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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"
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.
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
Sorry, but chances are you don't pay for your Internet connection. State colleges (I don't know how it is in Canada) are primarily funded from non-tuition based sources. Figure that a student pays a thousand dollars per semester, and there are fifteen-thousand students, that's 30,000,000 dollars per year for the school. Now figure you have 150 faculty members, at an average of 65,000 dollars per year. That's 9,750,000 dollars just to pay for faculty. Now figure there are 300 staff members on campus, at an average of 40,000 dollars per year. That's 12,000,000 dollars per year. That's 21.75 million dollars per year, leaving you with 8.25 million dollars to pay every student employee (probably around 4,000 of them), pay the electricity, pay water, pay maintenace, pay for office materials, including computers for so many of the people who work there, and pay back all the money it has borrowed in the past to cover various costs of running the campus.
Now tell me you pay for your bandwidth, which probably costs the university more than ten-thousand dollars per month.
You are paying for access to the network, but you have agreed to the terms of using said network. If the net admins (who probably also run most of the IT services for the campus) are spending too much time trying to limit non-academic bandwidth, then other services required for an academic network will not be nearly as well off. To be honest, I have no sympathy for a campus where people demand Kazaa, when better solutions exist that do not require using up bandwidth. A well-publicized (among the students) internal Gnutella network did wonders for the bandwidth problems at my school, which is an option you might consider, since it doesn't require administrative overhead/oversight.
As a student body representative, it is your responsiblity to work with administrative officials, not against them. If you find the terms of using the network too constrictive, campaign to have them changed. We didn't get them changed at my school - the excess bandwidth, before throttling was in place for http and ftp, was in excess of $100k, and it's hard to argue an idealistic case in favor of that number to a budget-minded administrator. Just remember to keep your options open, and work for what you believe in. When that doesn't work, re-evaluate your beliefs, and start again.