Schools to Avoid: University of Florida

Iphtashu Fitz writes "The University of Florida has apparently come up with a technological approach to deal with P2P file sharing on their campus networks. According to this article on wired.com they have developed a program that scans the PCs of students in the UF dorm rooms. The program, dubbed 'Icarus' not only detects P2P applications but viruses, worms, and other trojans. If a P2P application is found then an e-mail is sent to the user, a message is popped up on their screen, and their internet connection is disconnected. First time offenders lose their connection for 30 minutes. The second offense results in a 5 day loss. The third strike results in an indefinite loss of connectivity. An editorial in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, called the use of Icarus 'an invasive and annoying system that further deters students from living in dorms (see also another story).'"

Comments

Schools to no longer avoid!

[garcia]

Last spring, the university received about 40 notices of copyright violations per month. At peak file-trading periods, 90 percent of the traffic on the housing network was peer-to-peer. In an average 24-hour period, 3,500 of the 7,500 students in the residence halls would use P2P services like Kazaa.

Unfortunately you are on their network, thus your computer becomes part of their network (on campus). If you don't like the policy (and you are warned when you sign up for the DHCP access) don't connect to the network. If you don't think that ISPs are scanning computers for viruses, trojans, etc, you're wrong. I worked for ATTBI and there were quite a few people (calling in to me alone) that were infected with some sort of trojan/virus and they had been automatically disabled.

P2P applications should be blocked at colleges. Colleges are not houses of endless bandwith... 40 copyright violations a month is a pain in the ass to deal w/ (especially in this day and age). 90% of the traffic was P2P? What about Quake pings (when I was in college that's what I was concerned with) what about downloads of legitimate software? Hah, nope, just get your P2P porn movies and the latest DiVX of The Matrix Trilogy...

School to Avoid??? I would have avoided it when 90% of the bandwith was being sucked up by people sharing MP3s and porn, now maybe the bandwith is reliable and useful for stuff other than loading Google.

As far as it is detering students from living in the dorms... I have heard nothing but problems with overcrowding in dorms (3 to a room instead of 2, people living in converted lounges, being housed in hotels/motels until space becomes available, etc). You think that Universities really care about not having people in the dorms?

This is not an invasion. This is reality. College editorials are always biased bullshit. Please move along.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[cybermace5]

I 100 percent agree with you on this. UoF's killing P2P and trojans/worms on the campus network should be a reason to consider going there more, if anyone's looking.

Let me tell a little story. Napster arrived during my second year of college (a small highly-acclaimed private engineering school). Bandwidth didn't suffer too badly, we had 1500 students on the network with mandatory laptops, and though we maxed out our dual T1's we were still able surf the web and get halfway decent ping rates.

The next year, Kazaa and friends arrived, along with the new freshman laptops with large, empty hard drives. Within weeks, the campus network was unusable. You literally could not surf the web, research online journals, download drivers and development software and other legit uses of the network. No one even tried gaming. Yet, the bandwidth leeches could open a hundred connections and download music at useful rates...it was only the legit applications suffering here. I actually dialed my laptop out to a local ISP in order to get better access.

The situation was so bad, the computing center had to call a "town meeting" to try to work out what the problem was, and allay the obvious anger that many students felt at being able to download at rates less than 2K/s. Hundreds of students showed up, standing room only, it went overtime. The upshot was that a couple months later, our bandwidth was doubled to four T1 lines.

The fun lasted for about two days. After that, the situtation was just as bad. Then our computing department took action: they ran traffic analysis and determined what the percentages were. Over 70% of our bandwidth was going to Kazaa. The top 10 bandwidth users were accounting for over 50% of of the bandwidth. We were notified that traffic shaping was immediately going into effect; during daytime hours the traffic determined to be "non-essential" would be throttled to something like 10%, and it would rise to something like 30% max during the night and weekends. A couple people got their ports disabled, and all "non-essential" traffic was disabled in the classrooms. Apparently, since we had ethernet ports at every desk, a lot of filesharing was going on during classtime!

The effect was instant: pure heaven. Fast page loads, excellent ping times, no more dropped connections. P2P was the worst thing to happen to the college network scene. I happen to know that some of my work was affected by being unable to do research as quickly, since many of the electronic journals we had access to were hosted online. I think the best thing a college can do is block or reduce P2P programs, and let students do what they ostensibly are at college for.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[johnmearns]

Being unable to access the internet at all would hinder them more though. Bandwidth is expensive, and in a dorm it can easily be sucked down into nothing by p2p apps. Which is better, forbid p2p in what might prevent one or two students from doing something academic with it, allow it under the guise of academic freedom but causing a slowdown to the extent that no one else can do homework, or increase housing costs to cover the bandwidth used? Practicality is the point, not trying to be mean.

Good for them

[jayhawk88]

Using the campus network from dorms is a privledge, not a right. UofF has not only the right but the responsibility to ensure that their network resources are protected, not only from without but from within as well.

If students want to file share (legit or otherwise), or game, or whatever, without restrictions, they can drop the cash for DSL or cable.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[andrew_0812]

Fine. Prohibit P2P. The university owns the bandwith, they can block it, scan it, whatever. But invading the student's PC's is an invasion of privacy. This isn't even like watching employees. In a company, the PC belongs to the company, not the employee. These are the student's personal computers. The school has absolutely no right to scan the systems. The student is therefore totally liable for anything illegal found on that PC. The university should limit its power to scanning internet traffic.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[bongoras]

that's nonsense. Most schools ( and I'm a unix admin @ one ) have Internet connectivity that was purchased with grant money in the mid to late 90s. Dual T1s, maybe for a large school like Florida a T3. There are a few places with big I2 connections, true, but Internet 2 is only for connecting to other places with I2, so it's still necessary to maintain a conventional internet connection.

please be a little bit more well informed before shooting off your mouth. Bandwidth is expensive and not plentiful.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[secolactico]

Bandwidth is expensive and not plentiful

Somebody mod parent up.

A lot of people have the idea that bandwith is "air" not taking into account the costs associated with maintaining a high speed connection. Oversubscription is the only thing that makes it profitable and if too much of the bandwith is constatly bogged by P2P applications then everybody loses.

Same goes for people who pays $50 bucks for a 256K ADSL and the complain about not getting sustained 256K 24x7.

And what about legit uses?

[bishiraver]

Or other, relatively low-bandwidth server applications - like a MUD, or a small 8user, private game server? These are relatively low bandwidth, especially the MUD example, and do not interfere with legit research access to the internet.

You say they can't possibly be legit if they're running a server that would be caught by Icarus. Think of this:

-You're a student running a cvs tree off your box for an open source project. You get shut down because of the ports being used.

-You're a student writing some kind of server application for a computer science degree. You decide that it works well enough to run it on your own box so you can more easily monitor it. You get bumped off the 'net for doing research.

-You set up a private Natural Selection server and only give the password to people on campus. While this isn't "legit" like the other two examples, it does not use the external bandwidth of the university - only the internal LAN bandwidth. They pay for the hardware to accomplish this, not the bandwidth used like an external connection. While it's not "legit" per se, it really isn't that harmful either.

-You decide to run SSH on your box in your dorm room, so you can access files and applications on your personal computer from anywhere on the university, with your ssh client diskette. Even though I commute to college, I use this method to truck files back and forth to class without the headache of an ftp server or using an external storage space, like a web server. Not to mention, it's faster than uploading it to a web server.

All of these are actions which would result in your network rights revoked at this university. While it fixes one problem, it creates many, many more. It's not viable, and I'm just glad I didn't decide to transfer to Florida ;)