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Cornell Implementing Bandwidth Charges
Sabalon writes "Cornell University is planning on implementing a plan where if faculty, staff or students use more than 2GB of bandwidth a month, they will be charged for the additional bandwidth usage. The article mentions that last year over 100,000GB worth of files were sent from Cornell's network. I'm sure this is not the only school doing this or moving to this. I'm sure the conspiracy theory people will see this as a suggestion by Microsoft to stop students from getting those pesky Linux iso images. At least, according to the RIAA, CD sales around Cornell should now skyrocket :)" It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. Since students often have accounts on several different university machines, I suspect the more rebellious ones will be running an assortment of proxies and redirections to get around the restrictions.
Will the charges be based on MAC address? Since MAC addresses are so easy to spoof, authentication will become necessary.
Most recently-made switches can be set to only allow a single MAC address per port.. This would fix their problem with hubs as well as prevent MAC spoofing. Some can also be set to only allow the first MAC address that they see on a port and then lock out any new ones, making administration a little easier.
At my school, if you download just about anything during the day, or download anything over aboug 5 megs at full speed (about 1.5megabytes/s - its an oc3) you simply get cut off. No questions, and no getting it back.
The problem is really that most p2p software doesn't make much of an attempt to take the physical network's topology into account when it creates the virtual network of peers.
Years ago, before napster took off, I described what was essentially an idea for streaming p2p (didn't call it that) to a friend who is a very smart networking specialist, and he was horrified. I think he had visions of chunks of video being passed from kansas to hong kong to iowa to france, etc. I was too lazy and not skilled enough to follow up on my idea, so I lost my place in history.
But my friend's criticism was valid then, and it's valid now, and as these services become more popular, the chickens are coming home to roost.
It seems to me that if p2p software allowed people from a specific school to look for files on each other's computers first, and to go outside of the campus only when necessary, a lot of bandwidth would be saved.
Actually, the policy at Vanderbilt is 1GB down, .5GB up per day. If you exceed those limits, you get capped to 64kbps each way. This policy seems to be effective in limiting abuse of bandwidth, but still allowing legitimate uses.
I've only heard stories of service being revoked in cases of copyright infringement.
Why bother flashing the EEPROM?
ifconfig eth0 hw ether de:ea:db:ee:f0:00 is all you need. (You may need to bring the interface down first, though.) Additionally, it's not as a student couldn't wait until the target machine went into sleep mode or was shut off before spoofing its MAC address.
I agree with those posters who say Cornell's network is solely for educational purposes. As long as Cornell provides access to outside broadband providers (cable, xDSL, FSO, wireless), there should be no problem with people putting two NIC's in their machines and dual-homing them. I mean, shit. I can pop down to CompUSA and get a 100baseT PCI NIC for about $10. Bottom line: the school is obligated to provide for students' education, but not their entertainment. Another solution is for Cornell to completely get out of the business of providing connectivity to dorms and open it up to those companies providing access to MDU's (multiple dwelling units) -- and there are plenty of those companies. That way, the economics would cease to be distorted and those who use up a resource would have to pay proportionally. It's the same argument with water. I think it's silly that many apartment complexes include unmetered water useage with the rent. This distorts the allocation of this resource, as some people will wash their SUV's daily, whilst others hardly use water at all.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Could something like this turn out to be a real boon for Freenet to get a critical mass of users in one area?
fencepost
just a little off
This is quite true. I was a member of a focus group on this idea, and they said that use of the internal campus network was consistently at about 2% of capacity. External capacity has hit 100% in the past, causing them to limit Resnet traffic to a certain percentage of capacity. They would be quite happy if file-sharing were more internal. (Happy, that is, to the extent allowed by law. Cornell complies (somewhat grudgingly) with the DMCA.)