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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 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...
Actually, at this particular university the bandwidth was payed for by selling part of it to others in the area. Students who lived off campus payed nothing for network access at the public labs.
Students who lived on campus payed $5 a semester for a high speed connection. That's NOTHING compared to the cost of the multiple T3s.
Anyway, the express purpose of the network is for academic use. And that's never been questioned, and no academic use has been stopped. But when a P2P generates Terrabytes of data a day, there's not a whole lot of other options but to ban it.
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.
It can be argued, and has been successfully, but not specifically regarding a network.
An example I'm thinking of is Humbodlt State in CA. They built a new library and, as is usually the case, there were cost and time overruns. The students sued the school since they were paying for access to this new library, which wasn't available to them, and won.
The difference here, of course, is the non-academic use.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Yes, but every vendor is allowed to define what services it offers to its customers. Just because I pay you $x for product Y, does not mean I have the right to demand you also give me product Z.
By the same token, universities are able to compete with one another for students by advertising less restrictive policies on net usage, if they want to. Thing is, the legal risk from the MPAA and RIAA make them not want to.
Paying tuition doesn't give a student carte blanche to use college facilities and services. I wouldn't expect internet access, unless in a contract between the college and the student guarantees it.
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.
I talked to one of the network admins about the bandwidth kazaa was using. He told me it was taking up around 75% of all the available bandwidth. After the admins decided to shut it down for a few days, the data pipe was nearly empty. The only thing is, this had absolutely no impact on the network as a whole, even though the bandwidth was fully saturated , things weren't especially slow. I wonder if perhaps some schools have some misconfigured services, or if I just go to a school with a huge pipe. :')
If you get an error, type "OVERRIDE" or "SECURITY OVERRIDE" and then try the optimize command again.