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UC Irvine Cracks Down on P2P

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the sloooower-and-sloooooooowwwwweeerrrrr dept.

grendel20 writes "After years of dialup, one thing I was looking forward to the most about college was the fast ethernet connection. Upon arriving at UCI though, I found my kazaa speeds to be way below subpar. Apparently, UCI has limited access for all P2P programs with this fine piece of hardware. Now what do I do?" Whether you agree with what UC Irvine is doing or not, I do applaud them for publicizing and being straightforward about it. Upstream entities can implement these sorts of controls without telling users, and it's tempting to do so because it will reduce the number of user complaints.

4 of 549 comments (clear)

  1. Change the port by slifox · · Score: 1, Redundant

    You could change the port that your p2p client uses. That would allow you to circumvent their packet shaper for some time. However, be warned that doing this will only start a war with the CNS (computer networking services) guys, and will end up badly.

    How about, you just don't use P2P?

  2. You dont. by mrbill · · Score: 1, Redundant

    What do you do about it? You dont. Use the college high-speed access for education, not trading music and warez. Its their network, they have the right to restrict access to/from it as neccessary to allow proper use (according to their terms and conditions).

    If you dont like it, get an off-campus apartment and cablemodem/DSL.

    (Young whippersnapapers these days; when *I* was in college I was *GRATEFUL* to have a 1200/2400 baud dialup, text-only, to the VAX...) 8-)

  3. an arms race.... by wuchang · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Much to their chagrin, the next P2P file sharing applications will tunnel themselves within HTTP and SMTP. Soon, their firewalls and packet shapers will need to do full packet inspection in order to figure out what to block.

  4. I notice by tweek · · Score: 0, Redundant

    that alot of people are advocating using a port tunnel or somesuch to remedy the situation. Despite the fact that you shouldn't be wasting the bandwidth, you DO realise that Packeteer is a layer 7 appliance? That means that it actually checks the payload and not just the port. The only solution is to have encrypted tunneling but then again the packets will still have the same signature and they'll get blocked in the next software rev.

    --
    "Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"