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Rosen, Valenti Warn Colleges About P2P
fini writes "The RIAA and MPAA just sent a letter to 2,300 colleges or so, asking to crack down on P2P. Juicy nugget: 'Not only is piracy of copyrighted works illegal, it can take up a significant percentage of a university's costly bandwidth.' Also mentioned, some quasi-FUD on security issues. Six higher-ed honchos also sent a concurring letter. From the RIAA website, here's the story and the letters (PDF only). Mentioned as examples of model policies: Drake University, UNC Chapel Hill and University of Michigan . Interestingly enough, there is no threatening 'or else' stuff in those letters. Not yet..."
...but little do Rosen, Valenti, and the rest of the Consumer Control Cartel know that most college students trade amoungst themselves. Such was the case at my school and my friend's school.
www.phynd.net is a great solution to P2P. I'm sure the RIAA and MPAA will hate it just as much as P2P, but both colleges and college students love it. Here at UConn, someone has kindly donated the use of their Linux box to run Phynd, which scours the network and catalogs all types of shared files (not just mp3/ogg or movies). In a college with thousands of on campus residents, this saves hunge amounts of internet bandwidth [money] by keeping file sharing traffic entirely on campus. The students are happy because there are almost never any dead links, and files transfer at full speed.
Before this was implemented, P2P programs tied up HUGE amounts of bandwitdth. UConn was forced to administer a bandwidth quota per student, but fortunately that's only for off campus traffic, not local traffic.
But the best thing about it is that the students solved the problem all by themselves. And UConn loves it because it's saving them vast amounts of money.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
I don't know about some of the Universities that some /.'ers attend, but I would like to give an account of how mine handles p2p stuff. For obvious reasons, I would like to keep the name of the school anonymous. I work for my school's computer department on Linux clustering and research oriented computing. I have been with the department for about 8 months (almost since I started school). One thing that I really like about my school is how our network admins handle p2p. We have no 'real' policy on it. Basically, we leave it up to the users to determine what is right and wrong. There is a reason for this. We consider our network resources to be 'public domain'. They are paid for, in part, by the university endowment, but mostly it is paid for by tax payer dollars.
Now, since the government of my state has not placed a ban on p2p networks of any type, we are in no position to deny our users the right to use them. We are, however, allowed to throttle their traffic so that more of our bandwidth goes to university-related causes. Really, our department tries as much as possible to turn a blind eye to the p2p situation. We don't want to impede on our students abilities to use the internet in the way they see fit. The university will not, however, back a student who has been busted by the RIAA for illegally possessing copyrighted material.
There's plenty of public domain stuff out there. Last time I used a P2P app it was to collect some Christmas music for a party my wife threw. None of it was copyrighted to my knowledge.
While I completely agree that p2p piracy (last time I used it was to get some music by a friend who distributes that way) it is, alas, more than likely that those songs were indeed under copyright. The musicial composition itself is most probably public domain but the particular recordings might not have been. Remember, if it was recorded after the early 20s it is still under copyright unless it either lapsed through neglect or was intentionally placed into the public domain by the author/artist.
jello.
aka aron.
Squid solves the problem either by setting the brower up to use it as a proxy, or by setting up the a router to your upstream provider to transparently re-direct traffic to port 80 to a local squid server. So if anyone on your downside link attempts to hit the same page twice, you'll have no traffic leaves the network. Now your upstream ISP does the same thing. Now the upstream provider to them can do the same thing. The upstream provider from them can do the same thing, all the way to the backbone providers. So essentially, you pass thru various levels of proxying servers to get the content you want. Ummm, this sounds like a lot of Web Servers clusters passing around pages from other servers near them so you don't have to go to directly to the site. Which I'll bet money is paraphrasing your ideal P2P setup for web page delivery. Deployment of squid servers located on every Tier 1,2, and 3 bandwidth providers would look precisely like your P2P solution unless I miss my guess. This would mean when you asked for content, you'd only go upstream to the place it has been close to previously.
It's identical the caching layers in a CPU. First you look in the L1 cache, then you look in the L2 cache, then you go L3 cache. Now you look in RAM, if it isn't there you look on disk. If you've got HSM (heirarchical storage management), you look on tape.
How does this make a site cheaper... Well Akaima is cheaper then enough bandwidth to serve the pages yourself (if your big enough). It's cheaper, because you don't need nearly the bandwith, and Akaima already is huge, thus having economy of scale so they turn a profit on it, while saving you money.
Assuming everyone runs a Squid Cache at the various levels as described above, you'll only get 1 hit per page on your website ever until the cached copy expires on your backbone providers Squid Cache. You have the 11 backbone providers talk directly to each others squid caches. When provider A wants a page from provider B it asks the squid cache of provider B, the squid cache goes to your site gets the page and caches it. From now one, anyone who wants your page will get it from the backbone provider who routes you onto the internet at large. Stop and think about it, you could be getting viewed by ever slashdotter in the world, and see a single hit.
As long as the core caches have enough disk, so you don't get flushed out, you only need enough bandwith to do just that. That's it. You only need enough bandwidth to ensure that your pages can get to the core squid cache quickly enough for the first view not to die of bordom, and that's it.
Of course you run a pretty dull site, beings that you only have a static site. It doesn't work for dynamic content that depends on user level information, but then again neither would P2P.
Actually, I'm not enough of a squid expert to say that for certain. You might get 11 hits per page, one for each backbone provider now that I think about it. Still not an overwhelming amount of traffic.
Now it's time to talk reality... The backbone providers don't want to do that.... It'll save you money, and cost them money because you pay them. However, there is nothing to stop a group of people running clusters of Squid caching servers to do this for themselves. So it's doubtful it'll ever get deployed. It however is a solved problem.
As an aside, bandwidth is expensive because it's expensive. Running a website will *ALWAYS* be expensive. The core providers will always charge a premium price for it because they are providing a rare service you can't get from very many people. They charge a premium price because you'll pay it,and nobody will offer it to you for less. It's that simple... Build all the tools you want, and running a site will still cost the same amount.
Kirby
I work tech support for a small midwestern liberal arts college. We've got a 6 megabit outgoing. We had the subnets for KaZaa, WinMX, etc blocked. The first week of classes the connection was great. Then word got out that Morpheus was still working. Within a day the outgoing had slowed to a crawl. I like p2p as much as the next Slashbot but darn it, the network can't take that kind of abuse. We continue to allow LAN file sharing and AIM file transfers because they don't suck bandwidth, but the major p2p apps are just too wasteful...
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.