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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.
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.