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

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"

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.