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Academic Network Censorship?
Mark asks: "I'm the President of the Brock University Students' Union, and recently our IT geeks completely cut off access to the Kazaa network for the entire school. It concerns me, while I understand the need to save bandwidth.. what's next? File sharing bandwidth has been throttled for quite some time here, this is the first all out "restriction" we have seen. As a Students' Union we advocate on behalf of the 13,000+ students here, and we need to develop policy around network 'censorship.' I'd love to hear your experiences and suggestions. Our website is here"
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I was a student and and "IT geek" for the university I attended. As soon as Napster got big, every file trading network was we could find got banned. Why? Because it was eating ALL the bandwith. People with legitimate uses for the network (ie: not downloading music and pr0n) couldn't get anything done.
We ended up telling everyone they weren't allowed to trade MP3s, and shutting off accounts that did anyway. Didn't take that long before people stopped trying.
The school network is just that, the schools network. It's being used for academic purposes. Lack of access to a file trading network that eats enormous amounts of bandwith is in no way censorship. If you really want to trade files, then move off campus and get a broadband connection. It's their network, not yours.
The first popular peer-to-peer decentralized network, Gnutella, attempted to address the problem of port blocking by allowing any port to be used; this helped in some cases, but because default port numbers were assigned, port blocking was still able to severely disrupt the network. Assigning a random port on installation might solve this problem, but could cause others...
Gnutella also has problems in that it is TOO centralized. Jumpstarting a connection onto the network, when one's host cache is empty, is problematic. Some software writers attempted to solve the problem by providing host caches, nodes that simply share live connection points, but these caches became targets for lawsuits. There are a few alternate methods for looking up live nodes, but any such method is also susceptible to being shut down.
The conclusion? If someone has control over your network connection, it's really difficult keeping them from exerting that control. Anything that succeeds will have to be enormously fluid.
My god man go to a party and get yourself a woman -- after a little pussy fest I doubt you'll give a rats ass about KaZaaa.
Oh, I forgot, you're a network geek you'd get your ass kicked at one of the parties.
I Am An "IT Geek" And I Blocked Peer-to-Peer
I have taken and am taking mesures to snuff most P2P applications around here, especially Kazaa and other types of sharing for ONLY one reason, BANDWIDTH.
I know you know this but it is a real problem, the students spend all day downloading pr0n and mp3s hogging every available bit per second. Academic usage would grind to a halt when some new CD came out, it was terrible.
Don't worry about censorship, it was just a decision based on some fuggin' tards that can't stop beating off to mp3s and listening to pr0n grinding the network to a halt.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul Ash nazg thrakatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
Current systems don't try hard at all to download files from locations on the local network, which is pretty bad.
One of the coolest things about P2P is the ability to have closer servers with the same file.
Freenet doesn't have the pretty GUI, but it does a better job.
May we never see th
give me one thing you can do on a p2p network that you can't do anouther way.
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal shit really easy.
If your not bright enough to figure out how to steal anouther way, well you just don't deserve to steal.
Grow up move on.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I go to a college where we are unable to use p2p programs from the dorms. Nobody complains, however, if we just copy files over the campus network. At Iowa State U (not where I go :-( there is a program that searches ftp and windows shares on their network for available downloads. That's definetly a cool solution. I apologize for the little content in this message, but I'm listening to Off The Hook...
Everyone on the university network here has a full Internet connection, apart from the Windows Networking (NetBIOS/SMB/CIFS) ports, which work locally but are firewalled at the edge of the university. There's no data rate limiting other than the limitations of the hardware (my college was wired up with 10MBit hubs last year, but they've upgraded to 100MBit switches this year; I've had the full 100MBit download rate while ftp'ing Mandrake ISOs from another college's mirror, so there's certainly no artificial cap there).
If anyone uses significant amounts of bandwidth (there's no formal limit, but it seems to be measured in gigabytes a day), they're told to reduce that for the benefit of other users (on a "please stop before we have to force you to" basis).
This is great, because when you want to download something big (a CD image for instance), you get a huge data rate and don't have to wait long, but the network admins can still prevent people from downloading stuff constantly and overloading the network.
I suppose a more automated equivalent would be to give everyone the full 10/100 bandwidth to start with, then automagically reduce priority for people who've used too much in the last week/month/whatever.
Stop Whining and go study!
The school network exists to enhance your educational experience not for your personal enjoyment.
Also check the Acceptable Use Agreement that you signed (in that big pile of forms they gave you during registration), unless swapping mp3s and trafficing pr0n is acceptable, I don't think you have a case. You could always contact the Chair, Senate Committee on Computing and Communications Policy, in care of the University Secretary, and tell them that not being able to steal music is bumming you out.
I'm faculty at another smallish Canadian university and therefore AC'ing this post. Here, IT has been waging a war against P2P bandwidth abuse for four years. Consider yourself lucky.
Consider, too, that your university library doesn't have a subscription to Penthouse or even RC Modeller; and I'm willing to bet that the Techno section of Brock's music library sucks. Also censorship? Nah, just spending money somewhere within four miles of the university's already-broadly-defined mandate.
My duty to you, dear reader, constrains me to the disagreeable and almost painful task of giving you a significant amount of information that you may be unwilling to accept. Note that some of the facts I plan to use in this letter were provided to me by a highly educated person who managed to escape Brock University's cruel indoctrination and is consequently believable. Although Brock University would like us to believe that it has a "special" perspective on exclusionism which carries with it a "special" right to overthrow democratic political systems, it has given us neither good reason nor credible evidence to believe that. Its ballyhoos, on the other hand, give us good reason to believe that all the deals it makes are strictly one-way. Brock University gets all the rights, and the other party gets all the obligations. Brock University wants us to feel sorry for the snippy spoilsports who encourage the acceptance of scapegoating and demonization. I feel we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that one does not have to sully a profession that's already held in low esteem in order to speak up and speak out against Brock University. It is a whiney person who believes otherwise. Here's a specific example of the way in which Brock University is up to no good: It wants to block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can't get through. We find among narrow and uneducated minds the belief that the majority of villainous wheeler-dealers are heroes, if not saints. This belief is due to a basic confusion, which can be cleared up simply by stating that you might say, "Unyielding rigidity is just as much a threat to the continuity of things as deceitful totalitarianism." Fine, I agree. But it has been said that Brock University's ideas are a hotbed of escapism. I, in turn, believe that Brock University should get off its pedestal and walk a day in our shoes. Let me recap that for you, because it really is extraordinarily important: Just because Brock University and its associates don't like being labelled as "horny ochlocrats" or "negligent lugs" doesn't mean the shoe doesn't fit.
By allowing Brock University to make our lives an endless treadmill of government interferences while providing few real benefits to our health and happiness, we are allowing it to play puppet master. Once one begins thinking about free speech, about smarmy thought police who use ostracism and public opinion to prevent the airing of views contrary to their own laughable beliefs, one realizes that Brock University believes that honor counts for nothing. That's just wrong. It further believes that things have never been better. Wrong again! I guess what I really mean to say is that if Brock University bites me, I will really bite back. Brock University's catch-phrases are not the solution to our problem. They are the problem. Brock University sees all the evidence, but it is reluctant to accept the conclusion that we can never return to the past. And if we are ever to move forward to the future, we have to protect little children from interdenominationalism-prone moochers like it. Any rational argument must acknowledge this. Brock University's fork-tongued, sullen editorials, naturally, do not. Finally, whatever your thoughts or feelings about Brock University are, I urge you to help me beat Brock University at its own game.
How about all the students who want to use Kazaa go to the dean and offer pay $500 or $1000 more per year to cover the bandwidth costs. I'm sure if you got 50 or so students willing to do this the school might reconsider. Bandwidth rates are only around $700-$1000 per megabit per month, at least they were back in January when I got hosting.
Oh, what's that? You don't want to pay for everybody to use Kazaa? Well I'm sure other students don't want to pay for you to use kazaa, nor do the alumni, nor do the taxpayers (if you or your school receive any financial aid, which is almost a certainty).
If you want to saturate a network connection downloading movies and mp3 files, how about you move off campus and get DSL/Cable rather than ruining the network for people trying to get real stuff done?
rooooar
Honestly this stuff is a bandwidth hog, and its not your network...a college, or corporate network has but one purpose to get work done...thats why its there...if this were your cable modem or DSL line I might see a reason to complain...
My suggestion, build an FTP or Web site and let people download what they want from that...
Or get really intelligent and build a gateway server of some sort, that uses a web interface to submit requests to a machine on the otherside of the University firewall...that machine can do the search and download, and then offer the files up through web or ftp to download...
but na that to much work, you want your stealing to be easy...
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Hey, I wrote this submission into slashdot, and I'm not really all that concerned about the bandwidth restrictions on P2P.
What I am concerned about is future restrictions. Notice the retorical question "what's next?" That's really what I am concerned about. Cutting of P2P isn't the end of the world for an academic network, but what about some newsgroups, or Instant Messaging protocols (as they have talked about).
Mark
Brock Students in residence pay a monthly fee for internet access. Their communication fee is around $45 CAD (including telephone and internet).
Still.. not the point, but I forgot to say that!
Mark
Just like student councils or student senates,
your opinion is irrelevent. In the end, nobody
cares what you think. Its what the administration
wants that actually happens. You're only there as a
small decoration to look like they care what the
students think.
Though certainly bandwidth may be an issue, it is interesting that your college shut down P2P so soon after this article about RIAA/MPAA warnings appeared.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
At the college I'm currently at as a freshman, they have it set up so most of the file-sharing apps (like Kazaa) get throtled so that the people using them get sub-modem speeds out of the program. I think they are doing it by looking at what port the program is trying to connect on because if you go through an external SOCKS v.5 server you get a lot more than modem speeds. (The more I mention this though, the more likely that is gonna be killed too).
I would not make an issue out of this. You know that it uses excessive bandwidth that could possibly impair legitimate academic pursuits. Presumably this was done, because the network was not performing adequately or was costing more than it should. The block was placed to most likely reduce the current cost or in place of spending extra for more bandwidth. Would you want to place Kazaa access over say funding to a school club. Save your efforts for a more academically appropriate endeavour.
I work in a college IT department. The RIAA has sent letters to the boards which grant accreditation to all the U. S. Colleges "asking" them to help control the redistribution of material they own the distribution rights to by "asking" the Presidents of Colleges they accredit to prevent their students from violating their distribution monopoly. The implication is that future accreditation processes may include a "DRM good citizen" check. College presidents and trustees take this very seriously, folks, and this is no longer simply a matter of bandwidth. Without accreditation, its pretty damn hard to get students.
First, have you actually talked to your IT geeks to see how much bandwidth we're talking about?
Second, have them explore options to totally cutting it off. I agree that nuking Kazaa, et al, on an academic network probably isn't a bad thing, but I also agree that it's a bit of a slippery slope, what with things like freenet actually getting a bit of actual content. Bandwidth throttles can be inexpensive if you're lucky. They could also offer "full access" accounts for a premium, and slave those to one part of their bandwidth... then it would be the p2p users fighting over their limited space, and not taking up all the real users bw. My last sysadmin job, we set it up so p2p and anything not p80 was blocked during the day, but after work we'd open it up... perhaps your geeks could open the network on off-peak hours.
And, if all that fails, take a couple older PCs, put them in a room by themselves, share a cable modem or dsl between them, and toss in burners. Students who want stuff not available on the academic network can use those to dl and burn whatever they want. (and yes, there are issues with that... it's a last resort, ok?)
When it boils down to it, the most important thing is "Is this network for academic, or general, use?". If the U is giving you access to do your work with, then it's academic and they're right, but if it's general use, then it should be open. IMHO.
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
you, sir, have no idea what censorship is. Are they blocking ports to prevent free speech, divergent thought, student demonstrations, or criticism of the university?
No. They're blocking ports to reduce bandwidth consumption by people downloading w@r3z and mp3s. blocking frees up bandwidth for real acedemic pursuits, and is, in fact, anti-censorship, as the available bandwidth can be used for emailing your complaints to the student newspaper, putting up a "these teachers suck" homepage, etc.
Realistically, what you should be after is a completely open Network Acceptible Use Policy decision process. All users should be able to involve themselves in this process (students, faculty, administration, IT staff). During this process, the different groups will bring different desires to the table, and then be able to hash out an acceptible solution for everyone.
Realistically, there will always be some restrictions on what is considered "proper" network usage, since network bandwidth is a limited commodity. By having an open NAUP process, everyone has the chance to fully understand the limitations required, and contribute to the policy.
My suggestion it to propose an NAUP "board" with a representative from the above groups responsible for writing and approving such a policy. They should have the power to create and enforce such a policy, and the power to deal with any reprocussions thereof (e.g. if more bandwidth is needed to support the desired features, levy a fee on the appropriate user base).
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Setting up a P2P Network within the LAN? That way, bandwith costs aren't an issue and the student union can still trade files amongst themselves.
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
Why don't you take a flying fuck through a rolling donut.
Jesus Christ, how the hell do you get off dreaming this is about god damn censorship?
It is scumsucking bastards like you which give the internet a bad name. Maybe if you beg, plead and cajole, you might be able to explain to the powers that be why bottom feeding trash like you need to abuse the intellectual properties of others.
It never ceases to amaze me why universities even remotely allowed this in the first place.
1. YOU ARE NOT PAYING FOR THE BANDWIDTH. Get that out of your freeloading thick dumbass skull. A portion of your fees go to supporting the infrastructure of the university, but they certianly don't foot the bill. If you want to pay for the whole thing, go buy your own broadband connection and PORN THE FUCK AWAY!
2. DON"T YOU DARE TRY TO DISGUISE THIS AS SOME SORT of "Censorship" issue. No one is stopping you from hearing or publishing anything. It's just stopping you from jacking off to the latest girl-on-girl pic while watching a bootleg copy of spiderman. You want to discuss the political ramifications of the Bush administraton? USE Websites. You want to hear the music from the best of larwence welk? Do it on your own nickel, fuckwad.
3. As long as taxpayers are subsidizing the cost of your education, you could at least appear to give a fuck about blowing the money down the local shithole. When you are actually paying for the whole thing, you can set the rules. Prick.
4. Apparently it's whine about how my daddy abuses us week on slashdot. Christ all fucking mighty.
5. It's people like you that are wearing a SAVE WINONA t-shirt. Fuck the virgin mary with a candy cane. She STOLE, you wanna steal. Fucking lock the god damn bunch of you cocksuckers up with kevin "loose nutz" mitnick and throw the fucking key to the hounds.
--------------------
Well, there went all my karma!
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
Tough Titty. Dont like it? Transfer.
If you want the service of a full ISP then pay your money and get the service.
God I hate seeing a whole computer lab ful of idiots checking their hotmail accounts for spam, while people are waiting to do assignments. Sucking bandwidth dry while others want to do REAL research is a blody awful thing to do.
Piss off leacher.
Every school provided, on-campus internet service I've ever seen comes with a nice little clause in the user agreement.
That clause?
They hold the right to shut down any service that isn't used for educational purposes.
It might not be the same everywhere, but I wouldn't be suprised if there is that clause in any agreement you have to make to use the campus internet access.
Before you go complaining about this "censorship", remember, you agreed to their terms about it being for academic use.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
Here at Carleton, they recently killed all IRC connections in residence. I complained to Campus Computing Services and the Residence Association, but to no avail. From their point of view, IRC was taking up too much bandwidth from download hogs, so they killed everything. Now the only way I can connect with people back home is to use my shell provided by the good folks at The Engsoc Project. Monitor your situation, and don't let them end up like us.
I present the following analogy:
Suppose there's a lecture hall in some building on campus, and it has a nice multimedia projection screen setup. Now suppose that some local club (lets say, oh, the Anime Club) had arranged to show movies in this room during the evenings or weekends when it wasn't being used for academic purposes. Now imagine that this club became fairly popular, and started holding movie marathons every Friday night -- and that this use of the facility resulted in people spilling drinks in the seats, leaving trash all over the floor, causing extra wear on the seats from having their feet up, trashing the bathrooms in between movies out of boredom, having to replace the (expensive) bulb in the projector much more often, and perhaps having to leave the lights and building AC/heat on during weekends where before they were not needed.
The result is that somebody has to clean up their mess (janitors, building maintenance folks), legitimate users of the room begin to be affected (trash left in seats, projector breaking during lecture, etc), and in general an academic resource becomes overwhelmed with a non-academic use.
The fact is, if the above scenario ever happened at a university, the club would eventually be denied access. I don't think any resonable person would see this as somehow taking away a right or privilege of those students. Their use of the resource became too great. In the case of internet access, if you must download off Kazaa, live off campus and get a cable modem -- just like this hypothetical Anime club is free to use somebody's private home or rent some other facility for thier showings. No one is saying that you can't use Kazaa, they're saying you can't overwhelm an academic resource with a bunch of unrelated spooge.
In regards to legality of P2P, most P2P (as commonly used) is illegal. THerefore, it would be illegal for the campus to allow such activities. I'm skipping that point.
In regards to bandwidth (for anything P2P or not)...
The very basic law of demand, if you didn't know it in eighth grade, you knew it subconciously:
If they charge more, buy less.
Provide basic service through the LAN for every student (included with tuition and or housing), say 3 GB (not Gb) per month, at 256 Kbps. That should be sufficient for all academic research, and general entertainment, streaming content, flash, etc.
Offer students upgrade plans, such as higher bandwidth and data transfer.
Also charge students for excess data transfer, such as $5 per GB over the allowance.
If a student refuses to pay, refuse to provide internet services the next month.
This seems like a reasonable solution to bandwith issues. If the data transfer is still too high, then the additional income from bills couls support extra lines into the campus.
Finally, the school's computer service/IT department would have final say in many cases since the school owns the network and designates the IT department to manage it. I don't see why they would have any problem buying extra lines if the students are willing to foot the cost.
The product we use is the Packeteer Packetshaper. AFAIK (I'm not in the telecom area), this allows us to shape our traffic and place higher priority on "legitimate" traffic during the day. I have no idea what the pricing is on this beast (expensive, I think), but it has allowed us to continue to allow all traffic without resorting to more draconian methods.
Bryan J. Casto
bryan.casto(a)gmail.com
I work a company as their IT person. They own a apartment complex that they exclusively rent to college kids for the local community college.
They've got a 3mbit cable connection, cisco router, bay switches, 10/100 drop in every bedroom. I got a call day wondering why the internet was getting slower, slower, and slower. Well, I go out there, turns out they're just saturating the network with Kazzaa, Morpheus, whatever napster-alike they use nowadays. Kids can't register for classes, etc etc
To make a long story short, they didn't have the hardware available to implement a real solution, so I basically called our cable company up, explained the situation, and had them close all the connections other than email, web, streaming audio...
The cable connection was faster than ever! I've had them open up a few more ports since then, for various things like instant messanging, but that's about it.
Sure, the kids complain. They must not understand that the kind of file sharing they are doing is ILLEGAL. That's all there is to it. Sure, you can deal drugs to your college buddies, drink when your 18, steal music... oh well...
There are legitamate views on both sides here, but it's important to remember that it's not JUST an academic network. It's also a production business network for the university -- academics like to thumb their nose at that, but without the business side, paper doesn't get ordered, paychecks don't happen, etc. It's also a network serving the resident student population. Porn is a legitimate recreational activity on your own PC in the privacy of your own home. MP3 swapping gets a little stickier, but shouldn't be the university's problem in dorms any more than it's comcast's problem if I do it from home. I'd like to see more universities have different connections to serve the different populations. Likewise, charge appropriately. No reason the cost for the dorm connectivity should come from non-resident student tuition. Maor effort should go into making sure everyone pays for what they're using.
Prock see.
Find an open HTTP proxy out there on the net, and Kazaa away...
(+10, redundant)
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
My advice is not to push the issue. We had a policy about this sort of thing, we enforced it, students whined, the administration smacked them far harder and far far more mercilessly than the geeks ever had dreamed. Why? Because the administration had been noticing significant impact on their work. They care not for silly students, they DO care about how fast they can get their latest 200GB dump from the particle accelerator. Don't push the issue, you'll lose every single time.
I work at a large university in an IT department (but no the one that manages the network).
Over 70% of our traffic is from Kazaa an other P2P clients. The university has had to triple it's available bandwith on the campus uplink costing mucho dinero. They have tried very hard to allow all traffic without restricting certain protocols or ports, but this year it was just too much. If I'm not mistaken, they are now rate limiting access to the dorms.
Why not use taffic shaping? Becuase we are currently handling over a gigabit traffic for most of the day...buying hardware to support that much traffic would be quite expensive. Second, P2P applications are a moving target, so new applications or savy users will be able to bypass the filters quite easily.
So now, the students will have to deal with slow access in the dorms if they are going to keep using P2P applications. At least the rest of us, with legitimate internet uses, have bandwidth available.
ÕÕ
I happen to work as one of the monsters who busts you on your ass when you deserve it. This includes things like: trying to break into the registrar's office, forging emails, plagiarizing, and general illegal behaviour (like trading of copyrighted material).
First off, a round of applause for those smart enough to realize that this could be illegal. You will save yourself some trouble by avoiding the file trading networks.
Second, I've sat on the panel and voted to suspend or expell students after numerous warnings. Most of the hamsters are too stupid/shortsighted to get
it. We are protecting them - when I show the offending hamster the registered letter from Big Media that we just got, most of them seem happy enough to take the local restrictions and know that we'll fend of the lawyers. You probably suspect it, but there are admins out there who do get a kick out of banning you. Repeat after me: BOFH.
Third: I'm as much for academic freedom as the next university IT geek, but I don't believe that this freedom extends to illegal acts. What's next: I should let you surf for bestiality because it's part of a biology paper? Get real. You are expendable: if you expose your university to too much liability, they will drop you like the proverbial hot potato. I'm more than happy to make CDs full of evidence and hand them out to the cops and lawyers like AOL hands out free trials.
Four: It costs money. Lots of money. While we try to peer with as many places as we can, we're still looking at paying over half a million dollars this year for bandwidth as an operating expense. *Operating Expense*. Just like heat and water and power. Your tuition doesn't go anywhere near that bill. Neither do your residence fees. If I were to actually start charging the residence for what they use, their bill would probably double. Traffic analysis shows that over 85% of the packets bound for rez are not academic in nature.
Last year, by shooting down file trading, I reduced our bill over a hundred thousand dollars. Tell me again why the board/ president/ provost/ chancellor/ dean/ whoever cares about you being able to commit mass copyright infringement?
Five: speaking of traffic analysis, go right ahead and change the port. I know what the client looks like in operation. I do content inspection, so I'll still see what you're up to. I know if it's mp3s or divxs, and I know when you're over the limit.
Six: "What about libraries?" you cry. "We can copy stuff there!" hm. Well, you do copy things there for two reasons. Either because the library has paid a license fee or because you're too stupid to realize that you're breaking the law.
So. If you don't want me telling you what to do with my network (It's mine because the university hired me to maintain and secure it, and has given me authority over it) then go buy your own network. I bet it won't be long before your ISP gets DMCA letters and suspends you there too...
The organisation that I work for is currently facing a potential network traffic problem with file sharing programs.
:-)
I'm thinking of proposing that we get some flavour of DSL line in and route any non-academic traffic through that (i.e. anything not web, mail, IM and a few others).
One question before I start wading through man pages. I this possible? A simple yes/no will suffice. It would be nice to know that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
At my (nameless) university here, every user has 1 gig of bandwidth per day (up or down, whichever you hit first). As soon as you hit the limit, you get cut to a 56k equivilent untill midnight. its pretty good for 10mbit connection for $5 a week :)
The only problem we've found is that network services picks one IP a day , and actually listens to the datastream for copyrighted material. They seem to only really care about movies and large things, not mp3s, but still. If you get caught you lose your net connection for the year. Just two doors down from me, campus security paid him a visit about downloading 3 episodes of family guy. So it seems to be true, but im wondering is this legal? We've yet to find anything that says they cant. So if anyone knows anything about this kind of stuff up here in canada (eh?) it could be helpful!
that would not affect legitimate uses of the network. The very wire protocol that makes these file sharing programs useful ultimately makes it easy to selectively filter.
I had to set up an academic departmental lab in Japan once. It was a bunch of disparate systems, figured I'd get everything running linux, apache, etc. This meant I needed to download a bunch of stuff. Notice that this isn't Tokyo or Osaka, so the nearest store that stocks RedHat is literally two hours away and charges triple. If you wanted a copy of YellowDog retail, you had to get on a plane.
I cannot describe how frustrating it is to watch your downloads max out at 1.2K as your deadlines approach because the children in the next building want to listen to the latest drek cranked out by the likes of GLAY. I literally had to drive an hour back to my home so I could download and burn the CDs I needed.
I hate the RIAA too, and I mourn for Napster, but I would have blocked all those ports in a second at the college I worked for.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
They can also pay for the CDs and movies they want to steal on KaZaA, too, can't they?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
My school network shoots down anything over port 1024 (all traffic above that port is forced to share a rather small percentage of the bandwidth), on the assumption that academic work takes place on ports below that, while "general use" takes place on ports above that. However, I very frequently download music for academic purposes, and very frequently run into the bottleneck. I'm not downloading RIAA stuff here; it's recordings of other college ensembles. Also, try sharing academic documents with your classmates over aim; it's a joke. So guess what happens? Email.
Meanwhile I'm leeching pr0n off of port 80, which has no restrictions, but it's about the most non-academic thing I do...
the moral of the story is, everything is all screwed up, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it, because the network admins believe that >1024=criminal.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
give me one thing you can do on a p2p network that you can't do anouther way.
Make content scalable to any arbitrary level of demand, on the fly. That is what FreeNet can do, by replicating data on demand to more and more nodes the more it is requested. P2P is the first and to my knowledge only architecture on the net that has this capability, a capability that could well revolutionize the usefulness of the net. And I'm not talking about serving up pr0n or mp3s, I'm talking about making popular webcasts and websites more available and more accessible, rather than less. I'm talking about an approach that solves many of the scalability issues inherent in the net today.
The reverse of the slashdot effect: popular data becomes more available rather than less, with the cost shared by those requesting the data, thereby lowering the bar for those who wish to provide said data (a much nicer alternative to being forced to upgrade your web service when your site gets linked to by slashdot).
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal[sic] shit really easy.
First, what you just described is a form of censorship, it just happens to be a form you agree with.
Second, if they were serious about preventing copyright violations they would have to remove all means by which students can share files, which must include scp, ftp, http, irc, IM, and email, to name just a few.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy