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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.
Why does the fact that it's unencrypted make it non-scary?
Peace and love, y'all
What about FTPs? Direct file sending over IM clients? Usenet? IRC? Good luck, RIAA...
-insert a witty something-
Someone wasting bandwidth on a 'friends' episode is scary indeed!
"I only speak the truth"
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No, I would say scary after. If it were encrypted, if would be much harder to do.
...
I suppose you could claim "spoofed ip"
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.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
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"
Of course this is a good endeavor to stop piracy, but the question is: Even after they successfully identify each user, can they effectively shut down each of the machine? They can do it for their student, and probably *AA will jump in for the big-brotherism. But can they do it for the rest of the world? I think not.
So, if they do this again -- it's like Napster story once again. New, better P2P softwares will spring up and it's more resilient and equipped with military strength encryption and stuff, which will in turn annul their previous effort.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
...we rot-13 encode everything. Big deal.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
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
...to ask whether anyone has gotten FreeNet working over Mac OS X. I started the daemon, but localhost's port 8081 (or whatever it is) wouldn't respond.
Has anyone had luck interfacing with the program after starting it?
This new technology will last for about 1 day. That's how long it will be until Kazza, Gnutella, Limewire, et all will switch to an SSL encapsulated protocol. Suddenly all the "fingerprints" will be shot. Each and evey download of the exact same file will have a different, unidentifiable, "fingerprint".
Sounds to me like this company took a copy of Snort, set up a few rules for the "fingerprints" and sold it to the University of Wisconsin. What a waste of money!
that I'll be punished for stealing songs, if they release details, my freinds will never let me live down my collection of Ricky Martain MP3s!
Where is the RIAA mentioned in that quote? It's just the network admin for the University saying that, and it's a pretty common thought in most universities these days. I know mine was using one of those packeteer type programs last year.
I RTFA and I'm curious how this works.
It seems to say it rebuilds the songs, and assigns a digital 'fingerprint', which I'm assuming is some sort of a hash based on the resulting wave file?
If this is the case, how much does a file have to be altered to make it undetectable?
And can it have a false positive in the form of a song that sounds similar, but is protected under fair use - ie; a parody?
What about commercial music releases that sample public domain material?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Wide adoption of THIS project as reviewed on slashdot a while ago.
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.
If it's about bandwith, why don't they throttle the p2p ports like any self-respecting, upright university.
You misspelled "uptight".
Scarier, How many sheep fsking movies have they fingerd
It seems to me that Student Unions pretty much bitch and protest nearly all administrative decisions at a university. I would really expect them to go all out in this case. If they had any brains at all there would be a huge student rally this weekend to protest this. I'm pretty sure the WHOLE school would show up. NO ONE likes to have their privacy invaded and worst yet, have RIAA and MPAA within striking distance!
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
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.
...
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.
Yeah, I remember telnet.
.... hours since I have used telnet.
It's been like
Those were the days.
I don't think so. Everybody who is using the Net should be aware that he/she can be watched. P2P networks do not encrypt data because the idea behind it is to share. If you want to find out who is sharing files you don't have to monitor the traffic. You can just join the party :)
It means that no encryption would help. If you share your copyrighted material you can be watched by the RIAA and their friends.
I don't personally think it's dangerous for the p2p users (there are too many of them out there) but it's good to know
barwil
From the perspective of college system administrators everywhere, yes. I'm with network support at a small liberal arts college and let me tell you, our connection slowed to a crawl when the students discovered p2p. We don't have enough bandwidth to support that kind of thing, and with the RIAA and MPAA sending out cease-and-desist notices, we really don't have the legal wherewithal either...
No statement is true, not even this one.
It's pretty obvious you can't copyright a length 1 bit string, so how many bits do you need before you own it and I don't? 10? 100? 10,000? I know you can't trademark a number, can you coprright one?
Well, I'm sure this will appear in the large ISP's if it's proven to work on the small-scale...
Perhaps with this 'fingerprinting' technology the big boys can just charge us the ($.50/$1/whatever) a song they want from us anyways? Instant delivery system for them that they didn't even have to build!
This whole deal about copyrighted material somehow reminds me of the war-on-drugs... Making criminals of all the users didn't work there... Trying to stop the supplies at the street level didn't work either. The only thing that will work is legalizing the controlled substance... then taxing the hell out of it... hehee
People tried this towards the end of Napster (renaming the files to strange variants of the real name), but I think they were still able to track most of the copyrighted files.
This claim is interesting in a variety of ways.
If the notion of privacy in our communications is going to be utterly discarded, I rather wish the school had elected to eavesdrop on every phone call made on campus to help catch thieves, domestic abusers and other violent criminals, etc.
There are plenty of people who say what goes on the internet shouldn't be private; that there's no expectation of privacy there. I guess we'll get into this issue a bit on this topic. Just please don't forget to have a little imagination. This is all new. We're making the rules as we go along. Sometimes I think if the phone had been invented last year there wouldn't be an expectation of privacy on phone calls either.
Remember this is a "private" institution doing this, i.e. not a law enforcement agency. Remember that just because they can write a fancy terms of service that authorizes them to do whatever they want with the network, it doesn't make their actions legitimate, let alone moral.
Finally, most interestingly, remember that Fasttrack (i.e. Kazaa, etc) is encrypted over the wire (see this link). There's nothing saying that the whole thing won't be reverse-engineered and cracked sooner or later, but to my knowledge, that hasn't happened yet... of course, that could just be last I checked.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Can someone explain to me why this isn't illegal? Theres a law from the 1930's that prohibits telephone operators from listening to people's conversations. A few years back it was ruled that ISP's are in the same category as the telephone operators as far as the law is conccerned, and thus can't spy on what their users are doing. Yes I know its a university, but I think they can qualify as an ISP as well.
what constitutes your own network?
That is another good point. With SSL or some such, as I just posted about in another post, source AND destination port randomization would be another great thing. Maybe some random padding in the packet header too, and you're all set.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
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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...
:-)
I'd been *wondering* when someone was going to finally do something about his lousy music! U of W's spearheading a regular cultural revolution!
May we never see th
If monitoring and blocking tools were widely introduced, new software programs could easily develop ways to encrypt or scramble the data in transmission in order to make it unrecognizable by Audible Magic's tools or other databases.
.jpg of astronomical images, or pass it through a filter that makes it look like bad poetry, or make it a self-inflating-decrypting executable. You simply cannot write a program that will automatically filter all content, without simply denying all communication.
Encryption is just the tip of the iceberg. I can easily compress and encrypt any file, then slap on a header that claims it's a benign
:)
For the university it may be a technical issue, but in reality it's a legal one.
It's killing two birds with one stone, and one of them didn't need killing.
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.
Excuse me, even if the file was encrypted, the fingerprint for the same file shared all over would be the same and thus they would know when your sharing the latest Joe Millionar or Daredevil blah blah (who would do such a thing?! OMG).
Point is that fingerprinting probably just runs a md5sum on the file being sent or TCP fingerptints the transmitting bytes, this could not be defated by just encrypting the file !
Maybe something like bittorrent should enable small random bytes to be sent with the file when a file is being transmitted (which would defeat fingerprinting).
So, ok these guys have essentially done what FastTrackMovies has done and hashed each file. Hunky dory. So, people implement this and think "no one can trade my files, cause we know what they look like (and have the hash), so we can block it."
.zips or .tars the music or movie.
.zipped asset from being traded? I know it won't compress the MP3, but it will change the fingerprint.
Now, Joe Pirate simply
Exactly how would they then block the
Methinks WinZip is the Sharpie for this expensive DRM.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
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.
Or more easily, quotas on bandwith per IP. If anyone person has a REAL reson for more bandwith, their IP can be un-capped.......if not, they only get to download a dozen songs today instead of a few hundred.
:)
If it's about bandwith, why don't they throttle the p2p ports like any self-respecting, upright university.
If you read the article, you'll notice that they do.
I'd say that a better question is -- why the *hell* don't colleges have per-user quotas? Like, you can transfer at an uncapped rate for large_quantity_of_data/week, at which point you get capped to 2kbps. You can still do work, but P2P users will soon learn not to waste bandwidth, and to obtain files from machines on the *local* network as much as possible. That alleviates the cost issues and keeps everyone happy.
May we never see th
While the future of p2p is encryption, if clients exist that can unencrypt, then they can create their own client to track the files content..
Else it would be pretty worthless...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Theyre looking to block copyrighted audio content. Sure, that's fine. But you can't "fingerprint" something as complicated as a DVD or somebody's home-ripped pr0n movies because each ripper/encoder works a little differently.
Youre going to wind up filtering everything but *porn*. I can't really see that being what they intended to do.
"But it's getting to be the only way to control our bandwidth."
In one 24-hour period, for example, the most popular file traded using the Gnutella network was an MP3 by rap artist "Big Tymers," which passed the network monitor 188 times.
The students should really set up their own, internal P2P network. This would put less tax on the University's external bandwidth, downloads would be quicker, and, assuming it's restricted to local users, the RIAA couldn't really prove any wrongdoing. (Although their FUD generally scares universities enough.)
Universities are generally big enough to support a network on their own. They should.
While its true that most Student Unions bitch and protest nearly all administrative decisions, I would argue that the administrations rarely listen. It makes sense, though, because if you listened to someone who complained about everything you would never get anything productive done. In fact, the students themselves rarely listen to the Student Unions - only when there is a very serious infraction of their rights. So why don't the students have a huge weekend rally? Because I doubt that many University students care all that much. They all have classes, tests, and homework they have to get done. They might utilize p2p networks, but its not their life and if it gets sniffed they probably won't care a whole lot. There's no incentive for your random, average, run-of-the-mill college student to care about what gets sniffed on the network or not. All they care is that they have internet access to do research for their papers and reports - oh and chat as well.
I'm curious, could such "encryption" also be used on, say, credit card transactions?
Many do.
At Cornell, for example, if you transfer more than 27 GB over a 72 hour period (which, frankly, is insane...) they cap you to some small bandwidth amount for a period of time... Do it too many times, and they terminate your account.
Most other colleges have some similar system in effect where X traffic in Y period automatically makes your router rate-limit you.
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
Guess my univ isn't "upright" then. ALL incoming traffic is blocked, hell, even pings (ICMP) is. Outbound on all well-known P2P ports is also blocked. Guess they just can't afford packet-shaping.
But yes, IMHO the best solution is via port/packet-based bandwidth limiting.
Or we may find ourselves without the ability to enforce the GPL.
The RIAA themselves is guilty of seeding P2P networks with null files that share names with copywritten material. Who's to know if the eminem you downloaded is a song, or whitenoise?
To provide more empirical data to the other reply, Rutgers University's policy is to allow 2GB over any 7 day period downloading, and 512MB over any 7 day period uploading. This makes it pretty much impossible to serve anything but small files (they but the dorms into private address space last year as well), but allows enough room to get most things done on the internet, legit or illegal. And no, it doesn't matter if you spent your 2GB downloading Linux ISOs. The policy is meant to save bandwidth, not stop piracy.
If you exceed the limit, you cannot access the internet for a week. University resources may still be accessed, which allows for basic internet access through X or port forwarding, etc.
And no, the same laws that will be used against you if you are caught to use a program like DeCss will not be fairly applied against the RIAA if they decide to go after your encryption system.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
If they had any brains at all there would be a huge student rally this weekend to protest this.
To paraphrase Nietzsche, you are assuming something.
Also, if an unjust war against a defenseless enemy won't get them out in the snow of Laramie, this sure as fuck won't.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Why don't they just run a bunch of freenet nodes? First off, it's completely encrypted, so the university/RIAA would be completely screwed if they wanted to find out what you were doing. Plus, the files are optimally distributed across several systems, so then when there is a file to be downloaded, it won't be too hard upon the univerity's internet connection (that's assuming that it's a popular file and it's also distributed among several of your piers on the university's network).
Not only that, but if the university wanted to try to filter out all filesharing, then you could just run your freenet node through port 80, and it'll look something like ssl traffic if I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I'm wrong in that bit of info).
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
"...like back when everyone still used telnet..."
simple, p2p using ssh/ssl/etc on port 80
MAnyone know if a P2P that encrypts or SSH's? I know I'd be willing to try it out...
-Valiss
It seems to me any easy way to bypass (or at least extend) quotas at the University level is good old sneakernet -- much like we got our music when I was in School back in the '80s. One would make friends and get to know who liked what -- you want Dead Kennedys talk to Cosmic John, need Billy Joel, talk to someone else. We would build our collections a cassette at a time.
Since CD burners are so common now, why not do the same thing? Pass around CD-Rs with .OGGs or .MP3s around the Dorm (or between classmates) -- instant portable 600MB of "bandwidth" per CD-R. Great way to build up a collection without worrying about sniffers or using up the bandwidth.
Beware of Sleestak
It is possible to get Freenet working on OSX, take a look at the Freenet website here, and email support@freenetproject.org if you need any help.
Generally, the majority of campus internet traffic these days is related to file sharing. Almost every colleges and university in the States has had to employ some method for dealing with this, from governing bandwidth distribution to simply upgrading infrastructure. Curbing the distribution of copyrighted data is not just about folding to the RIAA ... it's a pragmatic solution to a huge problem.
People that watch "Friends" know how to use P2P software.
I'm stunned.
Would the university selling tapes of showerrooms be a privacy issue? There is no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's showerroom.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Wow, just imagine. Someday everyone will have a P2P network of their very own! Er, wait....
The University of Wyoming ... where the men are men, and the sheep are scared.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
With the dignified and respecful manner they treat their students with, I'm sure they'll be quite popular with the /. crowd. You should have added a link to their admissions page.
--
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Over here at a certain Central Ohio university (That happens to be National Football champions this year), we have a Direct Connect server sharing 10 TB of files; The transfers go over the local network. And the great thing is, it goes at ~900 k/s, unlike KaZaA which goes 15 k/s if you're lucky. Personally, I think this is the way to go; the university pays no bandwidth cost, and I don't have to wait all day.
1p}{ 1 sp34k |33+ +|-|e|\| p30p13 \/\/il| 8e i/\/\pr3553|)
Before some of our fellow slashdotters come up again with "They own the network": Yes, they do. But that does not grant them the right to monitor it continuosly and in detail.
Someone always owns a piece of infrastructure, be it an ISP, a University, the interstate authority or your 'landlord'. But they don't have the right to invade your privacy if you are using rented, leased or subscribed equipment. Imagine the owner of your apartment trying to monitor your living habits, to make sure "nothing fishy is going on in your apartment".
Network and telephone lines can transmit very private and sensitive information, and it is a serious crime to snoop that out. If you thought that was the right way, you're had too much time on corporate americas way of life. They are your customers, your contractors, if you like, but not only that, but living feeling humans that deserve to have a private life, one that's none of your business. You can imagine a thousand situations like this:
- You rented my car, why don't I have the right to monitor where you're driving, who you take with you and what roads you drive on?
- You rented my house. I claim the right to visit you whenever I deem it's necessary. And just to ensure, that my property is taken good care of and you don't hoard drugs there, I will make a full seizure every time I come.
-
I rented you my video camera, you've got to give me a copy of each recorded tape, so that you cannot film underage porn. Think of the children, my god!
-
And finally: I've given you Internet Access. Now that you can browse the web and do spiffy emailing, you must be utterly thankful to me. And since you are a student, you don't have any rights to complain, we will treat you as a slave and you have no private life. Be thankful, you even got a 'net connection and understand, that we have to make sure you don't do illegal things with it. We don't count the bytes, we don't have per-user quotas, we do the nasty GESTAPO stuff piling through all your traffic. If you complain, well, try another University.
Opening some other's letters is the same and I hope finally someone will punish the university for doing this.Let it happen, that on one incident, some very private information about a student is obtained that way and told the public to embarrass him. One lawsuit later, the U has lost 10 Million US$ for a settlement and the bandwitdh savings of 5 years are worth exactly nothing compared to this. Go ahead, wait till someone reacts. I'd do that.
Yes, I own the switches too. I don't get your point.
What traffic you propagate within the hardware you own is your business. Once it hits a router to another network (DSL/Wireless/T1/Cable) and enters their system it's no longer your traffic. As long as they don't violate their end of your contract, they can do what ever they want to do with your traffic when it's on their networks.
If I try to send traffic on my DSL provider's network that they don't want then they can block, deny or trash it. As long as it's not in the agreement that they have to carry it, then there's nothing I can do.
I really don't see how this is a hard concept.
There are a lot of people saying that encryption wouldn't be the answer but I beg to differ a bit.
If each file transfer between two clients was handled encrypted in the following manner:
- When you log on the network your client generates the equivilent of a PGP public/private key set.
- When a file is transfered from person A to person B person A encrypts it with person B's public key.
Now, no man in the middle can figure out what you are sending to anyone or what you are recieving from anyone
Yes they could just create their own client and do a search on the network and see what you have shared on your client but that is possible now.
The method described in the article doesn't do that though. It is a passive system that just monitors the data passing through each router. Encrypting all transfers and query responces would stop this kind of filtering as nothing will ever have the same signature twice.
That probably didn't make any sence but I've beeing diagraming crap for class for the past 12 hours and nothing makes sence any more!
I think this may have been touched upon here, but the college owns the phone lines going in, they can't arbitrarily listen in on that mode of communication, or even arbitrarily start sorting through who calls who.
At my college they had mailboxes set up in the student center. The college owned the property, but that doesn't give them the right to read my mail.
I am a convert. I used to believe even a company should be able to monitor all traffic, emails and files. Then I realized, just because you wrote a note down on a notebook the company gave you, that doesn't give them rights to read through your notes. Just because you take a call at work doesn't give the company the right to listen in. And if all these modes of communications and data storage are protected under privacy and speech rights, then there is no reason that speech rights should be completely ignored simply because you use a different medium to converse or share and store data.
a parody of an EmmnEmm songthat was about friends, and I called it friends, would I be in trouble?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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I go to a tech school and they have just about every single P2P service blocked, except for sharing directly between users over the network (such as Gnucleus or AOL).
Its amazing that despite my house only having a low bandwidth DSL connection compared to the OC-3 I'm running on at school I still am able to download 10 times as many files just because of the availability of P2P services when I am at home.
I think that the whole copyright infringement thing needs a complete overhaul with taking the internet into account....I mean, I buy more CD's if I can download songs and listen to more of the CD before I buy it, but if I can't listen to songs I probably won't waste my money trying to pick good CD's randomly.
'nuff said
I bet the university wouldn't have much of an issue with it if it didn't require so much bandwidth. I have a friend that just graduated from this U. and believe me they are having serious financial problems. I'm just guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if they're just trying to cut down on their overall internet usage.
I don't think this is relevant. I haven't looked at any packets going down the wire, but I'm assuming when you request a file from another user, you have to ask for that file. Filename request goes down the wire. Once you know the format of file requests for a given P2P program, you can just scan them to see what kinds of files people are requesting. If not the file requests, what about when the client replies to search requests? What about direct connect complete listing queries?
:) So in an effort to make things better, once the P2P catches on it will be made worse again.
Some users have already brought this up, but the way around this is to encrypt/re-code the traffic. That is, all the requests, all the listings, all the control stuff, and the file transfer itself. This may lead to an increase in bandwidth consumption just to encrypt everything though
Just like after Napster. When Napster was popular, there was a gradual movement to shut down access to it. So other services started popping up, then completely distributed services such as Gnutella. Gnutella is a tremendous bandwidth hog, as opposed to something more centralized.
I respect the universities that just try to limit the bandwidth consumption of the offenders. But just shutting this stuff down cold turkey is only going to lead to P2P more difficult to detect and filter.
Of course, organizations such as the shitty Adelphia cable should not BY DEFAULT have a 15kps upstream. Assholes.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
Well, since the system seems to be a glorified packet sniffer..the solution is quite simple actually. SSL/TLS was designed for this very scenario: on-the-fly encryption between two unrelated endpoints. You could do any number of other things if you didn't want all of the complexity of implementing full-blown SSL/TLS. If you were just interested in encrypting the application-level data, and didn't really care about the lower-level stuff...you could roll your own encryption scheme using DH or RSA in order to create a secure channel to derive/exchange a symmetric key (for DES/3DES/AES/*insert favorite symmetric algorithm here*). Of course, none of this prevents the RIAA or whoever from actually logging on to your system via the P2P program as a normal user and "browsing your wares", so to speak. I think for that, you would need a mechanism similar to the PGP "web of trust"...where you only allow clients that have been "vouched for" by entities that you trust. Yes, I know that digital certificates do the same thing..but they generally require more centralization than does the PGP model. You could limit the "degrees of separation" allowed to access your box...minimizing the risk that the "bad guys" could covertly sneak into the trust-web at a level that you authorize. Of course, as long as you are allowing basically anonymous connections to your shares, you'll never be 100% secure from the *AA, but this would certainly mitigate those risks to a large degree. The actual implementation of such a system is left as an excercise to the reader :)
Make a 1 byte file, call it "U of Wyoming - The modern day 1984.zip", get a friend outside the Uni. to host it, and set your machine inside the Uni. to download it once a minute.
Heh... If a few of you do that, the database could be full of useless info in no time!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The college would be in a GREAT position for a man in the middle attack.
[quote]It's scary until one realizes that most P2P traffic isn't encrypted, like back when everyone still used telnet.[/quote]
Uh. Most lUsers still use telnet...
Do they make a distinction between local network traffic and remote, though?
Hell, my own private network (in a 3 bedroom house) is capable of letting a dozen people download 2GB every hour, without hiccuping. Hell, they could almost upload the same, for that matter. As long as it stays local... once it hits that cable modem, things chnage drastically.
If they do, then someone needs to setup a mirror of a few of the important distros and other big packages, and be done with it. Let them download every single distro, at every minor revision... no one will care, as long as they use the local mirror.
And if they make no distinction, then they are just a bunch of asswad Hitler Youth, mindlessly aping Frau Rosen and Herr Valenti.
PS I always intentionally break Godwin's law. So ha!
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?
I'd be more worried when somebody's prof finds of a homemade copy of "Me and my dormroom buddies get it on.mpg" starring one of the students. That or just when the computer admin gets it... not sure who is scarier.
Someone set up an independent NAT, DHCP, firewall box and don't keep logs. Oh, that's what your roomates cracked w2k box is for? Never mind.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I read that as "Girls Gone Wild - Spring Break #19 - The one where the shave the turkey".
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
(of course, a way to get around the traffic hit would be to build a smaller, slightly less expensive internet just for the sniffer communications, but the costs for that would be pretty painful)
(Relating points 2 and 3 will mean the only thing the internet will be capable of anymore will be sniffer communication, but I suspect that would suit these guys)
The rest of the English-speaking world uses "Uni," not to mention Germany (I used to live there.) We're definitely the minority on this one.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
At the small Nebraska university I attend, our Internet access is completely shut off if we exceed 300,000,000 uploaded or downloaded bytes in one seven-day period. I would kill to be able to have 27 GB to transfer for the ENTIRE YEAR.
That'll just 'em a date with the Prof.
KFG
A VPN would prevent this.
Jamey Kirby
Can I trade a copy of your RSCA for "Backdoor Sluts 9"?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
If you're going to throttle bandwidth, it's better to do it in an intelligent fashion. A university isn't paying for a computer network for students to swap entertainment media, so, legal or otherwise, it makes sense to block that content. By blocking p2p, you could prevent useful transfers such as linux ISOs.
Vote for Pedro
Today, with all films/pictures copyrighted by default, and the copyright period lasting since long before color movies were invented, law-enforcers and administrators can very safely assume that everything is copyrighted. Until proven otherwise.
They can make the task possible by shutting down every form of one-to-many peer file exchange.
If you use session encryption then the key is different (and thus the ciphertext is different) for each download.
They've been doing this for awhile in some way or another as far as I can tell. I went to undergrad at U. of Wyoming, and I remember in my Junior year Operating Systems class (so, three years ago) my prof telling us about a list IT had that detailed the top traded songs on the network. At the time, I wondered how they actually knew which songs were traded. Now I see this turn up on Slashdot, and I guess I know. But they've been monitoring for three year (at least) I guess and seemingly haven't taken any action (though I do know they restricted the bandwidth coming from the dorm network segments at one point.)
All schools I've been to have some sort of "Computer use" or "Technology" fees. And of it's a public school, the rest are funded by the tax payers.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
our Internet access is completely shut off if we exceed 300,000,000 uploaded or downloaded bytes in one seven-day period.
This just pisses students off, can penalize people who accidentally use too much bandwidth, and just plain isn't a good idea. Much better to throttle the connection of the user's been using excessive bandwidth.
May we never see th
Exactly.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
I am in charge of the network/server department at our college.
.au files when I was in college thinking how cool it was that my box could play the james bond theme.
We have a limited connection to the internet, which is usually being eaten up by P2P traffic. Today, over an hour period, we had three students that used a total of 4G of traffic in an hour.
I don't care what the traffic is, but when legit work can't get done, such as our payroll system which uses SQL*Net across the WAN (bad idea to begin with, but that's a state bueracracy for you.) and their processes just aren't working, shit is gonna have to happen.
We blocked port 1214 (kaaza) and a week later the port switching version came out.
Right now we are facing the choice of either doing some severe draconian network policies or buyin a packeteer.
And how long will that work before the next fileswapping act runs with ssl over 443?
I feel for the students - it's something fun to do...hell, I remember downloading
Makes my life a pain in the ass - how to be nice and let legit stuff go on, allow some fun and experimenting to go on, at the same time "protect" the network and make sure it is available when need be.
is free! There is no extra charge when you live in the dorms or a on campus fraternaty or sorority. This gives the students even less say on what the bandwidth can be used for.
:). Kinda wish I was still there
I used to work directly under Brad Thomas and actually setup cricket to monitor the bandwidth on campus and as far as I know this is still working. The Packeteer software was added while I was working there while this new finger printing was added later. I know that the bandwidth from the dorms (as high as 50MB when unlimited) was killing voice and video trasmissions for remote schooling. Something definatly had to be done, they are not just evil.
Also I remember a couple of times where abuse@uwyo.edu would be hit by Sony records asking us to shutdown someones computer sharing illegal music on the net. Few switch commands later, *BAM*, the kid was disconnected until he removed the material. Kinda a fun job
That it won't take proper advantage of a local network. There is no good reason that any song should be transferred 181 times over the main upstream router. I presume that implies downloads. Once it has been downloaded, it's now present on a computer on the local network, which should have at least an order of magnitude more bandwidth available. The advantage for the user is that the file will transfer a lot faster. The advantage for the owner of the network is that local resources will be utilized (cheap) instead of the internet resources (expensive). Certainly, it's possible that someone downloads, listens once, and deletes a file before anyone else grabs it, but as soon as it has any significant saturation, it will be very difficult to remove ALL local copies for quite some time. I would bet between 95-99% of files downloaded by someone in a large network environment, such as a school or a large corporation, are already in existance somewhere on the same network.
Yes, the school is searching for illegally transferred content. However, while they might want to promote only legal use of their network, curtailing the internet bandwidth is most likely a higher priority, and if 95% of the data that flows over your network is illegal, that's a nice target to aim for. However, if the hit on their bandwidth was negligible, they probably wouldn't even pay attention.
This might at first glance seem to only help the downstream, but if the same P2P software is used elsewhere, then the upstream requirements would diminish as well. Even for those on cable networks, it would be better to only grab from someone on the same network, rather than hit a backbone provider. The less an ISP has to spend on internet traffic, the more money they'll have, and the less it will cost you, or at least the ISP's won't all go backrupt.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
By blocking p2p, you could prevent useful transfers such as linux ISOs
You're kidding, right? Who would download linux binaries, or even linux source, from a 'peer.'
It's much better to get software like that from an official source. There's no additional bandwidth chewed up by the user to do so. No way in hell I'd run binaries gotten off a p-p network, particularly not Free Software that I can download legitimately from an official source.
Read the article buddy. They did do that, that what the Packeteer program was for. But the problem was that the programs and the students themselved were finding ways around it.
Kazza started hopping ports, very had to throttle the ports then. Also the students found ways to get around this, like httptunnels. Or the one I used at UW. I had a work machine that was unthrottled, so I setup a Socks server on my machine at work(I worked for the Network team at UW) and tunneled all my traffic though that. Worked great, expecially since all the other traffic was slow
I know now that they are having such a problem with bandwidth that internet access in the dorms is slow for anyone and anything you just can block a couple of ports and call it good.
We don't call the university U of Wyoming or UW(you double-you). It's U Dub (you dub) :P
Proud freshman flunkout!
I though the bandwidth would go down after I moved out of the dorms. Since I kept trying to /. it in my posts (succeded once too).
Like here Or here. Or even here.
Guess my old drinking buddies filled the bandwidth gap I left when I dropped out.
Depends on what you mean by "didn't work". If you're talking about civil liberties being preserved while reducing the flow of illegal substances... sure.
I think the War On (some) Drugs worked wonderfully for its real intents and real beneficiaries.
I suppose you could find similar intent in the case of RIAA/MPAA, s/Drugs/Media/ etc...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
And downloading ISOs from an unknown source can be hazardous--which is why you always check the MD5 checksum against the one posted on the official site. So you grab 600MB ISOs from multiple people who are (ideally) closer to you on the network than the official site, and grab a 1KB file of MD5 sums from the official site, and all is well.
those who run the network are going to catch on and will do something about it
That is exactly the level of monitoring I expect from an admin. Monitoring the content of my traffic is too much, and letting everyone hog all the bandwidth they want leaving not enough for my valid purposes is too little. So more power to you.
It shouldn't be too difficult to backwards engineer there protocols. I'm sure that's how they were able to detect filesharing in the first place. If you can understand the data in the packets kazaa clients send, you can emulate it.
Maybe I misunderstood, please correct me if I'm wrong, but your post seems to imply that you think that anytime someone/some company does something that has the effect of furthering someone else's goals, then they are really doing what they're doing in order to help the other person/company. That's pretty flawed logic.
Suppose that I am married and my wife doesn't like guns. Further assume that in my house, what I say goes (I know, I know...but it's a hypothetical situation!), and I don't want the guns in the house because, though I like guns, I think they're too dangerous to have since we have children. By your logic, what I am really doing is conceeding to my wife, rather than making a decision based on my own beliefs, simply because it furthered her goals. That would be a wrong conclusion.
Now, back to the bandwidth thing. I am a network engineer at a large financial institution. We just upgraded our Internet pipes to 22 meg, because we need the bandwidth. Though we have plenty of money to pay for it, it may not be a cost effective move if we could have elminiated, say, 25% of the traffic (5.5 meg) through any valid (meaning, more cost effective) means. For a university (yes, I am very familiar with university networks and funding issues) this is even more critical, as their funding is much lower than where I work. And, in fact, even we limit bandwidth used by using a web proxy and by restricting sites that employees can go to (which, admittedly, does serve another purpose as well).
My point is, that this type of activity is very common, especially in well structured networking departments, primarily because a dollar that is spent on a recurring charge is a dollar that may be better spent elsewhere. The recurring charges are the budget killers, though some are necessary.
Just my $0.02...
Presumably you would use some kind of reputation-based system: you'd grant access to people based on their willingness to share with you.
This might be part of a solution to free-rider effects in p2p systems: you can (possibly) rely on the University not itself wanting to distribute copyright material.
Sometimes police do such things as part of an investigation, but it comes pretty close to entrapment. If UofWy offers me a nude goat picture and I take it then it might be hard for them to blame me for offering the same in return.
Wow.. UW on the Slashdot front page... Amazing. Unfortunately the article hardly says anything, so as a former IT employee and currently part of the staff that deals with all things related to student networking in the dorms, I'd like to try and fill in the details: Unfortunately, Laramie is NOT a large town (26k counting students) and the bandwidth coming in is very limited. The University only has a 30 Mbit upload capacity coming through Cheyenne, which (limitedly) comes from the huge hub in Denver, CO and (so we've been told) "there isn't enough capacity going into Cheyenne for us to purchase more". Up until a year and a half ago there weren't any problems here with bandwidth. Then all of a sudden everyone is using P2P in the dorms and leaving outside sharing on. It wasn't a problem of people downloading with P2P, it was the rest of the world downloading from us. There was so much traffic going out of the dorms that the entire university network was slowed to a crawl. Their solution at first was to just limit the dorm traffic to 10Mb which fixed the problem for the rest of the university but made it impossible for me to even read slashdot from my room. Naturally that was still a problem, as even legit HTTP traffic couldn't get through. They've been messing with packeteer for a long time but can't come up with a good solution. Right now HTTP packets have highest priority, followed by FTP (which wasn't allowed any priority at first until a lot of students complained) and just about anything else is like squeezing the entire population of China through a single revolving door. Speaking of telnet.. I can't telnet to anything off campus from my room unless I want to WATCH the packets arrive every 10 seconds or so. P2P traffic is about 20 times slower than a modem (but everyone still uses it.. as I sit here writing on my ex's computer next to her latest list of mp3s to download). So how do the geeks here survive? A lot of people are running local FTP servers, which is all I use any more. We can't play networked games off campus, so we have set up our own servers. But even that didn't work- Games like counterstrike which needed outside authentication would time out after 60 seconds. We managed to fix that problem with http tunnel. Almost anything can still be tunneled out and is unaffected by the packet shapers, provided you can find a good, reliable proxy on the outside. As far as getting busted for file sharing, we have shut off quite a few ports because of letters from the RIAA/MPAA, but for the first offense the students are only required to give us verbal confirmation that all of the illegal material has been removed before we enable their ports again. After that the ports to their rooms are shut off for the rest of the semester. Oh, and as far as an agreement? I sure don't remember signing anything related to the network usage. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with them snooping the files going through to help increase the legit bandwidth, as long as they aren't trying to crack through encryption and they don't snoop local traffic. I also think they should look into local file servers... you'd be amazed at what you CAN'T find on a 320 Gb ftp server filled by students... I never have to get anything from off campus anymore, unless its the latest source code for my Gentoo box (wget through HTTP works beautifully). At least the article picked the right person to interview as Brad is one of the few people over in the IT department with a clue. Sorry, couldn't let the article make our IT department look like they really know what they are doing. Really they are just being guinea pigs for this new software that the article is hyping up. IT is, however, doing a good job of walking the fine line on illegal P2P sharing. As Brad stated, they have a somewhat "don't know, don't care" policy while at the same time acting as MPAA/RIAA whores upon request (which I think is what this software is really for). Anyway, hope I could clear up a few things for you from someone who has been quite involved with all of this. Post questions, I'll be happy to answer. --An Anonymous Coward, even though most people from UW already know who I am now-- And uh.. mod this up/link it to the article
You are seriously mentally deficient if you think students own ANYTHING that the University owns. Tuitions don't even cover the total costs of getting an education, and haven't for decades. Ever hear of Endowment funds? If anything, the alumni own the universities along with corporate donors, the government, and philanthropic individuals.
And no there won't be riots. Not as many students think stealing someone else's intellectual property is as important as being able to get your class mate drunk enough to date rape her.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
btw, do you have that video? I'd be interested in maybe a trade.................
They do make a distinction between local and remote, and I believe there are local Mandrake and Redhat mirrors.
Well, there's only two possibilities, it's either the Redhead or the cucumber, right?
-- Dane Jasper Sonic.net, Inc.
" The U.S. Copyright Office Electronic Registration Recordation and Deposit System is the Copyright Office's system for registering claims over the Internet. Through the Internet, copyrighted works become available throughout the world instantaneously. As copying these digital works becomes easier, copyright protection is imperative."
Actually this could be cool, however following it to a illogical conclusion there are loopholes for massive abuse. A media file would have a locatable Digital signature that a filtering router could read. Check against a database for known bootlegs and you got your filter. (hmmm, run it on a linux box and finally get some RIAA/Evil use out of those longhaired geeks)
If no Digital sig is found then implant one and forward the file and new sig so the RIAA can add it to the registry for later review. Cause it could be a new burn of the latest N'Sync song or that one about Fred Durst telling Britney Spears to drop dead. you could plot the movement of files from user/site to user/site and show who gave what to who and when. You end up with a nifty tracking scheme.
This is a classic 'Man in the Middle' attack, one of those things the RIAA/MPAA wanted to do not so long ago.
Opps, You would have a way to hit them back. Say your ISP, the UofWhereEver goes and alters a music file with a fingerprint then they are subverting your property. If the file is legally obtained say self-produced then the original artist (you) will have a very clear case for copyright infringement. They will have created and distributed a reproduction of your recording for 'Commercial Gain' (acting as an agent for a speculative RIAA lawsuit), which is 99.94%, exactly the same as your copyrighted material.
So they have just violated Federal Copyright law by clandestinely adding a digital fingerprint. You can extract this new tag by doing a diff of the file against the orginal. Even a certain lackwitted judge in say Pennsylvania would be able to understand it then.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I'd love to see the protocol where the information doesn't pass between a client and a server...
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Since no one has come forward to sacrefice themself, I will look at the porn tapes to verify the copyright, just enclose some cleanex with it ok?
Even if it was encrypted, encryption just allows for either party to make sure no one else is listening. All they would have to do to listen would be pretend to be a peer. And, let me ask you this, what good would encrypting search queries be?
So, the best they can really do is "scramble" with the only strength being that the cypher wasn't know by others. We all know how strong this would be...
[If] you want Dead Kennedys talk to Cosmic John, [if you] need Billy Joel...
...kill yourself.
They that would sacrifice their
"Who owns the copyright on "Redhead Sticking a Cucumber up her Ass?"
Er... that would be me, and I tell you what, it's been more fucking trouble than it's worth.
Not only do I have to contend with rip-off artists like the makers of "Brunette Sticks a Cucumber Up Her Ass," and "Blonde Shoves a Cucumber up Her Ass" (and all the sequels... fifteen at last count,) but I sue the maker of "Redhead Shoves Cucumber up Arse 7" only to find out that it was a large courgette and not a cucumber, and some dipshit had re-named the file.
$10,000 in legal fees down the toilet.
IP is a minefield, I tell ya.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
The key to dealing with filesharing on campuses is traffic limiting/shaping. While it's true that current generation P2P apps can dynamically assign ports (thereby bypassing firewalls, and port limiting efforts), network administrators CAN limit the amount of outgoing traffic coming from student residence halls. That way, students can still pull down files, but cannot share nearly as many out. Which frees up some bandwidth for legitimate use. Adding SSL will only increase the bandwidth use and the time it takes to download files because of the encrypted payload. Each packet will have to be decrypted by the receiving host, which will take more overhead in distributing the files.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The admins wouldn't do any more to alleviate the congestion because they didn't want to "infringe" on the rights of the students to do what they want with their connections. I found it most annoying that the rights of others, though, basically took away my ability to do anything on the network that required a low latency connection.
Some people whine and moan whenever bandwidth caps are mentioned, but I think it's the best way to deal with a situation like this... I'd rather have a good connection with bandwidth capped ( I've little chance of exceeding a cap anyway) than the freedom to do whatever I want with a clogged network in perpetual rush hour.
Even worse, what if you name a file "Plant potter on sorcerer stone.jpg", and one of the idiots running the fingerprinting system decide to mark it as an infringing copy because the name is similar to "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone"? The potential for unintentional (or intentional) using this system censorship is huge.
It has already been shown by the ACLU report that the big media companies aren't careful about which files they claim are infringing, not to mention web censorship software. This is the main reason DRM systems concern me so much. They can restrict who is allowed to publish.
What you are talking about is old fashioned authentication and encryption.
DRM is where the system controls what you can do. It will only let you copy or view files their specified number of times. It will make sure the files are only produced by "trusted" people and/or computers. It will delete files if they are beyond their expiration date or are marked as "pirate" files.
You are slightly wrong. You can steal "intellectual property".
Everytime someone takes another's invention and patents it, they steal from that person. Everytime someone takes a very basic obvious idea (or one with tonnes of prior art) and patents it, they steal from the general public. Everytime someone takes another's work and copyrights it, they steal. Everytime someone makes a DMCA compaint for a work that isn't theirs or isn't copyrightable (such as price lists), they steal. Everytime someone trademarks a common word, name, or phrase, they steal. Everytime a lobby group / lawyer / representative / judge expands copyright, patent, or trademark law beyond what those laws were intended to protect, they steal.
Many shady companies and people have been doing this for years.
1) Yes, one-way functions are public key cryptography. When I was refering to "public key" in my post I should have written "public key infrastructure" which would have been more correct. Most people don't know the difference in any case.
If you are as clued in regarding cryto as you seem to think you are you'd also know that both symmetric and asymmetric systems are vulnerable and hard to use by themselves. To make a useful system you combine the two. Use an asymetric system to exchange keys, and here you can use a Diffie-Hellman or PKI system, and then use that key in a symmetric system to make it useable. (Since asymetric systems are way too slow to be used for actual data transfer.)
The combination allows you to securely exchange keys over an unsecure channel and to transfer data (reasonably) quickly.
The rest of your points are not really relevant to the situation (stopping someone from snooping your connection) but I'll adress them anyways.
2) While I don't quite agree that it's impossible to prove that no asymmetric system is secure there is no such proof today. If you can prove that a function you have is in fact impossible to break by any other means than brute force then you'd have a provably secure assymertic system. Today you just use a system which is secure within a specific time. (Eg somone sniffing a network need to break the data in pretty much realtime for it to be useful in these applications. Otherwise the data will just pile up and they'll have to start throwing it away.)
Fast number factorisation would indeed break a lot of public key systems currently in use. OTOH number factorization is IIRC a NP-complete problem, so when that day comes it will be such a huge breakthrough in computing that I doubt anyone will cry. (You'll just have to use a one-way function not based on products of primes.) And you make it sound as if figure out a really efficient way to generate lists of prime numbers is an easy task. Since there is an abundant lack of such algorithms you could deduce that it is in fact rather hard.
3) And yes, I'm quite aware that typical loopholes in crypto systems involve attacking the human elements. It can be because the algorithm for generating prime guesses is based on mouse movement (and most poeple just move the mouse in a clockwise circle to do this) or on bugs in the implementation.
This is why I put "implement protocol correctly" in the last sentence of my post.
Don't you as a network admin want to know what kind of traffic is happening on your network? Even if you don't block traffic (like UCB), you want to shape it. These F*ing kids think peer to peer is a right and will fill up your OC3 with p2p traffic in a second. I have seen many T1s reduced to 56k modems by too many people running p2p clients on a corporate network. Just imagine thousands of students all hungry for the latest music, pron, and vcd/divx releases. .edu networks for distribution purposes. I have seen hundreds if not thousands of xdcc bots on irc originating at .edu's. People also use their dorm room computers for this purpose.
Not only that, but courier and release groups highly covet cracked computers on
I would be worried about any university not closely monitoring all traffic. This isn't really a privacy issue.
(of course i never download anything or infringe on anyone's copyright. merely observations.)
music lover since 1969
I would rather be concerned by unencrypted data exported from my network. I expect all corporate data transfers to be properly encrypted, to their designated recipients. You can't just start to block all encrypted traffic flowing out of a corporate network without seriously disrupting operations -- unless your system is smart enough to somehow recognize the particular kind of traffic you want to block.
Now let's hope that whoever implements the next generation of P2P software will be smart enough to use standard methods (e.g. SSH or SSL) to ensure that the encrypted P2P traffic can't easily be distinguished from "legitimate" uses of the network ;-)
Trying to filter P2P traffic may be a nice goal, but is technically hard to achieve. Once you've given someone access to an IP network, you can't really control what they are transmitting -- unless you control one of the endpoints. Else, anything can be tunnelled over anything (sometimes ASMOP). If bandwidth usage is your concern, graph user bandwidth usage and ask them to justify it in terms of job-related items. Don't try to consider a simple bandwidth abuse problem like it is another kind of problem just because it's P2P. KISS. If you're worried about sensitive corporate data that an employee may be transmitting out of your network, perhaps you should be worried about that USB keychain in his pocket too.
"Words have meaning, and names have power." -- Lorien
I curious why they don't exist. OpenSSH is available to all, and I'm certain that scp could be adapted to the methods they're using now. With encypted traffic the playing field would suddenly change as it would make most of the network sniffing useless. Plus using SSH would give at least some marginal compression to the data stream, potentially speeding transfers.
So is this already implemented in one of the P2P networks or is someone working on it?
Mind you this doesn't solve the universities problems, though I would think that bandwidth throttling to each of the student dorms would be useful. By limiting the download speeds to the student to something like 15k/s it would still allow for a reasonably fast browsing experience, but would slow P2P. Combine that with Squid and you could make limit most of the bandwidth requirements.
The primary reason that we (oh by the way I work in the network group at UW) are participating with Audible Magic in this is to provide them with a solid testing ground for fingerprinting copyrighted content. Yes, bandwidth plays a part but that's only because we have a limit amount available to use for research. We use packet shaping provided by Packeteer and it does very well at reducing the amount of p2p traffic but with the advent of KaZaA version 2, which uses port 80, we are once again fighting a losing battle.
Wired Article
Download
I agree that a stable robust and widely used Freenet is what the RIAA fears most (other than a worldwide boycott of their products), and they won't do anything to encourage it.
Peerbuddy for Kazaa, Emule, etc, A P2P Firewall/Quality Filter Beta block list now at 2,200,000 IP's blocked.
The block list has been updated and now currently blocks over 2,200,000 IP addresses. New additions to the list are being found daily. Beta users will get an email with an update link. New beta users are encouraged to join at http://www.isopleth.com/peerbuddy.htm. No Ad-ware, Spy-ware or viruses.
PeerBuddy is a mini firewall for P2P (Kazaa, EMule, etc). The program filters out the IP addresses of people who share blank, or faked files and it prevents you from wasting your time downloading those bad files. This will help with your downloads since a number of organizations and individuals are sharing bad and blank files out there. It is also going to be blocking known email miners, stalkers, spammers and surveillance companies.