Slashdot Mirror
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.
Sounds not like a case of too few double negatives causing non-clarity to the writer.
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!
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.
Yeah, I remember telnet.
.... hours since I have used telnet.
It's been like
Those were the days.
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.
Its a joke, but shit like that actually costs MORE money than the stupid music.
People downloading good quality TV shows and movies are probably using orders of magnitude more bandwidth than people downloading many, many more songs.
"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.
Well, they still can't stamp out the CD burner and the "analog hole". Sales of CD-Rs should pick up after measures that serious are put into place, and nothing beats the bandwidth of handing your buddy a spindle of CD-Rs. Also, I don't know much about encryption, but couldn't someone and their friends agree on an arbitrarily huge key in person and trade their little hearts out?
-insert a witty something-
At our university you promise to not engage in criminal conduct on the University network. Sharing movies illegally (now that is unequivocally illegal) breaks the AUP and you have no expectation to privacy while committing a crime, do you? Does a burglar have the right to privacy when he discovers that he was caught with a surveillance camera in your house?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
There's no reasonable expectation of privacy using someone else's network.
Yes there is. Just like there is if you're living in someone else's house, aka, an apartment. At my school students have to pay for their internet access. This makes the school an ISP. As a business providing a service and can't just "do whatever they want".
Do you own your phonelines? Is it okay with you if the phone company records every conversation you make to check for illegal activities? They are their phone lines you know, you have no easonable expectation of privacy using them. Too bad, I guess you should have encrypted all your phone calls.
One of these days, an ISP or school will get sued for pulling this shit. Network traffic can contain some very personal information. AFAIK I have never signed anything that would let my isp monitor ALL my traffic continuously. Most service contracts suggest that the may be some montioring to ensure network performance, but it would be pretty damn easy to prove that this was not what they we doing if they were continuously monitoring my traffic for an extended period of time.
Of course, the real solution is to encrypt your traffic. Then you get to have your ISP prosecued for a serious crime (at least much more serious than copyright violation) if they do manage to break the encryption.
Life is too short to proofread.
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
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.
I read that as "Girls Gone Wild - Spring Break #19 - The one where the shave the turkey".
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