with any book you ask for (perhaps they may ask a small administration fee if they need to buy it especially or ship it from another library), and they should offer free access to the Net. (2) The library censorship that's topical at the moment is not decided by the libraries themselves: it's forced on the libraries by local government. I guess it's within the local government's rights to do whatever they like with their funding, but this kind of thing deserves a referendum.
--
I can understand getting in trouble for forwarding crap (the usual spam, chain-mails, etc.) - but only by those who you forward it to. If you didn't send the purity test to the admins and none of your friends complained to them about it, how did they find out? If they read your e-mail, then I'd say this is something you really should object to!
;)
Actually, one of my friends found it so amusing, he sent the whole thing to the dot-matrix printer queue; then forgot about it. An admin found this *big* pile of paper on the out tray, and of course, the From: header was the first userID on the page, and that found its way to some big cheeses.
I had to make my case to someone "important", and basically made it clear that I didn't consider the material to be obscene (it wasn't), but that I understood that it was an abuse of the university's IT services (it was).
The guy who printed it bought me a Guinness in apology. One of the best Guinnesses I've ever had, because I gave blood immediately before
--
Quality of Service was designed to resolve exactly these kinds of issues, and I can honestly see no justification, on the part of Universities or anyone else, to ban traffic they could equally well simply confine to "space available". It doesn't hurt -them- if spare bandwidth is utilised and may actually HELP them, as the students are going to figure ways round any legal blocks, anyway.
(Anyone who tries to block ports will discover how easy it is to install a port redirector on two sides of a firewall.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No, that's not a ST:Voyager episode, that's a saying that a lot of IT departments need to keep in mind. Sometimes, you save to sacrifice a few "high-priority" tasks that really aren't, to install the facilities that would prevent those "high-priority" tasks (or worse!) from occuring in the future.
Yes, you might say, but we're paid to do these NOW! That's very true, but it's also not the point. If a ship is sinking, it pays more to plug the holes than to bail, no matter WHAT the Captain might be telling you to do. Sometimes, the Captain is simply not that important. Getting the job done IS. You can always pass on the credit, when your users start showering praise, once disaster has been averted. That's not the problem.
If you obey the Captain blindly, and focus only on the short-term glitches, your ship, the HMS Information Technology, will sink. It might take a while, or it might be tomorrow, but it can't stay afloat for long, if you're concentrating more on the water than the holes. Repair the holes and the water will take care of itself.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
But there's a big difference between that and pirating MP3's.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
The only thing really, really banned at my college is, believe it or not, single sex halls of residence. You are not allowed to have a corridor of all girls bedrooms. There has to be at least one boy in the corridor. This is enforced more strictly than any other rule bar none; drugs, theft, you name it... no crime is worse than living in a single sex hall.
I went to Cheltenham and Gloucester College in the UK, a small degree college specialising in teaching, computing and art.
Unsurprisingly females outnumbered males 6 to 1 when I was there (now down to 2:1)- dunno why girls tend to like teaching and art, but they do.
This attracted local pervs like you would not believe. Prowlers, stalkers, even, I'm sorry to say, two rapists. You see, they could guarantee that certain buildings were inhabited only by girls. Easy pickings. Force open a window, any window, it doesn't matter... there'd be a girl there.
The problem was solved overnight by banning single sex corridors in halls of residence. Apparently prowlers, stalkers and rapists tend to go away if they suspect they're going to bump into the male rugby football captain instead of some female arts student.
The policy is amazingly successful. It literally got rid of the problem overnight. There hasn't been one single case of prowlers since (like 8 years ago), let alone stalkers or rapists.
Why is this relevant to Slashdot? Because it was the same damn prudes and far-right christian arseholes who were against single sex dorms then, who are are against uncensored internet access now.
Sex and sexual activity is a fact of life (heck without it there wouldn't be ANY life). Trying to censor it or segregate it out of existence is a waste of time. And more importantly, trying to do so is counter-productive.
I could understand censorship if we were talking about primary (kindergarten) schools, but we're talking about high school, sixth form (7th grade) and universities here!
The age of consent is 16 for heaven's sake... just bolt a few condom dispensers to the back of the toilet doors and let them get on with what consenting adults are legally entitled to do!
As for MP3s, well, that's just a bandwidth issue, not a freedom of speech or censorship issue. As such it is a fair point in my opinion.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I personally attend Indiana University and fully support the banning of Napster and all these people that are complaing about censorship this and what about our technology fees that need to get their heads out of their ass and realize they don't have the right to complain. I cant speak for other UNviersities but ehre at IU we have an agreement of fair use that everyone agrees to when they are given acess to the network. Obviously people dont read over it, but I have, basically it boils down to that the UNiversity owns the entwork and you get to use it as long as its for educational purposes. Obviously they cant block or police everything and make sure its only being used for educational purposes, but none the less, if they decided they didn't want to provide access to the world wide web at all, they could do that, its their choice. Its not censorship, Its their network and you agree to their terms. Now everyone goes well what about these 100 dollar student technology fees I pay? Well in addition to be an extremely computer literate student, I also work inside IUTS which is a major player in teh IU network. Your student technology fees, go towards, buying new computers, keeping the computer labs working nice, keep the main servers up, they do NOT pay for bandwidth, and seeing as napster was tkaing up over 70 percent of the bandwidth here, they have every right to block it, its not educational use, and its abusing the network, their is no hidden agenda against mp3's its puerly an issue with resources, and your techonology fee never gives you the right to abuse the privelage to abuse something you are let to use. Its not your right to view web pages, your lucky that the university gives the right and should be thankful. If you dont want censorship then find an ISP that doesnt care what you do and go with them. I just want all these people to stop complainng and wake up and realize they are complaing about rights being taken away and they arent rights they're privelages.
For 30k a year, i'll use my bandwidth for whatever i damn well please, thank you very much.
---
---
we stand in life at midnight, we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.
And we are *sortof* banning napster. It IS possible for it to be used, you just have to know what you're doing a little bit (as with most of the methods used by the colleges.) Methods to get around types of banning are posted on http://www.savenapster.com. Our SOLE reason for doing this was bandwidth. Period. There was little to no thought put into the legality of it. Our policy states that the network should only be used for academic purposes and thatthe network is a shared resource. If something you are doing is adversly affecting someone else's chance to get an education then you get shut down. We're a small college, so we don't have the man power or the money, or the time to look into throttleing bandwidth such as other Universities are doing. We wish we could. This is the first and so far only thing we've banned (though iMesh may soon follow). I'm interested in seeing napster saved myself. I love it, it's a great program, its design, however, leaves most universities no choice but to do something about it (whatever that sometihg is.) I'm sure I'm going to get flamed on this one by irate students, and I've gotten flames from students here. It's often not up to the sysops though, we got complaints from everybody on campus on how slow the internet connection is, and Napster was the cause. We had to do it so that the 90% of the people on the network who weren't using napster had bandwidth to do real academic work. This is not an issue about censorship. Students who complain that it's censorship obviously don't have all the facts straight and are jumping on the latest cause bandwagon.(I keep thinking about a 2000 version of PCU:) ) I've signed up for the save napster mailing list and I plan on keeping very close tabs on what's going on. I believe this will be a defining issue. This is the first real big issue that Universities have faced since putting in ResNet networks.
-jay
While I generally agree with you, it is just as (perhaps even more so) important to use your moral faculties when studying, obeying or disobeying the law.
There are a lot of laws which are in effect but which are weird and pointless, there are a lot of laws that must be challenged because they conflict with other laws, and there are laws which are perfectly okay from a legal standpoint, but which are morally repugnant and which must be fought at every turn.
Blindly obeying the law is a *bad* idea. Instead, be sharply critical of it, and don't be afraid to argue and act against a law if it is truly immoral (which I'm using rather loosely to also include those acts which would seek to rob us of our inalienable freedoms too)
-- 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.
Well, sure mp3 piracy needs to be curtailed, but not at the expense of preventing the use of the mp3 format altogether. Nor at the expense of mp3 sharing mechanisms which can be quite legal, as mp3.com is demonstrating.
-- 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.
Back in the days of the ARPANet, I am told, there was a lot of similar agonizing to whether or not it was okay to use a government-sponsored research network for unrelated uses (like personal email).
;)
Guess how that argument panned out
I'd say that there should be a limit on uses that are clearly illegal (Napster is not necessarily illegal - it stays unless you can prove otherwise) and that there should be caps on the amount of bandwidth that you can use, determined by the current demand. If it's 3am and the pipes are open, who the hell cares if you hog it all. Just be prepared to give it up when another night owl comes online.
-- 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.
UTA has NOT banned Napster or mp3s and announced a few weeks ago they plan on NOT banning mp3s or Napster. I submitted the article to Slashdot but it was, of course, reject. Ahh well. Pretty cool, huh? And they've announced plans to increase our bandwidth...there's obviously ways to work WITH the traffic caused by Napster instead of just banning it - there's almost 20,000 students here and a lot of them are on the network, but somehow they're managing to get us pleanty of bandwidth for educational and slightly less educational activities. ;)
Well now isn't this funny. If the university points out that pirating MP3s is illegal, and that people should stop it because they're chewing up bandwidth its ok. But God help the RIAA when they point out that just maybe pirating MP3s is illegal , and that maybe universities should ban Napster.
Compare the tone of this disscussion with any one of the other Jihads on 'Your rights on line'... The motivation for the control of napster must be irrelevant. Either, pirating MP3s is illegal, or its not. Doesn't matter who's pointing the finger or why. Now how far you want to go for that control depends upon which side you are looking at napster from (student or record company).
The fact is that if Unversities don't control MP3 piracy on campus, it will be used as an excuse to implement more and more draconian copy right protections by the Entertainment Industry.
--locust
I found it amusing that the "network administrators" never heard of traffic shaping. Granted, the banning is kind of shaping, but it's a rather drastical one.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
I sysadmin at a decent Engineering School with a crappy IT infrastructure (read no money and PHB's in charge of budget). We do some net-monning and if you do port scans Napster chugs bandwidth worse than anything else people use. We don't care to much about non-educational usage, but serious bandwidth hogging is a no-no. Napster is an obnoxious littl program, I remeber back in the days of ftp leach..... these kids now-a-days.
-just my $.03
LLAMA
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
it's a pity that people use so much bandwidth gratuitously -- streaming audio/video that they don't even watch/listen to, illegal MP3's, warez... (slashdot's my entry on that list, I guess :) )
and, despite what they say there, my connection to some of the campus servers is still quite slow. is it possible that a lot of internet traffic trying to get out over a capped link can make other traffic (which is not capped) slow? it's entirely possible that it's the servers -- the EECS department needs some more unix boxen!
Lea
Dear Lea,
I wrote to you two weeks ago regarding slow network connections in the Residence Halls. I am writing you today with an update. At present, residence halls have high speed connections (100Mbs) to each other and to all resources located on campus. Transfer rates to servers outside of campus, however, may continue to be slow at times.
The amount of traffic from the residence halls to the outside world has increased dramatically over the past few months. Residents who are using large amounts of bandwidth to the outside world, by running the popular software Napster or popular FTP and web servers, are greatly diminishing network transfer rates for everyone else with a residence hall connection.
The residence halls share bandwidth with all other campus users, including ongoing research projects which rely on consistent connection rates. To ensure adequate bandwidth availability for all campus uses, the department of Communication and Network Services has restricted the total amount of bandwidth available to the residence halls for communication with the outside world. The e-mail below from the Director of Communication and Network Services provides details on the actions they have taken.
Residential Computing is continuing to work with Communication and Network Services to achieve a balance between competing demands for bandwidth throughout campus. We understand that current transfer rates from sites beyond campus are slower than they have been in the past. If you are currently using Napster or running a web server, we strongly encourage you to stop. If you have a friends who are running Napster, we encourage you to ask them to stop. Through increased resident education and ongoing discussions with Communcation and Network Services, I will do my best to improve network connectivity for all reshall students.
Please read the message from Communication and Network Services below for more information.
>From Cliff Frost, Director of Communication and Network Services regarding network connections in the residence halls:
Background:
The Berkeley campus pays approximately $600 per megabit/second/month for connectivity to the worldwide Internet. (There are start-up costs not included in that figure, and a base cost below which the total cost cannot go, but that is a good approximation of our current cost.)
The Residence Hall networks are very well-connected to the rest of campus, and to the Internet in general. This is accomplished via a 100 megabit/second connection between the residence halls and the rest of the campus network.
Up until approximately November, 1999, the sustained use of the Residence Hall network connection was approximately 15 megabits/second. This was for all traffic--both with other campus sites and with the Internet in general.
Recent History:
Coinciding with the tremendous popularity of "napster" (which is a very nice tool in many ways) there has been a tremendous and rapid growth in the campus's traffic to and from the Internet. This growth also coincided with a similar growth to and from the Residence Halls.
In looking at the traffic patterns, and concerned about how we would pay for the exploding use of the Internet, CNS staff noticed that traffic across the 100 megabit/second connection to the Residence Halls had sprung up to peaks of 40 megabits/second and a sustained level of 25. At that point, CNS put a cap onto the traffic that the Residence Halls could exchange with off-campus sites, at 20 megabits per second. Note that this cap did NOT apply to traffic with other on-campus sites.
The effect of the 20 megabit/second cap was immediate. Traffic across the link dropped to peaks of 22-25 megabits/second, implying that most of the traffic across the link is with off-campus sites.
CNS later set the cap at 15 megabits/second and then to 10. From the data gathered it appears that the Residence Halls exchange between 2 and 5 megabits/second with the rest of campus. All the rest of the traffic is bound for the Internet.
Current Status:
At the request of Housing & Dining Services, CNS has temporarily raised the cap to 15 megabits/second while we try to work out ways to manage the explosive demand for Internet bandwidth from the Residence Halls. Housing & Dining has asked for CNS's assistance in analyzing the situation and developing potential solutions.
Before anyone starts calling me a tool of the system, let me point out that I did my undergraduate work in Communications Studies and their is no faster way to get me riled up than to get me talking about the evils of the administration's stranglehold on the student^H^H^H^H^H^Hchool newspaper
I was talking Monday with a friend who works as a network administrator for the school, and he said they just did a network analysis to see where their bandwidth was being used. It turned out that 1/12 of the bandwidth to the Internet for the _entire_ school of 28,000 students was being used by a single freshman. He was running a Napster server and got his account canned.
He didn't get canned because it was Napster or MP3s. He didn't get canned because they wanted to "censor" him. He got canned because (a) he violated the Conditions of Use in his account agreement, and (b) the school has only limited bandwidth and doesn't want to pay for any more.
Before we immediately start screaming about censorship, we need to also consider how many students may be abusing the so-called "free bandwidth" they are getting. After proper consideration, and if it's justified, then we can start civilly arguing about censorship.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in this comment are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of my employers.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/ucs/polic y/comp_policy.html
7.4.2 Collegiality and sharing demands that each user treat all other users as they wish to be treated. The following list indicates activities that improve the computing environment for everyone:
Deleting unneeded files and electronic mail to make disk space available for other users
Avoiding use of university computing and network facilities for tasks unrelated to academic or administrative activities particularly when the facilities are heavily used
Avoiding use of university dial-in communication facilities for tasks unrelated to academic or administrative activities particularly when the dial-in lines are heavily used
Avoiding use of computing and network facilities to peruse the Internet or chat with user groups when the facilities are being heavily used for academic and administrative activities
Refraining from using disk space for the storage of large sound or graphic files (e.g., pornography) that are not directly related to university activity
Refraining from consuming computing or network resources to play games (e.g., MOO's, MUD's, etc.) except when required for course assignments or research projects
--
My university is planning to ban multiplayer games too. At least I fall into the grandfather's clause, but sucks to be new students, when they won't be able to play Unreal against each other.
This is stupid. University is claiming that games take up bandwidth dedicated for research, even though research network is on www2.
Andrei
This is a serious dilemma from a operations standpoint, but it doesn't make sense to raise false issues. AFAIK, the vast majority of the technically savvy students have a far better grasp of the true network performance than campus bureaucrats anyway. The staff that is as good as the students is often two or three rungs below the people who get quoted.
I'm just an alumnus of an engineering school now, and not on campus on a daily basis. So, let me know if I'm off base.
--
Dave Aiello
-- Dave Aiello
I completely agree. AS an admin of one the universities on "The List" we had no choice. Our bandwidth is first and foremost for education. Anything you do with it after that is up to the student until that interferes with the use of the bandwidth for education and as we saw on our campus 80% of our bandwidth was being used for napster. Hardly education. I love napster and if we could we would turn it back on in an instant. Unfortunately we have found no way to do this.
.We charge a $100 dollar technology fee every year that goes towards keeping our labs in good shape and the computers in them cutting edge. (with only 2500 students thats not much to work with when it comes to hardware, licensing and upgrades)
And to answer further questions: We do not charge for the internet connection
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
My lame high school blocks ALL traffic except http and https traffic going through their I-GEAR censoring proxy. No email. No NNTP. Everything must be done on the internal netwokr and is content filtered.
You may have noticed my mention of https. We have constructed a https bouncing proxy site to go where we like on the web.
I'm not a fascist administrator or anything, but if I were, and I wanted to avoid an "arms race"... I'd simply expel students who used napster after the ban was announced.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
"Clearly, they cannot condone the flagrant ripping of MP3's on campus."
Last I checked, ripping a CD (you owned) wasn't illegal. I assume you would like to see campuses also cut down on people copying LPs to cassette tapes?
And another point. Banning Napster doesn't prevent people from pirating MP3's. Banning illegal MP3's will ban illegal MP3's. Funny how that works. It takes vigilance to stop crime, not another line in the old port filter.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Networks are expensive to maintain and bandwidth is also expensive on the scale a university needs. If a significant percentage of bandwidth can be eliminated without affecting academics (remember the piece of paper after 4+ years of school is the purpose of being in college), then what is the problem?
Remember the primary purpose of any campus network is for acadmic purposes. Show the university admins academic reasons for using banned software and the ban should be lifted. (Boy is that last sentence wishful thinking)
If you mean 10 or 15k, I'll have to smack you around. :)
Yes yes yes, big KB like ISDN speed, not kbps. That's just silly
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
OK, you can bitch about how "I'm paying for the bandwidth" but the truth is, you're not even coming close. And what's the big deal? No University student NEEDS a super high-speed connection in their dorm room. Isn't it possible to just throttle the dormNet connections to, say, 10 or 15k/sec? That's plenty fast to surf around a bit, but slow enough to make snagging that new Limp Bizkit album or the latest pirate VCD's a real pain in the ass.
Furthur complaints about "censorship" or "I'm paying for it" come off to me as merely self-centred whining. Jeez, I was impressed when my roommate dialed into the library cataogue computer with a 2400 baud on his IIci to check for books!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Here at Marquette, we haven't banned anything excpept the usual "You may not conduct illegal activities, you may not use University machines to do conslting unless you pay for the resources" things.
However, reverse DNS does not work on our Internet-connected dormitory machines, making usage of them for Napster/Quake/etc. servers Not a Good Idea.
Plus there's probably not enough room on the VAX that houses our "University-approved" homepages for any of this stuff.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
If I own a CD, I can do anything I please with it, short of redistributing the music. ... All of this is legal, provided I own the CDs that are the source material for the MP3s. It is no different than recording a CD onto a cassette tape so that you can listen to it in an old Walkman.
You would think so. For example, you would also think that if you legally purchased a DVD for your own private home use, you would have the right to operate that DVD with a computer running Linux, even if you have to write some software to support it. That makes sense, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, you do not have the right to do any of these things. Almost no forms of copying are still considered "fair use." If you access the data on the disc in just about any way that the publisher doesn't specifically authorize, you have infringed on their copyright.
See the Slashdot story on the DeCSS injunction, or the text of the judge's ruling itself.
My campus (which shall remain nameless except to those who know me and probably go here too) seems to have banned freedom of expression. Mind you, they'd argue with me about that, because I'm expressing myself to say it. Particularly on network matters this applies. I'll clarify to prevent the usual "well, you're just some lame script kiddie who thinks he knows what he's doing and tries to tell the professionals what they're doing blah blah blah".
I do LOTS of large-scale networking stuff as my hobby/semi-profession. I make it my responsibility to know what I'm talking about so I can explain what's wrong to users when it goes wrong, and as such have gained a very reasonable base in the fundamentals of networking and such over the time I've been administering UNIX/Linux systems. I can spew the buzzwords (BGP, IGMP (eww), OSFP, OSI Network Model, whatever) like the best of them, and at least have a decent understanding of what they mean. I also have resources who, if I DON'T know what something means, I ask them, and then I do understand.
So I contact our Network Operations department about a network outage, or a problem with inbound routing that is (admittedly by me) not their problem, but should be spoken to our provider about, or whatever. As a general rule I refuse to make the "hey, the network is broken!" complaints; I try to figure out the problem myself first, and then tell them about it. As a general rule, in most circumstances, I have been told by the manager or others in NetOps to go to hell, and that they know damned well what's wrong with their network, they get paid for this, I can't POSSIBLY know what I'm talking about, and to go away.
I don't understand this attitude to someone going out of their way to provide helpful information and possible diagnoses instead of "the network is broken". As a sysadmin and tech support provider myself, I know that SMART users who try to figure out problems themselves before contacting support@wherever make the support team's lives MUCH easier, and I for one am happy to get reports of problems, whether I've noticed them or not; it shows that people are paying attention and care enough about the service to ask it to get fixed.
So; I get told I'm not allowed to express that I'm having problems with the network, or if I do, that I'm not allowed to try to help. Great situation, if you ask me. So now I just don't bother. I look for my own ways around it. And if they don't like it, I guess they should have let me try to help them instead of working against them.
Don't mind me as I rant aimlessly.
---
Tim Wilde
Gimme 42 daemons!
Here at the University of Idaho, all on campus machines that are not designated to be external servers can only send outgoing connections. All dorms and student lab machines are firewalled from the internet and from eachother.
This very effectively keeps student porn web servers from popping up, but it dosen't prevent us from downloading anything.
It easily prevents a large number of security problems, but it also creates a group of people that use SSH to forward high numbered ports from CS servers so that they can access their systems despite the firewall.
I moved off campus because I trust my server more than I trust the campus servers that are unavaliable too often for comfort and I am using ADSL so that I can telnet to my machine from anywhere. It is a simple solution, nobody is forcing you to stay on campus and ADSL actually gives me a faster connection to the internet than the university service did.
I understand their position, and they still have a problem with people downloading gigs of mp3s and other files, but it nearly eliminates the liability problems of student run illegal MP3, Warez, and porn servers.
I prefer the ability to have complete control over servers holding my data, they prefer to have complete control over the servers on their network. It is a difference of opinion, but if you have a friend (or a friendly server) outside of any firewall, you can forward ports and bypass the firewalls.
It all boils down to LIABILITY, the Universities do not like to have the risk of lawsuit.
There is a superficially easy way to stop Napster from eating all of a University's bandwidth. Basically, someone at the University (or maybe a script) should send emails to anyone hosting copyrighted material on Napster and tell them to delete it or face temporary termination of their connection. A student can't complain, because they _are_ breaking the law. This way, not everyone is punished for what only some people do.
Granted, this would be a large task and would only cover the serving half, not the client half. Does anyone know where the bulk of the bandwidth is eaten up? I would guess that serving content uses more bits.
If you are actually paying a fee to access the campus network then they are acting as your ISP and should have no rights to tell you how to use your connection. If the fee is actually a technology fee then things change, because you are paying a fee to help pay for the technology on campus and not for internet service.
I'm a resnet admin at my school (I have to go lecture people about being bw hogs when they hit multiple gigs of uploads to off-campus in a day, so I'm familiar with how 90% of schools cut off access to programs like napster, hotline, etc: block the port. Seriously. Anyone with the smallest understanding of how a computer works can change the default port in the prog, and viola....no more problem.
In the case of things like napster, this is a good thing(TM) People who can get around the block anyways know better than to open up gigs and gigs of mp3's to other people on fast connections and expect them to play fair. Blocking the port protects the lusers who think that hitting the x in the corner shuts napster down; seriously, I've had to talk to about 300 people this year about bandwidth issues, and 280 of them have been people who didn't even know other people were getting files off of napster thru their comp..........
If the trade of pirated/illegal MP3's is so rampant on a college campus, why not monitor the traffic, collect data, and then bust the offenders? You do this enough times, and people will start to realize they are being watched and will be caught.
:-)
Effort. It takes a lot more effort. It's simple enough just to add a line into a portblocking table to stop it. And you'd have to monitor continuously, keep the tools uptodate with the protocol, and if you slack off, word would get around and mp3 trade would start again. These are students we're talking about
It's the university's bandwidth, they can say what does and doesn't pass through it. Personally, I feel the same way to "censoring" things in libraries. It's the library's computers, they can say what you read or don't read on it, the only problem here is the censorware's blacklist, and it being abused
QoS is easy to implement for upstream, but difficult for downstream. In short, you must work with your ISP to get it done and load down their equipment. Most ISPs aren't going to be friendly to that, and will likely charge you more. It is easier to just block ports.
For downstream, QoS on your router doesn't mean anything because the traffic has already choked down your pipe before you would make the "what is more important" decision. Therefore, the ISP has to do QoS and prioritize packets before sending them to you.
In a perfect world, QoS would solve everything, but I don't think you will find too many ISPs and backbone providers willing to implement it. Perhaps that perfect world will exist in the future, but not today.
I am not aware of very many network architectures which allow this, but it is necessary. Charge whatever is necessary per megabyte to fund network services. Those who use the system more will pay more; that it more than fair.
I can pretty much guarantee that a penny a megabyte would prevent most students from wasting; a gigabyte a day would be $10; that's a lot of money to a student. But if the student wishes to spend that much, then he has every right to.
We have right now the 'tragedy of the commons'; the solution is well-known. We need to implement that solution.
- Block sites that require heavy bandwidth, as has been done recently by universities dealing with napster, ipad, etc.
- Continue to pay the bills regardless of what is used and proclaim that students (and staff!) should have absolute freedom. Most likely this will result in higher tuition charges to cover the cost.
- Start charging each student on a per byte basis for the bandwidth they use.
I'm betting that #3 will win in the long run. It's the only fair solution when you break it down, as it charges the people that use it. As unfair as it seems to the people that want to use the most bandwidth, it simply puts the charges on the people that use it. Option #2 is certainly the way it should be, but if the cost is spread out to the students that aren't making use of it then its not really fair to them. What we need is free bandwidth, and since that'll never happen we're stuck with charging someone. The only sensible solution is to charge the people that are using the bandwidth. However, the biggest problem with this is that universities are not set up to handle this kind of recharge service. There is a whole new wave of infrastructure that is required to put a per-byte pricing model in place, and it doesn't exist in most places yet. Until it does, I'm sure more and ore universities will be implementing #1 since their budgets just aren't prepared for the bills their getting charged with.The next site to slashdot will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and start slashdotting it early!
If I own a CD, I can do anything I please with it, short of redistributing the music. This includes ripping the tracks off of the CD, encoding them as MP3s, and storing them on my hard drive. I can also take them, burn them onto a data CD-R, and bring them with me to work. For example, if I've got eight Def Leppard albums, I can rip them, encode the songs as MP3, and make a single data CD that has all eight albums in MP3 form. I can then take that CD to work, fire up X11Amp, and not hear a single song repeated all day. I can also take those MP3s, decode them, and burn them to an audio CD that I can use in my car or home stereo. This lets me re-arrange the order of songs on a CD, or put together a CD of my favorite tunes.
I can do all of this. All of this is legal, provided I own the CDs that are the source material for the MP3s. It is no different than recording a CD onto a cassette tape so that you can listen to it in an old Walkman. You have the right to "fair use" of the material. So I say again, there is nothing illegal about "ripping MP3s." Furthermore, "ripping MP3s" is all done locally, and doesn't use a single bit of a college network's available bandwidth.
The legal issues are about distributing MP3s, not creating them. Don't fall into the trap that the RIAA is trying to cleverly lay out. MP3 is not an "illegal format." It is not illegal to create, own, or use MP3-formatted music files. It is illegal to distribute those files to parties who do not legally own the source CD, which is what real beef with Napster is all about. So try not to confuse the issue here.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
All arguments aside about private vs. public colleges: I attended the U of Missouri and we did in fact pay $20 a month for ethernet access which came to around $9600 a month that a dorm would pay for something like ResNet. This most certainly facilitates the kind of bandwidth that the students would be using up with programs like Napster.
I hate to say this; but $9600/month is not nearly enough to service the bandwidth needs of 480 folks, even if only 20% are running Napster, IMHO. It's still subsidised. You have to factor in infrastructure cost, support costs and the like to come up with a true value. I don't know what kind of equipment or speed links are being used across that campus. I would say that $20 is a bargin, even if Napster is blocked.
I live in a dorm at Ohio University (I stay in the dorm partly because of the high-speed internet connection). This year, every freshman was given a computer by the University, and all year the network has been incredibly slow (I frequently couldn't tell if it was even up). Naturally, I blamed the freshmen. One day, all the speed and reliability I was used to came back. Why? Were the routers finally upgraded to handle the increased load brought on by the freshmen computers? Were the buggy DHCP servers fixed? No. I found out about a week later that the Napster metaserver's IP had been blocked. This is not in any way a free speech issue: I want to be able to read my email, and now I can.
Unless you're big on privacy... through the web person search, you could get not only the person's on-campus address and phone#, but their home phone and address! Not information that should be publicly available in most cases, especially whe someone takes the time to not have their number listed.. and home address? People shouldn't be getting that if you have a campus address defined... I think the phone numbers myay be gone now (I sent off a few e-mails, and alerted several students there), but the home address still remains...
Rutgers as also been very slow getting networking into the majority of the res halls... many were still running through an over-clogged dialup last year (can't say this year - I don't visit anymore). Napster + dialup = pain, no matter what 8^)
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Officially, we're only supposed to use the network for academic stuff (I think). In practive, network services lets you run whatever you want. There is no proxy, no firewall, just a pipe to the backbone.
In recent months napster traffic has become a significant portion of the residence hall internet traffic and is getting too expensive for Network Services. A few weeks ago Network Services instituted a 15 megabit/s cap on dorm internet traffic. The rest of the campus is unaffected. No services are blocked. Everything is just slower.
Ryan
Take a look at http://www.uri.edu/mrtg/jvnc.html
You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.
That's funny... My girlfriend lives on the uri campus. I just talked to her on ICQ and she's using Napster right now with no problems... Maybe they're limiting the bandwidth it uses for now, but they don't seem to have completely cut access.
Ah, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Scourge of Liberty and Friend to the Tyrant.
We really must get this damnéd thing repealed.
Of course, if you are in New Jersey, you should go to my old Alma Mater, Rutgers, anyway (where I got my B.A. in English). I think they have a more liberal use policy, here it is http://rucs.rutgers.edu/acceptabl e-use-guide.html
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I am in charge of the network at a university.We are forced into the position where we have to remove services because we just cannot get enough bandwidth for accademic purposes, let alone entertainment purposes.
For this reason there are various services which to my mind are quite important, which we find ourselves in no position to offer to students.
We are stuck in the middle on this problem and it's a situation we just can't win. If we dissallow the services we are censorious fascists. and if we allow these services, then it's our fault that network performance is abysmal. (that's not to mention members of staff downloading several, hundred megabyte files, at times of peak load and wondering why the service falls apart.)
wow, is someone a little bitter with (more than) a little misdirected anger. I don't think that I should be wasting my tax dollars on your anger management class. It obviously isn't working out.
-
I hate those people (like the parent to this post)who are always on the outside looking in. They are the ones that always have an opinion and a loud voice and they think that it matters. If you think that all of your tax money that goes to universities is being spent on some 18 year olds mp3 habit, then you need to look at the financial plans of universities. You will probably find that your subsidized mp3 money is just a drop in the bucket of the university's anual budget. If that is the biggest issue that you have and this is the best case that you have against money being spent on universities then you need to look again.
I have moderations points, but I felt that it would be more effective to reply to this than to simply mark it down like most moderators would do. I disagree with you 100%. Your approach sucks, and your language is deplorable at best. If you have a point to make - then articulate it. Telling someone to go fsck themselves because you disagree with them is about as mature as saying "Im rubber you're glue...." I encourage you to try again and reply to this post in a mature and vocal manner.
eric
-------------------------------------------
Please give your mod points to others, Im at the cap. They will appreciate it more
Need I say more? ANYONE who can write an article complaining about excessive bandwidth use and points to ICQ has NO CLUE what they're talking about.
Oh, and according to ipchains, I use about 20-50mb of off-campus bandwidth on the typical day, sometimes going up to a gigabyte once or twice a month with cd or other big downloads.
Overall, while I do use hellacious amounts of on-campus bandwidth (usually remote x-sessions), up to a gigabyte a day, for most of the days of a month a modem could handle what I use for off-campus stuff.
At my (UK) University they banned Napster a little while ago. We also have a transparent web proxy/cache (ie: you are forced to use it). The main reason for these measures are two fold. Firstly, to try to reduce the increasing network congestion. Secondly, to cut costs - as has already been mentioned on this thread, UK univserities now get charged per Mb of incoming traffic on the transatlantic lines.
So, I personally think the action they have taken so far is fair enough. The amount of bandwidth Napster takes up is silly - and it's easy to block. Most of the MP3s people will be obtaining are almost certainly illegal, so I don't see it as any infringement of my rights. Also, it is the Univeristy's network and supposed to be for academic use. I don't pay anything for it, so I'm hardly in a position to complain.
However, the Computing Services staff here seem obsessed with stopping any tiny thing they can. They are currently planning to block the IP ports that are commonly used by games (they recently did a test of blocking the Halflife mod Counterstrike's port). Now this strikes me as very odd. Most online games do not generate a huge amount of traffic (obviously a reasonable amount if you're running a server, but that's not the issue here). Most importantly, non of this traffic is going to go to the US and so incur a charge. With FPS games, ping is all important - there's no way you'd catch me even trying to play QuakeWorld or Quake3 on US servers. I want the one nearest to me (ie: lowest ping) - so the packets I create are going very far. Sure, some games (eg: Everquest) might be played on US servers when there are no European alternatives, but they seem to be taking a general "games are the cause of our network problems" attitude.
Maybe you're thinking that I'm being uptight cos I can't play these silly violent games? Maybe you're right. The point is though, that whilst I am using an academic network for pure personal enjoyment... game playing is not the thing to target. They are not going to be as draconian as to say that all non acamedic activities are banned. Why would they have plans to ethernet all University accomodation ASAP if that were the case? Very few people (I would say 0 - at least for access to things outside the University) have a real need for a 10Mbit ethernet connection. No-one's going to stop people from looking up train times during lunch for when they pop home the next weekend are they?
So something needs to be done, and if it isn't blocking games, what should it be? Well, how amount monitoring traffic and identifying high bandwidth users. If someone is running an illegal warez server, and they're asked what exactly is causing 3Gb of data to be transfered a day, they're going to shut it down pretty quickly. Perhaps even instigating a charge for people who do use large amounts of bandwidth (on legitimate things) - that would discourage frivolous use, and stop people grabbing some VCD from the US every week. Even enouraging people to not use hotmail accounts (we get charged for US access remember - and pages there obviously can't be cached!), but rather UK based alternatives, seems to me to be a far more sensible stratedgy, not just in terms of keeping students happy, but actually effective in reducing our bandwidth consumption, and our network costs.
--
Dr_Claw
But the fact of the matter is that it is not. I will challenge anyone to show me that even 1% of the MP3's available on Napster are not copyrighted.
I'm sure you're entirely correct in saying 99% of the songs on Napster are copyrighted, but (the way I understand it) just because I download an mp3 of a copyrighted song doesn't mean it's illegal.
Since I've gone to college, I've used mp3's for listening to music probably 98% of the time. A lot of those mp3's were obtained from Napster (that is, until it was shut down here). OK, now I will freely admit that I do not own an original copy of many of the songs that I've downloaded. In that respect, yes, I have broken the law and infringed upon the artists' copyrights. I do not wish to misrepresent myself on this matter. However, I have also used Napster legitimately so that I might be able to listen to a cd that I own, but I didn't bring with me.
Since I brought to college maybe three of my 200 or so cd's, I would estimate that... hmm, probably 60% of my mp3's are of songs that I own. Whether I rip them myself, get them from my.mp3.com, or download them from Napster, it is within my rights and the bounds of the law. If a college wants to shut it down on grounds of bandwidth concerns, that's fine. Do whatever you need to do. However, for a college to justify a blocking Napster because it's a tool of piracy, or the devil's work, or whatever... That's a misrepresentation.
I think you've actually invalidated your own point here. You've shown that 40% of your collection is illegal. I presume you're implying that you could easily give up that 40% and stick with the stuff you own legally. But you haven't. You've done quite a fine job, actually, of demonstrating that Napster is indeed a popular "tool of piracy."
:)
Oh well. So much for disclosure. My main point was to demonstrate that a percentage higher than 1% of Napster usage is legitimate. It certainly is for me, and is for the majority of people I know. In any case, I stand by my assertion that Napster has uses (that are actually used) besides pure-and-simple piracy.
If it is truly fine, then why are you publishing information on how to use anonynmizers on your web page? Maybe it's not so fine after all and you are indeed misrepreseting yourself, against your own wishes.
In an earlier draft of my message, I had that phrased as, "If a college wants to shut it down, that's fine. If I absolutely have to, I'll find a way around it." However, blocking access to Napster will effectively stop 90% of users (total guesstimate, no stats to back that up) and in all likelihood, alleviates whatever bandwidth concerns the network admin was having. I also stand by my publishing information on how to get around blocks imposed. I have perhaps 20 regular visitors (all friends of mine) to my site. Now, I'm an admitted music pirate, so place as little stock in this as you like, but I have no ethical issues with posting information on a lightly trafficked site that will mainly benefit friends of mine. And despite that damn mp3 habit, I'm not such a bad guy. Really
I enjoyed reading your response, you made some very insightful points.
-jay
Some companies actually have deals similar to that with their providers (both telco and isp). It however isn't usually so much a question of getting money back for not using it, it's more of a "pay for what you use" type of deal. So if a company doesn't use much at night (for example), they don't get charged for it. ATM *cringe* is a popular back bone where such policies can be adapted.
UND Computer Center, in agreement with the UND administration, is announcing that the Napster client software is officially banned for use by UND faculty, staff, and students. Napster is a program for sharing recorded music over networks and is being banned because it utilizes a large amount of Internet bandwidth, thus interfering with more suitable use. This action is based on the HECN Policy and Procedures (Section 4 Paragraph 3), which prohibits incidental personal use of information technology services, if such use interferes with other network usage. This policy can be viewed at the following web location http://www.nodak.edu/hecn/policy/. Certain technical measures have been taken to enforce this policy for the UND campus. Attempts to bypass these measures will be interpreted as violations of this policy. Your cooperation is appreciated.
When I was a student at Albany they were still in the process of lighting up the campus. (They'd run wire everywhere the year before I came. They'd told everyone that high speed internet access would be available everywhere. Then they didn't have the cash for the routers and hubs. Oops. So they lit up a little each year.) Anyhow, as a result there weren't as many people using it as might have otherwise. The computing department routinely "banned" software because it "might" be responsible for problems. I knew students who worked there, and after they tested it and found no problems, the ban was lifted. Except they never published anything saying the ban was lifted. If you didn't know the right people, you would never know. I got sick of it and ran coax around the suite so we could play Quake disconnected from their network.
It didn't surprise me the things they blamed on network games - These people actually posted the good times virus warning in the logon news! (And then 2 months later posted a message that it was a hoax and anyone who forwarded it would lose their account, so don't forward it! Mysteriously, they'd deleted their original post from the database.)
All in all, it's the kind of behavior I expect form those policing the educational world.
Check out my site to read about how Harvard University's General Counsel's office has forced me to remove DeCSS from my archive, and has buckled to their fear of the MPAA despite the fact that no legal precedent yet supports this point and that the preliminary injunction does not apply to me, nor has such an injunction been issued in this jurisdiction.
> Napster is pain in the butt and a bandwidth hog.
....course... ;)
> If that is the real reason it is being blocked,
> I consider that a legit reason. Bandwidth is a
> finite item, even at universities.
Yes definitly. I would like to add that in some
cases, blocking napster, while not optimum, is
a good short term solution.
I know that here, the network admins just looked
at their mrtg (I think they use mrtg anyway)
graphs and shit themselves when they saw how
much bandwith was being eaten up on the dorms
network. As a result...napster got blocked at the
routers.
At least here, this was only a temporary measure,
and there is talk (progressing at standard
University snail pace) of unblocking napster and
imposing a bandwidth cap. (I suggested putting
2 28.8 modems back to back and routing the
dorms through it....they said that was just too
sadistic though)
Course the real answer is to replace all dorm room
ethernet with 3 wire serial connections to LATs
that have all ports locked in at 1200 7e1
In any case...I would recomend that anyone who
is a student to make some noise and make sure that
any blocking is only temporary...its really
stupid for along term solution.
then don't bitch when your bandwidth gets capped
either
So I guess it would be "Fast, Unrestricted, Cheap
- pick 2".
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
proliferation of Napster and similar programs, plus other bandwidth stealing applications such as Spinner, Real Player, WinAmp (when used to receive Shoutcast Stations) and Instant Messenger programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and ICQ.
Wow, this sounds like they want to ban/restrict/whatever all the services that make the network worthwhile for a student in a first place. No surprise here: network applications take up bandwidth, and these add up - the administrator wishes they would just all go away so that he can reload his Slashdot pages quickly. But guess what the solution is? The solution is to stop whining and provide the bandwidth.
Because students pay good money for the use of the network, they stay in dorms just so that they can use the network, and it contributes greatly to their quality of life: they can get their music, they can talk to their friends and family, they can be merry and happy, but the bandwidth Barons would hoard the bandwidth.
The reasons for shutting Balch down are related to the fact that the number of people using the facility has steadily decreased, to the point where the university is (nearly?) losing money just by keeping the doors open.
You've repeated what I've just said.
Of course ResNet exists (anywhere) to help attract students to the dorms. That does not change the fact that it is an expensive and difficult service to deploy and maintain properly. Charging a fee for those who wish to use that service, in order to recover initial and ongoing costs, is totally reasonable.
Yes, of course. But since we've established that the university provides Resnet for its own benefit and not out of any kindness or generosity, it's perfectly reasonable for students to demand a certain level of service. (and I seriously doubt that the university isn't making a profit from the Resnet fee alone, without taking into consideration the other benefits that it brings them).
Do you know how much it costs to run fiber between buildings on a large campus, then wire several thousand rooms, and have to provide constant support for what you've deployed? Answer: it isn't cheap, either in equipment or personnel costs.
Have you considered that Resnet exists so that students will come to study at Cornell university, and continue to stay in the dorms while they're there, generating revenue for the university? Do you know that one of the most popular questions asked by prospective university students is "Do you have high speed internet access in the dorm rooms"?
As a former Cornell student, I can say for a fact that Resnet is one of the few reasons to stay in a pricey, overcrowded dorm - and as offcampus high speed access becomes more readily available, more and more people are moving off campus.
If you want to use ResNet, you have to pay for it, just like you have to pay to get on meal plan or to use the Cornell Fitness Centers.
This is another bad example. The meal plan is a very profit making enterprise: it costs something like $10 to eat a meal at the dining hall. And there's even been talk of shutting down the Balch dining hall because it isn't making enough money.
Here we tried to go that route. We noticed a problem a couple months ago. Instead of immediately imposing an outright ban on Napster we attempted to inform the students of the problem. We've posted signs, talked to RAs about educating their residents, gone to the student congress, etc. Result? Now Napster is only taking about 30% of our total bandwidth where it was taking about 40%. That's a reduction, yes, but 30% is still way over the top.
College students, at least the ones here, don't like being told what to do. The bottom line is that sometimes us IT people just have to be totalitarian pricks.
Nice guys finish last, and nice IT workers get fired.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
I wonder what the chances are that the universities are recieving a little bit of persuasion from the record industry on this one?
:)
It may of course be the case that they are just worried about their bandwidth getting chewed but in my experience many Phd's (computer science) are in on the game and do it themselves so there must be high-up influences involved here....
With respect to research: much of the time research use of education networks tends to take up tiny ammounts of bandwidth so why not use up the rest
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
All arguments aside about private vs. public colleges: I attended the U of Missouri and we did in fact pay $20 a month for ethernet access which came to around $9600 a month that a dorm would pay for something like ResNet. This most certainly facilitates the kind of bandwidth that the students would be using up with programs like Napster.
No...bandwidth is not free. But if students don't see the direct cost of this (e.g. a $XX a month surcharge for ethernet) then they most definitely see it in their tuition. At the U. of Colorado, students are charged a Riot Fee because of the certainty that they are going to riot at some point in the year.
The point is this. the students ARE paying for their bandwidth, be it directly or indirectly. So let's not hear all the SA's and SE's out there who've forgotten about their college experiences back in the early 80's bitch about it!
-FluX
-------------------------
Your Ad Here!
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"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Napster, in the way it is designed, causes itself to serve out mp3s even when the user doesn't really want to.
Anyone ever notice that when you "close" napster it just goes to your taskbar, serving off mp3s behind the scenes? I'm willing to bet half of the people who are serving out mp3s on college campuses just aren't aware of this (especially the less-experienced ones). Quite honestly, I find this "feature" annoying. Napster and its counter-intuitive response to closing the program gets about as much respect from me as a program that runs arbitrary code on my system.
For us, it's not a bandwidth issue. We have plenty of that. The reason we ban servers is that we receive weekly threats from the RIAA telling us to shut down IP's in the dorms. Since the state of Wisconsin doesn't want to take sides in the issue we comply. Basically the state doesn't want the liability associated with students running unmoderated servers.
Every student is given 10Mb free space on the university web server, free unix shell email, and free ftp access to their own account with a 25MB quota. Students may post anything they wish as long as it isn't profitable to them or it doesn't violate any local, state or federal regulation. There is no reason to run a server.
We also shut down connections for any student caught scanning networks and looking for holes.
The students sign an agreement to this effect before we turn on their port and 99% of violators admit they knew what they were doing is wrong. Besides, I wouldn't complain too much if I had a dedicated 10Mb/s connection for a one time fee of $25.
2) I can't have a toaster, candle, etc. How am I supposed to have my bagel in the morning?
3) I must be in by 12:30 on school nights. ridiculous, yes, it is.
And thats just the beginning. I can't believe i'm paying someone $11000 a year to impose more rules on my life than i live with at home. Sure, i'm in bed by 11:30 most nights anyway, i like to get ALOT of sleep. And I have a toaster, but the point is, Students have no rights, thats why they are students, if they had rights, they would be professors.
What, me worry?
I am a parent of a college student and pay more than $30,000 per year to her college in tuition and fees. I would be distressed if the college viewed the enforcement of the copyright laws as an important part of its mission. I would be outraged if the college forbade my daughter's bio-psych professor from distributing photocopies of recent articles on brain function to the class because such copies apparently violate the copyright laws and would question the college's priorities if it wasted resources enforcing someone's interpretation of the copyright laws as they relate to Napster. I would be seriously troubled if the college reacted to evidence of inadequate bandwidth by restricting use rather than seeing unexpected growth as a leading indicator of the need for more capacity and allocated resources accordingly.
Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years
But banning it because people do illegal things with it? Give me a break. Take a look at your local "decency laws". There's a 50-50 chance that netscape/ie are used for "illegal activities" on any given day. Not to mention copying pirated software...
The Daily Build
Censorship is restricting certain types of content only within a medium for some sort of political or moral goal. I don't believe that the university has any objection to students receiving any certain type of content (the AUP simply specifies that usage should be for educational purposes - I'll get to what this means in a bit). But regardless of the content, as the head admin says, "network bandwidth is a very limited resource." And I wholeheartedly agree to any measures he takes to help relieve the congestion, especially if it impacts only services, like Napster, that cannot possibly be considered to have legitimate educational purposes.
Yes, that's right, educational purposes. That's what university networks are supposed to be for. And I believe in a broad definition of "educational" that includes things like hosting Free Software projects, receiving and playing (non-stolen) music files, and even reading Slashdot. Most organizations, especially for-profit ones, do not even allow these activities because they do not contribute to that organization's mission. You should be thankful that most universities liberally interpret the boundaries of their missions and do not require you to pay for your own bandwidth to use these and other services.
Another issue to consider is that, in a badly oversubscribed environment like ours (100% usage from 8am to 6pm), every byte you get is a byte someone else won't. In a lot of cases, that someone else is trying to do real research, or as in my case, get security fixes and other data crucial to my job as a systems administrator. The conscientious individual recognizes this and self-imposes limits to his network use during congested times. After-hours, in fact, most limits are removed and students and faculty are allowed even freer use of the network. As I've been saying, these restrictions and limits are placed so that everyone has a fair shot at using the network. It would be nice if people would further limit their usage to truly educational material during the day; if they did then restrictions would not even be necessary. Until that happens (ha!) we'll continue to restrict and/or rate-limit certain services.
Unfortunately, decisions must be made as to exactly which services must be limited or cut off, and in general I feel that Napster is an example of a service with no real educational value and high bandwidth usage. Thus it is a good candidate for restriction. Perhaps you disagree, but then it would be your responsibility to decide what else must be limited or cut. Obviously items like DeCSS are not cut for these reasons, and I vehemently disagree with that practice. Ditto for cutting internet long-distance just to prevent competition. There are lots of bad reasons to restrict network usage, but I've yet to see anyone around here bringing them up and I suspect that in most places, decisions are being made for valid reasons, not censorship or to stifle competition. Here we are talking about bandwidth usage, and something has to go. I'm glad it's Napster and not FTP or HTTP. Certainly these protocols can be abused as well, but they are also frequently used for purposes directly related to the stated goals of the university. Think about it. If not Napster, then what?
--TM
When MP3s flying around the network start to affect people's ability to get real work done -- both by students and researchers -- I think it's entirely within the rights of the admins to restrict the use of things like Napster. Buy your own T1.
--
My job is system and network administration on the campus of a local university. I would be the one to recommend to my boss about these types of policies (and ultimately I think the final say would be mine).
:)
Personally, I feel that this _is_ a matter of censorship. Furthermore, banning sites and blocking ports is a futile attempt. Students are resourceful. They will find some way around it (proxies, say), or someone else who knows. Once one student knows a way around it, the whole campus knows.
Recently our uplink set a packet filter blocking all packats to napster.com. I lobbied against this, and stressed that this wasn't a solution to the problem. Blocking content _is_ censorship. While I am sympathetic to the problem, censoring people is simply wrong. The filter was dropped a few days later; I hope my arguments had a hand in persuading them.
I currently impose bandwidth throttling on the interface that connects to our campus residence. This seems to work reasonably well and I would recommend this to any network admin over packet filtering.
Jason,
tack@linux.com
In 1994, it was rare for students to take computers to campus. For most schools, this was the dawning of the connected era, when they were thinking about the procurement process for full scale fiber ethernet networks. Some schools wrote grant applications, begged alums, asked the state govt, raised tuition to pay for their "pipe dreams".
So, for a few years, in most cases, the bandwidth that was planned in the mid 90's has held out. But in the past two years, hardware prices have fallen through the floor, and evry kid wants to bring his or her computer to school.
At my school last spring, when I sat down to look, less than 5% of seniors had computers on the campus network (all computers have to be listed as students' usernames for easy ID). More than 70% of freshmen did. The explosive growth of end-user computing sent the computer from the realm of luxury item to the realm of more-important-than-a-tv.
So the procurement process has to start again, admin staff trying to get money to upgrade the network, keep faculty in working machines, provide multimedia teaching facilities in classrooms, provide public use computers for students who don't bring computers, spend money selling the school through its website, and making sure CS students have access to labs that will allow them to actually learn something. Add to that the personnel cost of manning the network, admining accounts, going to meetings to get more money, and researching new tech for upgrades, and you've got a pretty hefty bill, even in cases where a lot of the grunt work is done by students. Not to mention that hefty chunks of 1999's budget probably went to Y2K upgrades.
In short, bandwidth is a very expensive commodity for departments with short budgets, and students abusing it before the school can get what it needs deserve to be shut down. The angst-ridden middle class kid syndrome will whine to no end, though, thinking they were really paying what the resources are worth. Yeah, right.
Of course, the faculty were more concerned with "what do you do with students who spend all their time on the net and no time working? They already recentered the SAT for them. Now what?" But that's for another day...
--mandi
You can use QoS.
Even if you cannot use it selectively (with Napster this requires sniffing the proto and configuring QoS filters realtime) use per net/per IP limits (aka per dorm). Or even better schedule the dorms to use ONLY leftovers from the rest of the campus. Over. Done. Whoever says it is impossible eat a gun. Been there. Done that
Problem is elsewhere:
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Well, I know this is about as bad as censorship, but students need to be worn down. They need an oppressive network dictator lording over their every packet and destroying their fun. Otherwise how will they feel when they get into a job at a large company? They might be devistated. But that's how I would do it. Sure, take the easy way out. See if I care. ;)
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Just because you pay a fee for your connection does not mean they waive the right to determine how it may be used. If you don't like the fee, the conditions, or whatever else, you can always find an alternate method of connecting.
Personally, I don't see what people are bitching about. $80/semester is a fantastic deal for high-speed acccess. My cablemodem costs me $240 per semester.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
I agree with you on the Napster issue as well as just about every other point you make. I also don't believe that it's censorship more than it's trying to control bandwidth and legal exposure.
One place that I do have a problem is when public schools make sweetheart deals with long-distance carriers in return for kickbacks. They force their students to use one carrier from their dorm rooms under the auspices of cheaper rates, when in fact they are taking some of the savings themselves. Now, don't get me wrong -- I think that public schools should try to save money (or generate it) wherever possible to save both the taxpayers and the students money.
However, banning IP long distance phone calls is an active conflict of interest. It puts the school into a position of protecting their preferred long distance carrier's market by controlling their network.
What I suggest is not that schools should give up controlling their networks, but that they should be more careful in choosing who they make exclusive agreements with, or if they should at all. These agreements with LD carriers put them in an exposed position and tie their hands when they want to later control network bandwidth, and they are just plain no good.
In the last few years, it's almost been a free-for-all with schools making exclusive agreements with everyone from Microsoft to all the long distance carriers to Subway and even credit card companies. But these agreements come at a price that administrators don't yet realize: the integrity of their school's goal to provide education, not business relationships.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
If schools resources are to be used only for "learning", then why are student activity fees collected at most universities, often for recreational services most students never use?
And remember that universities are not usually strictly private profit-seeking entities. They are payed for by tuition and student fees, by charitable endowments, and by govenment money collected with taxes (even private schools receive federal funds for student programs and research).
You claim it's not censorship when someone else owns the wire, but what happens when everybody who owns the wires won't let you talk? What's your recourse, build your own Internet?
It's a tough problem (obviously). The best solution we came up with was to use DummyNet under BSD or iproute2 under Linux to give each user their own allocation of bandwidth. When they run out, they can still use our proxy servers (which don't incur charges) or can buy more bandwidth for their allocation.
IProute2 is actually excellent for this. It can do just as much as your average Cisco, much more easily: source-based routing, processing of packets based on arbitrary hexadecimal strings in them, and so-on. With a powerful enough CPU and two 3Com cards, we got a decent throughput too.
We came up with a whole complex system with perl, Oracle, DBI, SNMP, shaper.o (no iproute2 in those days) and lots of other things - then ran out of time and money just as it was starting to work (though shaper.o wasn't very suited to the task). There just isn't enough money, at least in UK universities, to do this sort of thing.
Instead each ethernet segment of 100+ users squeezes through a 20Kbps throttle. This is of course totally unfair, because 2% use more than the rest put together, but on the bright side traffic through our proxies is excluded from the throttling. It's a terrible solution but there isn't money for anything better. We don't have Cisco CPU capacity for selective QoS by protocol. Any suggestions welcome :-)
I work for core networking for the Univ. of Missouri and am a student who uses Napster.
I understand the problem. I mean, several weeks ago one res-hall (250 students) was cranking out 35 MBit (all Napster/MP3). We have a 45MBit link to the Internet. We put a filter on the router just to count # of packets going to the Napster server - several hundred per second. That just to the server, NOT mp3 files going across the wire.
I can understand turning it off. Although we started with the biggest offenders at first - that doesn't work. It's the large number of people using it - not several major offenders.
So how to nail it? filter out anything to that class C - fine. That'll work temporarily. Proxy's are abundant. DNS it - they'll use external DNS servers. The only viable way I know of to really shut it down is possibly to shut off ICMP inbound. Although I'm going to try to write a filter that would nail the Napster protocol. Blocking ICMP would suck, but it would work. If anyone knows a better idea, please please let me know.
Brent Deterding
Univsity of Missouri - Columbia
Data Network Planning & Support - Core Group
Research Computing Group
Grader - CECS 253 (UNIX)
Brent Deterding Data Network Planning and Support University of Missouri @ Columbia
The most common practice by university admins to block student access to napster servers is by establishing a firewall (or modifying existing firewall to block napster). Unfortunately, this is also the most difficult method to bypass. Essentially this firewall looks for all information going to *napster.com and stops it. The only way to continue to access napster servers is to "bounce" off another site (that you can connect) to, to napster. This can be achieved using various 'proxy' software. 1) Someone who is offsite from your university needs to download and install a socks4/5 compatible proxy server, configure it correctly and then give you the information. 2) You will put this information in the section where napster asks if you go through a socks proxy/firewall. This will tell napster to first establish a connection with that server and then go to server.napster.com. Then you will be able to connect to napster's servers. Also, a good thing to remember - you're going to want to bounce off someone with a decent connection to the internet. Although almost all traffic is peerpeer - napster still talks to you for queries. The peerpeer connections will be established seperately. Another fairly common method to prevent students from accessing *napster.com is to remove the dns entry for napster.com. Every computer needs a dns server to resolve IPs (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) to hostnames (host.mask.com). Your school (or ISP) provides this DNS (domain name server) for you to use. The school could change their dns entry of server.napster.com, which is the host that the client looks for, to something else (a school warning page) -- or remove it entirely. Fortunately it's very easy to bypass this method. Unlike the firewall, we can do one of two simple things. 1) Simply insert a different DNS server into your configuration. This will then have your computer point to a different nameserver instead of pointing to your school's. Other nameservers won't have blocked napster because they have no reason to do so. 2) Edit your 'c:\windows\hosts' file. This file allows you to put an IP and what host it should resolve to, thus bypassing the need to have the dns server look it up for you. This is perhaps the best option of the two, incase your school has special dns entries that another server won't have. sample: (c:\windows\hosts) 208.184.216.223 server.napster.com #napster dns entry Note: You will have reboot for these settings to take effect. Also, if your school FIREWALLED napster, you will not be able to use this method. See Proxies section. (A good way to know you're firewalled, is to try to ping server.napster .com, then when it doesn't work ping 208.184.216.223. If the second way (ip) works - you're not firewalled. You just need a dns entry).
Who the hell told Carrot Top he was funny?
Napster and other bandwidth hogging programs can cause slow Internet connections for everyone
The Chronicle of Higher Education published the following article in the issue dated February 25, 2000. Salisbury State University is facing similar bandwidth issues with the proliferation of Napster and similar programs, plus other bandwidth stealing applications such as Spinner, Real Player, WinAmp (when used to receive Shoutcast Stations) and Instant Messenger programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and ICQ. As a consideration, please be aware that using these programs during peak hours (usually 9 AM to 9 PM) causes the network to slow significantly, so please try to limit your use of these programs (especially the Napster-like programs and the streaming audio programs like Spinner, etc) to non-peak hours. In this way, we can ensure that the Internet is available at an acceptable level of speed to everyone that needs it.
"Napster, a tool for finding MP3 audio files online, is causing headaches among network administrators -- not because of its potential for copyright infringement, but because when students use it en masse they can clog even high-bandwidth campus Internet connections.
A growing number of universities have responded to the resulting congestion by cutting off the software's access to the Internet.
The program runs on personal computers and allows a user to share his or her collection of MP3 files. MP3's on users' hard drives are made available for both searches and downloads over the Internet by anyone else who runs the program. At peak times, this network of Napster users can offer access to several hundred gigabytes of data, or hundreds of thousands of individual files.
At any given time, each user can be sending and receiving dozens of files. Multiply that by hundreds of students on one campus, and the consequence can be a serious traffic jam.
"We found that, on average, that particular program was using 10 to 40 percent of our campus Internet bandwidth," says Marjorie F. Proell, communications director for Saint Cloud State University, in Minnesota. "There were times it peaked even at 60 percent."
Such high traffic can slow down everyone else's use of the Internet, whether for surfing, for transferring scholarly journal articles, or even just for sending mail. "It was reducing the speed and reliability of our Internet services, which is something that's felt by everyone on campus --students, staff, and faculty," says Ms. Proell. In October, network engineers at Oregon State University noticed increased Internet traffic, which they traced to Napster. "It was using 5 percent of O.S.U.'s total bandwidth going out of the university," says Christopher White, the administrator for the university's residential network. That percentage "doesn't sound like a lot, but it is -- a real, real lot," he says. By November, Napster was using up 10 percent of the bandwidth.
At first, administrators responded by calling students who were using the program and telling them that such bandwidth-hogging programs violated the university's policies on acceptable use of the network. But when it became clear that hundreds of students were using the program, officials decided to block the network channel that carries Napster traffic.
"If we had let it go much longer, I think we definitely would have had serious problems," says Mr. White.
Other institutions have reported similar traffic problems. Institutions that have reportedly banned the program include Boston, North Carolina State, and Northwestern Universities, and the Universities of New Hampshire, Pittsburgh, and Texas. Institutions don't just face slow Web connections as a result of Napster -- they can face significant Internet access costs as well. According to Curtis R. Pederson, Oregon State's vice provost for information services, Napster was costing the university about $1,500 per month at the time it was shut off.
The university normally spends $12,000 to $15,000 a month for Internet access. Mr. Pederson says the university is planning to hold a forum with students to talk about "Internet use and ethics, and the reality of the budget." Other institutions have had similar meetings.
Administrators who have blocked access to Napster say that bandwidth is their main concern, rather than the continuing controversy over MP3 files, which are often used to illegally transmit copyrighted music. The Recording Industry Association of America is pursuing a lawsuit against the makers of Napster because of the ease with which the program lets users share pirated music.
The association also regularly requests that colleges shut down online archives of illegal MP3's on campus networks and has created an educational campaign intended to teach students about copyright law.
Oregon State's Mr. White says the decision to block the program was definitely made easier by Napster's illicit uses. "If it was a program that had real educational value to it, it probably would have been a lot harder," he says. But, he adds, "we wouldn't have even noticed it if it wasn't for the bandwidth issue."
BTW, I received this mail from my school account - one "powered" by Groupwise - but that's all I use that account for, because it's literally down as much as it is up. But I guess that's another story...
--------
Oscarfish.com: tropical fish with attitude. Way t
Three years ago when I lived on campus, I ran an mp3 FTP site. It was pretty popular for the few months it was public and I was able to serve about 100 gigs worth of stuff. I decided to cut back because the University did monitor that stuff and basically it's their bandwidth.
There is the arguement that you have to pay Computer Access fees. At Texas A&M where I went to school, that was all of $50 a semester. I pay that in one month for cable service. I don't really see how I can then justify saying that I pay $50 a semester I should be able to use all the bandwidth I want. My cable company asked me to stop running an FTP after 3 days and 1 gig served.
The thing is if your actions are negatively impacting other people, (and high bandwidth usage does!) then you have no right to complain if someone asks you to stop. Yeah it's fun to complain, but grow up people. Don't take it all so seriously.
Mordred
I have no objection to the college banning me from using Napster (Or wouldn't have if I was still there). It is after all THEIR network. What would worry me is that someone was looking at what I was downloading.
Can't load limits be implemented?
Fight Spammers!
Take a look at http://www.uri.edu/mrtg/jvnc.html
You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.
WRT napster: I am well aware that it could be used for the transfer of non-copyrighted MP3's. But the fact of the matter is that it is not. I will challenge anyone to show me that even 1% of the MP3's available on Napster are not copyrighted. And this thing is using 20% of the bandwidth on a lot of campuses! If students in fact own the CD's, why can't they just rip their own copies?
So don't talk to me about Napster. As for DialPad: that is also a purely economic decision in most cases. Yeah, it only eats about 20K/sec. But remember that's 20K/sec for hours on end. It adds up.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
I'm sure many of you will claim that "this is just the start of censorhip" and "a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant". Here's the thing you've got to remember: when you cry "censorship" over petty stuff like this, you will not be able to get my attention when there really is censorship. For example, the DeCSS stuff is quite disturbing from a free speech point of view. But by hassling with dialpad.com, you are losing credibility for that battle.
Never cry wolf.
--
-- Slashdot sucks.
Napster itself is legality-neutral (like almost all tools). Since today there is no way to distinguish between an illegal and a legal MP3, Napster can't be held responsible if people choose to use it to share the former as well as the latter.
OTOH Napster is a worse bandwidth hog than W2K's Active Directory. Both should be banned.
--
E_NOSIG
Napster is pain in the butt and a bandwidth hog. If that is the real reason it is being blocked, I consider that a legit reason. Bandwidth is a finite item, even at universities. Yes, you can say that your dollars are paying for it. I would argue, if you want to say that, that there is a finite amount of bandwidth that you have paid for and after you have used it, your service is cut or you can pay for more. It is not cheap to throw in additional internet links. The end user has to be responsible in their usage.
Now on the censorship side, that is just not acceptable and should not be tolerated. Bandwidth mangement is one thing. Censoring is never the right reason.
How exactly could you ban Napster? I know you can use the "You are not allowed to run Napster" rule, but how does a university physically block the access? By blocking the ports? Looks like Napster could just work it's way around that with every beta release. I have heard on /. of universities blocking Napster and the next release working anyway.
Will this just be a never-ending war?
Plankeye
Who the hell told Carrot Top he was funny?
Here at Cornell University we pay over $80 a semester for access to the Campus Network, it is in fact a money making endevour for them. There have been threats of crack downs on programs like Napster and sites like DialPad, but nothing yet. As I also work for the campus computing center running the email system, I know that we in fact do not have a bandwidth problem, however that is an easy excuse for them. If they want to make reduce access, fine, I don't agree with it, however they do then need to stop charging students. I am sure this is similar to other campuses as well. If your campus does do this the first thing you should do is change all the default ports on things like Napster (they block the port not the protocol) and look into proxys
I wouldn't mind if my College (Snevets Institute of Technology) would ban Napster... Trying to do work that involves the Net is now close to impossible since the network is almost always completely clogged...
If it was up to me, I'd throw in another connection or something and limit Napster to a few machines or something. I dunno, I just feel frustrated that our 'state-of-the-art' network doesn't work for jack when 200 people are using Napster simultaneously.
Eh, I'll shut up now
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
Somebody in a post elsewhere (attached to this story) mentioned QoS, prioritizing packets along the lines of:
1. everything not mentioned below
2. web
3. internet telephony
4. Napster
If there's leftover bandwidth, Napster gets it (hopefully preventing people from getting deperate enough to go to lengths to circumvent the measures). And if somebody else needs bandwidth, they get it. E-Z.
I'm the primary network administrator for a small college with a ridiculously limited Internet connection. We have ~350 students and 10Mbps Ethernet to all dorm rooms, but we only have a 512Kbps uplink at the moment. As a result, our users often end up contending for time on a rather congested link.
The three or four warez d00dz who think they have to have a dozen MP3s or VCDs downloading at all times don't help. A few months ago we had one or two twits using up well in excess of 50% of our bandwidth, moving traffic we all knew perfectly well was bootlegged media. But we really see this as an excessive-use problem, not a bootlegging problem -- so we put a 200MB/day cap on usage. As soon as any user machine on our network has moved 200MB over the Internet link in one day, it is unceremoniously blocked off until 3AM the next morning. There is a "free period" from 3AM to 6AM during which people may download all they want without limit; also, we grant exceptions for academic use, such as when someone wants to download a new distro CD image. (The funny thing is that the really heavy users don't use the 3AM-6AM window, even though there's plenty of scheduled-download software out there. They just hit 200MB and get blocked -- just about every day.)
We do, actually, have a policy against bootlegging software, music, movies, and the like -- but I'll be the first to admit that's a CYA move, so if RIAA or the like come attack us, we can say we don't tolerate bootlegging. We don't go looking for MP3 servers unless someone raises a fuss. We do block NetBIOS-over-TCP at the firewall, but that's all. (We're planning to block inbound SMTP directed to systems other than our mail server in the near future, but that's to stop spammers, not to limit our users.)
Blocking services by port number is not a solution to excessive use, nor is it a solution to bootlegging or other "contrabandwidth". In a port-blocking situation, the serious abusers tunnel or otherwise route around the censorship; the regular users get stuck with bogus limits on their use; and we sysadmins have to play catch-up maintaining a list of blocked services. If congestion is the problem, ban excessive use, not controversial use.
Generally speaking, in terms of the way laws are written and upheld, the use of mp3s would be upheld because although it has illicit uses, it also has legitimate uses. Think of the music students on campus who download recorded music from sites that make it freely available to the public for study and just for regular enjoyment. I've also known students who tape lectures of classes and make them available for other students via mp3.
Think about guns - guns are made to kill people. They are used in crimes every day all over the nation. But still, they are legal, because we recognize that they have legitimate uses. You can restrict the use of guns, and you might even reduce crime, (I don't actually believe that, but that's an entirely different story) but you'd be giving up a portion of your freedom to do that. Similarly, you can ban mp3s, and you may reduce the amount of IP theft, or lower your bandwidth utilization, but you're giving something up. Namely, the positive aspects of downloading mp3s, and also, the students freedom to be in an environment that allows them to expand themselves as they see fit, not as the university sees fit.
I can kinda sympathize with the bandwidth argument, but I really hate it when people change things midstream. If you come onto the university network, and sign an agreement saying "by signing this you agree not to do x, y, or z" then you have a choice, and you can go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you invest in a NIC for your student network, and then have regulations piled on you never agreed to, that's different, because you weren't given a choice.
It's their bandwidth, right? So they're completely justified in monitoring and restricting all traffic, including all your outgoing email and communication and logging them. That's just not fair, and it's somewhat absurd. They're fighting a losing battle anyway. If they ban napster, somebody will figure out how to run it on a differnent port, or will just move to another service.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
For instance, you can say the following:
- First, let all traffic not defined below go first (SMTP, NTP, etc) -- basically all non-classified traffic
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all web traffic,
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all IP telephony traffic,
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all Napster traffic.
(Insert other bandwidth hogging apps or reprioritize as necessary)Basically this is probably the best for all worlds, since then the Napster users can try to hammer the network all they want. They just will have their packets dropped first. This will allow them to actually use *ALL* of their network.
Good Fast Cheap. Pick any two.
Well, Napster is clearly a software product that is used almost exclusively to pirate MP3s, it leeches up a lot of bandwidth, and has some pretty bad security holes that means that potentially the client can be forced to serve up any file to a malicious Napster server.
What's wrong with universities banning it? Clearly, they cannot condone the flagrant ripping of MP3's on campus. I'm sure they'd do the same if they found 10000 warez sites running on their students' boxes.
I'm not saying that censorship is a good thing, just that in this case I fail to see how this is construed as censorship, given that using the application for anything other than illegal activities is fairly hard. 5% of university bandwidth is a hell of a lot as well.
I wish Napster was only taking up 5% of our total bandwidth!
Here at the college where I am a technician we've already had the first part of our firewall system installed to secure the campus and restrict the use of Napster. Our reason to kill Napster is the same one repeated many times in this forum--bandwidth. Currently, Napster is taking up about 25-30% of the sum total of our T1 line.
It used to be a 3-to-1 ratio of incoming to outgoing traffic. 75% of the traffic came into the campus LAN and 25% (or less) went out. This year, that has all changed. As I write this our MRTG graph shows 150K+ going out and less than 100K comming in. At night its even worse (typical night: 50K+ out vs. ~10K in). On average we are split equally between traffic comming in and traffic going out.
I probed and port scanned the network a couple weeks ago and found 30-40 people who were running a Napster server. Lets say each server allows 10-20 users. At peak that would mean 300-800 people are downloading large MP3 files. We have a student body of 1000. The math becomes a little frightening at this point.
This is a college LAN, not a server farm.
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?