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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. '"
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.
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
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?
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?
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.
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.