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USC To Students: No Sharing Files
jukal writes: "copy-paste from a Wired article: 'Students at the University of Southern California could face a school year without computer access if they are busted swapping movies and music online. In an e-mail message to all students, school officials warned that using peer-to-peer file-trading services could force the university to kick students off the network. '"
What if it's MY music? I cannot share it?
If you're going to do it, use a dial-up account with your own ISP, because we can't afford all of the bandwidth.
RomSteady - I came, I saw, I tested. GamerTag: RomSteady / http://www.romsteady.net
Let's see, how are we addressing this issue this week? Isn't this the way that we *want* piracy to be addressed? By going after the *pirates* instead of the *technology?* I wonder how many reactionary Slashbots will attack USC for taking *exactly* the approach that these same Slashbots have recommended so many times.
Hat's off to you, USC. Keep up the good work.
Way to spark innovation! It was attitudes like this that led to all the great technological achievment from universities... NOT
Now all the students are going to need to learn how to run anonymous FTP servers and use FTP clients. We certainly wouldn't want to make supposedly tech-savvy students learn how to do something more difficult than double-click a few times.
Hrm, here at ISU the local campus LAN is just about all anyone needs. Would kinda suck if people couldn't use that anymore...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
File sharing is a form of stealing which is destroying our economy. The damage it does is comparable to terrorism.
And besides, no 'criminals' who do filesharing posess the creativity necessary to craft their own music or art.
(Apologies to those who miss the sarcasm)
Put traffic shaper on them - let them use equivalent of 28800 modem. Just enough for browsing the web and work but lousy for file sharing...
If I had the RIAA breathing down my neck about this, I'd do the same thing. Better to go along with this issue than to tie up god knows how much money in court costs.
~D:
Of course they want to stop piracy as well, but I think the bigger issue would be bandwidth.
You think I'm paying to go to school so I can learn? I'm paying for 5 years of quick music, movies, and porn, damn it. Turn off my network access and I'm going to community college.
---------------------------
This has been happening at colleges all over for some time. Last year when I was still living on campus they sent out letters to each room saying something similar to this. Everyone did it anyway. I never understood why they didnt just filter them out .. but I didn't work in the IT department.
Anyway, the guys upstairs found a few wi-fi networks in the area and ran a cat5 out the window and down to our room so we had unrestricted (and suprisingly faster) access then the rest of the campus.
There is no spork.
Schools in! Get back to work you slackers! ;)
Ok well anyone who is in the CIS program should know how to setup the following. Make a secure tunnel connection into your friends cable modem/dsl service using ssh. Setup up a proxy on that friends box and then use it to connect outside to these servers. Just use a socks proxy running on port 80 to connect. This way the traffic will be encrypted over your network it will look like you are connecting to port 80 on that box and even if they have a sniffer setup they will only see jarbled ssh traffic.
My school/univ, The Cooper Union, is supposed to be a top-ranking undergraduate engineering college (per US News rankings), but in the dorms (aka "student residence") here, ANY kind of file sharing is banned. The admins have taken proactive measures, including blocking ALL inbound access, and blocking ALL one/two-way UDP traffic. Only outbound TCP is allowed...and "criminal" ports like 1214 (Kazaa), 6699 (WinMX) and a host of other ports are blocked.
What also sucks is that the UDP block also cuts down ICMP ECHO (aka "Ping") packets...it is a crying shame that an Electrical Engineering student at "one of the best engineering schools" cannot verify network response times!!
Let me add, however, that I understand the file-sharing thing...our pipe is just 3xT1, and they wouldn't want to bog it down with pr0n and mp3s.
Ideally, they would use Packeteer or some other program to prioritize non-file-sharing traffic and/or throttle bandwidth to and from "criminal" ports. The UDP/ICMP block, however, is inane.
But hey, in case you didn't know, the Cooper Union is the only 4-year private univ in the US that gives a full-tuition scholarship worth about $100k over four years to every student admitted!
I got this sig off of KaZaA this morning
Does this mean students can swap illegal software and media offline on CDs? I'd think it more efficient that way anyways. Who is with me?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
cracking idea :)
University is a place where you study, it's not a place where you swap porno movies!
Good.
I'm sick and fucking tired of the retards who run P2P filesharing software on my University's network. Thanks to them, during the first and last two weeks of each semester, I see my bandwidth get killed (which I use for legitimate purposes, downloading source tarballs, ISOs of Linux distributions, and so forth). Everytime I see some moron running KaZaA, It is all I can do to avoid purchasing a lethal weapon and killing them.
But hey, in case you didn't know, the Cooper Union is the only 4-year private univ in the US that gives a full-tuition scholarship worth about $100k over four years to every student admitted!
How do they determine the value of the scholarship if they don't charge any tuition?
"We want to alert you to the fact that many of you are risking complete loss of access to the USC computer system and both disciplinary and legal action," wrote USC dean of libraries Jerry Campbell and vice president of student affairs Michael Jackson in the e-mail.
...
this could explain that
The network is capable of preventing crime, and now someone's actually doing it.
I go to a university, we havent got huge pipes, this is the University of Kansas (go jayhawks) I lived on campus, and the bandwidth being sucked out by the dorms was so intense you couldnt barely do ANYTHING online, at any time, on ANY part of the network. Last year they increased prices and then only allowed half the universities bandwidth to the dorms, now when on campus you can actually get online and download files fast again as long as you are in a computer lab. OFC when I was still living on campus I ssh into the lab machines, wget the files i needed to the machines hard drive then downloaded it across the network, but The only reason I was able to even do that was because of them making only half the bandwidth available to students in the dorms. Maybe some of you dont know the issues at colleges, maybe some of you live at KU and dont download HUGE files (say Debian ISO). Or maybe you think 15 k a second max is "fast" but Universities are doing this to protect themselves, the networks just die under the loads, at least KU did, and I can see why other colleges might be taking measures, its to ensure that each student doesnt have to pay 70 bucks a month. Considering students got high speed internet for 12 bucks a mont, you cant complain. Because of filesharers it went UP to 12 a month, it used to be 7 dollars a month, and it was faster.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Marist College, our local liberal arts college, does that too. They say that the extra traffic pulls the network speed down to a trickle. I believe them.
Skidmore, which is a $35,000 a year school, has set their routers to "deprioritize" packets flying to and from common P2P ports, but all the other ports fly fast. I believe for that kind of tuition, the school should come up with a way to give every student good bandwidth to do whatever they want, even if it means giving everyone their own DSL line out of the school.
Because students are taking up all the bandwidth redundantly downloading the same files from outside the school, I offered to run an OpenNap-like server so the bandwidth used would only be internal bandwidth. The administration wasn't interested.
My school has a great compromise: It throttles all the ports for things like Kazaa, etc, to something like 5-10 kbps. Good enough for mp3s, keeps the bandwidth down for other uses.
Ha har har
Perhaps some of these Universities might consider capping the bandwidth limit for students if it's really that big of an issue. Really, if it's bandwidth they're after, then why not buy better bandwidth? It should be the University's responsibility, not the student's.
On the other hand, if they're worried about copyrighted material, and they are, then hats off to them for bowing to the fecal lords.
bluHatter
You should learn to write properly. If you wish to call me an ass, you should use "you're" (abbreviation for "you are"), not "your" (possessive). So what you meant to say was "Your'e an ass".
At the University of Central Florida, they have a no p2p policy also. I got caught last year and had to pay (about) $30 to go to a "computer usage" workshop for an hour. 20 minutes of the hour were spent watching an episode of Futorama. Students who got caught twice had their network access permanently revoked. The letter that I recieved gave me a URL that contained the "evidence" (in the form of a SniffIt screenshot) that I was using a p2p network.
The wired article doesn't make it clear if all P2P activity is banned or just movies and music. I suspect from an administrative standpoint they'll shut down the whole P2P thing rather than check to see what is being shared, and if you have legal right to distribute it (e.g. photos from last weekend's kegger).
It also doesn't say if intranet P2P is OK, or if they are just forbidding P2P to/from outside the university.
Of course the USC network admins know this directive is foolish. File sharing happens via IRC, FTP, HTTP, IM and many other forms, straight client-client as well as through various tunnels and gateways between P2P networks. It's not likely that they want to become police, either.
This directive serves the university only two ways (ok maybe three).
1) It gets the RIAA off their backs for a while.
2) It keeps the clueless from using P2P networks - only the clueful will know how to still share files at will, and they are less likely to get caught and spell trouble for the University.
3) It reduces the load on their network.
All three are temporary gains but they must think that's better than nothing. Once again we see somebody attacking the symptom (P2P) rather than the problem (stealing copyrighted works).
At my university (private school in east Texas) there is no official policy on using filesharing programs. However, if you use too much bandwidth the other students will track you down and make you pay. I remember one day when I stepped out of my room and saw a lynch mob headed my direction. Fortunately I convinced them it wasn't me. (And it really wasn't, either.) I don't think they would have believed me, but I let them examine my computer for themselves.
wrote USC dean of libraries Jerry Campbell and vice president of student affairs Michael Jackson in the e-mail.
No wonder, its the king of pop! He wants his royalties
If they give a scholarship to every student, then how do they make money, and how do they value the scholarships? I could say that my public high school gives away ten billion dollar full tuition scholarships to every student...
-Ted http://www.freemathhelp.com/
here at URI we have a packeteer.. we have 55 megs of bandwidth , 10 of that is p2p, we limit it to 10, 20 burstable... so we ALWAYS have bandwidth for everything else we also cap the outbound to 5 megs.. we cut off direct connect and hotline and such.. and we have been kicking people off only if we get an e-mail from the MPAA or RIAA.. othe rthan that we could care less.
Home Sweet Home Linux
in my school (georgia tech), we just use something called buzzsearch, it's a webbased windows shares/samba scanning/indexing/searching service. The source for it is available on sourceforge, so people at other schools can start their own services. So far, all p2p networks are allowed, including kazaa, imesh, gnutella, etc..
but I guess warez is alright? :)
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
People need to remember that you can /dcc send to people on IRC. :)
Tell me what you believe...I'll tell you what you should see.
All this banning seems extreme. I know of a couple of kids (one at Penn State) that follow a more reasonable rule. Students are given a basic set of etiquette rules, and warned about downloading copyrighted material. Each student is given a limited amount of bandwidth per month, which is monitored. If they go over, they better have a good reason, or they'll lose their net privileges for the rest of the term. This method allows for high tech access to information, and educates them at the same time. Isn't that what school is for?
Why don't the students just build their own wireless network for filesharing? Could be too difficult....
I'm sure people will find a workaround. Wireless, sharing over https, SSH, anything encrypted with SSL... it shouldn't be hard to get around it.
My school implemeted a similar policy several weeks ago, citiing a warning letter from the BSA. I imagine this is something that will happen more and more in coming months as 1.) the BSA sends out scare letters and 2.) Schools get sick of having legitimate educational traffic degraded for P2P file swapping.
Come test your mettle in the world of Alter Aeon!
It would be intresting to see what happens to the students who where like me and had to test edge cases of the rules (I was a unit test in the rules!).
In both Mnet (http://mnet.sf.net/) and Freenet you don't know what you are actually sharing, just that the software is managing a part of your hard drive. In Mnet you most likely don't even have a full file to share with others, only a small percentage of the file.
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
...give you a basic bandwidth per month, and if you want to go over, you have to fork out lots more per month.
(Cisco has a solution that does this, if I remember right...but I can't remember what it's called.)
1. It's NOT public, but private.
2. They don't make money off students. Zero. Nada. Zilch. They subsist off of their endowment, donations from alumni and grants for research.
3. If you will look here, you will see that the Cooper Union is ranked third in the list. The top school in the list, the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, has a sticker-value tuition price of $33k. Considering that, I think $25k is a very fair assessment of Cooper's yearly tuition fee, assuming they charged one!
4. Your taxes pay exactly zero cents of my education. My taxes PAID a chunk of you public school education. Your analogy sounds makes as much sense as the UDP block I talked about in the original post.
They were one of the universities to block napster when it started becoming a problem, but they later reversed that. I'm no longer on the campus network having moved to my own appartment but when I was on the network, even when there was massive amounts of file sharing it was still considerably faster than my 1.5/768 dsl is now, so I don't think bandwidth is the real issue as some have suggested. They flag down those that consume a lot of bandwidth and send them warnings, and sometimes suspensions. (I have a friend that shared files over irc and got a nasty letter about using too much bandwidth)
My freshman year (a while ago) the "my network neighborhood" feature of windows worked and many shared files that way. That went away the following year much to the annoyance of many students.
This e-mail isn't really news, it's more of a reminder of a policy that was already in place.
On an only slightly related note. The campus network is handled by ISD (Internet Services Division) which has nothing to do with the CS department. The CS department has an eternal grudge with ISD. (As do a good number of CS students)
USC also seems to take complaints about the students overly seriously. My friend got spam sent to him to which he replied "Fuck you" along with some other unpleasentness. The spammer complained to USC who sent my friend a warning about proper conduct.
They can still access data on the VT network at full speed, but after they hit that last VT gateway into the Internet, that speed is halted. Severely.
Tech savvy students + tech restrictions = new technology.
Its as simple as that. I look forward to what they come out with. Sure, you could argue that they could get around it with SSH etc, but I would love to see a nice p2p app with encryption and compressed streams as part of the built-in architecture.
Does anyone know where the general public can get information about cd sale trends? (aka purchases per specific dates for specific releases in specific geographic locations)
Here is the whole copy of what was sent to all students here:
Dear Student:
This email is being sent to all students at USC to make sure they have the same information about copyright compliance.
Introduction
The University of Southern California is committed to the education of its students. Part of the educational process includes the provision of internet connections for students in classrooms, residences, libraries, eating establishments, and other places on campus. Students who live off campus may also access the internet through USC's computers via modems. Over the past two years the university has made efforts to make students aware of policies governing the use of its computing facilities and systems to enhance their educational experience and keep them from violating university, state, federal polices and laws that would negatively impact their student status.
As a part of this ongoing effort we want to alert you to the fact that many of you are risking complete loss of access to the USC computer system and both disciplinary and legal sanctions. Below is an overview of how students are placing themselves in jeopardy by inappropriately using USC's internet connections.
Is File Sharing Worth Losing Student Privileges at USC?
You are undoubtedly aware of the development of file-sharing software such as Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline, also known as peer-to-peer networks ("P2P networks"), and the fact that the use of P2P networks to share copyrighted material, such as movies, music and software, can violate the rights of copyright owners. As you probably know, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that the majority of Napster users are directly infringing federal copyright law by sharing music files without the permission of musical artists and recording companies who own these materials.
Copyright infringement occurs whenever you make a copy of any copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner, or obtaining permission some other way. Infringement also occurs when one person purchases an authorized copy, but allows others to reproduce further "pirated" copies. For example, if a student purchases a CD and creates an MP3 copy on his or her hard drive, and then uses a P2P network to share that MP3 copy with others, both the student and those making copies are infringing the owners' copyright rights and violating federal copyright law.
USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property. It is antithetical to this purpose for USC to play any part, even inadvertently, in the violation of the intellectual property rights of others. The USC policy regarding student use of USC computing resources clearly states that a student who reproduces or distributes copyrighted materials in electronic form without permission from the material's owner may be removed from the USC computer system and face further disciplinary action.
Further, infringing conduct exposes the infringer to serious legal penalties. In response to the growth of infringement through P2P networks, the recording and motion picture industries have increased their efforts to identify and stop those who download unauthorized music and video files. Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) can and do monitor P2P users, obtaining "snapshots" of the users' Internet protocol addresses, the files they are downloading or uploading from their P2P directories, the time that downloading occurs, and the Internet service provider (ISP) through which the files travel. (Gathering this information is not a violation of the users' privacy rights, because the user has voluntarily made his or her P2P directory available for public file sharing.)
Once this information is obtained, RIAA, MPAA and others can demand that an ISP remove any infringing copies from its system and may obtain a court order directing the ISP to identify the infringing user and to cut off the infringing user's access to the ISP's system. Further, if the user is determined to have infringed copyright rights, whether through P2P networks or other means, he or she can also be subject to sanctions such as the destruction of all unauthorized copies and monetary damages. In some cases, criminal sanctions - imprisonment and fines - may be imposed.
As an ISP for its students and faculty, USC has received an increasing number of notices from RIAA and MPAA identifying the IP addresses of USC students who are sharing copies of music and videos without authorization. USC will be forwarding such notices to the individual students involved and taking further steps to ensure that the infringing conduct ceases immediately, including, where necessary, depriving that student of any access to the USC computer system and further disciplinary sanctions. Obviously, if the complaining organization decides to take further steps to identify and prosecute the infringer, such conduct also runs the risk of incurring sanctions under federal copyright law, which can include monetary damages, and, in cases that are sufficiently extreme, criminal penalties - both imprisonment and fines. Copyright law provides no exception from liability for university students.
You should be aware that sharing music, videos, software, and other copyrighted material is a violation of law and can expose you and those with whom you share to legal sanctions, as well as sanctions under USC's own policy. Please do not put yourself, your friends, parents, and USC in the awkward position of having to confront such issues. We trust that you will take this issue seriously and conduct yourself accordingly.
Sincerely,
Jerry D. Campbell Dean of Libraries and Chief Information Officer
Sincerely,
Michael L. Jackson Vice President for Student Affairs
Peer-to-Peer file sharing is a no-no
WAP's are bad news
Further reading indicates that you can get shut off for a short period for file sharing and have your jack turned off for good for having a WAP. Apparently last year somebody had an Airport up and it took down 3 floors in one of the dorms.
Both of those seem like pretty heavy penalties. That is *exactly* how the policy went at the beginning of this school year. I think they may have sent out another reminder about the wireless though. I guess they realized that nobody was reading the agreements and it wasn't fair to simply shut their jack's off with no warning.
Anyway.. guess Universities are getting tired of wasted bandwidth. Here is a graph of bandwidth usage at Boulder over the last 48 hours and here is the base site with lots of statistics, in case you're interested.
Ben
"I either want less corruption, or more chance
to participate in it." -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Just make sure you shut of sharing with other users :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does anyone find the proximity of USC to Hollywood relavent in this decision ? Perhaps some wealthy alumni are also in cahoots with the MPAA/RIAA ? This just makes me suspicious as hell.
In an e-mail message to all students, school officials warned that using peer-to-peer file-trading services could force the university to kick students off the network.
Yeah, but I'm sure they can still get away with setting up a local gnutella server on the intranet. They're probably only monitoring incoming traffic.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
I downloaded unreal tournament 2003 demo off of kazaa (using kazaa lite). I wouldn't have been able to get it off any of the commercial servers as there is alot of traffic on them from eager unreal fans. P2P really is the future for downloading large files, it's to bad USC is trying to keep its students back in the stone age.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
OR ...could force the smart students to develop an anonymous, encrypted filesharing system and squash the whole plan. woops! now what? maybe a better solution is just plain traffic-usage capping.
I mean, they are simply warning students that the RIAA has been watching the scene and they are attempting to compartmentalize the students from the greater network.....for the good of all file swappers too.
I think that the message is "be discrete about your swapping, use FTP, CD's and other media for the transfer...don't advertise and especially don't gloat that you are getting away with it."
Remember also, they don't want to get involved with policing everything on the net. That's the angle that all ISP's are taking against the RIAA/DMCA lawsuits now....pretty much "it's not our business what the customer has at their house, they don't have it on the server here, so it's none of our business." I think that the school is just attempting to give themselves a little "plausable deniability" in this matter.
As P2P goes, "advertising" all of the songs that you have at one location is dangerous. That's a known weakness. Perhaps this will get solved, so that donors do not have to have their IP's revealed...
First check my reply to the other guy with the same question here.
Then for the official line, go here (brief), and here (complete history).
Also, it's FREE...as in beer. Unlike the Defense Academies, which are also technically free and even give you something extra, we do not have ANY kind of bond/obligation to Cooper Union after we graduate.
By the way, it's free because that was the founding principle of the college. The founder, Peter Cooper, wanted to provide education to "the boys and girls of this city", that was "as free as the water and air."
Good thing the students are learning in a university that when a means of sharing ideas can be used for ill that it must be stopped entirely. We wouldn't want them distributing their own thoughts. It's best to squash free thought while it's still budding.
On a side note, I personally found UT 2003 to be pretty stupid. Sure, the graphics are prettier, but the enemies are harder to see and hit, the weapons are nothing new, and the game characters are ugly- and all the same. Moreover, using prisoners in arena fighting? didn't they just do that in Quake 3? (Not like it was an original idea then).
Overall, I was dissapointed, and the consensus among my friends and I is that UT will outlive UT03.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Since the students arent being distracted by porn and music? IF they no longer have much use for the network, they wont have any problem in breaking it.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
phuck man, I(as a HS junior) have been poking thru USnews looking for places to think about for a month or so. Apparently, they have now gone paysite(@least for a month or two while they have a college issue out)
I guess what it comes down to is they don't give a damn about the legality or morality or whatever. They're just concerned about bandwidth use.
Nobody said anything about taxes. He was merely asking who made the assessment of the value of thier tuition? Cooper Union or an outside source? His point, from what I could tell, was that if Cooper Union was setting thier tuition at that, but never charging it, then it was meaningless. That is where he came up with his high school example (which, btw, you assumed was public), if nobody is charged to be admitted, you can pretend you charge whatever you want and then, out of the goodness of your heart, waive it for everybody.
I really dont know where the taxes thing came from, try to calm down next time, please.
Please. Almost every large institution has a policy that 'sharing music and movies is bad!'
:P
Call us when a university actually gets around to booting some thieves for once.
Why not do traffic shaping as soon as you go over a certain limit?
2mbit normal and if you go over a certain limit you have 28k8 of 56k for a month or 3 months.
This way students will take care of their connection.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
When napster first came out, it took up more than 85% of the total bandwidth. That meant people trying to do searches in the library weren't able to do so in a timely manner. This way, everything works, and people are still happy (because happy students == more tuition). It just means that you can't get instant gratification. You actually have to wait for your songs to download overnight. And movies/pr0n? They turn into a week-long wait.
I am very happy with what the school did with it's P2P apps, even though I live off campus. :P
~Mike
Get Firefox!
I prefer my college's 'solution' to file sharing: Please Leech!
My bad, he said public high school. DOH.
Re taxes, just making the point that Cooper Union is really free at no cost to anyone, while public schooling is free only with minor costs to everyone....
People have been getting kicked off the school network for sharing MP3's at Carnegie Mellon for years. Even if it was just by sharing a Windows directory with the local network. I've seen students lose their network connection for an entire semester a few times.
Think about it, while YOU might be sharing the files, your Uni?College/Whatever the heck you people go to will be held responsible for anything caught on their network if any organization were to conduct a full sweep of the network and find hundreds of gigs worth of copyrighted materials. It only makes sense for them to discourage filesharing. They don't care if you got it on your comp, that's not their concern. The fact is they don't want it on their network using their servers, because at that point they end up screwed.
At least that's what I got when sysadmins from my college found out I was running an illegal version of Win2k Pro and hosting about 8 gigs of warez on the (rather small according to US standards) college network... User/Password protected NTFS shares on a supposedly Win98/ME only network (Don't ask.) stick out like a sore thumb apparently...
Hate me!
They have absolutely no legal basis for such a move. If they suspend a student (or even just a student's access) on an allegation of using P2P software, they could find themselves in very hot water indeed.
The student could sue for anything from discrimination to loss of opportunity (economic loss) etc. I hope their law faculty are good in the court room, because USC just opened up a Pandora's box of potential legal exposure for themselves!
You go to college in California to learn how to be treated like you're in first grade!
I do tech support at the University of Pittsburgh and Besides the bandwidth suckage of p2p there is another problem. The Riaa has been hassling the university tirelessly about file sharing. It seems that alot of computers on campus were getting hacked and many of them were serving Warcraft 3. We were contacted and threatened with fines and all sorts of legal crap. The university is now instituting a similar ban to the one that we are discussing here and it is important. There are a few advantages that a university cannot pass up.
1. no lawsuits, if it's an enforced policy than the specific violators can be prosecuted.
2.Less pay wasted on sending tech support to remove the multitude of viruses from kazaa downloads.
3.MORE BANDWIDTH to be used for legitimate uses.
Here's the thing: why should the university provide a way for people to trade copyrighted material?
Every university I know of not only has student accounts, but also have www/ftp servers as well so students can exchange information. Sometimes used for personal photos and what not, but often times used to gather and share research. This was one of the primary reasons I wanted internet access in the first place.
I can in part understand not using filesharing services such as kazza / morphus which for the most part consume much bandwidth, and are almost always used for *entertainment*, as well as the liablity of sharing copyrighted materials.
But universities are places for research as well. While I can agree that they have every right probiting users from sharing that Metalica CD... present policy seems to limit how you public your research on let's say BlueGreen Alge. Not exactly the stuff you'd find in kazaa.
In the 21st centry, we need to respect the fact that multimedia is an excelent way to present information, wether it be mp3, mpeg, or dare I say it power point.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
At the University of Toronto, the bandwidth limitations this year on their resnet is limited to 750mb/week (for outside transfers). They don't monitor traffic between users on the internal network, which is understandable.
However, last year, the limit was set at 500mb/week. For those who wanted to sample a linux or bsd distro, this did not make life any fun at all, as the download had to be resumed to finish it, in a period of two weeks.
I think...
I have freinds who go to the science and art departments at Cooper Union. Tough over there.
That's right children, remember the REAL USC is in California!
There is some other fake institution that uses those letters, but they are a sad, pathetic school that is barely a shadow of the REAL USC!*
*This post written by a thru-and-thru Clemson student, and all those that know that USC is a school in California!
This is no surprise, considering USC is right down the road from Sony, Universal, Disney, Paramount, etc. It supplies more wetware to the film and entertainment industry than any other, and takes more money from said industry to support its world class film, music, and business departments.
...and there's no underage drinking or non-marital sex either.
Schools provide students' network access as an aid to their education.
If a student feels he/she must have p2p there are private ISP's out there who are willing to offer their services for a price. Most people in the real world do pay for their internet access.
There is no reason that a student should expect his/her school to sacrifice bandwidth or risk legal problems to support the student's habit.
What sucks is when you attend a medium size school that just follow the trendsetters of the big name schools. Incoming stupid regulations on things beyond their control.
You people speaking out against this are terrorists and need to be imprisoned for life or executed. Your promotion of piracy and commission of piracy, or the violation of federal law are worse than what happened on 9/11/2002! You people are EVIL and need to be promptly destroyed. This is a socialist country and you will do what you're told!
Perhaps a larger shame is an engineering student who doesn't know the difference between UDP and ICMP packet types. And that a UDP block doesn't block ICMP, because that'd be an ICMP block. A UDP block can screw with most traceroutes, however.
Heh.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
For those of us who are just a few years (months, in my case) from going to college, it would be useful to make a list of the various policies at colleges. I propose that anyone who knows of a particular college's/university's policy post a reply underneath with the organization's name as the subject.
I do hope you are joking because if you honestly belive that......
USC receives much of its financing, especially its prestigious Film School, there can be no doubt that this was financially motivated on USC's part becuase of political pressure from the MPAA. This new rule is not a coincidence, not that the ruling is not economically sensible in some regards.
www.enthea.org
You're forgetting Olin. They are also doing the full tuition scholarship to all admitted students
I've heard that they own a couple of office buildings in Manhattan. Rent in NYC is ungodly high. My understanding is that they make enough off of those rent's (probably donated building too) to pay all the operating expenses for the school. CU also has one of the best Architecture schools in the country, in highly regarded in many fields of study, and I'm sure they don't have any problem getting nice big grants and donations.
This really isnt that unusual. It may seem harsh but that is pretty standard proceedure for someone breaking the rules. I am the network admin at a small school with very limited bandwidth, and I set pretty strict rules on what is acceptable and what is not. It seems that no matter which way you end up going on the P2P issue you will always get complaints. If you leave it wide open you'll get complaints that nothing else works, or at best its really slow because the P2P networks eat up all your bandwidth (Napster was eatin 96% of ours at one point). If you ban all the P2P networks by threats, like above, or by using technology such as a packetshaper or a firewall, you will end up with many unhappy students. Eitherway its a lose lose situation for you. The best bet is to find some happy medium, which so far as I can find there isnt one. However we are addressing this with our students cooperativly, that way when we make a decision we can be sure we at least have some support.
While their decision to take people off the network for the entire year for using p2p is a bit harsh I do understand why they do it. Bandwidth is not free. Try to put your selves in the sys admins shoes. Its a hard job and banning, and making threats to ban users is not an easy thing to do.
USC is a private University in Los Angeles and is closely tied into the film and music industries there. Of course, they'd cow tow to their 'benefactors' in the RIAA and MPAA. What do you expect them to do? Have the balls to say no? No way!
In related news, campus to crack down on students who spend too much talking on the phone. "We have a limited number of circuits, and these students with long distance relationships are withholding nookie from their deserving peers."
Who cares about the students? What are the rules for the faculty? :-)
I should post anon. for this one...
Ahh a Fellow Cooper Student who reads Slashdot and posts! Hail! for a while i thought i was the only one.
With you i agree, Sometimes i feel that cooper's policy's are alittle too draconain, but i cant complain since i getting away scott free.(as in tution)
Being such a small school with such limited funds, Blocking all p2p only makes sense, espically with limited bandwitdh. If kids started sharing movies and music, traffic at cooper would come to a dead standstill and then everyone would be mad. So i cant complain, im just happy i have broadband at home. though i am jeaslous of my friend in SUNY albany and his schools OC-3 grrrr.
are you sure its a 3xT1? sometimes it dosnt even feel like a T1.
Sun is Warm, Grass is Green
First, the network was terrible from 6pm to 10pm my freshman year before they banned napster. After they banned napster, it was a little better but not much.
The main problem is they're trying to avoid lawsuits and cut costs which I'm all for. I don't want my tuition going up just so people can run napster/gnutella. I'm too lazy to spell out the differences between a school network and the cable I get in my apt, but you can probably figure them out.
Basically, I'm all for cutting costs. Which is why my biggest pet peeve about USC right now is that we just got brand new powermac G4's with Superdrives and 19" LCD displays in EVERY computer lab. The Dells also have 19" LCD's. Sheesh. A few would be good, but I don't think the old imacs were too obsolete for web/email/word, which is what 90% of people in computerlabs use.
Anyways, we whooped up on Auburn and Colorado (40-3 takeit!) so I'm happy anyways.
This is probably more of a matter of bandwidth usage then anything else. I know at Gatech the uplink was being maxed out constantly in the fall and spring last year causing even ssh to computers on campus from off campus to be slow.
They won't officially tell us what they did to fix the problem but they sure didn't come out and say we couldn't use file trading programs. What it basically looks like is they selectively drop so many packets from the typical file sharing programs to lighten the load so that other types of packets have no trouble getting out. By dropping only the occassional packet they can let the connection stay alive and not interrupt the transfer but effectively slow it down and leave more burst bandwidth for other stuff.
It seems nobody has gone to Cooper Union's website and do a little reading. Cooper Union is a private institution. It was founded by Peter Cooper, a wealthy industrialist in the 1800s. He also did this without ever learning to read. So, he took much of his money and set up The Cooper Union. The university runs on an endowment set up by the founder. Therefore, the school isn't paid for by taxes. Cooper Union does own real estate and land, so rents from people leasing the university's land and properities also help pay for the upkeep of the school. The tuition is completely paid for students. They still have to pay for books, an annual student fees, and living expenses (i.e. dorm), but the education itself is paid. The tuition's value is an estimate based on competing universities' tuitions that offer similar programs. By the way, it is really hard to get admitted into the school (this is also reinforced by several surveys, including U.S. News). There are less than 1000 matriculated students total, so there are no more than 150-200 freshman slots available. This is how the school can keep costs down for making tuitions free for students: limit the available seats.
Hold on there.
Here at UCI, we pay a good 200-300 dollars a quarter out of the 1600 just for the network we're on. That's about a hundred dollars a month for our access. THE STUDENTS are the ones who pay for the bandwidth at the public university where the state is supposed to cover the cost. If it were California paying for the bandwidth usage, then cap the up/downloads. But it's not.
On Carleton U (Go Ravens) 's Resnet (from which I'm reading /. at this moment), all p2p applications are essentially blocked by the firewall, as are most incoming connections. I tried setting up Apache with some outlandish port number and nobody on the outside could see it. However, people on the inside could. Anyhow, on teh subject of file-swapping, some claim to have had limited success with the new Morpheus client. However, I prefer a nice little application called "MP3 Voyeur". (I don't have the URL, but Google for it.) It bascially scans all the open shares on the network for files having a certain extention that you specify (.mp3, .avi, .mpg, .doc etc) and lists them. You have the option of playing them from the source or opening the folder, making drag and drop simple. There are a fair bit of things on the network, so I'll be happy for the time being.
The advantage of this is that it frees up bandwidth for other things. I snared a Debian ISO in an hour or two, as well as downloading America's Army at a peak of 397kbps (>380 sustained). Of course, Sunday afternoon offers slower transfer speeds.
Bandwidth use at Cambridge University in the UK has been restricted for ages... essentially you're allowed to use the network for necessary academic purposes, and personal use as long as it's light. Peer-to-peer file sharing is definitely out.
This is largely because the college pays 1p/Mb for incoming transatlantic traffic during the day... this charge comes directly from JANET, the Joint Academic Network.
Didn't stop me downloading Linux ISOs (in the middle of the night, to avoid the traffic charges)...
Anyway... I'm not paying for the 5Mbit/second access... why shouldn't they say how I'm allowed to use it?
Seems fair enough to me.
With the threats of bandwidth caps on cable modems, you'd think people would start to realise... bandwidth costs money.
Yeah, actualy, ISU students' developed strangesearch (which you probably already know). I had no idea it had gone beyond our lan :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Or maybe they're just tired of the harrass-a-grams from the riaa and mpaa pointing out the never ending stream of students in their dorms serving up copyright violations that the university is now obligated to spend resources to go stamp on?
We get them constantly. Our policy has been, so far, that we assume, until proven otherwise, that our users are obeying our AUP, which, honestly, breaks down to "dont break the law using our network" (which would include copyright violations), and "don't run a business using our network." When we get one of the "make them cease and desist" letters we inform the student, give them something like 24-48 hours (I forget exactly how much) to terminate the activity, or their port will be turned off, and file the action with the student judicial affairs office, which then takes them to student court for violating university rules. Generally they'll just get probation on a first offense. This takes an awful lot of staff time and energy, and I can see the attraction of just making a general preemptive strike... USC's probably been through the same thing and their fuse has run out.
Universities, being big on the publishing of ideas and such, are also big on defending copyright... I doubt there was any particular pressure that needed to be placed on USC by the riaa and mpaa.
My favorite comment is where they say that P2P can be used to trade copyright material. Well, it can be used for *non* copyrighted material too.
Are they going to ban hair-pins because they *can* be used for picking locks, butter knives because they *can* be used for violence or beds because they *can* be used for sex?
What if it's MY music? I cannot share it?
No, you cannot share it, because the music you think you wrote probably isn't your music. It belongs to the music publisher who published the particular sequence of four notes before you did. Under the "substantial similarity" standard used by United States courts, there are fewer than 50,000 possible distinct melodies in the Western musical scale, and there are hundreds of thousands of copyrighted songs published by major music publishers who have cross-licensing agreements with one another. Do the math. What's the probability of avoiding a lawsuit? What's the probability of winning if you can't afford legal representation?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Those students can still use IRC :-P
and nature of this article, I have to whole-heartedly agree with it. Yea, I know the whole intellectual property and fair use thing is out of proportion, and the RIAA and MPAA are crazy, and most EULAs and other licenses are unfair. But, not only is it a legal issue but it *is* a bandwidth issue as well. I work for an ISP... and da poop really hits the fan when the colleges go back to school. It's when the virus outbreaks, DDOS's, p2p, congestion, hacking and all the crazy stuff start back up. Just sounds to me like this university just wanted to cut down on the headaches. Legal, bandwidth, or otherwise. What happened to crazy college parties with naked chicks and beer? What does everyone do now? Download divx's from morpheus and watch em in their dorms?
FLR
What about "All your hat are belong to USC"?
No, more like The hat is yours, hat-baby.
At my University (UW-Platteville) you're basically not allowed to do anything with the network except web, email, and IM. This is nothing. If they only told me I couldn't run napsterish stuff, that would be fine, but we're not even allowed to run Linux while connected to the network. That's why I had to get a second box - Linux runs on the old one, and I telnet to it from the Win98 box which is on their network and also shares a drive. It's actually a pretty cute setup, though...
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
go wireless
Not necessarily specific pressure, but the fact that the U gets a ton of entertainment industry money cannot have totally escaped the thought processes of the USC administration. They have buildings named after movie stars; there is tons of implicit pressure to defend the industry's interests whether or not such pressure is ever made explicit.
Nonetheless, from what I've seen, USC has done or at least tolerated some significant moves that deserve commendation. The current policy is a complete shift from their stance during the Napster/Metallica fallout, when they refused to shut down napster ports and spokespeople pointed out that Napster allowed for many things besides trading "illegal" files. Also don't forget that USC publishes the Online Journalism Review, who published articles on both sides of the napster and copyright battles. I would guess there is a split at USC among the administration regarding what to do about copyright infringement and that the current policy probably reflects exasperation at getting threatening letters about USC students sharing mass quantities of files.
they didn't ban p2p. They just warned students not to use it illegally. Why is this distinction lost on so many people here?
What you think honesty makes me sick...I can't believe that civiled people still have such primitive racial superstitions. I hope this is just some base attempt at a joke. And yes, by the way, I am white.
SIGFAULT
Others have given the clues:
/. articles. Go google for them a bit ...
The administration assumes that if you are using PSP you are making illegal copies. Very few people record their own music. So few people do this that it's not worth taking into consideration. If you are using P2P, they will assume that you're guilty of copyright violations, and it will be up to you to prove yourself innocent.
Also, it has been pointed out that you're at a school that gets a lot of money from the movie and recording industries. If you are allowed to distribute your own music without first signing it over to a recording company, you will shoot down the whole reason that those companies exist.
This is what it's all about, dummy. The Internet is providing artists like you with a new channel to your audience. That channel isn't under the control of the recording industry. You don't have to sign over the rights to your music to distribute it on the Internet. This is one of the things that the RIAA is trying to stop. They've realized that if they don't stop it, they'll be out of business.
This is all documented well enough in other places, including previous
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I can't help wondering what the University will think when somebody realizes that a wireless access point is cheap and readily available, and (the drumroll...) not part of the "University" network.
Don't take life too seriously; it isn't permanent.
Jes, they can sniff & log IPs and MACs. But both can be cloned. A malicious student could get another in deep trouble.
Any draconian authority has to be careful not to get used as a hammer for personal revenge.
Well said...
I spent my first year in the dorms. Life was hell and the school did MUCH to make it worse. When I left and moved off campus to a nice apartment, school became so much better. On campus students are NOT people, they are CA$H cows to be milked for as much as possible. I picked up a room mate and the cost was not much more the I was paying to the school.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
at my college (wcupa.edu) they pretty much blocked aim today. the average student doesnt know this, but you have to change the port you're on to 13 i think. bleh, they've blocked every file-sharing program i've been able to find... but they havent been able to block mirc :) i feel for those people out in cali!
see sig. see sig run. run sig run.
I had some issues with my University. After talking with a lawyer, it was determined that I had not signed a lease. Rather, it was a LICENSE.
They had all rights and I had none. I moved the next day..
Good Luck!
After recieving the letter about "Copyright Compliance" last week, and looking through ISD's website, it looked as though there were a loophole in their policy.
For one thing, P2P programs still appeared, at the time, to be working. The ISD actually sent out this same exact letter last spring after the RIAA and co. contacted them. The programs were not blocked at that time, either. The ISD also sets ridiculously high limits on bandwidth usage (10 GB/day max), so it seemed the only reason they were cracking down was threats from The Industry.
If I buy a CD and rip it for my own use, that's legal, right? So if I buy a CD and download that same information, what's the difference? I payed the musician (ha) to have the use of it. If the RIAA claims I'm downloading something illegally, wouldn't they have to prove that I don't have the CD somewhere, perhaps tucked away in my basement at home? And if they can't make a case without proving a negative, how can they ever get after someone for simply downloading?
Right, so with the notion in my head that it was only the sharing that could get me or the school in trouble, I sent off an e-mail to Jerry Campbell explaining that:
"My mother owns some albums in record form, and some of the records aren't in the greatest of shape. At the end of the summer I had started downloading these songs for her, and I'm wondering if it is possible to complete this here.
My question then, more basically, is whether it is acceptable to simply download, but not share, files? This would be accomplished rather simply by just moving songs out of the 'shared' folder, or setting a program to allow no uploads.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, I look forward to your respsonse."
Well, it's true. Here's what Mr. Campbell had to say to clarify the matter:
"Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, even though your mother owns music in the form of record albums, downloading that same music without paying the legitimate copyright holder constitutes a violation of copyright law. The basic problem is that downloading copyrighted music (or video) from an unauthorized source is an illegal act--regardless of how or where you might store it. So to answer your question, University policy prohibits the illegal act, meaning that you are not allowed to perform the download. Because the University is serving as your Internet Service Provider, such downloading would put both you and the University at risk.
I hope this answers your question, and I will revise future letters on this matter to be more clear in this regard."
what is ironic about this is my school, Georgia Tech, has a student run file share crawler called BuzzSearch (it even has a sourceforge page ;)
:D
I mean, with 3TB of stuff to play with connected at about 6MB/s on average, who needs Kazza?
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
From a previous post:
The USC policy regarding student use of USC computing resources clearly states that a student who reproduces or distributes copyrighted materials in electronic form without permission from the material's owner may be removed from the USC computer system and face further disciplinary action.
and:
Organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) can and do monitor P2P users, obtaining "snapshots" of the users' Internet protocol addresses, the files they are downloading or uploading from their P2P directories, the time that downloading occurs, and the Internet service provider (ISP) through which the files travel. (Gathering this information is not a violation of the users' privacy rights, because the user has voluntarily made his or her P2P directory available for public file sharing.)
The unavoidable conclusion is that USC will listen to the RIAA and kick students of the school networks if they claim infringment.
The potential for abuse is manifest, despite the proported condern from student privacy. Students without access to computing resources may not be able to complete assingments and so the ban ammounts to expulsion. Will the University just take someone else's word for such a serious charge and punishment? It looks like the process could short circuit many student protections all for the sake of the lowest form of publicaion in the world, pop music.
Their definition of copyright violation is a bit out of wack too:
Copyright infringement occurs whenever you make a copy of any copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs, stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright owner, or obtaining permission some other way.
Bullshit. My copies of my property are my business and are covered by fair use. Republication is a violation of copyright and reasonable numbers of coppies do not constitute a republication.
Factual errors like this from a major university are disturbing. If they don't get it, who will? Are the same idiots who wrote this letter in charge of prsecuting students? Great!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
From an earlier post:
"Don't they have something better to do during the summer than hack our site?" asked the RIAA representative, who asked not to be identified. "Perhaps it at least took 10 minutes away from stealing music."
Don't they have something better to do during the summer than harass our schools? Perhaps it at least took 10 minutes away from sueing everybody silly.
Nononono... It's merely out on lease. Infact, the Labels have the right to repossess your music at any time.
On that note, how else is the industry supposed to recoup their loses when they are used to the business model "One product per person"? Puttin aside the gouging they engage in, I seriously wonder how people think that is fair? I bought a blender, I own it and if the neighbor wants to borrow it, great, even if for an extended time. But there is only one blender at all times and I suspect eventially, you'll want it back and the neighbor will either A) be inconvinienced or B) Buy his own. That used to work for the Record Labels too. Now it doesn't. They distribute one copy, and you have the ability to make an infinite number of copies from yours. Your property, right?
In reality, while it's a abuse on the customer's part, it's really the record industry's failure to adapt adequately that's the problem. By all rights it IS your copy and you should do what you want with it. But it's also the company's right to ensure they make a profit off of it, but WITHOUT violating your rights. So what's a Label to do? Copy protection, but we all know that game. New formats, but nobody's buying into it. They're in a unique situation... Unless THEY get a clue, we're going to end up involuntarily strangling them to death and dump the recording industry into a recession. Yeah, I actually believe that.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Squareball, there are two strong arguments against you.
First, I very much doubt that you would have any legal grounds upon which to object to this new policy. In the off-chance that the forms you signed *in order to attend* granted you the ability to share files, there is without doubt also a clause allowing the University to change those terms. It is not enough that you signed a contract to agree to internet service (unless you paid additional money for it which was associated with the signing of this additional contract).
Second, as unfair as this may be to you, there is no practical way for the University to allow you and others in your situation this privelege while denying it to everyone else. To do so, the University would have to play file-cop, devoting resources to checking what all of these people are sharing; this is not the University's job.
A better solution is to make your case to the relevant department or resource. Perhaps there is a program that provides opportunities such as distribution for student artists.
If there is not such a program, why don't you talk to other student artists and petition to start one?
I would imagine this could create a larger market for shell providers. Just run a private socks5 server with user name and password, to bounce into a p2p service, for an extra $5-10 a month. I think it will work. Hell I already do this.. only I don't have to pay for my shell.
You're nothing; like me.
Didnt slashdot run a story on franklin w olin college that also give full tuition to all students admitted? I think its private but I could be wrong.
LOL. Free at no cost to anyone, eh. Apparently good ol Cooper Union is lacking a basic economics course.
I guess you're right: It is free, and worth every cent!
google for TINSTAAFL someday.
I live on campus in a dorm. As a student, I love the computing policy of "download as much as you want, just don't upload or we'll bust your ass." However, I can very much see how the campus IT department would want to regulate this kind of thing as just about everyone I know has been downloading like mad since arriving at school just under a month ago. Looking at DUMeter, I have downloaded about 10 times as much as I did back at home, where I have cable, thanks in no small part to the massive bandwidth available.
OTOH, outside of blocking certain ports at the firewall level (which will be circumvented immediately by the more "1337" among us), I can't see any viable means of preventing the use of file sharing programs what with the truly massive (>85% of students on the campus network) number of people on campus using file sharing programs.
Flame one, flame all, but this is merely my perspective from the stance of a typical, computer-savvy student living on the campus network.
--
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
It's funny, when I first read this, I thought it was a spoof of Larry McVoy defending the bitkeeper licence and whining about opensource people being thieves. Scary thought.
Just for a reality check.. when I bought this place, I found myself saddled with a shit phone line and no broadband available. My average dialup speed went from 53k ALL the time to 26k on a good day. Bloat being what it is, 26k is no longer adequate even for everyday browsing (and I don't load images or javascript). As a result my time online has more than doubled yet I get half as much reading and other such work done, even tho I've dropped most of the "just for fun" sites from my daily rounds.
I'd hate to be a student trying to do research on a 28k connect.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The campus LAN at my old school was a freaking gold mine. A lot better stuff, fun to poke around without actually looking for something particular, and the download speeds were obscenely fast.
:P
Of course, most of the student population probably doesn't know about intranet file sharing. The nerds either have to spread the word, or keep their mouths shut, depending on how many lusers they want raping internal xfer speeds
--- Do you believe in the day?
This isnt really that newsworthy, since my Uni did the same thing years ago just before free Napster got shut down.
P2P is an expensive problem for campuses. Here are some interesting statistics about network usage at Cornell University:
http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/students/bandw idth/charts.html
Over 55% of total dorm bandwidth was from Kazaa/Morpheus!
True. My bad. Freshman. :)
Seriously, I got the ECHO (which is not UDP dependent) and the Tracert (which is UDP dependent) mixed up.
That's the official line from the CUCC. Considering I've got http dl's @ 400 kbytes/s on the dorm network (which feeds of the main pipe), I'd say it's atleast two T1s, most probably three.
some comments seem to suggest that it's a bit lame that the university is doing this to get the RIAA off their backs. my response is, it's perfectly reasonable. I work in a library. We could say, sure, copy and download what you like, but be aware of your copyright responsibilities, and we'd get laughed at. Therefore, the library has to make decisions to ensure that we are not held responsible for someone else's mistakes. responsibility for copyright compliance generally lies with libraries, archives, and other similar bodies. The university is just acting to ensure that someone doesn't bring down a massive suit because some dweeb decided to download Britney's new album. Yes, the administation is responsible for that.
Besides, who really needs that much online access. I got through university on dialup.
And thinking ahead, would you show up at work and download several gigs a day on Kaazaa?
At Humber College the residence is on the same network as the actual school -- and this year they installed a BIG PHAT FIREWALL. Now students cannot do anything that doesn't use port 80. No IM, No FTP, No VOIP, No streaming, No File-sharing. Are they happy? Oh my.
geeks are cats who dig a certain kind of cool
When I first read the headline I was upset, damn RIAA and MPAA flexing their muscles, Big businesses using any means necessary to protect their interests seemed to fly in the face of what the educational institutions are all about. As I read on and read many of your comments my eyes were opened. My experience with kazaa and p2p apps is limited to my use and those people in my small company. Even with everyone in the office downloading/uploading on kazaa, it rarely made a dent in our available bandwidth. I really wasnt aware of THAT problem. Hearing many of you complain about how your bandwidth is severely taxed because of them made me agree with you. If I was at work or back in school and I couldn't efficiently use the network because of the people abusing it, I too would want to kill and mame. So I started reading the comments with one opinion and ended up with a different one. I think USC is making a fair call. Thanks to everyone for sharing their sides of the story. I agree with you that people should not abuse reources and copywrite laws, but I also agree that technology should not be banned when it has perfectly legal uses.
Just whatever you do, do NOT go to West Texas A&M University. http://www.wtamu.edu/
They limit P2P, block the residencial ethernet ports on a whim; and the agreement essentially says that if you connect to their network, they have the right to fully search your computer.
in deciding to live off-campus this year. anyway, this is the first i'm hearing of this and i go to USC =)
I'm a student at Georgia Tech and we're the southeastern backbone. However, we're limited to a 155mbs full duplex line shared among 7000 students. I recieved this letter stating why they banned irc ports.
From: John Mullin
Chief Information Officer
Georgia Institute of Technology
Over the past several days there has been a significant increase
in the number of external probes of Georgia Tech computing
systems. As a result, since September 6, we've had over 100
machines compromised by attacks. These attacks are designed to
load hidden programs (Trojan-like) onto our systems, programs
that are designed to prevent us from accessing GT computing
resources. Moreover, these hidden programs allow attackers to
use GT systems to launch further attacks against sites across
the entire Internet. These are called denial-of-service
attacks. To the best of our knowledge, no Institute data is
being compromised. We are, however, very concerned about the
potential for GT computing systems to be involved in a
much broader, Internet-wide denial-of-service attack.
Some of the details are:
Windows computers are primarily victims of these attacks. While
our Computer Support Representatives (CSRs) and Computer
Services Specialists (CSSs) have done an excellent job of
keeping up with the many Microsoft patches, this current wave of
attacks is undeterred by properly configured and managed
systems. No one here at GT, the vendor, or the Internet security
community is yet certain how these attacks are propagated from
one system to another.
To mitigate this risk to both GT and the Internet community as a
whole, OIT will immediately block off-campus access to two
widely used applications we believe are being exploited, Secured
Windows-based Filesharing and Internet Relay Chat. These two
applications are currently the source of a large number of
system compromises that allow off-campus hackers to remotely
control affected GT systems.
We are working with Microsoft and other information security
organizations to develop the appropriate software fix. Until
then, we are TEMPORARILY blocking off campus access to
Windows-based secure filesharing and IRC to prevent further
compromises to the Institute and off-campus colleagues with
whom we collaborate and share information. Our plan is to review
the situation daily and have the problem resolved as quickly as
possible.
In blocking the off-campus traffic we limit the potential damage
with no impact to on-campus traffic. If you use these
applications on campus, within the GT network, you should see no
impact. However, if you try to access these applications from a
remote location, like your home, you will not be able to use
either application.
If you experience any problems, or if the loss of filesharing
causes critical disruptions, please contact your CSS/CSR or the
OIT Customer Support Center at 4-7173. We will keep you
informed about solutions we identify and any other information
you need to know as the situation unfolds.
Thank You,
John Mullin
Irc is mission critical. Why oh why does every single administration have to be a Communist regime? If it isn't the blandness of the food that kills you, its the lack of girls that will! 70% men, 30% women population.
I don't understand how it is possible to ban a person from the campus network. On IRC, it's fairly simple to ban a user's IP, or even their entire domain. But on a local network, in order to enforce a ban, you have to differentiate between every user on the network (you can't shut off an entire floor of the residence hall just because of one offending user).
The easiest way to shut off a user's access is to shut off his port. This happened to me when my computer was infected with Nimda last year (and I have a higher opinion of C&C for having the sense to do it). This will keep a total idiot off the network, but all it takes is an ethernet switch, 20 feet of CAT-5, and a friend down the hall, and you're back on.
Another way would be to ban you're computer's MAC address. This would probably work great for most users (they'd be like, "WTF, what's wrong with my computer? I can't connect from anywhere!")The problem is, this would ban the computer, but not the user. For under $20, you could get another network card and be back on in no time.
So how would you propose banning a user from a network where the user never has to identify him/herself?
University networks aren't there so that you can do whatever you want (though most of them let you get away with it). I don't see the problem with network admins not providing you with more services you can justifably need for your studies, and they do not include P2P. If you do not like the AUP, find a provider that gives you what you want. If you can't, that still doesn't allow you to break that contract.
There are two points here - bandwidth hogs and copyright infringers - often related but not necessarily. People who only use a lot of bandwidth for serious purposes is ok, I don't think any admin will kick you for downloading a full set of linux distros etc.
But it's not there for you to get your latest Britney Spears album or the Tron 2 DVDrip. And as I read the actual email, you will only lose access if you commit crimes (read: copyright infringement) using the university's connection. Does that really surprise you?
So I find the universities have the full right to decide:
- Wheather they wish to offer access to any P2P networks.
- What to do in case of copyright infringement, like terminate the contract.
But I would say they can not:
- Prosecute someone for having a P2P client running, but only downloading/serving legal programs.
Of course, IANAL, but I think the last case would be about 0.00001% of the cases.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They cut off hotline? Glad I haven't lived in the dorms in three years.
Maybe not, but it certainly is their responsibility to provide a necessary and appropriate service to their staff and students. Being able to download reseach papers or look up a useful web resource is what that service is for. P2P song swapping and Quake3 parties are not. When the latter starts interfering with the former, they have every right to act, and they should do so.
The only possible objection I can see to this is if they have some sort of service agreement with their students that says the students get Internet access for whatever purpose they want, with no strings attached, and they're taking money from the students on that basis. Maybe they do, but where I went, they made it quite clear what the connection was for. They then quietly ignored things like games playing, while the games players had the common sense to do it outside of the busy hours so as not to get in the way, and everyone was happy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
No, it isn't. The average undergraduate student in the UK currently graduates with something like UKP10,000 of debts, and it's rising fast as university costs and tuition fees increase year on year. Unlike the US, however, where the university funding, scholarship and employment set-ups are reasonably well integrated, there are few means available to UK students to sort this out when they graduate, leaving them at the mercy of banks, which are not always reasonable in their behaviour.
Many of these students are going to be seriously in debt for the next decade or more of their life, leaving them with limited options for trivia like buying a home or raising a family. I was lucky enough to avoid it myself, as I got through the system just in time, but many of my friends and family haven't been.
If you're going to make nasty comments, please get a clue first. Otherwise, you're going to upset an awful lot of people by rubbing salt in a deep and wide open wound.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Declan help!! If you can bring back the porn you can bring back the music too.
Will I still see USC FTPs running, etc?
Wichita State: Dont ever go down this road, it is a bad bad idea. I pay to live here, and I should get to do with MY data as I please on a line I pay for. Blocking ICMP is damn near bad enough, but I can deal.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
As a graduate of Rose-Hulman (I attended during the last four years running we were #1 on U.S. News) I agree that $100,000 is a pretty reasonable estimate. And they don't give out full-tuition scholarships...I was lucky to get about $7k/year. They aren't making money, either. Most development and equipment purchases have to come from donations (some extremely generous alumni are out there!).
We had a very similar problem with network bandwidth. Junior year I was lucky to get 3k/s and couldn't download any distros, couldn't get required files for my classes, and web surfing was painful. On one of the campus-only newsgroups, there was a pretty big thread of, umm, negative comments about the quality of the network staff. Some of us got talked to a little bit, but it brought the issue to the forefront and a "town-hall meeting" was scheduled over the network situation. It was standing room only, and lasted two hours past expected...everyone wanted more bandwidth (we had only two T1's) and proved that RHIT allocated less bandwidth per student than a dial-up ISP would allocate for modem customers. Shortly afterwards, two more T1 circuits were installed.
It didn't help. Within weeks, the network was just as slow. It was still slow until the beginning of senior year. At that time, the network department announced that it would be throttling certain types of traffic, and there would be an informational meeting. One of the major points of interest of that meeting was a chart: percentage of bandwidth in different traffic. I believe that over two-thirds of the bandwith was peer-to-peer filesharing traffic. Another interesting point: five individuals were producing over 50% of the filesharing traffic.
At that point everyone saw red and wholeheartedly approved the throttling, which was time-of-day based; drastically reduced percentages during the day, zero filesharing in classrooms (laptop school, network ports at every desk), and half-way throttled on weekends. The effect was immediate and normal internet use vastly improved.
On a college campus, there are enough people and enough music files to go around, if that's your thing. You just have to go out and actually interact with people. It's not cool to sit in your room racking up 150 Kazaa connections, using the school's bandwith as an alternative to interactin with people outside your dorm room.
...
Here at UMBC they also began with a policy like that this year. http://resnet.umbc.edu Copyright Violations = No Internet Access Copyright violations are still illegal! Even though ResNet users may run servers, they may NOT offer pirated MP3s, warez, images, etc.
Let me offer little bit of perspective as a ResNet Coordinator at a middle-sized school.
Many of the negative comments seem to focus on this as a heavy-handed approach to the bandwidth problem. It is and any network admin or resnet person knows this. However, unless there is money in the budget to do something else (we're getting a Packeteer - woo hoo!) then there is not a whole lot else we can do. We're getting threated from all corners - the ??AA and the students are diametrically opposed. Guess who has the money and the lawyers?
Also remember that many resnet programs are a hodgepodge mixture of the Housing and campus IT department. In addition, like many other jobs in IT, ours is a thankless one. We do our best to serve the students but are (too often) hampered by time and money contraints.
To those people who believe that there will always be a way around any restrictions that campuses put in place: you're wrong. We have the passwords for the routers (including the edge router that connects the university to the rest of the world), the passwords for all of the servers (DHCP, DNS, etc), and keys for all the communications closets and machine rooms. We have the overwhelming advantage. At the end of the day, we can (like some schools already do) always just block all outgoing traffic.
We don't like doing things like that. We work at universities because we enjoy working with and for students. We believe in education and we know that you learn by doing and by experimenting. Unfortunately, the days of us being able to turn a blind eye to most of the activities on our networks are quickly ending.
My advice to any students who live on campus and don't like or understand their campus network policy is to find the person in charge of resnet and talk to them. I've talked with many of my peers at other institutions and they're very nice, reasonable people. If that doesn't work, go talk to the housing staff and express your concerns.
ALL the college campuses are going to start enacting these rules. I'm here at Virginia Tech, where everyone has practically unlimited bandwidth. We're "banned" from using p2p, but you know what - They can't tell unless you share it on the LAN. That's where you get busted. P2P usually only gets 300 to 800 KB/s. The LAN you could eat up to 100 MB/s. Then you could get a JR and get kicked off campus forever. Usually, they'll just give you a warning, or five.
"And if this don't work, we're gonna shut down the whole darned net!"
Honestly, where would this approach end. The business of shutting down networks which carry some portion of illegally transferred files is clearly a dead-end strategy.
The reality is that a certain percentage of all net traffic is illegal. Therefore, if we take this strategy to its extreme it would require a shutdown of all net traffic in order to stop people from pirating.
Methinks this is poorly thought out policy.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
At Lehigh Univ they use bandwidth limiting. You get 1 gig (up and down channels are 1 gig each) to us per 12 hour on a floating window. You go over and you are limited to a shared 56k connection. With an avg of about 15 ppl in the box you can surf slowly but thats about it.
Of course there are ways around it, but with anything there always is.
As far as i know from some of my friends many colleges HATE when you use their connection to the outside but if you stay on their network they dont care because many places have gigabit backbones.
First off, an Electrical Engineer student should have better things to do that ICMP pinging hosts around his school's network. Second, unless you are the network admin in your spare time, it's not really your business to be verifying network response times!! Finally, if you really needed to learn this stuff, you could setup your own lan and do such testing in your own sandbox. If you just have to have a "real world" scenario to examine, then your professor's should be able to help you out.
About as pompous as
No Drinking On Campus
It's really sort of weak when you look at it altogether:
Dear Student:
This email is being sent to all students at USC to make sure
they have the same information about copyright compliance.
Introduction
The University of Southern California is committed to the education
of its students. Part of the educational process includes the
provision of internet connections for students in classrooms,
residences, libraries, eating establishments, and other places on
campus. Students who live off campus may also access the internet
through USC's computers via modems. Over the past two years the
university has made efforts to make students aware of policies
governing the use of its computing facilities and systems to enhance
their educational experience and keep them from violating university,
state, federal polices and laws that would negatively impact their
student status.
As a part of this ongoing effort we want to alert you to the fact
that many of you are risking complete loss of access to the USC
computer system and both disciplinary and legal sanctions. Below is
an overview of how students are placing themselves in jeopardy by
inappropriately using USC's internet connections.
Is File Sharing Worth Losing Student Privileges at USC?
You are undoubtedly aware of the development of file-sharing software
such as Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline, also known as peer-to-peer
networks ("P2P networks"), and the fact that the use of P2P networks
to share copyrighted material, such as movies, music and software,
can violate the rights of copyright owners. As you probably know,
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that the majority
of Napster users are directly infringing federal copyright law by
sharing music files without the permission of musical artists and
recording companies who own these materials.
Copyright infringement occurs whenever you make a copy of any
copyrighted work - songs, videos, software, cartoons, photographs,
stories, novels - without purchasing that copy from the copyright
owner, or obtaining permission some other way. Infringement also
occurs when one person purchases an authorized copy, but allows
others to reproduce further "pirated" copies. For example, if a
student purchases a CD and creates an MP3 copy on his or her hard
drive, and then uses a P2P network to share that MP3 copy with
others, both the student and those making copies are infringing the
owners' copyright rights and violating federal copyright law.
USC prohibits any infringement of intellectual property rights by any
member of the USC community. As an academic institution, USC's
purpose is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual
property. It is antithetical to this purpose for USC to play any
part, even inadvertently, in the violation of the intellectual
property rights of others. The USC policy regarding student use of
USC computing resources clearly states that a student who reproduces
or distributes copyrighted materials in electronic form without
permission from the material's owner may be removed from the USC
computer system and face further disciplinary action.
Further, infringing conduct exposes the infringer to serious legal
penalties. In response to the growth of infringement through P2P
networks, the recording and motion picture industries have increased
their efforts to identify and stop those who download unauthorized
music and video files. Organizations such as the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) can and do monitor P2P users, obtaining "snapshots" of
the users' Internet protocol addresses, the files they are
downloading or uploading from their P2P directories, the time that
downloading occurs, and the Internet service provider (ISP) through
which the files travel. (Gathering this information is not a
violation of the users' privacy rights, because the user has
voluntarily made his or her P2P directory available for public file
sharing.)
Once this information is obtained, RIAA, MPAA and others can demand
that an ISP remove any infringing copies from its system and may
obtain a court order directing the ISP to identify the infringing
user and to cut off the infringing user's access to the ISP's system.
Further, if the user is determined to have infringed copyright
rights, whether through P2P networks or other means, he or she can
also be subject to sanctions such as the destruction of all
unauthorized copies and monetary damages. In some cases, criminal
sanctions - imprisonment and fines - may be imposed.
As an ISP for its students and faculty, USC has received an
increasing number of notices from RIAA and MPAA identifying the IP
addresses of USC students who are sharing copies of music and videos
without authorization. USC will be forwarding such notices to the
individual students involved and taking further steps to ensure that
the infringing conduct ceases immediately, including, where
necessary, depriving that student of any access to the USC computer
system and further disciplinary sanctions. Obviously, if the
complaining organization decides to take further steps to identify
and prosecute the infringer, such conduct also runs the risk of
incurring sanctions under federal copyright law, which can include
monetary damages, and, in cases that are sufficiently extreme,
criminal penalties - both imprisonment and fines. Copyright law
provides no exception from liability for university students.
You should be aware that sharing music, videos, software, and other
copyrighted material is a violation of law and can expose you and
those with whom you share to legal sanctions, as well as sanctions
under USC's own policy. Please do not put yourself, your friends,
parents, and USC in the awkward position of having to confront such
issues. We trust that you will take this issue seriously and conduct
yourself accordingly.
Sincerely,
Jerry D. Campbell
Dean of Libraries and Chief Information Officer
Sincerely,
Michael L. Jackson
Vice President for Student Affairs
... I photocopy a textbook chapter for a class-mate?
e .h tml
(Let's suppose that the bookstore didn't aquire enough copies to meet the demand, for example).
Can we expect to be called to account for violating the author's/publisher's copyright? Those textbooks are d***ed expensive; RIAA would just love the textbook-publishing business.
(Can you say 'captive market'? I knew you could!)
Maybe these policy discussions need to pay a little more attention to the other side of the issue too.
PS: here's a couple of article by an established singer-songwriter 9With some top hits in her career too)argueing that napster is GOOD for business, and some concrete experiences, including her own, to back it up.
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacl
http://www.janisian.com/article-fallout.html
Dear Mr. Matt Cohn,
Please expect a visit from our jackbooted thugs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hlawyers at your residence, "7160 SW 109th St., Seattle, WA, 98115".
We will be searching your computers and house for illegally copied content.
Thank you,
The RIAA
"We're the RIAA. Shut up and listen."
While I agree that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opinion would seem to say that widely sharing copyrighted recordings over a P2P network is an infringing activity, I don't think the students doing the downloading are infringing, as I understand the opinion and the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), which seems to explicitly authorize people to make copies for their own personal use. The AHRA was invoked as a defence in the Napster case, and the court ruled that it doesn't protect widespread sharing over the Net. I don't think the opinion concluded the same for receiving such files.
IANAL, and I would welcome opinions from those more expert than me, but I think USC may be talking out of its *ss here.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I don't know what school of music this guy went to
Most judges aren't musicologists either.
but he is forgetting all about rests, whole notes, sixteenth notes, thirty second notes, etc. This increases the number of possible distance vectors between notes.
The standard for copying in U.S. copyright law is not an exact match but rather "substantial similarity". The short/medium/long scale can easily be interpreted as quarter/half/whole or sixteenth/eighth/quarter for a particular piece.
What I want to know is where on earth does it say that we are limited only to four note melodies???
Read the beginning of the article There was a case involving the "Hallelujah Chorus" by Handel and "Yes! We have no bananas!" by Frank Silver. Handel's publisher won that one, setting a legal precedent that four notes can easily be enough to establish substantial similarity.
I have personally played many eight note melodies
Two eight note melodies that match in four notes may be considered substantially similar.
Will I retire or break 10K?
...if you don't get caught, it's not illegal ;-)
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
there's a handful of students (around 20), usually the ones with huge hard drives, and they run apache servers for sharing anything from music, movies, programs, games, anime, you name it, it's probably out there. and the school actually allows this to go on because students are able to use internal bandwidth (downloads can range from 1-8mb/s) instead of letting the students clog up the external bandwidth by using kazaa and the like. i guess their policy is 'illegal stuff is gonna happen anyway.. might as well make it as small a burden as possible'