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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"
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe in the States...
SU's in Canada are actually quite powerful.
University of Western Ontario's SU has a budget of about $25 million dollars. Queens $8 million, Waterloo is probably around $15 mil.
Money isn't everything though. We are also very politically active and influential. Student's here gave $5 million to help the university with expansion. That kind of cash doesn't come without some benefits.
Don't get me wrong, they abuse us a lot.. and we bend over every once 'n a while -- but we aren't little and insignificant as you may think.
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.
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...
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.