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U of Wyoming Fingerprinting All P2P Traffic
mk2mk2 writes "News.com has an article on how they're preparing to shut down P2P sharing of copyrighted content: 'For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song or "Friends" episode.'" It's scary until one realizes that most P2P traffic isn't encrypted, like back when everyone still used telnet.
What about FTPs? Direct file sending over IM clients? Usenet? IRC? Good luck, RIAA...
-insert a witty something-
No, I would say scary after. If it were encrypted, if would be much harder to do.
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I suppose you could claim "spoofed ip"
Why's this under privacy? There's no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's network. Especially when the stated policy upon arrival almost certainly says "don't do this"
It will only take a few arrests of young college students in the States to pressure the release of secure sharing over P2P. That's probably one of the reasons the RIAA isn't targeting anyone in the States yet. They are testing the waters in Australia however, but they don't want the P2P networks to go secure until they have cataloged everything they can.
Where the Music Matters
If it's about bandwith, why don't they throttle the p2p ports like any self-respecting, upright university.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
There is one small point you are overlooking here. They (the University of Wyoming) own the network they are snooping...you don't. That is what makes the difference between it being okay for them to do it and not okay for you to do it.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
SO, i guess they have no problem with ME running a sniffer on all traffic on their network? I mean, since they feel its ok for them to do it, its ok for me to do it.
Dude you are so off base you should be modded a funny. (Mods, please read parent before modding me)
The point is, it's THEIR network. It's not the student network, it's not the taxpayers network, it's not even the Alumni's network. It belongs to the University plain and simple. University is for research, not d/l pr0n or sharing eminem. Students are given access to the internet in their dorm rooms to assist them with their studies.
If I caught you running a sniffer on my network, I would yank that patch cord leading up to your room so fast it would make a "whooosh" sound like a whip cracking in the air.
What sucks about giving freedom and liberty to people (or even college students!) - is not knowing ahead of time what they might actually do with it.
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You know - like invent a decentralized p2p network and trade music files with it
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Sometimes, my stupidity amazes even me.
All they need is software that emulates kazza or other P2P software and attempts to make connections to user's computers. Unless you do filesharing with people you trust, there is no way you can hide what kind of traffic is being sent. On the client side, the person not sharing files, I guess you could use encryption, but then you know what that will lead to in universities? A ban on high-bandwidth encrypted connections. As long as it's a problem I think the technology to detect P2P will keep up with the P2P software itself.
Besides, if I went to that university, I wouldn't want my research slowed down because some freshmen was trying to download Friends episodes.
If administrators can't distinguish "good" traffic from "bad" traffic, they will have no choice but to simply remove any access at all to the Internet from the problem subnets, namely dorms.
So, encrypt the traffic. Make it so that nobody can tell what's inside the stream. That's dandy. But if P2P usage makes it such that researchers can't get the resources or bandwidth do actually do their work or are significantly impacted (the argument of whether researchers are doing anything more than reading Slashdot or Dilbert is for a separate post), even if the traffic isn't recognized as P2P per se, you can bet that this will be the next step.
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
Why don't those silly P2P programmers get smart and start making their software work off port 80. That oughta stall them sys admins for a few more months.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
They really don't care *what* is being shared so much as bandwidth costs. For U of W, this isn't so much a legal question as a policy question to keep their network costs from spiraling out of sight.
And many P2P users simply don't care in the least about their bandwidth usage -- they suck up as much as they can get. No effort to obtain a file from another computer on the local network (granted, most P2P software doesn't even support this). They simply expect mass amounts of bandwidth, and for other students' tutitions to subsidize their downloading.
I'd like to see per-user data transfer per week quotas, where users get capped to 2kBps or so for the rest of the week if they exhaust their quota.
May we never see th
Forget compression, what about transcoding of the files between various formats or bitrates? Forget about the aural impact of transcoding for a second, but the datastream impact. My rusty ol' ears won't hear anything different, but the data stream will have a completely different signature.
If its watermarking, would transcoding it destroy the watermark?
It's different if they just want to conserve some bandwidth, but if they are just trying to stop the distribution of copyrighted works, then that sounds like an impossible task. Who owns the copyright on "Redhead Sticking a Cucumber up her Ass" ?
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
What the AC was probably trying to say (but in a, shall we say, crude way) is that there is no key to extract.
Any encryption protocol worth it's salt (ie generally not those propriatary/secret protocols) is protected against this. Eg SSL or SSH which you can snoop all you want, but there's never a key sent in clear text across the channel. Neither is there any key to find in the source. Instead a key is agreed upon by the clients as they connect, but using "one way functions" which are hard and/or practically impossible to crack. You can also use public key encryption with it to add even more security and authentication to the system.
That's why he suggested that you should read about SSL. A cheap way is to just look at the relevant RFC, although it may be a bit complex if you don't have any experience in number theory. Another hint could be look at crypto sites such as Bruce Schneier's crypto-gram (counterpane.com).
In any case, if you use a well tested protocol and implement it correctly (not always trivial) then the system will be secure.
That's not the point. They're not targetting burglars or file pirates, this system invades the privacy of EVERYONE on the network utilizing P2P for a variety of reasons, not necessarily to get a sneak peek at Matrix: Reloaded. That's illegal or at the very least immoral.
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
Why don't all the filesharing networks, Kazaa, gnutella, etc., encrypt their searches with ROT13 and then slap malintentioned groups snooping traffic with lawsuits citing the DMCA. Since the movie industries pushed this to control their media, this would be quite an ironic usage of the DMCA. hehe
That's where the power hungry politicians in the University world have it wrong. The students own the network, not the administrators. The students have paid for the network and are paying the administrators to operate the school. I really am quite confused as to who the heck some of these people think they are, implementing measures like this. It would be like hanging from a rope over a gorge and cutting the rope because it's violating copyright law. I have a feeling that once the whole student body catches wind of a P2P crackdown on campus that there will be massive protests and possibly riots. Like the incident at Michigan State University when the University decided to ban alcohol on campus. The whole freaking place went to hell, rioting on campus, cars on fire, etc. I think the reason that we are not hearing more opposition from the people who pay for the networks is probably the same reason that most of the computers that these people use leave port 139 open.
Let the police do their job and RIAA push the police to do a harder job. The university administrators should stay the heck out of it unless there would be legal implications for the university. Afterall, the administrators are there to make the university a better place for the students, not for the RIAA.