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"

Comments

Kiss it all goodbye

[flikx]

How naive to expect campus networks to remain uncensored. This isn't the 90's anymore, you know.

This isn't "censorship"

[Zack]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Henry V .009]

Couldn't some type of priority system be set up? That seems like a better tatic than banning a P2P networks.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[murat]

I completely agree, but they could come up with some other solutions. For example, they could limit the bandwidth of each computer. That could slow down the ftp leechers too.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[foistboinder]

It's their network, not yours.

True, but the students' tuition is in part financing at least some of the network. Can't it be argued that network access is something the students are paying for?. It's not exectly like a corporate internet connection.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Zack]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[UnrefinedLayman]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[MrResistor]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[foistboinder]

Unfortunately this argument can be abused. "Since tuition can't possibly pay for X, students can't complain about how X is run."

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Discoflamingo13]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[gentlewizard]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[p7]

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.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Bald Wookie]

They did. Turns out that P2P has a priority of zero.

Here's a challenge: Name one legitimate academic use for Kazaa.

The people in charge of the network probably couldn't come up with one. Kazaa was causing problems so they shut it off. Why should they put any effort into some type of priority system if it doesn't have academic value?

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[aerojad]

That is all well and good, but what about the students who live on campus, far from home, who enjoyed downloading music at home and enjoyed a relatively restriction-free internet. The school's network isn't needed at 1am, and I highly doubt that the professors checking their e-mail or going to the occasional flash animation for class dosen't draw too much off the network bandwidth. The fact you would resort to completely blocking all p2p and shutting off accounts of students makes me sick. You are the embodyment of censorship, and as far as I am concerned, a bonified puppet of the music industry.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[wcbarksdale]

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. The school's campus is just that, the school's campus. A protest would not serve academic purposes, so prohibiting a protest on school grounds is in no way censorship. The school's library is just that, the school's library. Controversial books would probably not serve academic purposes, so removing them is in no way censorship. By this logic, a university is incapable of censorship.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[wcbarksdale]

Well, I know people who needed to read maybe a 5 page excerpt from a book that was under copyright, and they found a pdf via p2p.
Granted it's not legal, but it's academic. And it's hardly unethical; those students would have just walked to the library instead, rather than running out to the bookstore and buying a copy.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Zack]

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls but here we go. Your analogies are horrific. Terrible. Horrible even.

This isn't the same as "banning protests." It's the same as saying "you can't have parades around the paved streets 24 hours a day since people who actually ahve to get from point A to point B can't since its clogged all the time."

This isn't the same as "removing controversial books" from the library. It's the same as saying "you can't checkout 2,000 books at the same time to build a fort and prevent anyone else from checking out books for academic reasons."

In no way as anyone's expression been hampared. There is no censorship. Explain to me, without using terrible anologies, why not allowing students to clog bandwidth with mp3s is a form of censorship.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Zack]

but what about the students who live on campus, far from home, who enjoyed downloading music at home and enjoyed a relatively restriction-free internet.

No one is forced to live on campus. If you don't like it, move off. If you really want to trade MP3s, then get a dial-up account and dial off campus.

The school's network isn't needed at 1am,

I beg to differ. Our network was constantly in use. Constantly. But on a side note, our original restrictions were "No P2P between 8am and 8pm" But people didn't listen, so we shut them down entirely.

The fact you would resort to completely blocking all p2p and shutting off accounts of students makes me sick.

It wasn't my policy. Like I said, I was a student at the time. But given how much trouble P2P was causing for our network what other options were there?

You are the embodyment of censorship, and as far as I am concerned, a bonified puppet of the music industry.

You are a troll, and as far as I am concerned, a bad one at that.

Now, please explain to me how not allowing P2P networks on a private academic network is the same as censorship.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[octalgirl]

Well, of course it is. Schools should never do anything that limits their students ability to gather new information. They already had badwidth throttled, and Kazza can grab more than just MP3. Most univerities don't go for dis-allowing just about anything, from the most outrageous art, weird science, etc.

It sounds like the RIAA got in their ear and convinced someone that all downloading was illegal, which of course it is not. You say it is the schools network, yet students pay many thousands to attend. Keeping the throttling seems like a reasonable middle ground. A similar line was just discussed here. Schools educate, not eliminate, and schools that dont take this opportunity to teach students about their fair use and the ethics behind it are missing out.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Tuxinatorium]

OC3 = 155Mb/s = 1,674GB/day = 50,220 GB/month = $50,000/month

It works out so that it costs almost exactly $1/GB

Suppose a college has 20,000 students.
50,220GB/month/20,000students = 2.5GB/month/student

The cost of an OC3 is also only $50,000/month/20,000stu = $2.50/month/stu

therefore, it makes no sense to put such harsh restrictions on bandwidth when they could just charge each student a nominal fee of $10/month and get an extra 4 OC3s or an OC12 (which is probably cheaper).

IMO, they should just record how much bandwidth students use and charge them a nominal fee of $2 for each GB in excess of 10GB/month. They would even make a profit from the internet access then.

Re:This isn't "censorship"

[Henry V .009]

It's worse than that. They are already charging the students for the bandwidth. But they are hiding it in the tuition payment so that they are under no obligation to provide any specified level of service for the money that is being paid.

The lump sum tuition that goes for all sorts of things that belong more at club med than at an educational instituition is one of the things that makes what should be a rather cheap service (education) unaffordable for many.

Gnutella's model

[TheSHAD0W]

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.

IAAITGAIBP2P

[Universal Nerd]

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.

Re:IAAITGAIBP2P

[nizcolas]

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. :')

Re:IAAITGAIBP2P

[wcbarksdale]

So limit residential usage to maybe 50% of campus bandwidth. And limit p2p ports to maybe 50% of residential bandwidth. This is basically what my school does, for some percentages. Also I find it somewhat odd that "Academic usage would grind to a halt when some new CD came out". If you run this close to capacity that a few 5MB transfers per person per day can clog the system, you desperately need an upgrade. I wouldn't be surprised if CS majors submitting their homework all on the same day clogged the system similarly.

Re:IAAITGAIBP2P

[Stormy Henderson]

If it was truly a few 5 MB transfers per person per day, life would go on. But that isn't the case. It's a hundred students sending MP3s and warez to hundreds or thousands of people a day, each. Out of your dorm. On your hall. So that it's faster to walk to the next room with a floppy.

Until my wife's university blocked file-stealing, their external connection was only fractionally as responsive as my 56k modem.

Use more intelligent file sharing systems

[0x0d0a]

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.

Some of you people must be on crack...

[Neck_of_the_Woods]

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.

Interesting Solution

[finity]

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...

What my uni does (nicer, but takes more effort)

[smcv]

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.

Waaaahhhhhh!

[cbass377]

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.

Re:Waaaahhhhhh!

[Anonymous Coward]

insightful?

you never went to college did you?

the school network doesnt only exist for educational experience. that may be in the "mission statement" or whatever, but in REALITY. its a different story.

i am sure you would study without any time to relax if you were in school.

How about this:

[Evro]

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?

Re:How about this:

[Wakko Warner]

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.

Why don't you take that same $500 or $1000 and purchase the CDs???

- A.P.

Re:How about this:

[Evro]

Well, that's clearly an option as well, but given that the current crop of college students seem to think unlimited access to Kazaa et al. is a god-given right, I think the odds of that happening are mighty slim. Plus, maybe he "needed" kazaa in order to download the latest movie, because he's too cheap to pay the $4 to rent the DVD. Kids today are very strange.

Sorry, but....

[haplo21112]

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...

RIAA/MPAA Warnings

[EzInKy]

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.

Re:Heh, president of the Student's Union...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Choose your battles

[p7]

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.

RIAA

[imsmith]

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.

Re:RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that very hard to believe. The instant the accreditting boards try to impose some sort of requirements on the big universities, the universities are going to jump ship. I just can't see the Ivies, etc. taking orders from the RIAA/MPAA about their networks - and the Ivies have enough clout that if they jump ship, the accreditting board will be permenantly crippled. Want to sue the Ivies? Guess what - they got the best lawyers teaching at the best law schools - it'd be a might short lawsuit that would harm the RIAA/MPAA more than doing nothing.

No, the only people this would intimidate is the smaller universities that exist only because of the accrediting. And I don't think it's possible to force something only on small universities and not on large ones.

Ideas...

[Cervantes]

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.

"censorship" my ass!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

what you want (vs. what you said...)

[trims]

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

How about...

[EaTiN cOfFeE bEaNs]

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.

Re:How about...

[jon787]

There are some programs out that do LAN searches and such. I know this because every once and awhile I get queries on my NetBios ports and I traced them back to someone with a LAN search engine website up on their resnet connection here.

Re:How about...

[smallfries]

Well, any university that did that would open themselves up to a lawsuit for promoting piracy/ But the problem isn't the cost of external bandwith, its Kazaa (et al) saturating the internal bandwidth stopping people from actually using the network.

What!?

[His name cannot be s]

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!

Re:What!?

[FatRatBastard]

God damn, I wish I had some modpoints. Short, sour and absolutely spot on. Too bad you're going to get nuked Karma wise.

Re:What!?

[Timmahhh!!!]

HA HA HA....That is too friggin' funny. That is, quite possibly, the best flame I have ever seen. Thanks for making my day. All I can say is pay for BroadBand like the rest of the "non-college" world.

You really should check your user agreements....

[Dark Nexus]

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.

Carleton

[Hydro-X]

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.

Re:This is the Canadian standard

[wcbarksdale]

your university library doesn't have a subscription to Penthouse

Speak for yourself:

[...]
Pearl Diver (Portland, OR) Lesbian HQ75 .P35
Pedestal (Vancouver, BC) HQ1457 .P37
Penthouse (New York, NY) Erotica HQ1.P418
Penthouse Forum (New York, NY) Erotica HQ1 .F74
Penthouse Variations (New York, NY) Erotica HQ1 .P41
[...]

Here's an analogy...

[bedessen]

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.

Traffic Shaping

[Bryan_Casto]

Instead of complaining to your campus IT folks about how this smacks of censorship, suggest ways they might get around the issue on the technical front. Here (Marshall University) we do traffic shaping on our internet connection, limiting P2P and game traffic during the day to something like 10% of our available bandwidth, and when 5 pm rolls around, the limits come off, and it's essentially a free-for-all.

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.

Here's my experience

[vasqzr]

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...

It's not JUST an academic network.

[lythander]

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.

Re:It's not JUST an academic network.

[Zack]

True, it's not JUST an academic network, but it is PRIMARILY an academic network. Student use was for non academic use is granted as a little bonus for people living on campus. But when secondary uses interfer with the primary purpose then there's a problem.

but shouldn't be the university's problem in dorms any more than it's comcast's problem if I do it from home

Which is slightly different. Comcast is an ISP, their business is on internet acess. A university can be considered a business too, but who's product is academics. But like I said above, if it interferes with the primary purpose of the network, it's got to go.

I do like the idea of providing seperate networks. Provide students with their own network, including a route to the main campus network, but a seperate pipe for the internet. That would solve most of these problems. There's only one problem, it would be SO much more expensive

Students were paying $3 a semester, only those living on campus, for a high speed connection. If they had their own seperate connection, I'd expect those costs to be about 100x higher at least. Or perhaps a charge per meg or gig transferred on a P2P network? Lots of interesting options there.

BTW, I'm glad to have a level headed response. One that doesn't involve calling me "the embodyment of censorship" hehe.

Two words

[Gothmolly]

Prock see.

Find an open HTTP proxy out there on the net, and Kazaa away...

(+10, redundant)

Where I work....

[duplicate-nickname]

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.

Re:Where I work....

[duplicate-nickname]

Also, to add this this point.

The acceptable-use policy states that the network is there only for educational purposes. Yes P2P *might* have some educational purposes, but probably not. Also, the university has receive over 150 notices of copyright violations this year. I'm highly suprised the legal department has stepped in to start shutting things down.

Quit your whining - you've lost already.

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Ways around this?

[FrenchBoy]

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. :-)

Network Monitoring

[BlaKmaJiK_]

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!

I feel your pain, but not really...

[jeko]

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.

Jesus christ.

[Wakko Warner]

They can also pay for the CDs and movies they want to steal on KaZaA, too, can't they?

- A.P.

academic vs. general

[chocolatetrumpet]

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.

It is you who should put down the pipe

[FreeUser]

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.