Slashdot Mirror
Blocking Kazaa 2.0?
coder_ asks: "Has anyone had success blocking the latest versions of this annoying P2P application in a network-wide context? Previously, people have been told to block a specific port, etc, yet as expected, Kazaa has found an easy solution to this. Apparently, when a connection via default port is not available, Kazaa makes encrypted http requests through port 80, making it rather difficult to now block. If anyone has had success in doing so, I would love to hear from you."
Fuck off. You have no right blocking and filtering traffic for a certain application.
P2P forever!
Lets hope ALL P2P and other applications begin tunneling and encrypting via HTTP to make filtering impossible.
The way it SHOULD BE(tm).
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
If you work for an ISP or are a corporate lapdog for big media, STFUB. It won't work and you'll only piss off your paying customers who'll jump to your competitors. Your company will nosedive into the ground - and I'll laugh.
If you are in a corporate or educational environment (and internet bandwidth is supposed to be a productive asset) - there are no precise technical solutions that you can use given the variety of transport options and changing protocols. A few options:
(1) Train your users not to use disallowed software, pointing out bandwidth problems. Then threaten, make the consequences clear (see if it improves). Then take action if bandwidth usage is still bad and start temporarily suspending accounts a day at a time - although double-check they aren't using bandwidth for legitimate purposes first.
(2) Throttle bandwidth based on average usage over the past hour or so with walking averages. I'm sure this would be easy to set up with a software firewall. After a long leaching session, see how they enjoy the internet at 1 kbit/s.
Yeah, you're the annoying nazi guy, just like the guy at my college who decided that no one needed inbound connections on campus or any connections on ports other than ssh, ftp, telnet, pop, imap, smtp and http.
Screw him, though, I tunneled everything through a socks 5 proxy on port 22 on a friend's ISP and probably got more traffic going through this than most of the rest of my college.
Why don't you start thinking of how you can make your job worth existing by actually helping your users instead of hindering them? Get off the power trip.