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

Anti-Intellectual Environment

[TPIRman]

From the article: If students are mistakenly identified as violating the school's policy, the burden is on them to justify what they are researching, invading their privacy in the process, [EFF attorney Jason] Schultz said.

In other words, innocent until proven guilty. What kind of intellectual environment is there at a university that intimidates students from conducting research? Now, you could argue that there are not many research projects that would be helped by P2P applications, but the school's definition of violations is so ethereal that the cautious, not-so-tech-savvy will be left afraid of his/her computer. Will downloading that PDF violate the bandwidth rules? Is this FTP server a file-sharing network? Your average students won't know for sure, and they won't test the limits for fear of losing their Internet privileges. These scare tactics will inevitably hinder valid academic pursuits.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, innocent until proven guilty

EXACTLY

Oh wait, the EXACT opposite.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[TPIRman]

Hahaha -- oops, yes, the exact opposite, guilty until proven innocent. Sorry about that. But the rest of my point remains

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.

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

[Tackhead]

> > In other words, innocent until proven guilty.
>
> You mean it's "guilty until proven innocent" at UF.

In Soviet Russia, you're innocent until proven guilty!

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[WTFmonkey]

You should know better: on slashdot it takes fourteen valid points to make people forget about a silly typo. They'll pick apart an innocent mistake and call you stupid rather than look at your valid ones. *shrug*

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[4iedBandit]

What kind of intellectual environment is there at a university that intimidates students from conducting research?

So you want to complain about it? How about offering a valid solution? P2P apps soak up bandwidth. Viruses soak up bandwidth. Johnny Student is sharing 500 gigs of dvd's from his PC, and Jane Student has every virus known to man on her PC. Those two students alone are soaking up the available bandwidth and denying other students the ability to conduct legitimate research.

What kind of intellectual environment does not monitor their network to ensure that it remains available for legitimate use? If you want unhindered P2P, get a private connection. If you can't be bothered to protect your computer from viruses, get a private connection. Why shouldn't people face the consequences for their actions? Why should the truely innocent users pay for the abuse of those who can't be bothered to think of anyone but themselves?

There is only one body that can ensure that the campus network remains viable for all students. That's the campus body that runs the networks.

It's no surprise that any research requiring an inordinate amount of resources has to be justified. If the student is really researching something and they require more bandwidth, they should either justify it to the university or get their own private connection.

They may be paying for use of the network, but so are the hundres (or thousands) of other students. Bandwidth is not unlimited and the campus agency responsible for it has to make sure it's available for legitimate purposes.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[BagOBones]

They can't scan what you don't leave wide open.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[E-Rock]

If you think admins are bad about patching computers, most students don't even know that it is possible. Scanning the machines has become a requirement. Trust me, there's no budget or staff allocated for something like this, but they HAVE TO DO IT or else the campus network is flooded with crap from these machines. It's also part of the TOS to connect your PC to the campus network.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[ePhil_One]

The school has absolutely no right to scan the systems.

They are conducting port scans, not installing agents like AdAware or AntiVirus. And I'm sure there was an appropriate clause in the TOS the students agreed to that says the students consent to it. If they don't like it the can call up their own ISP and not connect to the school network.

Basically, its the schools network, they can use it as they please.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[El Cubano]

The university owns the bandwith, they can block it, scan it, whatever.

Try again. The taxpayers of Florida own that bandwidth.

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.

You are absolutely correct. What they should do is monitor the routers, and then disconnect those in violation of the policy. So if your machine is infected with SoBig, as soon as it starts sending out the virus, then, and only then should they cut you off. Then you can prove to the IT people that you cleaned up the machine and they can let you back on.

There is no need to invade people's computers. That's like getting pulled over and ticket becuase it looked like you might speed.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[aldoman]

oooh yea, those 10gigabit (or whatever) internet2 connections are going to really suffer from 5mb being transferred over them. Seriously, this isn't the early 90's anymore. Bandwidth is cheap and plentiful.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Badmovies]

I doubt that they are actually hacking into the computer. More likely, Icarus checks to see what ports are open on a computer and then makes a determination which services (where services might be a worm, P2P, etc) are associated with those ports.

Colleges do not have the money to support servers (which is what P2P makes a computer, really) on their network. The college network is there for students to do research. If 90% of the resources are sucked up by P2P, I can see their point. Want to be a P2P junkie? Fine, get your own personal setup on dial-up, cable modem, or DSL.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Stackis]

I work for the UC system as a Sys Admin, and couldn't agree w/you more. Too many students seem to plug their machines into the Resnet, and not bother about AV software, or the bandwidth wasted when they share large files over the network. I think what U of F is doing is nothing but protecting their network from the inevitable...

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

[pz]

Try again. The taxpayers of Florida own that bandwidth.

There is a large difference between paying for something and owning it. While I do not have the UF charter at my fingertips (does anyone? could you look this up, please?) universities typically recieve grants from various levels of government and governmental agencies (in addition to private funds, proceeds from endowment, tuition fees, licensing fees, etc.) which is money given to the schools, mostly to do with what they will. The Florida tax payers may, ultimately, foot much of the bill for operating UF, but the University embodied in its board of regents, trustees, or overseers (depending on the charter) is the owner of things like infrastructure, physical plant, real and intellectual property, and so forth. Therefore the University does own the bandwidth.

But then, I'm just an academician who's spent his adult life in various university settings, not a lawyer. (And I agree with the rest of the parent posting.)

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[James Lewis]

The issue here is the invasion of privacy. There are plenty of ways to control bandwidth usage without doing this. My college (Ga Tech) had huge problems with p2p software taking up all available bandwidth. For about two semesters the pings were 1000 even to across the street, and the network was almost unusable because of this. Finally Ga Tech did something smart: they updated the hubs so that they could limit everyone to 60 kb/sec upload on a port by port basis. The vast majority of traffic created by P2P is from uploading. Now everything runs smooth.

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.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[johnmearns]

That does hold true for p2p apps, but it doesn't for viruses that would otherwise cause problems on the LAN also effectively denying others service. Proactive scanning of PCs on the lan for viruses and even vulnerabilities helps to ensure the security of the lan and the availability of its resources. If you don't think that is in your best interest you would be more than welcome to get your own isp or something I would imagine.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[RandomWhiteMan]

"If the student is really researching something and they require more bandwidth, they should either justify it to the university or get their own private connection."

First, in most dorms rooms with ethernet, bandwidth is set. At least at my old school you didn't get the option of getting more bandwidth in your room, or anywhere else on campus.

Private connection? In a dorm room? This is not available at any college I've ever heard of. The only place you could live while going to college and have a private connection would be off campus, and then the ICARUS program wouldn't be an issue.

I wouldn't mind this program except that the University has a monopoly over ISPs during a students freshman and sophmore year. Usually you have to live in a dorm those two years, and since the dorm controls you cable and ethernet, you don't have an option, unless you go with a local ISP over the phone line. If you want to go to college and use the internet your first two years, you have no option but to use the campus network.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[will592]

The sad part is...who knows what work CS students living in the dorms might be doing that requires opening ports up and running servers on their machines. This is just bad news if you ask me.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[mikelu]

So set a daily/weekly/monthly bandwidth limit per user according to what is acceptable for the network. That works fine and doesn't violate any privacy.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[dissy]

> > The university owns the bandwith, they can block it, scan it, whatever.
>
> Try again. The taxpayers of Florida own that bandwidth.

Just like your boss owns your house and car and everything else you bought with the money paid to you from him.

The taxpayers give money to the school for it to do with as it wishes.
What the school spends it on is a seperate issue.

'paycheck' or 'govt grant' it doesnt matter. money has exchanged hands and it is no longer the taxpayers once the school gets it. Thus, anything the school buys with it is NOT owned by the tax payers.

If it was any other way, I would loan everyone I know a dollar, and later claim that whatever big thing they did in their life resulted directly due to that dollar i gave them, thus i deserve credit/profit/etc for it.

Doesnt quite work like that.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Igmuth]

Well, ok. 5mb *10000 people = 50gigabit. Now where did that plentiful bandwith go?

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[PhiltheeG]

These scare tactics will inevitably hinder valid academic pursuits.

How?

Students will continue to learn... I've been working at/kept in touch with a community college for over ten years. I've also been friends with a network administrator for a Big 10 school for years. Student's that want to learn will always do what they need to do to learn, obtain their degree/transfer and get on with life. But, even before the Internet, the vast majority of bandwith used was not research or educational and used by a small minority of people. It was people downloading every .gif from Compuserve's libraries. People using Mosaic to get a "pic of the day" from France... People hitting the alt. newsgroup tree (at one point %85 of all traffic was incoming alt.binaries.pictures)... Now it's people installing P2P (or trying to install) services on computers to download as much as they can before getting caught. And it is such a minority of people that it is a shame the majority of students, there to learn, are suffering because a group of people feel it is their God given right to exploit every single resource afforded to them.

Oh and by the way, this costs money... Something a lot of schools are in desperate need of.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[bishiraver]

Hear hear. The simplist solution is usually the best.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[FuegoFuerte]

I think their motive is fine and good (I worked in a uni IT department for a couple years, and have seen first-hand how bad p2p f's up the network). I think the problem is their implementation. I don't think there should be an automatic ban for p2p users, I think instead it should be something like a pyramid rate-limiting structure. So, those who actually have a legit use for p2p (who will often be downloading
For virii, I don't have a problem with instant removal from the network, so long as chance of false positives is somehow eliminated.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Marc2k]

The campus owns the network, it is your prerogative to leave or find your own ISP if you don't like their bandwidth or their rules. They're not holding a gun to your head, you can just as easily plug in your phone line and use dialup. Sharing 100 gigs of anything on P2P is generally *NOT* an acceptable use for "average internet computing use", and is against some college TOS'es I've seen from the get-go. Also, think about it, if I use a couple gigabyte's worth of transfer a week, multiply me by 13 or 14 thousand. Pretty big, huh?

The point is hey, you may like sharing both illegal and legal media over P2P, but not everyone wants to pay for the upgrade so you can download your favorite WHAM! ditties. My freshman year of college, a kid across the hall from me had a family hand-me-down running Windows 3.11 (this was 2000, mind you), he could barely play *an* mp3 while having IE open. Me? I was running an httpd, ftpd, hotline server, downloading things from P2Ps, and hogging bandwidth like you wouldn't believe.

That kid paid the same amount of money for network utilities as I did. Would it be fair to ask him to kick in another $200 a semester so that I can run DirectConnect faster?

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[PotPieMan]

I wouldn't mind this program except that the University has a monopoly over ISPs during a students freshman and sophmore year.

Not at UF. Living in residence halls is entirely voluntary.

And if a student is researching something that requires an unusual amount of bandwidth, his or her college should provide the resources. Actually, that's how it works at UF.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Worminater]

Actually, you are required to use the schools internet if your on campus.

bastards dont allow outside lines to come in, or else i would have dsl right now:-p(school network sucks for just about everythign including web browsing)

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[corbettw]

"So you want to complain about it? How about offering a valid solution?"

OK, here's one: it's called QoS on a switched network. Instead of saying "everyone gets 100Mb connectivity, more than enough to saturate our single T3, each", set the network to only allow 500kb per LAN drop. Simple solution, and solves the problem nicely without having to poke around inside students' computers.

At the same time, monitor bandwidth usage on a per port basis (gee, too bad there isn't a free multi-router traffic grapher out there somewhere). Any user that consistently pegs their bandwidth cap gets a stern talking to from the local network honchos.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[techno-vampire]

They may be paying for use of the network, but so are the hundres (or thousands) of other students. Bandwidth is not unlimited and the campus agency responsible for it has to make sure it's available for legitimate purposes.

I don't like the idea of a university thinking it has the right to snoop into student's computers, but who pays for the bandwidth brings up another point. Stuednts using an excessive ammount of bandwidth to download music is just the same as spammers using excessive ammounts of resources to send their spam, especially when you consider that neither one is paying for what they're using. Giving each student a quota, and charging them for excess usage would not only teach them that bandwidth isn't free, it will probably cut down the trafffic considerably, especially when you consider how little money many students have.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[sketerpot]

There are some very nice programs that are great for managing bandwidth. The one I'm most familiar with is ET/BWMGR, which can throttle bandwidth for Gnutella, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Morpheus and iMesh. I think that it's a much nicer idea to peacefully limit the bandwidth If it's bandwidth that you're worried about.

Of course, this doesn't work for, say, IRC fserves or eDonkey2000, but in those cases it is still possible to limit a student's total bandwidth, just not with the same amount of precision. After all, practicality is certainly the point, but that's no reason to be mean.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[dissy]

> Of course you trade your time and knowledge for a paycheck. Your boss doesn't
> just give you money.

Yea, and you pay taxes in exchange for the right to live in the country and for the country to protect you from other countrys.
(Ok, ideally, but still)

> Taxpayers are forced to pay. It's thier institution, thier bandwidth

You are not forced to pay. You are free to not be a citizen.
Of course to not pay any government you would have to not live under one.

Living in the backwoods of some forest that isnt claimed sounds like a sucky way to live to me.. to each their own of course (And there are people that do just that)

Either way, in both cases (paycheck and taxes) you are paying for something.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[sketerpot]

It would be a good idea, though, to tell all students to please install software like Ad-Aware and an anti-virus program.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[WildFire42]

Actually, Oklahoma (as an example in this case) has its own Educational Internet Group, called OneNet, which is designed to provide Internet connectivity to not just Post-secondary, but also the 500 some odd K12 school districts in our state.

The two major Universities use most of OneNet though (which is connected to Sprint to the rest of the world). My particular University, with 24,000 students, has a Gig Link to the OneNet core in Oklahoma City. We have dual OC-12s to Internet 2 in Abilene.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[sketerpot]

Here's an interesting thought experiment: imagine a program that would listen on a bunch of ports and spew random binary garbage back to any client that connected. Would it be detected as a P2P app if it listened on the ports that Kazaa listens on? Would the student have his/her internet connection automatically toyed with for what is essentially a prank pulled on anyone presumptious enough to try to connect to ports identified as open by a port scan? Would this be ethical?

/me goes off to write such a program. It would probably be trivial.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[sketerpot]

Feynman sexist pig!

Hey, maybe it was just random.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[zangdesign]

The taxpayers of Florida own that bandwidth.

Fine. The University is the steward of that bandwidth, and has been given the right and duty to make decisions about it's use to maximize the benefit for the university, the students and the taxpayers. By ensuring that P2P applications are not used on the system, they are maximizing the benefits for all students, faculty and administration, which is well within their purview.

Their methods may be questionable at best - but their intent and duty is pretty clear.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[mliesenf]

The University of Florida has an I2 OC-12 at 622Mbit, an OC-3 at 155Mbit and a T3 at 55Mbit. http://net-services.ufl.edu

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[bzipitidoo]

Inconsistency?

Most are saying the University shouldn't invade students' privacy or presume to dictate how students may use the network. Some of that is because we all know hard and fast rules are too crude and often don't work. And students shouldn't be guilty until proven innocent. Not fair! The Uni needs to stay off students' backs.

Then some who agree with that go on to say students need to be responsible and 1) use hard passwords, 2) install anti-virus software, 3) keep their OS patched, 4) not send huge files over the network all the time (except to comply with requirement 3??), and perhaps take other measures. Computer users shouldn't need to be that sophisticated. Password rage, anyone? How about you people get off the students' backs too, and work on making the networks more robust? If one student can take down the entire network with a P2P app or a virus, that's not the student's fault. That's the network. Networks can do better than that. There are all kinds of ideas and algorithms for dealing with such problems. The "IP: advanced router" option of a Linux kernel configuration has some.

Let's not forget another thing that needs to bear blame: OSes that willfully and flagrantly disregard basic security for frivolous reasons.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[willtsmith]

For that matter, going to University X State is optional as well. You could choose Y State University to find thinks better to your liking.

Honestly people, education DID occur before pervasive internet connections.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[willtsmith]

Simply install a second network card and attach these services there. It doesn't matter if it's not hooked up to anything, you can direct clients there on the local machine.

I'm sure that if your doing something really important that a professor will make appropriate resources available on lab machines.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Durandal64]

Your boss is not a public institution. Where do you think that the government grant money comes from? Gee Dubya Bush's Magic Money Tree? No, it comes from tax payers. Public institutions are not free to violate civil rights on a whim because they are institutions of the government, and despite what John Ashcroft would have everyone believe, the government must respect civil rights. The issue is not whose money it is. So everyone can stop pretending that public institutions can shamelessly step all over their employees and students like private ones can.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Durandal64]

The University of Florida is a public institution and therefore does not have the power to arbitrarily violate its students' civil rights whether it's the "steward of that bandwidth" or not. Please see the Constitution of the United States.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Ionized]

Oh, PLEASE explain to me how preventing students from using P2P applications is a violation of civil rights. I would love to hear how you justify that.

If you mention free speech, I'm going to laugh at you. Free speech does not include providing you with an easy mechanism to relay that speech, that's your own responsibility.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[tyrione]

From the article: If students are mistakenly identified as violating the school's policy, the burden is on them to justify what they are researching, invading their privacy in the process, [EFF attorney Jason] Schultz said.

In other words, innocent until proven guilty.

I inferred they are guilty until they prove the allegations proposed, in a criminal and/or civil court, are false.

The burden of proof is on both parties but only the accused will be sanctioned, unless the accused proves one's innocence and files a counterclaim.

Since the University is being legally pressed to protect the intellectual rights of professionals that have not, in writing, sanctioned the distribution and redistribution of their intellectual properties it seems rather obvious that the University being the wall between the Establishment and the Student is enacting a policy to protect them from future litigation.

No educational institution wants to be charged with authorizing illegal activities, period.

It should be rather clear to the students and I'm not an attorney.

DON'T DISTRIBUTE SOFTWARE AND OTHER COPYRIGHTED NON-PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS, WITHOUT THE WRITTEN AUTHORIZATION TO DO SO, OF ANY KIND YOU DUMBASSES. IT'S A FELONY AND YOU SHOULD BE ARRESTED FOR IT.

TO THOSE THAT CREATE SOFTWARE, AND OTHER COPYRIGHTED NON-PUBLIC DOMAIN WORKS, CLASSIFIED UNDER COPYRIGHT AND PATENT OFFICES, "DEFEND YOUR CREATIONS AND PUT NOTICE OF THOSE CLAIMS ON EVERY PIECE OF CREATION. IF YOU DON'T YOU HAVE ONLY YOUR OWN ARROGANCE IN THE SYSTEM OF JUSTICE TO BLAME."

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[MaestroRC]

Absolutely wrong. I am a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and they here take P2P and such quite seriously. If you are found to be sharing files that are against copyright (which, by the way, you are PUBLICLY sharing, so they are quite legally allowed to look at it), you get disconnected. All they do is see who the users of P2P are by looking at the network traffic, then take a little app and have it see what you have shared, if anything. Then its nothing major for them to link your MAC address to you IP address, which here is also linked to your NetID, which identifies you as you. When one plugs into the network, there is a TOS agreement that you have to click through to register your computer and get on the internet. Part of that is that they can do what as far as the network goes with your computer to ensure copyright law and security.

I for one have no qualms about them scanning the hell out of my system, or blocking P2P traffic (we have a port shaper that allows only 1% of available bandwidth to recognized P2P ports on the network), since BEFORE these policies were implemented, the campus connection was painfully slow. I'm not talking ISDN slow, rather, 14.4Kbps slow. And this is only 3-4000 students being served by an OC-48. After it was implemented, web browsing was increased dramatically (downloads to other universities and large corps went back up to 3-5Mbit, like it should be), and overall everyone was happier. People are stupid, get over it. When stupid people get together in large masses (the ResNet is one huge LAN), everything is multiplied exponentially... virus problems, worms, and bandwidth usage. It may be "evil", but its a necessary one.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[DunbarTheInept]

If you are found to be sharing files that are against copyright

But the onus should be on THEM to prove it, not on you to prove you aren't, which is how the system currently works.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[MaestroRC]

It's very similar to being pulled over for speeding or your wife walking in on you with your pants down... you still get a court date and a trial, but the other party has already seen what appeared to be something violating the law. After that point, it is your responsibility to prove that what you were doing might not necessarily have been what it appeared. If a netadmin sees my computer using a ton of bandwidth on kazaa's ports, then sends a request to my computer to see what i have shared, and sees a bunch of MP3's and a few DiVX movies, at that point I've been caught speeding, and must go to court to prove that I did or did not legitimately own them.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[jazman_777]

Try again. The taxpayers of Florida own that bandwidth.

How can something be owned by everybody and nobody at the same time?

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[C10H14N2]

Students are already paying considerably more than the market rates for their rooms. If the universities can't cough up decent network services equivalent to what is commercially available, they simply need to outsource and stop crying. This "we just can't afford it" is bullshit.

If students can get ostensibly unlimited use of DSL for $50/month from the local telco, there is no reason the university cannot approximate that service even if that means having the local telco wire the buildings and offload the res.net from their domain and stop bitching about it entirely. Of course, outsourced services fall prey to the constant and overt mark-up rackets and micro-kingdom vanity that universities so irrationally cherish.

If you have 7,500 students signed-up for residential service and $50/month is extracted from each, thats $375,000 per month, far and beyond well enough for a 10G connection that would allow every single student a sustained 1Mb/s link with LOTS of breathing room. Say they only pay for eight months a year, that's still $3,000,000 or $250,000 per month. If they can't get enough bandwidth for less than a quarter million a month, whoever is in charge needs to be fired immediately. Ok, so in Florida's case, they pay for DHNet out of the rents. Fine. A single occupancy room costs $2675 per semester, or, about $643 per month in a city where studio apartments run more like $400/month. I would gander they could find fifty bucks a month in there somewhere or they could just explicitly charge for network services.
http://www.housing.ufl.edu/housing/GenInfo_Stats.h tm

They simply have no excuse to brow beat students to protect their pathetic service levels when cheap commercial alternatives are available that could easily be integrated into university housing and when minimal access fees would pay for obscene amounts of bandwidth. So they dropped their usage by 85% by being draconian. Great, I could cut traffic on Los Angeles freeways by jack-knifing a tractor-trailer on at the I-405/10 interchange. Doesn't mean it solved the problem. It's a racket. Screw 'em.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Xugumad]

I don't know about other universities, but here the policy has always been clear. The residential network is basically there for accessing external information that you need for academic reasons. Network based research can be done from the computer science systems, where special arrangements are in place already. Okay, maybe it would be nice if non-comp sci students could do network research, but I don't see it as a critical thing that they can't!

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[madcow_ucsb]

Dual T1? T3? Jesus, that's pathetic. Even in 2000, my school (UCSB) had at least a T1, a DS3 and an OC-12.

Not sure what the current configuration is, but the dorms alone just got upgraded last year to a 70Mb pipe (that's >46 T1s just for resident students...)

And when I came in as a freshman in 99 we had a 10Mb half-duplex pipe for the dorms (and it was ALWAYS saturated and got nasty packet loss)

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Grieveq]

The above statement is correct. Only 1/3 of UF's funding comes from the State. The rest is tuition, research, patents, etc. The taxpayers do not "own" UF or its bandwidth.

Lets set up a hypothetical situation. Just like people who hold shares in a public company may have a say, but they do not dictate day to day operations.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

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

It's not my job to ensure my ISP's profitability. If they chose to advertise 256K ADSL, and don't provide it to me, that's false advertising. It's not time to become my ISP's accountant -- it's time to take them to *#&%#@% court for misrepresentation (or whatever -- IANAL).

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[AArmadillo]

Although I agree with the idea of your post, there are several dorms at the University of Florida with full OC3 connections to them -- the students aren't exactly bandwidth starved :P. I'm not sure what kind of upstream billing arangement UF has, but most likely the reason they want to get rid of P2P is because it uses a tremendous amount of upload bandwidth, which is usually quite a bit more expensive than download bandwidth.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[ShadowRage]

actually, it would more than likely deter me from college itself, and go figure, it's a southern college, very reserved, strict, controlling, etc.

whatever, I say, get into a situation that will get you into a tech college and get you your training you need, that or attend a californian university. :P

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[UnsungZeros]

Seeing as how I attend the University of Florida and live in the dorms I can tell you that bandwidth is not a major problem. DHNet, the name of the service provided in the dorms, has rarely, if ever, experienced any major slowdowns from p2p usage. Icarus was implemented during the summer in response to multiple threats to the university by the recording industry about the illegal distribution of copyrighted materials. The university is simply covering its ass, as it doesn't want to deal with any lawsuit that the RIAA might feel like dealing out. Icarus simply starts to restrict access when it senses abnormal bandwidth usage, illegal or legit. Supposedly they have improved it to differentiate between illegal and legit uses, but I can testify to the contrary. Several of my friends have had their access cut off indefinitely from legit uses and are pending investigation. Icarus was also expanded to rid DHNet of viruses and worms after the wake of the MS Blaster Disaster. I haven't personally had any problems with it and I don't use p2p apps over DHNet. I simply transfered my music collection that I've amassed at home to my computer at school. Works for me.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[mumstakovich]

That wasn't exactly the whole reason for the 1000+ pings. P2P was definitely to blame for the increased bandwidth load that ResNet faced, but the reason the pings got out of hand was that the whole network was based on old 3Com hubs. With all those packets going to every port on the box, things got insane fast. The major thing that helped improve things (along with the bandwidth capping, which I had not heard about) was that they upgraded everything to smarter switches that didn't have the problems of the old gear.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[inertia187]

Seems like a bad rap for the university with the longest photo history. I guess the times are changing.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[riffer]

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.

Remember, it's only students using the UF Department of Housing network from the dorms, NOT the campus-wide network. Plenty of open computer labs and other places to plug in a network. I'm sure there's WAP's all over now too...

Dorm residents have always been required to sign agreements banning all sorts of activities and even posession of certain items (i.e. pets, electric burners, etc).[1] You want to live on campus, you gotta play by the campus's rules. So yes, UF does have the right to scan student's PCs when the student is living on state property and using the housing network.

Whether that's fair or not is left to the reader.

The student is therefore totally liable for anything illegal found on that PC.

Yes. Yes, he is. Shocking that, being legally responsible for the contents of one's computer. If you want to pirate software, music, and movies than don't be surprised that if you get caught, you'll actually be held responsible.

The university should limit its power to scanning internet traffic.

True story: The entire UF campus lost connectivity to the outside world back in ~99 repeatedly. Turned out that a student's use of a particular instant messaging client happened to trigger a bug in a core router that crashed the IOS. Woopsie!

[1] Not that that didn't stop some students from trying to burn down South hall...

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[saiya]

Your analogy is flawed. In the case of speeding, "innocent until proven guilty" still holds. For example, if the officer doesn't show up to defend the state's side, the case gets defaulted to you.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Lord_Dweomer]

Then they should be upfront about this, and not tell you that you get unlimited access blablablabalbla. It's not my fault they didn't come up with a business model that worked. If they advertise a product to me, and I pay for it, I intend to use it. If they do not provide that to me after I pay, that is fraud.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[RogueProtoKol]

Why would you need to? (as far as AV and 'Ad-aware') are concerned...

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[AchmedHabib]

and people get the connection speed they buy, down to the DSLAM. If you want a line that ensures that you get maximum speed it costs a lot more.
What would anyone gain to sue them for not delivering fx my 1 Megabit line full speed from everywhere in the world at all times? all you would "win" was to get much slower line speed for a much higher price. The bills has to be payed and if you force them to guarantee that you get full speed all the time, the price will raise a lot.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[loraksus]

and sure, lets follow that up and even cap the ports that _can_ be used for file sharing (i.e. everything besides port 80. this includes ftp, et al. ) to something like a 56k modem. I only say this because once the penny pinchers see they can save $1000 a month on bandwidth, that is ALWAYS the next step.
I know a couple people who go to several schools like this. Forget about sending a movie home, it is quite literally faster to burn it onto cd and mail it. Even a 1mb jpg takes quite literally 10 -20 minutes.
I'm not going to go into the fact that universities that force freshmen to live in dorms regularly charge prices over and above the market value of similar rooms - often by 25% or even more. The extra money surely doesn't go into any addditional "services".

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[riffer]

Actually, while UF owns what it purchases, it is very much considered property of the state. Note that does not mean owned by the taxpayers... there's not much tax money gets spent on that us taxslaves get to legitimately call ours.

In Florida the "Sunshine Law" dictates an open-access policy for Florida government and extensions thereof. Meetings regarding the planning of UF's policies and future are supposed to be open to the public. The complete payroll of every single UF employee (faculty, staff, OPS, A&P, etc) is a matter of public record. Guess what else that means? E-mail relating to UF business (aka State of Florida business) MUST be archived indefinitely for potential public access. NERDC had a tape library of old e-mails going back to at least the early 80's, last I saw.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[riffer]

Sure it's a racket. And you know what, demand for on-campus housing is so intense, UF will put three people in a room about 15' x 15' in size (if not smaller). Hell, some dorms didn't even have AC as recently as the early 90's (in an area where summer starts in May and temps hover around 90's for about three months or so... not to mention the 100% humidity).

Yet, demand for on-campus housing is huge. No, UF doesn't need to force students to live on campus, the number of baby freshmen leaving home for the first time is more than sufficient to fill the rather small number of available beds on-campus. UF had 42,000+ enrollment in the early 90's, yet the size of the physical campus hasn't changed in decades.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[secolactico]

I don't know who your ISP is so I can't comment much on them. Advertising, for better or worse, is supposed to be taken with a grain of salt. Don't let yourself be misled by it. Read your contract and your TOS. If it says there that the will provide you with 100% bandwith 100% of the time, you have grounds for reclamation.

But in my experience, if you want 100% CIR, you'll need to get a clear channel circuit or somesuch and that is WAY more expensive than your typical DSL line. Shop around.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[instarx]

I/'m not sure the University owns the bandwidth. The Univ of Florida is a government institution, not a corporation that WOULD own the bandwidth. The UF bandwidth is paid for by tax dollars.

More significantly, being a governmental organization UF is held to a higher standard as far as wiretapping, spying, breaking and entering, trespass, and intrusion on citizens privacy (e.g., students and their PCs) than a corporation or private university would be.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[C10H14N2]

It's a great set up. Financial aid packages cover room and board for on-campus living, yet as soon as a student chooses to move off-campus, suddenly financial need doesn't include food or shelter and the money disappears. My university did the same to incoming freshmen, resorting to "Quads" -- 18x12 rooms with shared bathrooms -- eight 18yos sharing one toilet, roughly 7' square each for bed, desk and drawers. If a private landlord allowed that kind of abuse, he'd be thrown in jail. Hell, I had better accommodations at university in rural Africa, including free high-speed internet, than I've seen at any U.S. school, certainly of the private variety that seem to be the most egregious lot. It's sickening. They act as if because the students are paying on credit, they're being gracious to provide anything short of what otherwise would barely meet Red Cross standards for a refugee camp.

It's akin to if you walked up to a Mercedes dealer with cash and drove away with a Mercedes for 10% under sticker, but if you walked up with a letter of credit, they'd charge you for Lamborghini and force you drive away in a slightly used 1984 Yugo... and then if you returned your Yugo a month later, they'd demand full payment for the Lamborghini anyway.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[riffer]

I'm confused, what school are you thinking of that refuses to disperse financial aid if you don't agree to live on campus?

Financial aid packages come in all colors, shapes and sizes. I know there's no universal requirement such as you're talking about with college financial aid, at least in the US.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[ncstockguy]

Tempest in a teapot. Why not only provide slow-speed connections to the dorms. So that if a student was inclined to download an mp3 it would take them 8 hours. But for such things as email (without attachments), or academic programs, it would work just fine.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[Ionized]

so, please show where port scanning is defined as a civil rights violation, keeping in mind that it only sees what the computers's owner wants you to see.

privacy certainly isn't an issue, any more than you can scream "privacy violation" for someone looking up your street address in directory assistance, or reading the bumper stickers on the back of your car.

Re:Anti-Intellectual Environment

[brrr]

The way to not have your computer scanned or whatever is to not have it connected to the network...

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!

[night_flyer]

oh yeah, thats definitally a troll...

dont mod him down, tell him why he is wrong (he isnt by the way, its their network and they can do what they want to... including pulling the plug)

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at UF and know the one of the designers who worked on this. It's actually a really good system that has other purposes besides blocking P2P. It also scans the network for virus, etc and locks infected computers off the network to prevent the spread of whatever it is. The infected computer get pushed to a site saying what the problem is and how to fix it.

Quite a impressive piece of work that is going to to be under the GPL (as I understand it).

Disclaimer: I don't work on the project, just know someone who does.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[masoncooper]

I think the reason to avoid UofF was because of its invasive approach to controlling the network. Their app takes advantage of loose shares. The university I attend has used packetshapers quite successfully to control P2P bandwidth and their new 'Vernier Login' system keeps infected systems from chewing up the remaining sliver of bandwidth.
While I personally got so sick of the new system that I switched over to cable, I understand their need. The way the Vernier system works is your machine is assigned an IP but the DNS server forwards every one of your requests to a login web page where the student had to log in with their NT accound. This way, if they knew of a system that was infected, they would know whose machine it was(and could lock them out if necessary). I got sick of it becase it timed out every 5 minutes if no traffic took place over port 80, that means that streaming audio, FTP, even IRC/IM would drop out if you didn't keep browsing. Heck, even reading long pages would time you out, forcing you to go back and log in again.
But anwyays, this IS an invasion, their concern is what their machines are putting ON the network, not what's stored on their personal machines.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[LostCluster]

This really is a matter of people being given an inch, then taking a mile, and wondering why they're being pushed back now.

If you play by the rules, campus Internet access is a beautiful thing. However, it's the P2P bandwidth hogs that ruin the party for everyone.

There's no need for P2P to download anything when you've got such a fast connection to Internet2 at your fingertips. Either your school or one nearby will have all the Linux ISOs and other free-to-download programs you'll ever need.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[alienw]

You think that Universities really care about not having people in the dorms?

Hell yes. Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement" aspects of university-run housing. The price of a dorm room (anywhere from $5k to $10k a year for a crappy double room) generally makes the real intent behind such policies crystal-clear.

Besides, if a university routinely does things that piss off the student body, there's a good chance that the university should be avoided. If you pay a shitload of money to the institution, it better damn well make sure that you receive what you are paying for. If their IT services do not give a shit about students, then chances are good that nobody else does, either.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Chupa]

I agree for a number of reasons. Any ISP has the right to set such policies, and they can only result in better service for everyone else who actually keeps up with their security patches and doesn't waste bandwidth. How many campus residential networks went offline for extended periods over the last several weeks due to worms? Since when do people whose computers are loaded with virii and trojans have a divine right to use them on the network? I'm failing to see the big deal here.

Besides that, since when is living on-campus the only way to go? I did that for my first couple years before moving off-campus, and I wish I had moved sooner. The dorms are so incredibily expensive (and crowded) now.

Anyways I find the title of this story highly ignorant on the part of the slashdot editors, for the above reasons and more. If you dont' like the rules of on-campus dorms, move somewhere else! What does that have to do with the quality of the school or its education?

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Xerithane]

Respect to you garcia. Great post. It is their network, and this is great software. I hope they release this open source so more people can implement it.

If P2P had more valid uses, and wasn't used 99.9% of the time for copyright violations than I would disagree with you. Until a P2P network that only allows "free" material, you have no business using a schools bandwidth for it.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[CGP314]

90% of the traffic was P2P? What about Quake pings (when I was in college that's what I was concerned with)

Read the article, they won't let you play quake either.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[garcia]

IT does give a shit about the students. They are allowing everyone to use the bandwith for legitimate purposes.

You are receiving what you are paying for... AN EDUCATION. I didn't realize that paying for college necessitated a fast P2P pipe for getting porn, movies, and music.

I guess things have changed since I graduated way back in 2001.

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:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Ionized]

That's just a stupid statement. UF doesn't allow students to run quake servers, but they are more than welcome to connect to quake servers elsewhere.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[El Cubano]

P2P applications should be blocked at colleges.

What about my Linux ISOs that I want to share with the world? It is perfectly legal to share those, yet I don't see them endeavoring to identify what is being shared, only that it's being shared.

I agree that downloading copyrighted content wastes tons of bandwidth, but that should not prevent those who share legitimate content from freely doing so.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[bahamat]

Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement"

Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.

What if I can live with my parents and not pay rent? The school can't compel me to live in their facilities (afterall, this is not a day care, or even a night care). And what's it to them if I want to be anti-social? Collge is about buying an education, not social acceptance.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Kenja]

If you and people like you make up less then 10% of the student body but are using 90% of the bandwidth then what your sharing dosn't matter.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[sweetooth]

Believe it or not he's right. A whole heckuva lot of schools (I was looking in 97) started requiring that all Freshmen, and some required all Sophmores, to live on campus. The only exceptions I could find were if you were local or had family in the area that you would be living with. The reasoning was it was another educational experience living with other people that you didn't know, and other cultures that you might not be used to.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[AmigaAvenger]

Mine does, and many others do if you are not staying with relatives within 30 miles of the university. It is part campus involvement, part most for the university, and also part keeping freshman alive for the first year...

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[orthogonal]

I work at UF and know the one of the designers who worked on this. It's actually a really good system that has other purposes besides blocking P2P.

As a piece of technology, Icarus may or may not be a good tool.

But if you're not frightened by its intended use, you're missing the point. Nothing is technically -- or otherwise -- excellent enough to justify turning off your moral sense. You have an ethical duty, regardless of your technical acumen, to think of the moral implications. Indeed, the argument can be made that greater technical acumen demands a greater ethical care on your part that technology not be used to decrease human freedoms.

"Dude, I just built a mind-control ray that makes anyone it touches ecstatic to be a slave of Mine Leader!" is NOT OK, even if you go on to explain "But dude, it's like totally cool and neat-o how the mind-control ray works."

In a less comic-book vein, building "really neat-o" mass surveillance technology is not, generally, something to be proud of.

If you must be a cheerleader for this technology, I beg you to pause at least a little while to consider how it could be misused:

• would you want the Chinese government to have it, so that they might hunt down and suppress samizdat calling for human rights?
  
• Would Stalin have found it useful to maintain his police state?
  
• Could it be used to search computers not for viruses but for memes that the State or interest groups find objectionable?
  

What if the US Government decides that Federally supported schools (and given the realities of student loans, all colleges are "Federally supported" under the law) should not use their networks to disseminate information about how to get abortions? (Not so far-fetched: that's already a requirement for any family planning organizations that gets US foerign aid.)

If by connecting my computer to the school's network constitutes being "a part" of that network, can Icarus search and destroy a list of abortion providers on my hard drive? Or if I'm anti-abortion, can it search and destroy a list of abortion providers if I include beside each provider's name his home address and a tick mark if he hasn't been murdered/driven out of business yet? (Also not so far-fetched: Planned Parenthood has abused the RICO statutes to supress anti-abortionists.)

The 4th Amendment limits the government's ability to search my computer, but if a college insists that
all freshmen live in the dorms,
and that all computers in dorms be connected to the campus network,
and that all computers on the campus network be searched by Icarus,
can they turn over to the government what they find on my computer?

What if they find an essay advocating the decriminalization of marijuana, would that be of interest to the local sheriff? What if they find a diary note where I mention I bought a nickel bag or marijuana? What if they find my plan to murder a rival drug dealer?

Were this strictly government action, a warrant would be required for this search. But if my computer is "part of" the campus network, have I given up all my rights?

Id it OK for a Christian School to search my computer for porn? For an electronic copy of the Quoran? For a heretical version of the Christian Bible? Or are you sure that Icarus will draw the line at viruses and P2P applications?

What are we more concerned about, a virus that might disable a few computers, some violation of copyright, or the right of free men and women to be secure in their privacy and the privacy of their thoughts as expressed on their magnetic media?

Are you really ready for the implications of this technology, or are you just blinded by its "gee-whiz, neat-o" aspects?

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[jcrash]

Solution: simply open a page that refreshes every few (2-3) minutes

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[alienw]

Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.

I haven't done an extensive survey, but all of the universities I applied to (such as UIUC) had such a policy. Sure, they sometimes make exceptions (if you live with your parents, are married, have children, have disabilities that the university cannot accomodate and have a doctor's letter saying so, are over 21, and so on). As for widespreadness, a quick google search shows that such policies are rather common, especially at public institutions.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[pmz]

Unfortunately you are on their network...

I wonder what happened to when being part of a University network was a good thing. Is there no idealism, anymore?

What about students who are interested and motivated to do research that can be helped by P2P. I don't even need to try to think of examples, because a university environment should expect any. Well, I guess since the only research done, anymore, is that which the university can sell to industry at a profit, so perhaps this whole Slashdot thread is just irrelevant.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[BizidyDizidy]

Most require? I haven't been to college in a good number of years, but that seems like a big load of crap to me.

At least you called it a big load of crap without doing ANY research to the contrary.
For instance, at Stanford University, freshman are compelled to live on campus.

You obviously don't HAVE to live on campus, but if you still have to pay and have a room (and a meal plan). IIRC from my applying days, several "upper-tier" universities have a similar policy

In other words, nice try but no cigar.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[alienw]

They are allowing everyone to use the bandwith for legitimate purposes.

Not really. As a rule, IT should not meddle with anything that only involves downloading. That can be done much more easily -- shut off major consumers of uplink bandwidth, firewall kazaa upload traffic, use something like PacketHound to block uploads, and so on. In no case should they actively portscan and automatically block computers.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[r00t_of_all_evils]

I would think that network gaming hogs more bandwidth than p2p downloading does. I've got a friend in College in Oregon who can't even use her internet connection because people in her dorm only use the network for gaming, and in my networking class in high school half the class played Quake over the network, and every 15 minutes or so the switch would lock up and need to be reset. I imagine the new network-based games are no easier on bandwidth than the old ones were.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[pmz]

IT does give a shit about the students.

Perhaps they can use some of those lucrative educational discounts to outfit their network backbone with multi-gigabyte-per-second interfaces to stay ahead of the bandwidth curve. Perhaps the most effective thing would be to set their dorm switches to 10Mb/sec to each room, so the aggregate totals stay managable. Students can each request 100Mb/sec or 1000Mb/sec if they can give a credible academic reason, such as a university sanctioned research project.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[st0rmshad0w]

You are receiving what you are paying for... AN EDUCATION. I didn't realize that paying for college necessitated a fast P2P pipe for getting porn, movies, and music.

True enough, but why I wonder are students here where I work getting free frickin cable???

College housing has lost its focus. When I was in school, I was lucky to have a phone in my dorm room.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[ibpooks]

Tuition and residence fees are completely separate; tuition for the education, and residence for the porn and MP3's.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[sunking2]

A big reason why this is often done is to try to appease the surrounding towns who have to deal with the huge influx of new residents and the problems that they bring. UMass required freshmen to stay on campus unless you were labeled a commuter(at least 13 years ago they did). Easily gotten around, but most people simply didn't bother, so the rule pretty much worked as intended.

Really it's not such a bad thing for large schools. It lets the local towns sleep a little better thinking they won't have as many parties to break up, and it keeps of campus housing costs down a bit because demand is not as high.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[masoncooper]

Unfortunately no one was aware it was HTTP traffic that kept the session going until a little "discussion" with one of the OIT people. By then I had already signed up with cable. Now I use a keepalive program on my laptop when roaming on their wireless network but my desktop is no longer on resnet.
Besides that, I'm still happy. The change to resnet left us all with private IP's that left many FTP sites unreachable (even with PASV) which meant I couldn't update my website, plus the P2P filtering filtered Bittorrent, and of course with no public IP, my computer was unreachable from work so no VNC or web services. I think the biggest complaint came from users with game consoles. This effectively shut them out because most don't have web browsers.

We've begged and pleaded with them to lax the rules or change the implementation. Even a PPPOE or MAC registration would be an improvement but our requests fell on deaf ears. I personally don't feel it was the right choice, we were given a single days notice it was going to occur a few weeks after we signed our apartment contracts! How's that for timing? But that's how our university functions. They gave a few families 90 days notice that their University-owned houses were going to be condemned and torn down for expansion only 60 or so days after signing a new lease. Oh well, they have their reasons I guess.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[numark]

OK, so you let students that are interested in P2P research get exempted from the policy, and allow their computers to access the networks freely. Require them to show that they're actually working on something every month or two.

The rest of the people, downloading their Linkin Park MP3s, have no legitimate reason to slow down the networks for the rest of us (I'm at a university, so I know what it's like). Universities should not have to pay to provide Internet access to their students if they're just engaging in activities which are designed to consume fairly large amounts of bandwidth and are, by and large, illegal. Sometimes you have to make unpopular decisions just to help your network survive for all of the other academic research endeavours.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Darren Winsper]

With stuff like bpf and Linux QoS, it's possible to not throttle to a certain percentage of the system, but to a certain priority. A friend of mine has written a script to prioritise things so well that you can saturte the connection downloading files, yet a gamer can fire up their game and still play with a ping below 100ms. The major problem at the moment is finding ways to identify the P2P traffic. Programs like Overnet use random ports, so you can't identify by port, so we need to find something else to identify them by, which doesn't seem too easy.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[mrtroy]

It is a school to avoid. My university had bandwidth limits per 5 days. Something like 500 megs every 5 days, if you were over that limit you were placed in restricted bandwidth where you could read webpages slowly, but not download anything large. This worked perfectly to stop students from downloading excessively.

The biggest problem is NOT p2p, it is ignorance. The students get a fresh computer with lots of storage space, and a fast internet connection. They download too much crap, and then leave it open for everyone and their brother to download. They get backdoored, and setup as an xdcc bot. 9/10 bots in my favorite xdcc channels are on american university domains, and none of the xdcc bots are ran by the computer's legitimate owner.

Blocking p2p is not the solution whatsoever. Have educated computer users, and educated admins. Block ports of trojans. Have reasonable, yet large bandwidth limits. This IS an invasion, and its unnecessary.

The main people I blame in the situation are the admins. Setup your network properly, and this will never happen. Web pages will never load slowly. Secondly, I blame ignorant users. They leave their car door open and the keys in the ignition.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[zeath]

I will completely agree with you in turn. I'm lucky enough to be good friends with a few of the more intelligent denizens of the computing center at my college, so I get to hear all of the story-behind-the-story as well.

My freshman year was the Year of the Napster, though in the last few months of its existence I felt the pain of my college's pipe when trying to do the simplest things, like typing over ssh. It was simply unusable. They throttled by ports, and the person in charge of it was (and still is) incompetent. Back then, everything that wasn't on port 80 was throttled in one single category, while port 80 was prioritized. An http transfer would fetch 400k/s, while a ftp transfer from the same site would crawl at 3k/s. But using a tunnel for the same ftp connection was nice and speedy through port 80.

They have since instituted packet shaping policies, even though they denied them in the first issue of the school paper (which has yet to be digitized). They blame the slow speeds on Blaster and other incarnations, which is laughable at best. Though this is ironically, indirectly true, because they throttled 443 (https) because some filesharing service (the name of which I forget) uses it. On the upside, I have more time to work on my rubik's cube when I'm trying to look at my credit card balance.

Furthermore, the same incompetent individual in charge of the packet shaping has throttled each specified port in its own individual category. Which means that, say, Kazaa traffic gets 56kbps (the number that I was told), while Gnutella gets its own 56kbps. This is nice and all, but I'm still able to log on to good ol' IRC and download or even upload at 200-300k/s to my heart's content. Since they have the packet table filled, God help them if someone decides to be cute and set up an XDCC server or twelve.

We (my fellow CS majors and I) have ranted about this among ourselves and with our friends from the IT department for years now. The problem is that the college is primarily liberal arts (which was my first mistake, though I had enough coworkers in my future field recommend it to me) so most of the students don't know any better. They just want their porn and mp3s as fast as possible, and legitimate uses be damned.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[CaptainFrito]

It's called the "presumption of guilt."

Even sharing copyrighted material is not necessarily illegal. Let's say you have an old 8-track of the White Album, but alas, no more 8-track player. So you find an MP3 version (or whatever). It's okay under fair use to have the ripped version since you paid for the material already (no different than dubbing your old LP to cassette, and long settled in the courtroom).

For all the supposed losses, I sincerely wonder how many of those files really would have been 'new sales'. If they have ripped their own libraries. It has been pointed out several times that the deteriorating profits by the music industry have been because everybody has completed the conversion of their old libraries to CD. The RIAA has resorted to terrorism, universities to censorship, and the lawmakers to presumption of guilt.

The Internet exists for the users and it suffers from the tragedy of the commons. But so do public highways, and so what's next? Prohibit cars with MP3 players on the basis of transporting stolen property?

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[hiryuu]

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...

Out of curiousity, that didn't happen to be this school, per chance?

:)

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[gid]

Lets see... quake3 is designed to be able to be played over a modem, it may use 10KB/sec up if you have it cranked up for isdn or cable modem usage. I've seen bittorrent suck down over 350KB/sec, using over 30x more bandwidth.

If you school has an underpowered router, than gaming can overload a router because of the sheer number of tiny packets going thru it, I'd bet that's what was going on. Kinda frustrating, no real fix for it, either get more ram for the router, or get a new one, those things can be darn expensive. But if the router is flipping out just because of a little online gaming, it's probably time to get a new router anyway, who knows what other headaches that poor thing has caused...

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[hippo_of_knowledge]

Somehting similar is being done at my university. We're sitting at 10Mb normally in the dorm, but we can request to be upgraded to a gigabit connection if we have a valid reason. There is also packet shaping utilized, so p2p isn't really worth it, but a group of students has recently set up a local private Direct Connect hub so we can share files without consuming the precious bandwidth to the outside world. It seems to be the best of both worlds.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[shivianzealot]

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.

For the most part, I agree with what you've said or at least consider it a well constructed argument. However, I've known some students who SHOULDN'T be allowed to do what they are at college for.

...just being cute.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[cybermace5]

The initial reaction to leave the content alone, and double the bandwidth. However, the leeches moved in the fill the gap. When the traffic shaping went into effect, you could practically hear the sigh of relief across the campus. Actually there were yells of "WoooHOOO, the INTERNET WORKS!!!"

We actually considered running a T3 in, and figured out what the per-student cost would be. It was bearable, but why shell out a few hundred dollars each so that some snot-nosed freshman punk can be all leet with his 5,000 MP3s? That is so COUNTER to the idea of getting a service you pay for, it's not even funny. Throttling Kazaa was as close as we could come to throttling the Kazaa users around the neck, which the vast majority of us wanted to do.

An apartment and cable connection is a whole lot cheaper than college, if that's all you do there.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[bigpat]

"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"

Don't you start with Google... Google is what we are and what we want.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[cybermace5]

ostensible

adj.
Represented or appearing as such; ostensive: His ostensible purpose was charity, but his real goal was popularity.

Heh, just trying to be pedantic. ;-)

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[gbjbaanb]

How is it the university's fault to giving you access to the internet in the first place? Man, you have some seriously screwed values.

When I was at uni, no-one got internet access. If you needed access to the internet, you had to use the computers in the computing centre, and ask for access too. And they used to ask such terrible, civil-liberty destroying questions like 'why do you want access?'

You have it so easy, you've forgotten what it is you've got.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Cecil]

So, your school reduced P2P traffic to a fair and reasonable but still usable amount, the result was great, and this is your justification for banning all P2P services completely and utterly?

Huh.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Rogerborg]

> 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.

And my friend had his Telewest account disabled because he was infected with Code Red. Thus he was assured by the phone drone that finally gave him a reason. Here's how the conversation went:

• Friend: "How can my Linux box be infected with Code Red?"
• Phone Drone: "Well, what are you running on it."
• Friend: "Uh, ssh, an ftp server, Apache."
• Phone Drone: "Apache's a web server, right?"
• Friend: "Uh, yes. Why? Code Red only effects Microsoft IIS."
• Phone Drone: "Apache has an IIS component."
• Friend: "Sorry? It must be a bad line. What did you just say?"
• Phone Drone: "Apache has an IIS component or module. It's vulnerable. That's your problem. You need to patch it and run your virus checker."
• Friend: "My head just exploded."

You see, that's the problem with your argument right there. ISPs do fuck up, and when they do, it's biased bullshitters - like you, I'll come right out and suggest - that enter a surreal world of spin to explain and defend the policies that lead to the automatic no-argument no-comebacks disconnections. But hey, it's just some college student putting themselves into debt for the rest of their life; what's their word against a Perl script written by a guy that probably spent his college years playing Quake.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Cpt_Kirks]

Quite a impressive piece of work that is going to to be under the GPL (as I understand it).


Really? Exxxxcellent, MWAHAHAHAHAHAH...cough! /burns

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[sh!va]

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...

NO NO NO you're missing the point. Schools and Universities are supposed to be havens of intellectual freedom. They should not prevent students from doing anything. They should not shield students from liability (in the p2p cases) either, but under no circumstances should they prevent people from running something on their computer. This goes far beyond invasion of privacy - this is the exact reason why we have raging debates about whether TCPA/NGSCB is a good thing (see previous slashdot article).

You cannot possibly dictate what may or may not bolster the sparking of original ideas. Nobody can. As a result, if you're trying to create an environment where you want the best people to generate the best possible ideas - think of stuff that has never been thought of before, you cannot, in any way, hamper their thinking, their originality by doing things such as Icarus does.

If we agree that universities should never be restricting access or preventing people from running programs, then we come to the engineering problem that is basically this: "Given a few malicious users who use an inappropriate amount of a precious resource (bandwidth), how can we establish fairness". There are a variety of solutions to this problem - including ones that establish fairness without walking all over one's freedom. For example: (these have been mentioned in previous posts) establishing up/down quotas per LAN drop, smart QoS based on bandwidth already consumed, throttling particular streams in case of high bandwidth use, etc. The advantage to all these schemes is 1. They do not disallow you from doing anything 2. They are flexible enough to be tailored to particular students' needs in exceptional cases.

The whole point of this post is simple. The primary issue here is not privacy (it is one of many) but that of freedom. Universities have always been and should always be places of complete freedom. Law enforement is not a University's prerogative and should be delegated to the proper authorities.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[BRUTICUS]

definitely agreed. My school teaches animation,game animation and otherwise, and I can't even instal Quake to test my game models in the engine because the school doesn't want anyone playing games.

I think there is just better ways of going about these things and its very hard to get through to a network administrator, who is not an artist. His job is not to make the school network a better place for the student (unfortunately) they are hired to restrict students and I don't think this is a good thing.

I think network administrators should be more understanding of their position regarding the point that sh!va is trying to make above. Before he moved to a new college, our old network administrator was an animator and he would do everything he could to allow us to test on games, have our program of choice's personal preferences load when we login, instal plugins, etc,..etc,... I think schools really need to think about how their network can work FOR their students not against them.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[arkhan_jg]

If by connecting my computer to the school's network constitutes being "a part" of that network, can Icarus search and destroy a list of abortion providers on my hard drive?
No. It scans ports. If you were running a publically accessible webserver, or a publically accessible windows share, it would warn you and turn off the connection etc. It does NO SCANS of content. If however you're mad enough to put your creed publically accessible with write permissions, someone else just might delete it. Or maybe one of the viruses which spread via network shares might.

Let me repeat that - it's content ignorant. The Uni don't care what you're serving, simply that you're not allowed to due to the legal/bandwidth issue.

The 4th Amendment limits the government's ability to search my computer, but if a college insists that all freshmen live in the dorms,
They don't.
and that all computers in dorms be connected to the campus network,
They don't do that either.
and that all computers on the campus network be searched by Icarus,
The computers are not searched. They are port scanned for applications that share things. They are banned as part of the TOS.
can they turn over to the government what they find on my computer?
How? They don't look what's on your computer. Plus, I think you misunderstand the 4th amendment. No, the government can't come in an search your house without a warrant. However, if you were to put a big ass marijuana plant in your window, and stand by it smoking some, and offering to sell it to passers by, I don't think you have much expectation of the police ignoring you.

What are we more concerned about, a virus that might disable a few computers, some violation of copyright, or the right of free men and women to be secure in their privacy and the privacy of their thoughts as expressed on their magnetic media?
This always kills me. How can you expect privacy for the things you are publically sharing to everybody? It's like putting something on your website, and then suing people for looking at it and violating your privacy...

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[carpe_noctem]

Yaaay. Go rose. =)

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[DunbarTheInept]

It's intellectually dishonest to assume that use of a certain port number equates to high bandwith, or to copyright violation. That's the kind of idiocy that leads to rules like "don't run a webserver on our network because we don't have the bandwith" - when a webserver may or may not be high traffic - depending. And it's made even stupider by the fact that tools do exist to log the bandwith usage, so the fair and honest metric COULD be used if they wanted to.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[DunbarTheInept]

YES! (I'd mod you up, but I already posted in this thread).

The exact problem with this whole idiocy in the ISP industry these days (and the university's decision is along the same lines) is that the guilt doesn't get proven by someone with the competence to know the difference. Some program automatically flags a problem and you get cut off. When you try to look into it and see what happened, you can't get past the first line of phone operators who know only what's written on their scripts. This creates extra hassle for anyone with the audacity to be running something other than the status quo (and thus his situation doesn't fit the ill-designed script the phone support guy is reading.)

It's *that* that causes the guilty-until-proven-innocent problem.

I would love a system where people could be booted for wasting bandwith on p2p piracy, if it was possible to make it impossible for the system to generate false positives. But this is the real world, where such a system takes effort to make - more effort than the ISPs are willing to put into it.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[DunbarTheInept]

If you were running a publically accessible webserver, or a publically accessible windows share, it would warn you and turn off the connection etc.

Stop. I need read no further. The system is already stupid RIGHT THERE. Just because I'm running a webserver doesn't mean it's holding illegally copyrighted content, NOR does it mean it's getting a lot of hits with a lot of bandwith on it. That implicit assumption on the part of the person who designed this system is technologically ignorant.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[stfvon007]

Interesting, Both DSL and Cable are availible in my dorm. (though there are so many people in the area with cable connections that its as slow as dialup, but the DSL is pretty fast) However few people at my college who live in the dorms do this because it costs extra, and is slower (My college has duel OC3s and a T3) The option is availible though to those who want it.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[hiryuu]

I guessed by familiarity - size, description, timing of the laptops becoming mandatory (I started there when the NeXTs were still relatively useful). There are only so many small, acclaimed engineering schools of about 1500 students.

:P

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[dolo666]

Mmmmmm Quake Ping. I know I have that crusty ole CD laying about here somewhere. Quakeworld must hum on my lastest system.

The points you raised about P2P on campus are indeed valid, but still sad.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[cybermace5]

I actually had someone email me with " 'a small highly-acclaimed private engineering school'
just curious, is this harvey mudd college? ;)"

Those Harvey Mudd guys, always taking our glory! ;-)

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Styx]

Don't underestimate the bandwidth usage of Blaster and its siblings (Naichi/Weichi and so on).

Some of the smaller border routers at my university were buckling under the strain, until filtering of port 135-139 was made mandatory.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[zeath]

I certainly can't deny that there is a strain on the network because of it. I have an ongoing log, for posterity's sake, of refused incoming connections. Very few are anything other than the NetBIOS ports, and generating a 4mb log file daily (anywhere from 1 to 5 attempts every 10 seconds) is rough.

What ruffled my feathers was how they completely denied any throttling of P2P protocols, and blamed it solely on the RPC exploits. The exact statement in the article, which I just retrieved, is, "there was no 'attempt to stop peer to peer file sharing' made by anyone." The interviewed, the head of the IT department, goes on to explain that the connection problems seemed to match up with the filters put in place. And since the P2P applications aren't condoned, they're not going to bother to resolve the problem.

But, as I said, I know people who work there and have plainly stated that they are throttling most P2P protocols.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[arkhan_jg]

Well, the article doesn't specifically state that webservers are blocked, only 'servers'. Still, it's irrelevent, as the exactly the same arguments apply to p2p apps - i.e. legitimate uses will be blocked along with illegitimate uses. This is however, a different argument than the one i was tackling, i.e. 'what right do they have to scan my files on my webserver and delete them'. Anyway, on to this new argument. In YOUR OPINION it's stupid to block students running their own fileshare services. In mine, it's perfectly reasonable. The university already has facilities to publish legitimate information, i.e. student webservers and email servers. If you had a specific need to publish something in a manner that wasn't already available, that had to be hosted off your personal box, I'm sure you could talk to the systems admins to find a way to do it. Icarus will certainly have a whitelist machine:port option. 85% cut in bandwidth traffic by blocking unauthorised p2p and virus connections is frankly worth the slight inconvenience to those few who have a legitimate need to publish from their own boxes as opposed to the main servers.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[yerricde]

Except residence and tuition are "tied" in the antitrust sense of the word. Those who buy tuition at many schools (including most students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) are forced to buy residence as a non-negotiable part of the contract.

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[riffer]

Hell yes. Most universities require freshmen and even sophomores to live in the dorms citing various "campus involvement" aspects of university-run housing.

Yeah, but that's not the case at UF. Sticking to the facts at hand, the University of Florida has no mandatory dorm residency policy.

I doubt they ever will either. It's not like UF has to work to get students to sign up for dorms...

Re:Schools to no longer avoid!

[Desmeso]

Explain to me why *I* have a stick in my ass

Come on Billy, it's been fairly obvious for quite some time.

Scared?

[giantsfan89]

Sounds like they might be a little scared of lawsuits. I'd think that colleges don't have that much budget for a legal team.

Re:Scared?

[El Cubano]

I'd think that colleges don't have that much budget for a legal team.

Yup. No legal team whatsoever.

Re:Scared?

[giantsfan89]

Professors in the college of law have the time to also represent the university in a potential, extremely high profile law suit? Hah!

E-mail?

[Exiler]

Wow, what a wonderous world we live in where students can recieve e-mail when their internet connection is hosed *goes wide eyed*

Re:E-mail?

[frostbane]

Well, they can cut outside connections, but the students can still have access to the network. If the message is sent to an account provided by the college then they shouldn't have any problem getting the email.

Re:E-mail?

[phoenix_rizzen]

Internet connection, not network connection. They'd still be connected to all the internal servers so they could receive e-mail. Just their access to the outside world via the Internet gateway would be blocked.

Re:E-mail?

[mliesenf]

Their connection does not get hosed. I'm a user of DHnet. They get put into a restricted vlan that has access to only ufl.edu sites. http://www.dhnet.ufl.edu/ Read up, become informed.

Re:E-mail?

[not_anne]

Back in March 2003, a friend at university got his net connection cut off for hosting a counterstrike server in the dorms. That's all well and good, but the violation was back in November. He had long since stopped playing CS.

Not only is it odd that it took the school 5 months to do something about his server, but when he called networking to find out when he would get his connection back, the clerk told him that they were scheduled to send him an email about it Monday, and that he'd get his connection back in a week!?!

n/a

spurrier

[Anonymous Coward]

place hasn't been the same since Steve Spurrier left.

Who named that sucker?

[RobertB-DC]

From the Wired article:
"We needed something to stem the flow. We were spending too much time tracking people down," said Robert Bird, supervisor of network services for the UF department of housing.

So a guy named Bird creates (read: has some overworked grad student create) a program called Icarus to "bring down" file sharers. I guess he imagined his program being like the sun melting the wax on the mythical Icarus' wings and sending him crashing back to earth. And Bird himself, of course, would be the sun-wary Daedelus, who after trying out flight himself, hung up his wings as an offering to Apollo.

I guess he's now a flightless Bird. The old story about the ostrich sticking his head in the sand comes to mind.

Re:Who named that sucker?

[Theatetus]

I guess he imagined his program being like the sun melting the wax

Ummm... then why not call it "Helios"?

Re:Who named that sucker?

[mikelu]

Obviously because Bird realizes he is trying to oppose the gods by reaching divinity (since that is what it would take to stop filesharing) and he fully anticipates failure.

Re:Who named that sucker?

[Bitter Cup O Joe]

Man, that's a long way to go for a bad punchline.

Re:Who named that sucker?

[mliesenf]

Are you just asking to get Own3d? You do not know who he is and what he can do. I'd watch my tounge.

Re:Who named that sucker?

[Trazk]

The best reference I can come up with is Deus Ex.. The AI programs in the game are both named Daedelus and Icarus.. They are programs inherent in every communications device, and are linked at a central hub.

So, I guess if you want to stop the UNoF, You'd have to blow up Area 51 and bring down the global communication array.

More draconian measures to come?

[caluml]

How long before Unis demand that all computers on one of their networks join one of their administered domains, with Domain Admins in the local Admins group, or with one of their public SSH key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 for *nix boxes?
Logins tested every day at random times. Should a login fail, box comes off network.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[theCoder]

That's so scary, but the really scary thing is that I can see them doing it, too. After all, most college dorms reserve the right to search your room at any time.

Though, if that did start, then I can't imagine how long it would be until someone came up with a hacked environment for them to ssh in that looks like root, but doesn't actually have any real power -- kind of like a honeypot. It would have to be some sort of hacked ssh server that routed root logins with the given public key to this honeypot. Maybe it would even maintain the state so that future log ins would keep the changes made in previous log ins. If you really made it smart, it would keep a list of IPs that used that account, and make sure that the open ports and services running on that machine were right. Oh, my, this is getting really devious. Almost like making your own little Matrix for the university sysadmins.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[Syberghost]

How long before Unis demand that all computers on one of their networks join one of their administered domains, with Domain Admins in the local Admins group, or with one of their public SSH key in /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2 for *nix boxes?

Who cares? Hooking to their network isn't a right, it's a privilege. If you don't like it, move the eff out of the dorm and get your own access.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[sl0ppy]

and then how long before the incoming ssh attempt is transparently proxied to the vmware instance running on the box, instead of the main os?

there's always a way around, they'd have to go to a client/server method, and eliminate heavy clients in order to secure the network completely.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Bullshit. If you're paying for a dorm room, you have the right to any services that come with that payment. And since a lot of schools require that underclassmen live in the dorms, a lot of students can't just pick up and move.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[Knightfall]

I had to bite on this one. I am a sysadmin at a medium sized private college. The LAST thing I want is anything related to me or my job directly on a student's computer. I don't want them as members of my domain, and I don't want any access to their computer. Do you have any idea the lawsuits that would open up? I control from the network jack on back. If your computer is soaking up all the bandwidth, for whatever reason, it is the schools (and being the designated agent of the school, my) right to shut your connection off. At least colleges like mine and the UoF are checking to make sure there is not a legitamate reason for you to be bringing down the bandwidth house!

My 2/100 of a $.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[rco3]

Double bullshit. If you ran your tub 24x7, would it be fair to ask the rest of the students in the building to shower in a cold dribble? How about all the students on the entire campus? "Oh, but I PAID for that water in the residence fee! They should upgrade the water service!"

Grow up.

You use all the bandwidth, then I either get none or I have to pay more next semester to cover the cost of upgrading service I already paid for, and never could get because you used it all. And then you increase your usage to the point where I *still* don't get any bandwidth...

Oh, and here at UF, nobody has to live in any dorms. The waiting list, however, is a year long to get into some of the on-campus housing.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[SonicBurst]

A-fucking-men to that. As the net and sysadmin for a small community college, I can feel the same way.

Our college just built dorms, so of course I have just finished building the dorm networks, and scary thoughts of lawyers and federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison were evoked when someone suggested that we add all student PCs to a Windows domain so that we could manage them. No thanks. I don't want to even know what they have on their machines, much less have admin control over them. I'll just monitor and shape/block network access as necessary, thank you very much.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

What if you're not ALLOWED to live off campus?

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[Gilmoure]

Then that's a school to avoid. UF does not require anyone to live on campus.

Re:More draconian measures to come?

[Syberghost]

Bullshit. If you're paying for a dorm room, you have the right to any services that come with that payment.

One of those services is broadband Internet access with rules that are subject to change, which currently include a rule against broad-scale P2P network file sharing.

That's exactly what those kids are getting.

Icarus

[mopslik]

The program, dubbed 'Icarus'

What are the odds that this program is running on a Sun machine?

Re:Icarus

[Houn]

Interesting Note, aside from Icarus being the stupid Greek boy that flew too close to the sun, I'm reminded of the game Deus Ex; one of the AI Programs that the Govt. developed to spy and gather information from all over the networks was Icarus.

So, being big gamers, I'm guessing they won't care when 90% of there traffic is CS and BF1942?

Re:Icarus

[LostCluster]

Why would you need P2P to download GPLed software when you're at a University that's on Internet2? What, FTP over I2 isn't fast enough for you?

Re:Icarus

[Richard_at_work]

Yup. That's the only thing P2P is good for: downloading copyrighted files. Certainly no one like me would use it to share GPLed software. Somehow I'm sure Icarus cares not about that distinction.

Guns. Some people enjoy them as a hobby. They also have illegal uses, but the guns themselves are not illegal. Except, do they allow them on the campus?

Re:Icarus

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

Yup. That's the only thing P2P is good for: downloading copyrighted files. Certainly no one like me would use it to share GPLed software.

Why would you not use an ordinary webserver to distribute GPL'd software? Then people can find it from Google and download it with a normal web-browser (instead of having to run P2P software).

Re:Icarus

[Izeickl]

I always find it ammusing listening to people claim the legal uses for P2P. Its like standard politics, just keep saying it even though you know its BS. Sure some of it may be legal, but who do they think they are fooling? P2P = copyrighted crap, argue all you want about your tiny amount of free files your sharing, admit it or dont admit it, makes little difference to the facts.

Re:Icarus

[mliesenf]

FreeBSD.

Re:Icarus

[riffer]

Pretty low. It's probably running on AIX.

Re:Icarus

[yerricde]

Web hosting costs money. I haven't looked into SourceForge.net lately because SourceForge.net does all file transfers with SCP, and three and a half years ago (when I last tried SCP), there wasn't a mature graphical SCP client for Windows OS. (Yes, I'm one of those graphical-first-script-it-later people, having been brought up on Macintosh computers.)

Switchable MAC address...

[SnowDeath]

So, what happens if a kid brings their netgear MR814 router with them and every time he gets cut off, he simply changes the Internet-side MAC address of the router through the handy-dandy html-based admin tool?

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[GearheadX]

As a former resident of the UF dorms, I can answer this question. The last time someone hooked a router into a dorm room connection, they blew out the entire building's network connection for several days.

The Division of Housing does NOT look kindly upon someone who so much as mentions the word 'router' in their hearing.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[Nykon]

depends, some universites approach the security the opposite way. You do not have ANY access until your computer MAC address has been added. So all they have to do is remove your MAC and you can change it to your hearts content but unless its an allowed MAC you are not getting out. Of course in that case I guess you could just wait itll your friend is done using his and just spoof his MAC address.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[LostCluster]

You're still screwed. The lockdown can be placed at the switch port(s) that leads to your room. Can't spoof those without breaking into the locked closet... which hopefully the RA should be able to stop.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[KillerHamster]

If they're like my university, they link your DHCP registration and your MAC address to your email username or student ID and limit how many you can register. We are allowed 2, unless you complain, which is why they let me have 5. (I now have a FreeBSD box set up as a NAT gateway, so it isn't really relevant anymore.)

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[edwdig]

Common practice at colleges is you have to have your MAC address registered to get an IP address through DHCP.

You could try taking someone else's MAC address, but you'd probably get noticied fairly quickly, and be in a lot of trouble.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[Casshan]

If it is anything like ISU every time a new MAC address shows up on the network you have to register it with the university before you can connect to the net. This way there is always a username behind the MAC.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[ceejayoz]

So, what happens if a kid brings their netgear MR814 router with them and every time he gets cut off, he simply changes the Internet-side MAC address of the router through the handy-dandy html-based admin tool?

At the University of Rochester, we had to register our MAC addresses with ITS. Plugging a non-registered MAC address into the network resulted in that network port being shut down for ~30 minutes within about 30 seconds of plugging the ethernet cable in.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[whopis]

They do MAC address filtering... you have to register your MAC before you can get onto the network.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[thedillybar]

Most of these networks have DHCP servers that rely on MAC addresses. Basically, if you change your MAC address, the DHCP server won't give you an Internet IP, they'll give you 10.x.x.x, allowing you to communicate only with a webserver that takes your University login/pass.

After you sign up, it ties your University ID to your MAC address. I'd imagine they're not going to allow you to register a new MAC address if you're currently suspended.

On the other hand, if you don't use DHCP, and define everything (e.g. get the DNS servers and gateway from your roommate, and pick an IP in the same netblock) then there's no stopping you until you get an IP conflict (at which time you choose a new one).

Eventually somebody gets pissed of, traces it to a specific port on the switch, your room, etc. And the Department of Public Safety knocks on your door...

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[hazzey]

That doesn't work when they shut off your access from the port that goes to your room.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[jdreed1024]

So, what happens if a kid brings their netgear MR814 router with them and every time he gets cut off, he simply changes the Internet-side MAC address of the router through the handy-dandy html-based admin tool?

What makes you think they're blocking by MAC address? I work at a fairly large university, and when we need to disabled access to a host (ie: when they get infected, by, say, Blaster), we turn off that switch/repeater port. Doesn't matter what your MAC address is or how many times you change it, if the repeater/switch port is disabled.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[redcup]

I used to work at the helpdesk at my school, so I can tell you this would most likely have no effect.

To give a real example from my university: By default, all the network jacks are on, and if you use it and don't pay for the dorm internet connection, it gets cut off after a week. If it is never used, it is left on (this helped reduce the mess of getting everyone set up the first week in the fall).

One day in the middle of the spring semester, we detected port scanning from a student townhouse dorm, coming from an unregistered jack (the townhouse had 4 of them, 2 of which were being paid for). The jack was still on because it was previously unused. Solution? We simply had the NOC kill the jack.

The student had switched the jack his computer was connected to, thinking it would prevent us from tracking him down. He was half right - perhaps we couldn't say which student in the townhouse was doing it. If he had a router behind it, we didn't need to know - the jack was all we cared about.

Lo and behold, within a few minutes one of the students at that room called up to say his network connection had died. It was hilarious... it was practically a confession. Of course he denied it, but refused my offer to come over and check his computer since it was port scanning without his knowledge. We let him off with a warning, and to the best of my knowledge, he didn't do it again.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[Anonymous Struct]

I can tell you with certainty that they know which switch port you're on when they nab you. They just shut your port off at the switch, send you a letter, and wait for you to come in.

This honestly isn't anything to get up in arms about. The DHNet people at UF have been shutting ports off for network abusers for a long time. I recall the day a roommate has his port shut off for some excessive bandwidth usage that was drawing complaints from upstream. The fact is, you were always going to get shut off as soon as they found you using kazaa (or napster, it was back then). This just cuts some of the work out of the process for them.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[gpinzone]

If the "Division of Housing" thinks that a router can blow out a network connection for days, then perhaps they should be administering the network. Instead, they should take care of things like make sure there's toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[MoxFulder]

Townhouses? Dorm connections that you have to pay for? Why, you must be at Cornell :-)

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[GearheadX]

The Ethernet service for UF is administered through the dorms by Division of Housing paid technicians. Under the logic that if the servers are going to be taking up their space, it will be in their budget and under their control.

The router issue is an old one.. Very old.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[scrytch]

So, what happens if a kid brings their netgear MR814 router with them and every time he gets cut off, he simply changes the Internet-side MAC address of the router through the handy-dandy html-based admin tool?

"Hm, seems port 17 on the switch has 287 MAC addresses behind it. Maybe we should monitor it a little more."

48 hours or so later, one less student.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[MickLinux]

It's pretty clear that he intended what he was doing. That said, not all port scanning is intentional.

When I first got Debian going, I installed klisa, since it was part of the Networking package, and I didn't know better.

Very quickly, I lost my internet connection. I didn't know why; I called up. I heard something about "hacker".

Later, I spoke to their English-speaking guy. He said that I was on their list of "worst hackers." I asked why. He said I was port scanning. I said I had no idea, could he work with me on it. So we tried my Windows setup -- nothing. We tried Linux. Port scanning. I then went through, one by one, asking "Is this it?" and killing processes, ten minutes apart. Finally, I killed klisa, and the port scanning stopped. I uninstalled it, and never again had a problem.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[Have Blue]

If the dorm network is anything like the network at UIUC two years ago, they will block the Ethernet jack in your room. Good luck finding a router that can get around that.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[SonicBurst]

Well, I know what I do to counter exactly this...I lock the MAC address table on the switches after the first week of school. New MAC address detected on the switch port automatically shuts off the port.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[DunbarTheInept]

That brings to mind another question - WHY IS PORTSCANNING CONSIDERED CRACKING? WHY? It's a legitimate way to see what services are running on a machine, as in, "Oh, I guess I can't use talk with him, he doesn't have a talkd running." Yes, it is ALSO a tool used by crackers, but then again so is the keyboard, and you don't see anyone complaining about that.

Re:Switchable MAC address...

[MickLinux]

Port scanning is akin to walking up to someone's door and trying the knob to see if it is open. If you are a security agent, hired to do this once a week, then that's fine. Aside from that, it is a part of burglary. If you want to try to talk with him, set up your talkd, and then try to get him. That's akin to walking up to the *one* door and knocking.

Where's the beaf?

[stevew]

So the university has taken a pro-active to insure that they're hardware isn't used in the commission of a crime - and people don't like it.

Now I KNOW that not all P2P users are copying music - but MOST are.

Further, you probably sign a usage agreemnt when you connect up to the school's network saying that you won't due anything illegal. All the university is doing is holding you to that agreement.

I don't see a problem here

Re:Where's the beaf?

[BagOBones]

I agree, if I was running a large network like that I would block P2P. The bandwidth cost savings alone would be worth it.

But then again this might bread a whole new form of file sharing or promote older ones like Newsgroups... It is interesting that they are blocking IRC.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[blibbleblobble]

"So the university has taken a pro-active to insure that they're hardware isn't used in the commission of a crime - and people don't like it."

You could equally protect the students against slander charges by cutting out their tongues. P2P systems are no more criminal than is your webserver, your email client, your word processor, or your conversations at the pub.

There are a certain class of people who dislike Peer-to-peer networking, and are trying to compare it with everything from copyright infringement to illegal pornography to terrorism to try and get rid of it. These are the people who would like an internet where they speak and you listen. Luckily the internet doesn't work this way, and nearly every device attached to it is peer-to-peer in some way.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[Muttonhead]

Beaf? It's not even in the dictionary.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[WTFmonkey]

mmm, bread....

Re:Where's the beaf?

[niom]

Now I KNOW that not all P2P users are copying music - but MOST are.

Further, you probably sign a usage agreemnt when you connect up to the school's network saying that you won't due anything illegal. All the university is doing is holding you to that agreement.

Don't you see a little contradiction between those two statements? If using P2P isn't illegal per se, preventing you from using P2P is not simply holding you to that agreement.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[kaladorn]

Now I KNOW that not all P2P users are copying music - but MOST are.

Ignoring the obvious question of how you *know* anything about *most* P2P users....

I thought (not being entirely humorous) that a lot of P2P activity was related to one of the real drivers on the net: .... p0rn. Has anyone actually come up with meaningful statistical studies of what the relative % of P2P uses were (p0rn, music, video, academic, etc)? If so, I haven't seen them and would be glad to have someone post some links. (Yes, I am in fact a lazy bugger...)

Re:Where's the beaf?

[smoondog]

You are absolutely correct. Except that the University of Florida has every right to limit certain types of traffic on their network.

-Sean

Re:Where's the beaf?

[91degrees]

Excessive response, and automated systems to determine guilt. With a side issue that it appears that the same response occurs when people are doing perfectly legitimate things that happen to be covered by the wording of the usage agreement.

Going without network connection for a couple of hours should be deterrent enough. Even if applied a lot of times. As long as file sharing results in more downtime than uptime, it will work perfectly adequately as a deterrent. 5 days downtime is far too much. A punishment should make people feel they did the wronmg thing, not make them angry at the party carrying out the punishment. It simply breeds resentment.

The fact that it is automated means that even if you do use the system entirely for material that may be legitimately shared, you still receive the same punishment as iuf you are breaking the law. If it simply appears that you are doing so, you receive the same penalty.

Finally, whuy is it in the university's interest that people don't run Quake servers? These don't take a lot of bandwidth - Quake was designed to work on dialup! They decided to ban all servers because some of them were being used to offere illegal services. How can a Quake server be used to do anything illegal? It can't. Even if it could, a human being should investigate and determine the nature of the server rather than leaving moral judgements to a machine.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[Xerithane]

There are a certain class of people who dislike Peer-to-peer networking, and are trying to compare it with everything from copyright infringement to illegal pornography to terrorism to try and get rid of it.

I compare it to riding on the short bus.

Yeah, you may not be retarded but everybody else is. Chances are everyone thinks you are, too.

(Just like Slashdot)

Re:Where's the beaf?

[mikedaisey]

Except for the part where they are looking inside people's computers. You may wish to actually read the articles.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[bonius_rex]

Whoop de doo.

So, the students set up their own wireless network.

One of them tunnels through the campus network to a buddy's machine off campus.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[niom]

That's all very well and good, but I was only saying that the agreement argument goes nowhere. If the agreement says you won't do anything illegal, and you're preventively stopped from an activity merely because it could result in something illegal, you're not being held to that agreement. At most you're being held to a different agreement about not doing anything that looks illegal.

Re:Where's the beaf?

[imsabbel]

From what i see of shares in winmx, kazaa and edonkey, i would say by volume:

45% Movies
20% Porn
20% Warez
10% Music
5% Series, books, ect.

Music doesnt matter anymore. In times of dsl and cable, 5mb for a song dont matter. even if you download 200.
Movies are a great part. 2cd releases are common, weighting 1.5GB per shot and most people download them, watch them, and at once download the next.
Porn is very common, but not as much as you would believe. It isnt shared very much (compared to warez and movies), and there are less files.
Porn just isnt very suitable for p2p. Who wants to download for a day to get a porn movie to jack off? Just get a crack for a porn-site and watch the video stream in realtime ... :)

Easy to bypass

[ttyp0]

Our school offers VPN access and I'm sure most other Universities do also for off campus students. Simply keep your RESNET box connected to the VPN and voila.

Show your hate for SCO. Get a cool t-shirt and donate to the Open Source Now Fund.

Re:Easy to bypass

[LostCluster]

Not quite sure what that gets you... they simply can lock you out at the network switch in the closet. Your wire is effectively cut, and you go bye-bye...

Firewall them!

[EvilNight]

Set up a firewall on some old P166, build your own subnet, and lock them out. It's not hard. Mandrake MNF or Astaro are great for this sort of thing. Run a VPN between you and your friends in the dorm. Heck there's lots of fun to be had there.

Re:Firewall them!

[LostCluster]

Firewall denies their check, they consider that a failure, the switch in the closet it told to forget about the port to which your wire is connected to, you're off the network, buh-bye.

Re:Firewall them!

[RighteousFunby]

Heck there's lots of fun to be had there.

There's also lots of fun to be had in typical college activities, such as random promiscuous sex...

Wait, I'm on Slashdot. Wrong place, wrong time.

Re:Firewall them!

[linzeal]

Than you run an emulation of windows that only has access to the ports they scan that reacts like a normal windows 98 box. Than you tunnel everything else on a VPN.

Re:Firewall them!

[petabyte]

Yes, if your firewall denys the check. Firewalls are also very capable of sending back "yes, yes, nothing to see here."

When I was in the dorms I had a very nice statefull IPF firewall that everytime the university portscanned me, it gave a response on ports 135,139 as windows would have. The rest of the ports were closed. Could they have figured out it was an OpenBSD machine? Sure - the TCP sequence prediction is a pretty good hint at that. Could they figure out what I'm running behind that firewall? Very very unlikely.

At that point they could just start monitoring the packets going across the wire and go into big brother mode.

Some bored college kid will find some way around this and 100 of his friends will be doing it within a week. Thats the nature of the system.

Re:Firewall them!

[httptech]

Firewall denies their check, they consider that a failure, the switch in the closet it told to forget about the port to which your wire is connected to, you're off the network, buh-bye.

iptables -j REJECT --reject-with tcp-reset

Icarus sees port as being closed instead of filtered. Problem solved.

Re:Firewall them!

[gregmac]

Than you run an emulation of windows that only has access to the ports they scan that reacts like a normal windows 98 box.

Right. If it's not a windows box, you MUST be up to no good!

Re:Firewall them!

[Anonymous Coward]

And then watch as your connection gets turned off because they see that you're firewalling the connection, subnetting, and running an illegal VPN -- ALL AGAINST THE RULES.

Their network, their rules. Deal with it, use dialup, or move off campus. If you want to pay for the University's legal defense against the RIAA, go ahead. The RIAA is really the main reason why this system got implemented in the first place.

Re:Firewall them!

[linzeal]

It is easier to play dumb in this case. If you stick out on any school network you are more likely to attract attention to yourself. Be it Mac Os X or Irix, the admins will be less likely to just scan over your ip when it comes up that their little VB program or maybe nmap reveals that you are like 1 in 100 college students with a *nix box.

ipchains

[Egonis]

Sooo... find out what host/ip 'Icarus' is on, and make an ipchains policy to ignore that address.

Problem solved!

Rogers (here in Ontario, Canada) did similar portscans, but I haven't been found out for over a year.

Re:ipchains

[Sabalon]

now we look deep into the mind of icarus...

check host 1 - no p2p, looks up to date.
check host 2 - same as host 1
check host 3 - can't reach it. now calling function to block this port...port block okay
check host 4 - this one is reachable and looks good.

etc...

glorified port scanner?

[Pr0Hak]

From what I have been able to gather, detection with ICARUS is done by regularly port scanning machines on the campus network. There doesn't seem to be any component of this sytem to allow users to share legitimate content (for example, I regularly use Bit Torrent to share live concerts performed by bands who allow and encourage concert taping and distrubution) --- This really bothers me!

The virus & worm scanner portion of this software is a really good idea, and something that a lot of campuses have implemented with students returning this fall and all the Blaster hoopla.

The Wired article lists this software as open source -- has anyone been able to find a pointer to the source? I searched around Google a bit, but didn't find anything.

Re:glorified port scanner?

[Pr0Hak]

You're right, they have no such obligation. If the university has a general "no servers" policy (IMHO bad, and unproductive to academic pursuits) , then that is something that a user would have to live with. My problem, however, is targeting P2P type programs exclusively. I wonder if ICARUS cuts off users that have HTTP or FTP ports open?

Re:glorified port scanner?

[Ionized]

yes, it does, and yes, we do have a "no servers" policy.

Re:glorified port scanner?

[mliesenf]

I live on the DHnet. www.dhnet.ufl.edu They can enforce all of their rules. Most of their systems are passive. Their Active systems are used to just find servers. They find all of the P2P from server-less clients. -- it's true.

What other options?

[wizarddc]

I imagine like a lot of other big schools, there is a huge market for off campus housing. And by off campus, I mean on campus or just off campus, not far away, usually just houses rented out by the room to students. Does UF have this? If so, students can just give the school the finger and live somewhere else.

Re:What other options?

[i.r.id10t]

Housing here in Gainesville is fscked. Either you can afford to live there, and therefore the rent is low, so it becomes government housing and all your neighbors are crack addicts, or your mommy and daddy pay $800+ per month for an apartment in the "student zone".

As a lifelong resident of Gainesville, I hope this does keep a small percentage of students from coming back.

Re:What other options?

[Gilmoure]

Apartment prices are high in the Tampabay area as well. 2 bedroom places run $600-$800/mo. These are pretty run down places, too. You can find cheaper rents in some parts (older house with stand alone garage apartments) but that's where I usuall have my car broken into. As long as Florida is a desirable place to live in, it'll be getting more expensive.

Bad why?

[stanmann]

I know the party line says that File sharing is good, but if they have signed a user agreement which in exchange for "free" internet access, they can't use p2p.

I'm guessing that there are ways around it, but P2P is an inherently flawed way of opening your computer to someone else. Especially since in other news today, we find that the "pirate-friendly" P2P service(Earthstation allows deletion of any file on your computer.

Hmmm...

[The Fanta Menace]

Bring on the inter-dorm wireless networks, then.

Re:Hmmm...

[RatBastard]

Sure. Then you are eating your bandwidth on the hardware you bought. Of course, the school in question might has a TOS agreement that prohibits this.

I'm so old - I'm telling a 'back in the day' story

[CGP314]

Back when I was in college, a friend of mine had roommate problems. So the usual things were done against the offending person: clothes out the window, salt water in the monitor, calls at all hours of the morning. You know, kid stuff.

But installing P2P on his computer would be even better. He would lose his Internet connection, and if he was really lucky, get sued by the RIAA!

If you're not going to allow it...

[ivanmarsh]

Why try to detect it, just block the ports.

Leave it to a university to come up with such an ass backward policy.

Re:If you're not going to allow it...

[Lazaru5]

Because some P2P clients let you change the port? Application Recognition is more accurate than blocking specific ports.

And I think you meant (it's not, but it's what you meant) that it's an ass-backward way to enforce the policy. The policy itself is sound.

And when it comes right down to it the only thing the university cares about is the network, and it's been completely ruined by P2P sharing and recent network borne viruses/worms.

Re:If you're not going to allow it...

[DJayC]

They can't block the ports for the local network. I think a lot of the bandwidth usage comes from local transfers. Kids running DC servers or using Blubster.

It's not JUST P2P programs!

[r_glen]

Icarus then scans their computer, detects any worms, viruses or programs that act as a server, such as Kazaa

Apparently, you could get busted for running ANY kind of server. Couldn't you just install a firewall and block local connections?

Re:It's not JUST P2P programs!

[Professor Bluebird]

It should be as simple as blocking whatever address/subnet they're running Icarus off of.

iptables

[Feyr]

i'm not sure what they expect to do with this thing, but it wouldn't be that hard to fire up tcpdump and get a range of "management" ips. you then block those ips from connecting to your computer with iptables/ipchains/ipfwadm/windows firewall/your favorite bagel. that and it surely won't stop hardcore downloader from logging on IRC and downloading from there (surely everyone know only newbies use kazaa, the rest are still on irc)

they can try to block losers, but they won't get the truly geek. and i sure wouldn't accept any violation of MY privacy and limiting legitimate uses (private servers,game servers, research projects, name it)

and before i get blasted into oblivion, no i don't use kazaa et al, my music is all legitimately got from www.emusic.com, go check it out

Re:iptables

[Greyfox]

I'm sure the university's answer to that is to just unplug network connections they can't access. So what if it screws over ZoneAlarm users -- the uni really doesn't want people using its bandwith anyway.

Re:iptables

[Feyr]

and how can they tell apart a box they "can't reach" from one that is simply not open? zonealarm is a piece of crap if you want my opinion. don't DROP the packets, but REJECT them. they'll be none the wiser

Re:iptables

[Lazaru5]

Their primary objective is to make the network useable again by reducing P2P and network borne viruses.

Who cares if they don't get the truly geek. They will have saved their network.

Your privacy would only be concerned if they were looking at what you were sharing/downloading, etc. Icarus doesn't do that.

Re:iptables

[Feyr]

no but it does cut you off if it finds a port open, which you then have to explain to the guys-in-ties (because you really weren't doing anything illegal), THAT is the invasion of privacy, indirectly i'll admit and it doesn't stand if you really ARE running kazaa or other (in which case you deserve what you get most likely, assuming you are using it to illegally share copyrighted work)

Re:iptables

[Greyfox]

Come on. It's university IT staff we're talking about here. A box they can't reach versus one that's not open will most likely be treated the same way; simply disconnected. I tend to be cynical but I bet I'm not wrong.

Re:iptables

[Knightfall]

Private servers and game servers are NOT legitimate uses of university owned bandwidth. Research projects, email, etc are.

Yes, I am a sysadmin at a university.

Re:iptables

[theCoder]

Students *not* running any of the p2p apps will be sending REJECTs back when the port scanner tries to connect. A firewall properly set up will also send back REJECTs when the port scanner tries to connect. The port scanner has no way to tell the difference. Your cynicism may be well placed, but I'd bet those admins would get in hot water if they started disconnecting people not running p2p apps.

Re:iptables

[silvwolf]

Heh. I'm a student tech at my school.. was out at an university owned apartment this morning.. Older gentleman, said he teaches a course there. He was moaning and groaning that his connection had been down for a week or so. First sign of a problem is about a dozen porn dialers in add/remove programs... Bunch of other porn associated stuff in there and on his desktop. Kinda shocking, really. I figure that some porn program has hosed his system, so I slap in my Knoppix CD to make sure and still can't get a connection (Windows indicated the cable was plugged in, but couldn't get an IP address). Unplug his cable, plug it back in, and it works again. Oh well.

While I'm there, I offer to run Ad Aware and put the school's Symantec Corporate AV on his computer.. Go download Ad Aware and the default save location is some directory filled w/ porn videos showing thumbnails of them.. Hardcore type stuff..

Remember, this is an older guy who teaches a class or two for the school.. Well, he sees my weird reaction and mentions that he is teaching a human sexuality course and he visits lots of adult sites for his research... Neat research.. ;)

Any files or just copyrighted ones?

[jgabby]

So does this system differentiate between copyrighted files and public domain, or does it kick you off for sharing ANY files? Or does it just kick you off for running a certain list of p2p programs? What about Windows file and printer sharing? Do they control only what goes between the school and the outside world, or are they also concerned with traffic local to the university?

Spoofing

[Nykon]

I wonder if it only scans for the application or actually watches network traffic for p2p connecitons. I wonder how long it will take a CS student to just write a daemon to listen on the connection port and respond back with a "everything is fine here" type response so that they are free to use the computer as they should be.

Will products like ZoneAlarm block this?

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

So I guess the first question that comes to my mind is, will a products such as ZoneAlarm stop this? And if so ... will any penalties result from blocking?

Re:Will products like ZoneAlarm block this?

[Jucius Maximus]

If you have told ZoneAlarm that your Kazaa is allowed to act as a server then it will allow external connections coming into ports that Kazaa has opened, even if those connection are from Icarus. Kazaa will only filter based on programs, not statically defined IP blocks. Thus Kazaa will NOT stop such a scan.

To avoid it, I would block incoming connection university-owned IP blocks for ports owned by your favourite file sharing system. Of course you'll be cutting yourself off from downloading from other people on resnet. If I wanted to get fancy, I would set up a honeypot system to log scans and then keep track of the Icarus source IP. Then this could be used to block their scanning technique while allowing network connections with the rest of resnet.

Re:Will products like ZoneAlarm block this?

[Dachannien]

Yes, but then you would no longer be sharing files, since ZA would be blocking those ports.

Re:Will products like ZoneAlarm block this?

[johnnyli]

Yes you could still be sharing files, as a firewall preventing incoming queries will not prevent sharing. Technically, the queries will be passed through the Kazaa supernode connection to you, and your computer will initiate the connection and "share" (ie. upload) the requested file.

silly Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Avoid going to a school because it doesn't allow you to illegally get mp3s and DivX movies? If I haven't heard anything sillier, than this is it.

UF is a good school with many established majors and sciences. UF is smart to protect their university and risk getting lawsuits due to the arrogance of people.

Bring on the P2P banning in all schools! Naturally, this is Slashdot where its readers tend to bitch about everything, but we must remember that "geeks" aren't really people anyways. Just a bunch of ugly males who cannot fulfil basic human needs as showering, female interaction, and fresh air.

Re:silly Slashdot

[pclminion]

Yes, I think you should avoid going to a school with an innocent-until-proven-guilty policy of banning network access to anyone who happens to run a P2P client, be it for copyright violation or not.

Or are you saying there is no legitimate use for P2P?

Don't give me the bullshit about how most users are pirates anyway. I already know that. What I want you to answer is: do you believe in the concept of "innocent until proven guilty," or do you not?

Automatically shutting off someone's net access because a certain port is open is tyrannical.

Re:silly Slashdot

[stratjakt]

P2P, no matter what you're using it for, sucks up bandwidth and costs money.

They probably dont want you running webservers on your box either, they have their own servers for your homepage. Don't like it? Run your server somewhere else.

You want to show the world your foo fighters discogrophy? Pay for your own connection. Instead of just indirectly jacking up everyones tuition costs to cover the terabits of dogshit flowing through those pipes - which were put there for academic purposes.

Re:silly Slashdot

[pclminion]

Keep on defending yourself...

I don't use P2P. Or is it totally inconceivable to you that somebody who doesn't use it might have an opinion on it?

You know its illegal, but you keep on rationalizing that it is still ok

I don't rationalize anything. I don't share music. I don't believe it is "okay" to violate copyright. I never said any of those things.

Is it so fucking stark inconceivable to you that a person might use a P2P client for a legitimate purpose? Suppose a bunch of people decided to use a P2P client to share photographs they've been taking around campus. According to you, these people are criminals merely for using P2P software.

As I said, shut up with your bullshit about how P2P is only used for illegal purposes. That isn't even the point here. The point is that people must be considered innocent until proven guilty, not vice-versa. If you can show a person is trading in illegal files, then do what you will. But a university whose policy is to unilaterally shut down internet access to anyone who uses a P2P client is not respecting this cherished right.

Of course, a university can set any policy they wish on their own network. It doesn't change the fact that it is immoral and tyrannical, and it most certainly is a reason to avoid the university.

Re:silly Slashdot

[cK-Gunslinger]

I think you should avoid going to a school with an innocent-until-proven-guilty policy

Ok people, that's at least the second time I've seen this statement. INNOCENT-UNTIL-PROVEN-GUILTY is a GOOD thing.

Re:silly Slashdot

[pclminion]

I actually meant to type the reverse... I had hoped it was obvious, guess not.

Re:silly Slashdot

[EvilSporkMan]

File sharing of mp3s is illegal
Redundant (MP3 refers to a type of file), and wrong. Sharing of copyrighted MP3s that you do not have the right to distribute is illegal; hell, it's not even illegal to "share copyrighted MP3s" since, in the US at least, they're all automatically copyrighted, regardless of the copyright holder's policy on sharing them.

WiFi?

[John Jorsett]

One student who asked not to be named said he was upset that he can no longer play LAN games with friends on his floor. Last year, he would regularly joust with 15 others, but the school restricts using a computer as a server, so he's given up the activity.

Can't they set up a WiFi net of their own? Seems like that would permit gaming at least.

Sounds like China

[Jucius Maximus]

As I understand it, if you search for the names of political figures from a chinese internet connection, you'll be cut off for a short period.

Re:Sounds like China

[Martin Marvinski]

Yeah, China is the Chinese leader's country and if they want to block their people from visiting sites, it is their right.

And if the chinese citizens don't like what their leaders are doing they can just move to another country...after all it is the Chinese leaders who own China. The tax payers pay for the Universities bandwidth and if a genius is in a dorm making the next tech revolution, this could actually stiffle it. How would the tax payers feel knowing the University stopped a potential mulit-billion dollar industry from being invented?

Remember, that peer to peer technology is the latest breakthrough. Steve Jobs was a phone phreaker, Bill Gates stole Computer Time at his high school and Harvard. I know many electrical enginnering students who messed around with supermarket announcemnts with home made gadgets as well as changing stop lights to green.

Experimentation and a bit of fun/lawlessness can produce great new technology. The greatest thinkers weren't college suckups, but rebels. Newton was second to last place in his class, Einstien routinely got poor marks, Gates stole computer time, Steve Jobs stole telephone connections with his preak boxes. These are all examples of rebels who went on to create billion dollar industries or revolutions in science or math.

Imagine if some admin Jobs in jail because of his phone phreaking.

Re:Sounds like China

[Martin Marvinski]

"Yeah, because the rural poor of China have *so* many travel options. Bet you'd love to see them flooding into your country, wouldn't you?"

You missed my point. My point was that the school has a responsibility to be open. Sometimes being open has consequences like kazaa. But many times, things like kazaa and being open bring about great technical innovations. My point on China was that the GOVERNMENT has no right blocking web sites just as the University of Florida has no right to block student's internet access. University of Florida gets taxpayer money, and as a taxpayer I want students to explore the boundaries of technology.

Imagine if no one did. We wouldn't have half the innovation we have now.

Re:Sounds like China

[willtsmith]

Steve Jobs was a phone phreaker

Steve Jobs hung around his friend Steve Wozniak ... who was a phone phreaker. Jobs was the businessman who started marketing (discreetly) the boxes that WOZ built.

Re:Sounds like China

[dipipanone]

The greatest thinkers weren't college suckups, but rebels. (...) Gates stole computer time, Steve Jobs stole telephone connections with his preak boxes.

Some mistake here, surely? Gates and Jobs, greatest thinkers of our time?

I believe they invented the interweb as well.

I hope Icarus doesn't get too near my Sun

[tuffy]

Sparcstation, that is.

"..deters students from living in the dorms.."

[Ophidian P. Jones]

They left out the part about "...to use the dorm network connection for illegal and improper uses."

Maybe this will actually ENCOURAGE responsible people to live in the dorms, now that they know network performance will actually be improved without P2P traffic wasting bandwidth

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:Good for them

[Bull999999]

Not to mention that they have to cover their ass from RIAA

Re:Good for them

[g1zmo]

Unfortunately, so are the required network-usage fees that you pay, regardless of whether or not you even own a computer.

Re:Good for them

[throbbingbrain.com]

Using the campus network from dorms is a privledge, not a right.

It's neither a privilege or a right. It's a service.

Dorm IP access isn't a charity handout, it's a bought and paid for commercial service.

Re:Good for them

[El Cubano]

...they can drop the cash for DSL or cable.

Just out of curiosity, what ISP is going to roll out broadband to a university dorm? That is like a non-existent market.

Re:Good for them

[argmanah]

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

Your argument would be sound if the student had a choice of providers. If I as a student had the right to refuse the terms of service provided by my University, and get an alternative provider instead, I would agree, the University should be able to create whatever policies it wants. But since the University is basically shoving this down the throats of the students, forcing them to pay for it without offering them a choice, I have a problem with them getting a blank check on how they set their policies.

Plus, back when I was in school, our land lines ran through a proprietary on-campus system (you could dial 5 digits for on-campus calls), so no DSL was available. Our cable ran through the campus cable system, so no CM was available.

Given that I could not get DSL or cable as alternative access, and I was forced to pay the "Technology Fee" whether I used the ethernet access or not, you can be sure I would have raised hell if they tried to pull this kind of nonsense back in the day.

Provided you have the grades and the motivation, I consider a college education to be a right (one which the government agrees with, if you look at all the grants and scholarships given based on need). A public school should not have the right to invade a student's privacy with scans of their machines in a situation where a student is forced to pay for the service, under a threat of "If you don't like it, go somewhere else for college."

Re:Good for them

[scotch]

Mod parent +1 insightful, thank you.

Re:Good for them

[morcheeba]

I'll guess that UofF requires all freshman to live on campus (that's a popular requirement at many colleges). Good luck getting a 3rd party DSL, satellite, or cable provider. And if their phones are in a digital system (as were the ones at my college), you can't dial out to an ISP.

The only alternatives would be cellular data or 802.11 pringle-link to a friend's house nearby.

It's a monopoly situation (just like the require on-campus food plan meshes nicely with the "no-stoves" policy) that you've got to make sure isn't being abused. Dammit, I would want my bit torrent copy of Red Hat 10!

Re:Good for them

[cybermace5]

If someone wants to sit around all day sucking up bandwidth, blowing off classes and homework in order to do so, an apartment and cable connection is far cheaper than college.

Going to college itself is a service that you pay for, but they can easily kick you off the island if you abuse the services you paid for, like tests and homework. If you don't like it, leaving that college IS your only option.

Stupid college kids and their illusions of having rights and such. When you enter the university doors, you either belong to them or you're gone.

Re:Good for them

[malignatus]

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.

Using any connection you paid for should be a right. When I paid for my dorm room, the cost included food, TV, water, electricity and Internet. I should be allowed to use the services I paid for regardless of whether or not they're on campus.

But even if adopted your stance, I couldn't get cable or DSL even if I wanted to spend the money. The campus has its own phone system and wiring. The best alternative would be dial-up.

Result: I moved out of the dorms and pay for DSL from a local provider who lets me use the bandwidth I paid for (just as long as their asses are in the clear).

Re:Good for them

[PotPieMan]

No, UF does not require freshmen to live on campus. There's not enough available housing.

Re:Good for them

[TrbleClef]

UF doesn't require freshmen to live on campus.

Only freshmen that begin at the university during a summer term must live on campus to be eligible for housing in the fall.

Re:Good for them

[Zach978]

I've gotten a cable modem in an appartment (University Owned) that had ethernet in all the rooms. I needed it for work.

I think here, if you can get cable tv then you can get cable internet.

Re:Good for them

[Have Blue]

Education may be a right; bandwidth is not a right. If you're not using it for educational purposes, or if you're using it for illegal purposes, or *especially* if you're using it at the expense of other students who really are using it for educational purposes (see other posts in this article), you haven't got a leg to stand on when IT cuts you off.

good news for geeks

[mvh]

All the regulations they put in place and their little program just seem like good news for geeks. Sure, the average student's rights are being grossly violated but the not-so-average geek can find so many ways around this plus i'm sure his/her bandwidth is increased drastically. I'm not saying the administration isn't stupid, just that their stupidity should be used appropriately.

Re:Alternative OSs?

[Nykon]

Either that or make sure at least one of your friends is still connected and have hook up a wireless access point to his connection :)

Great. Soon coming to an ISP near you!

[Billy_D_Goat]

It is news like this which causes me to drink more Dew. More and more ISPs (whether they are colleges or corportations) are acting as Big Brother to their subscribers. There was a story a while ago which talked about ISPs acting as a firewall for the stupid. Well, now we have them looking out for our interests by tracking down virii, trojans, P2P. I guess one could see as vaguely similar to how cable companies control what is fed to their viewers. Great. Can't wait till Roadrunner picks up this feature.

An Inside Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I am currently a sophomore at the University of FL who works part time as part of the campus network ops group. This provides me an intimate knowledge of how Icarus works.

Icarus is a VB application which attempts to connect to the standard ports used by the various P2P apps. If it is able to connect to one of these ports, the IP is marked as suspect in the central DB.

Addresses marked as suspect are then sniffed, and all packets going to and from that IP are logged to a central server. The RIAA has already subponeaed most of this data for further analysis (and more lawsuits, I would expect).

Hope this helps
-sk

Re:An Inside Perspective

[numatrix]

That's nice, but you didn't tell them the whole story. I work at the as one of only three full-time security people for the whole university, so you probably know me. Let me fill in the gap.

The system is more than just a port scanner. If you think you can evade it simply by blocking probes, you're dead wrong. The system is more than that, it also incorporates passive monitoring. Here's a hint. There ain't no way to disguise high bandwidth. No encryption, no port changes, nothing that will hide that. If you're downloading massive amounts of data, you will be found. Period.

Also, for those people who are arguing about morality, ethics, service, responsibility, priveledges, whatever, it's a moot point.

When you move into the campus housing, you sign a legal document to the effect that you will not run P2P. No, it's not illegal to run it, but it ~is~ a violation of your living agreement, and housing is well within their rights to shut you off or take other action for P2P or abuse of services (as many other posters have noted, the few that abuse the service often make it unusable for those who legitimately need it).

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Ionized]

this is actually completely wrong. it is not VB, the RIAA has not subpoena'd anything, and the system does not rely on port scans alone to determine violations. but thanks for playing.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[skajake]

> . If you're downloading massive amounts of data, you will be found. Period

Does the school also dissalow downloading massive ammounts of data? Also, P2P leeching is just inbound data transfer just like HTTP. WTF is the difference?

How do you define P2P? If you are uploading to a peer? Or if you are downloading froma peer? What is a peer? A machine that runs a non HTTP service?

Oh Gosh.... what are things coming to.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[mliesenf]

I am also a sophomore at the University of Florida. I am a knowledgeable user of the DHnet and an active member of their forums. If you have any questions that you would like to be answered by a reilable source just visit the DHnet forums at www.dhnet.ufl.edu/forums and ask one of the administrators. They are the same people who administer the network. nuff' said.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[happyfrogcow]

So what about a CS student working on a client/server or P2P program? Is developing and testing this for a class project a violation of the housing agreement? I'd be interested in how the legal agreement defines P2P. (any UF students have a copy?)

The development stages of a project wouldn't consume so much bandwidth, but if it is a P2P project, then it's illegal?

Re:An Inside Perspective

[mdouglas]

When are P2P apps going to start wrapping themselves in SSL or IPSEC to defend against being sniffed in transit?

Re:An Inside Perspective

[techno-vampire]

The system is more than just a port scanner. If you think you can evade it simply by blocking probes, you're dead wrong. The system is more than that, it also incorporates passive monitoring. Here's a hint. There ain't no way to disguise high bandwidth. No encryption, no port changes, nothing that will hide that. If you're downloading massive amounts of data, you will be found. Period.

This makes me feel much better about the program. The original article made it look like it was actually examining the computers for the programmers. This is more like keeping a log of what phone numbers call in and which get called without recording the conversations. Still something of an invasion of privacy, but not as obtrusive as it appeared.

I agree that you have to search out and stop those that waste bandwith on such things, but wouldn't it be easier just to block those ports at your own routers? I know some ISPs block outgoing connections to port 25 to prevent spammers from relaying through open SMTP servers. Couldn't you just block the appropriate ports and be done with it?

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no need to guess about what the code base is or how this tool operates. Florida has something called the Sunshine Law. This tool is not security related and does not appear to fall under any other excluded category so it it has no protection from the sun. All anyone has to do to get the code and any documentation is invoke the Sunshine Law.

~Peace~

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Ionized]

most newer-gen P2P applications allow you to change the ports they connect over.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[mliesenf]

"Yeah, it's all true. As part of the ICARUS package we are going to provide our VB application development suite for Unix. Open source!

Or not." -wills, DHnet Administrator

http://www.dhnet.ufl.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?t= 17 5
(ps. they all use bsd)

Re:An Inside Perspective

[peachawat]

> If you're downloading massive amounts of data, you will be found. Period.

So you can't download any ISO of a Linux distribution, too?

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Peredur]

So how does bandwith reporting stop usenet? Or streaming mp3 from legit places?
Why not just implement a firewall that blocks p2p?
P2PWall tries to do this: http://www.lowth.com/p2pwall/

Re:An Inside Perspective

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

When you move into the campus housing, you sign a legal document to the effect that you will not run P2P

Why do you make them agree not to run P2P apps? Agreeing not to perform illegal activities (such as copyright infringement) is one thing, but just banning P2P doesn't make any sense.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[PCM2]

If you're downloading massive amounts of data, you will be found. Period.

So I'd get popped for downloading Linux ISOs?

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Peredur]

I know that kazaa doesn't use a set port anymore, so it's much harder to trap that way.

You have to look at the packets themselves. p2pwall (in my post above) does this. It makes it possible to allow kazaa, et al to run, but doesn't allow them access to the outside world. Useful for distributing class notes, etc.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[gl4ss]

massive loads of bandwith is the norm for cutting access on FAST university(housing) provided networks.

there's absolutely no need to profile the data, do port scans, scan files or any crap like that(you don't need to know more than that they're overusing the connection beyond agreeable limits, so you shouldn't know). such action would be viewed around here very invasive and downright criminal(to the point of being breach of telecommunications secrecy and the guys responsible would be spending some few hours down at the police station in questioning, fuck, telecom execs have been down that route for looking into their own companies logs), no matter if you included something allowing that in the TOS. and absolutely no need to invent some 'scans your files' jizz to go with it, that's just spooky and bad press.

that's how it is setupped here(i got a 100mbit jack on the wall), you use too much bandwith(doesn't matter what you're transferring, in fact, they're not allowed to profile what i'm transferring, again, that could be interpreted as equivalent of wiretapping) for extended perioids(read as 30-40gbytes of transfer in 2 week perioid to outside of the student housing network) and you're cut off. so basically, if you leave kazaa on and sharing then it's pretty probable you end up being cut off(heck, the lines are fast). likewise, if you leave a torrent seeding the latest redhat on full for a week you're pretty probable to get cut off as well. all and all it's not bad service for 12 euros per month.

heck, there's a shitload of programs that could be considered to be p2p of some sort or another(it's just a fancy marketing name for easy serving), so just adding clauses for 'p2p' is stupid and a mark of (unneeded)scare tactics in which point you might just as well give up offering the service at all..

Re:An Inside Perspective

[rossz]

When you move into the campus housing, you sign a legal document to the effect that you will not run P2P.

Except that stripped to it's basic definition, the internet is nothing but P2P apps. What does a browser do? It requests a file from another computer. Same with email.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[veritron]

Out of purely intellectual curiosity, would sniffing the network for a couple of days yield the IP addresses of the machines running the program yield IP addresses that could be used to create a firewall rule rejecting all incoming packets from the program? Or would a firewall rule like that break your network access?

I don't attend University of Florida, I'm just wondering.

Re:An Inside Perspective

[timdorr]

Ok, so lets say I SSH tunnel to an offsite server and do all my stuff through this tunnel. Sure, I may use a lot of bandwidth, but it's all encrypted and you have NO proof what I'm sending is non-academic. Hell, I could be transferring video files for a presentation for class. How could you tell?

I think you'd have a hard time prosecuting in court without proof of what was actually being transferred...

Re:An Inside Perspective

[Tokerat]

If you download them all day and night, sure.

What I want to know is, what if I am viewing a media stream? Then again, I suppose that's why it's more than just a bandwidth gauge...

Re:Alternative OSs?

[BorgDrone]

From the article:
Icarus then scans their computer, detects any worms, viruses or programs that act as a server, such as Kazaa.

Looks like it's a machine somewhere on campus and all it does is check for known open ports, nothing a simple firewall rule can't solve.

What do you mean "School to Avoid"?????

[digrieze]

Yeesh, this is one school that is ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING about the problem.

My Niece went to college this fall and her "100mb/s" connection in her dorm room was running slower than the 56k elcheapo modem we installed so she'd have fax/voiceline answering machine capability.

I checked her system (worked fine) then put my packet sniffer in the wall socket and it just about fried! The university support puppy tracked it down to some students shairing movie files.

I'm emailing this story to them.

Re:What do you mean "School to Avoid"?????

[digrieze]

Actually her dorm HAS gigabit (newly installed cisco routers too). Her system only has a Siemens 100mbs card, something I'm going to correct on her birthday. And yes, upteeunknown people CAN kill gigabit also.

Firewalls?

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

Wouldn't a good firewall prevent this sort of program?

Maybe I'm missing something here but it seems to me it would be easy to defeat.

Icarus

[CGP314]

When students first register on the network, they are required to read about peer-to-peer networks and certify that they will not share copyright files.

Yup. That's the only thing P2P is good for: downloading copyrighted files. Certainly no one like me would use it to share GPLed software.

Somehow I'm sure Icarus cares not about that distinction.

"When we turned the program on, our bandwidth usage dropped by 85 percent," said Norbert Dunkel, director of housing and residence education for the university.

Good job. You wouldn't want anyone to use all that bandwidth now would you. Better just have people checking their email, after all, if you are using more than average, you must be up to something bad.

A quote in hindsight...

[101percent]

"One-hundred billion goes to the War Department this year out of three-hundred billion budget (1974). Police agencies have become so vast- National Security Agency alone is the largest police bureaucracy in America yet it's activities are almost unknown to all of us - that there is no turning back from computerized police state control of America." -Allen Ginsberg. 1974.

Tech people will agree with the title of story

[gorjusborg]

I could be wrong, but if the University of Florida decides to keep this policy, it will be devoid of anyone tech saavy (who cares about being abused).

I personally do not trade MP3's, but I would find it highly ignorant of a University to assume that file trading programs can only be used for trading copyrighted material.

I equate this type of action with a Christian university banning students from using the network if they had web browsers, since they could be viewing pr0n!

Pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

Re:Tech people will agree with the title of story

[BattleTroll]

Give me a break. There are plenty of alternative approaches to distributing software that don't rely on the bandwidth-sucking P2P protocols. Not only does the Univeristy get their bandwidth back to use for legitimate purposes, they avoid the legal hassle of tracking down copyright violators. UF has a responsibility to the students, staff, and tax-payers to make sure the facilities they provide are usuable, cost efficient, and legal.

Baylor's policys

[phreak03]

Baylor university blocks kazaa (we tried changeing ports, most open proxies are banned)
Winmx pulls 1k (we suspect some sort of capping)
bittorrent is irrelgular
gnutella is flat out blocked
gnutella2 works sorta
edonkey still works (but we firewalled)
and my 2nd nic card is blocked for 4 months running NAT to hook up my xbox (despite the policies never mentioning NAT)

I've been threatend with "I will personaly come up and rip your arm off if you do that again" allready on the issue of NAT

Colleges everwhere are getting draconian
we are running a W.A.S.T.E cluster at the moment in my dorm (even the RA's are on it) and have about 1/2 a terabyte, and various people are finding ways to connect (dialup, so they can VPN home and such)

still with filters and invisible rulesets that get you banned for 2 weeks for trying to do something as silly as update a webpage with front page, IT contractors like RESNET have way too much power.

Re:Baylor's policys

[orthogonal]

I've been threatened with "I will personally come up and rip your arm off if you do that again" allready (sic) on the issue of NAT

If you've actually been threatened with violence by the University or its agents, I'd say you have excellent leverage when you sit down with the University Provost.

Shift in mentality

[jludwig]

Well, the RIAA knows it's hopeless to go after individuals, so I'm sure this policy had something to do with a few phone calls to those in charge of computing services at heavily wired schools. If you are the RIAA, why not threaten to sue the ISPs/colleges? Much more cost effective than going after users. It has worked/is working elsewhere: Tobacco companies are wrong for manufacturing cigarettes, McDonald's is responsible for making people fat, gun companies will very soon be responsible for the manner in which their product is used, it's only logical (in that wacky American way!) that ISPs and colleges will be responsible for user actions... The implication here is that people are too stupid to know any better I guess.

What are they complaining about?

[finity]

My school - Kansas State University - blocks all p2p networks I've tried (except one), so they don't need to scan for students running the programs, no one will.
We also have some program that scans for viruses (actually, it scans to see if your computer is vulnerable). If it finds your computer is vulnerable, your port is automatically blocked without warning. I really don't understand what they have to complain about.
In my opinion, it's the school's network and they should be allowed to do whatever they want ith it. It's my responsibility to fool them at any chance I get. You can always use a VPN to circumvent this stuff, and being in linux most of the time, I don't have (much) trouble when it comes to windows viri. You could also determine which computers they use to scan with and then just block them with a firewall.

Sketchy details

[stratjakt]

Are they scanning (hax0ring into) your machine, or just intelligently monitoring network traffic?

Your machine is your machine, the network is theirs. If they don't want you running kazoom then dont run it.

Your there to learn, not steal music from the hardworking folks who produce and distribute it.

Friggin hippies.

Stupid Logic

[Supp0rtLinux]

I hope they make sure the email and pop-up arrive before the connection is severed. What happens if they've killed messenger to avoid pop-up spams? What if they aren't checking email at the time? Reality is they could get termed for 30min and not even know it if they were at class or something with LimeWire running. And what if they're not running Windows? What if they have LimeWire on OSX or Linux? It sounds like their idea isn't too thought through. Certainly the guys at Berkeley could've done better.

Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[TigerTime]

Atleast concerned with Universities. They have every right to see what you are sharing on your computer or what viruses are coming out of your computer.

It's not like they are scanning the hard drive. They are scanning the ports and seeing if certain applications are using them.

This would be like saying you have a drive thru window on your house and you're selling crack out of it. If a cop goes around your neighborhood and see's you selling crack out of the window, you can't claim invasion of privacy.

Re:Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[citking]

I agree completely.

Here at the university I work for we have had the hardest time trying to get students to look at the big picture, how their obsessive game playing, compulsive downloading of music/movies/porn (sorry, I had an exam in psych today and it appears to be showing!) and obvious script kiddie hacks of other web sites slow down the entire internet for everyone.

Any given day we'll get a call from some kid who's complaining that his WarCraft 3, his KaZaA, and his port scanner are running way too slowly and he wants us to fix it NOW!

Basically what it boils down to is this: The network itself belongs to the university and, as such, must fulfill the mission statement as laid out by the university officials. Here at UWP we state very clearly that the internet/network are to be used for official university business only and incidental personal use of the network/internet is OK as long as it doesn't interfere with university business.

P2P does interfere by drawing bandwidth from, say, Financial Aid, who is, at the same time, trying to submit FAFSAs to the Federal Gov't. Students can be very short-sighted, and while I sympathize with them, I can't see why they don't realize that the other 1600 people on the network besides them all are competeing for the same resources. Maybe someday they'll learn.

Re:Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[EllF]

Actually, it's like having a drive through window on your house and being arrested for it. P2P networks are NOT illegal or bad; piracy is illegal. Possessing a tool that has legit capabilities is not cause (or rather, should not be cause) for being harassed.

Re:Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[HeghmoH]

A university probably also has the right to search your shoes before you enter a classroom, since it is private property and you have the choice not to enter, but people will still complain extremely loudly about it, and rightly so.

Some universities just don't get it. They see their network as a service that they are obligated to provide, as a minus on their balance sheet. They want that minus to be as small as possible. Students obviously need web and e-mail, so web and e-mail access must be provided.

Some universities do get it. These are the universities who realize that they don't know everything. The universities who understand that their network is an educational and research tool, and that allowing students to find new uses for the campus network is part of their students' educations. They provide free (as in speech) access. They provide working network ports everywhere that you can plug your laptop into. They provide wide-area WiFi coverage. They don't yell at you when you go into a lab, yank the network cable out of your workstation and plug it into your computer instead.

This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.

I once went to a school that did things like this. If they suspected you of evil, they would freeze your account and then wait for you to contact them. When you finally did, they'd read you a laundry list of things you never did. It was a high school. I expect high schools to be totally moronic and invasive people factories. I expect more from institutions of higher learning.

Re:Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[dfenstrate]

how their obsessive game playing,

Funny, at my school, when the admins were setting up bandwidth throttling, they ignored gaming, because it wasn't a significant traffic load.

Of course, because they had a firewall, traffic shaper, and some other machine I don't remember- each with dozens to a hundred rules- they fucked up the network more than unfettered access. Ping times got up to 2 seconds at their worst.

Solution was worse than the problem. Typical bueacracy.

Re:Bandwidth is not a right, it's a privledge

[kirkjobsluder]

This is not to say that this second type of university simply allows the students to run rampant on the network. But the tools are different. Instead of yanking network access at a hint of trouble and invasively scanning people's PCs, they use traffic shaping and selective blocking, not because they think P2P is evil but simply to conserve bandwidth. They treat their students as reasonable human beings because they realize that they are ultimately the university's customers.

How is port-scanning for open servers invasive? I guess I see a bit of hypocracy here in that I don't think that anyone would object to security scans for open mail relays that can be used by spammers, or for known worms and viruses before they spread.

I guess I don't see how it is not a violation for Joe User to download files from my service on port 8080, but is a violation for my ISP to download files from my service on port 8080.

I agree that traffic shaping is a better idea in general. But caveat emptor here. If you don't agree with the terms of service, don't sign the service agreement.

What the fuck?

[NDPTAL85]

Can you explain how in any decently designed network simply connecting a router can blow out the entire building's connection?

Re:What the fuck?

[kaladorn]

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but Ethernet has a standard for how many segments you can tack together (5 is it?). So if he added a router at the end of along chain, might that not have exceeded what the spec allows? I seem to recall the IT guys at work bitching out some people on our test team for just willy nilly throwing on extra hubs and exceeding just that limit, leading to network issues. But perhaps there is another mechanism that explains this?

Re:What the fuck?

[Tack]

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but Ethernet has a standard for how many segments you can tack together (5 is it?)

Adding a router does not extend the segment. It creates a new segment and a new subnet. The 5-4-3 rule does not apply to routers. Just imagine how broken the Internet would be if we could have at most 4 routers between end points. :)

Jason.

Re:What the fuck?

[GearheadX]

This was about five or six years ago, when the school was first installing the system in the first dorm. And the guy in question had an off campus apartment and was trying to rig something up between his on-campus room and his off-campus apartment. He misconfigured something in a truly spectacular fashion and caused the whole system to turn on its head.

Ever since. The DoH has reacted to the idea of a router anywhere near their previous Ethernet ports with great vengeance and furious anger.

Re:What the fuck?

[Creepy Crawler]

Seems to me somebody isnt cut out to be network admin material ;-)

Tis not directed at you, Tack.

Amen

[alex_ant]

Speaking as someone living in a university apartment, whatever the IT guys can do to restrict P2P or even block it altogether is fine by me. There was a lot of moaning from a small subset of users after Packeteer (bandwidth limiter) was installed on the network a couple years ago, but the effect for 90% of the users has been a dramatic increase in general responsiveness. You can still use Kazaa and so on here, but they're throttled down to 20K/sec.

Re:Amen

[christopherfinke]

You can still use Kazaa and so on here, but they're throttled down to 20K/sec.

That's nothing. Here at the University of Minnesota, Kazaa (and other P2P software) bandwidth is throttled to about 1.5K/s. It'd be faster to dial up.

Re:Amen

[DunbarTheInept]

That's a stupid solution. Making Kazaa slow ALL the time punishes those who were only going to use it once in a while. What makes more sense is to track how many bytes of transfer a machine uses on each port per day (or week, or month, or whatever works best), and throttle only those machines that are using a lot of Kazaa. Don't punish the guy who's only downloading a 20 meg file once a week by making him wait 21 minutes for it, when the actual target you're after is the guy downloading several CD images a day.

In other words, don't punish the occasional bursters. Occasional bursting is more efficient than a sustained connection.

Small Discrepancy

[citking]

The open-source program was developed by campus programmers to cut off the file sharing going on among students. Housing officials say the application educates students as it restricts them from peer-to-peer services.

According to this article on dmusic.com, they say that '"The program's authors are trying to keep its exact workings secret to protect against hackers, who may find a way to bypass it."'

Thus, how can the program be open source if the authors are working to protect the inner workings from being hacked?

Here at the University of Wisconsin Platteville, where I work as a Lead Network Consultant, we recently ran into an intra-LAN file sharing app called UWGO (you can find it on SourceForge). We shut it down almost immediately, but an app like ICARUS would help us immensely. I wonder if the University of Florida would be willing to let other schools try this out....

Re:Small Discrepancy

[pigscanfly.ca]

What do you have againts intranet file sharing ?
Unles you use hubs I dont see how this could be a problem for other students and would likely decrease your overall bandwith usage.

And UF students don't know IP tables?

[mjfrazer]

Shouldn't take too long to add a rule to drop all packets coming from the admin machines. Now if they start scanning from machines outside the UF network, they'll probably catch a lot more people.

I guess the windows majority will be prevented from using P2P, but the CS majors with linux boxes will not be stopped.

How DARE they!

[gnu-sucks]

Oh, the horrible world we live in! These students suffer the slings and arrows of an EDUCATIONAL network. I think they should feel privileged in that they have internet access.

It is 100% up to the university how their network is used. Reguardless of if you view p2p music 'sharing' as theft or not, you can't be so stupid as to be outraged over what this university has done.

I bet they have saved themselves several gigabytes of transfer every day through this.

Oh, the poor suffering college students! What WILL they do, to get their fix? Oh, thats right, beer!

And to that stupid newspaper that says this will make the dorms less attractive - you guys are so naive. I suppose by not allowing posession of marijuana, they make the dorms less attractive. You know, a beer machine in the lobby would help. If it was free beer, of course.

I don't mean to sound like flamebait, but this is just one of those examples of how spoiled our society is, and I'm part of society, so I get to bitch, right? :p

Go figure-

[Mu*puppy]

-an invasive and annoying program, from a university who's mascot is a GATOR.

Ahhh, gotta love the cool, refreshing taste of irony... :>

Hey Slashdotter!

[NDPTAL85]

Guess what? We're not talking about killing babies. We're talking about securing network and school resources from those who choose to use them for non-academic purposes.

Big difference there! Hopefully you'll move out of mom's basement someday and discover that.

Re:Hey Slashdotter!

[Surt]

Except ... I regularly use P2P network programs for academic purposes. Almost daily.

Re:Hey Slashdotter!

[HiThere]

Mac OS X is merely a clumsy UI that looks pretty. If *I* have a hard time navigating on it, I'm not surprised that my wife gets confused.

WinXP is fighting to bring on the night.

OK. I'm replying to your sig. But your sig give reason to understand you comment in context. Personally, I can understand the need for a bandwidth cap, but that's not what they're doing. Or at least that's not what is being claimed. (I already had no interest in attending the University of Florida, so I didn't check further.) But the only "valid" reason that I can see for this action is to prevent themselves being sued. OK, I suppose, but they should be up front about the reason. And there is no excuse, NONE, for them to be so intrusive about it. To me this smacks of the long-time college policy that basically boils down to "We've got the power, and you'll do what we say.", without feeling any need for any justification.

OK, I can see valid reasons why they would enact a policy similar to this one. But this particular one is, indeed, a good reason to stay away from that school. (And not just the dorms.)

bad geeks, no bandwidth!

[Schwartzboy]

"People are not file sharing to do their homework."

Um...granted,

Re:bad geeks, no bandwidth!

[gorjusborg]

"People are not file sharing to do their homework."

I don't think it is fair to say this, especially if the University has a graduate program. A maxed out network could be a perfect specimen for plenty of computer science related research projects.

IMHO, a university's role should be helping to research a technical solution to the phenomenon, not a 'legal' one. That is, unless the problem is interfering with the ability to do research.

Tool of the System

[CGP314]

Senior Jennifer Puckett, president of the Inter-Residence Hall Association, called Icarus "a good thing" as it enforces rules that were already in place.

Slashdot poster Colin Palmer was surprised to hear himself say aloud the words "What a Tool" as he read this in the wired article.

What kind of geek...

[glenrm]

What kind of nerd would live in the dorms anyway? Uh, sorry forgot what site I was on...

Doubtful

[Professor_Quail]

So I guess the first question that comes to my mind is, will a products such as ZoneAlarm stop this?

I wouldn't think so. ZoneAlarm blocks all ports except those you are using. If Icarus scans your machine and finds an open/active port 1214 (Kazaa) then it disconnects you. The only way you might be able to do something would be to use a non-standard port, because if Icarus only scans to see which ports are open rather than actually checking what kind of traffic is running through each port then it might not catch you.

Education is a good thing

[UltraSkuzzi]

"Housing officials say the application educates students as it restricts them from peer-to-peer services." Remember this program's purpose is to 'educate' the sudents on the evils of music piracy. I really think more time should be spend discussing the evils of 'bad' music like Nickelback and Creed. Look for a class called 'Respecting IP' in a college near you.
~UltraSkuz

This comment is liscensed by SCO.

No IRC?

[TheMatt]

Look at the "another story"... Man, I pity the poor soul that isn't a Linux guru but wants to try Linux out. I figure 75% of my Linux questions are answered via IRC. It is still a much better and quicker way to get the answers than mailing lists or Usenet. (FWIW, the other 25% is mainly Gentoo Forums).

Stupid solution to a simple problem

[bailout911]

This is by far the dumbest method of controlling P2P traffic I've ever heard. At Kansas State, you can have any P2P program you want on your harddrive, it's just not gonna give you any performance at all. I know the guy who does the "bandwidth shaping" as they call it, and he's real, real good. Honestly, I have no idea how it works, but he's given several talks on the topic of eliminating p2p traffic on college networks. All he'll tell me is it doesn't work by port numbers, it doesn't work by IPs and it's not protocol specific. Yet within 2 or 3 days of a new p2p program being released transfer rates for it are crushed down to the 0.1 k/sec range.

That's the best solution. Let the students have whatever programs they want on THEIR computers, but control YOUR resources appropriately.

ISP Portscans

[gunnk]

If you don't think that ISPs are scanning computers for viruses, trojans, etc, you're wrong.

I *know* my ISP is scanning:

http://security.rr.com/probing.htm

Why P2P?

[El]

Why not just invest in a CD-Burner, have 20-30 students chip in for a CD and make copies for everybody? Cost you ~$1 per CD (or less with more participants)... what's your time worth?

COMPUTERS!

[NDPTAL85]

Get it? All of this is just COMPUTERS. Not civil rights. Not human rights. Not even animal rights, but COMPUTERS!

It is no great injustice that someone's net access has been temporarily shut off because they were using a troublesome program.

Re:doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but firewalls dont matter... its the traffic packets that can screw up your system code. i had a guy on mIRC do it to me when i was in his channel. He was an @. He threatened to take me offline. I have a firewall. He took me offline with special created packets not destined for any port. I wish firewalls were better at block such things.

Beats my school...

[BitwizeGHC]

... where you can be disconnected indefinitely no matter what you do. It's a Windows network, first of all, and secondly, it's not properly partitioned or firewalled away from the rest of the campus network. Some joker thinks it's cool to break into police files (which are sitting out there on the same subnet as the res network), the network admin simply pulls the plug.

Obervation

[LittleGuy]

Blansett said even if users are sharing legally, they can be shut down simply for using up too much bandwidth, which can slow down Internet access for more casual users.

Before Napster, P2P, RIAA, and the lawsuits, this was the most reasonable excuse for curbing legitamate on-line access. Universities can claim their network was a limited resource.

privacy

[rwven]

invasion of privacy much? Can they force a student to install their filter?

No LAN Games if no P2P?

[indros13]

I have no knowledge of programming, so I have a question. Is it a given that a program designed to sniff out and restrict P2P access cuts off LAN gaming? I'd have to agree with the Quake-playing student in the article, blasting holes in your college friends is fun!

Virtually, of course...

*I* could have told you to avoid U of Florida...

[Atario]

...after all, it's in Florida.

[Running, ducking]

Except...

[heathrow]

the University of Florida does not require students to live in the dorms. They've got crowding problems to this day.

Next argument?

Re:Except...

[Darren Winsper]

He said "most", not "all". Pay attention.

That's simply asinine....

[Anita Coney]

In addition to using p2p to try out new music before I buy (since Napster I buy a LOT more music beacuse I'm exposed to a LOT more music), I also use it for downloading game demos and patches that I can find elsewhere.

Would the university have banned the VCR before the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the device in Universal v Sony?

Heck, it's even worse than that. A Federal court HAS ALREADY determined that p2p programs have legitmate non-infringing uses and are not illegal. What right does the university have to ban a legal device?!

Um...

[Ransak]

Not that I'm advocating this approach just to do something illegal, but couldn't you just NAT your network drop and block the scanners at your own firewall/router? I guess I'm confused as to why approaches like this are still cropping up when there are roughly a zillion websites on setting up something that would coincidentally make this approach and others involving scanning moot.

Unless they are sniffing traffic, then I would guess your only options would be to use an offsite proxy or an encrypted P2P app like Freenet.

bad geeks, no bandwidth!..parent was a mis-post

[Schwartzboy]

From the article:"People are not file sharing to do their homework."

Um...granted, I never attended college in Florida, let alone this particular school, but back in my day, CS majors had some pretty serious file-sharing going on for various collaborative projects, grabbing example programs and other random crap that the profs would want us to take a look at, etc. I guess that geeks aren't "people" by the school's logic, since people aren't file-sharing to do their homework, but that shouldn't be news to anyone here I guess.
I can understand schools wanting their bandwidth protected from those evil people who want to do more than e-mail their friends "hey, U want to go 4 beers tonite?" with campus network access, but call a spade a spade, please. If your main argument is that people can share files over a network, and some of those shared files might be copyright-infringing evil things, people can just as easily respond with the argument that people can share files over the network, and some of those files might be academic in nature and important to their primary function as students. "If you don't like it, go somewhere else because we're dirty bureaucratic bandwidth whores" is a perfectly valid argument, but say that. None of this "it's for the children!" or "it's for cuz we can't get sued this way, Vern!" That's just...wrong.

Not entirely sure that I believe this point of view completely myself, but there seem to be a deluge of "good for the school, yay for the new University overlords!" posts, and that makes me feel sad and lonely.

If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwidth

[Alereon]

If usage has risen to the level that the school's internet connection can no longer cope, the solution is simple: get a faster Internet connection. $1 per student per quarter would easily pay for a few dozen additional megabits. As an ISP, the university has a duty to provide fast, uncrippled access to students, who ARE paying for this service. The fundamental problem here is that people are forgetting that P2P filesharing applications are a legitimate, important use of the resnet. It is no more acceptable to disable P2P access, much less suspend accounts, than it is to turn off HTTP or E-mail to save bandwidth.

Why is this a bad thing?

[ionpro]

Maybe I'm not reading the article right, but it looks to me like it just blocks you if you try to share files. Use Kazaa Lite, disable sharing. Problem solved. That is what my ITS department recommends. We don't actually block them if they insist on sharing, but the RIAA lodges a complaint fast enough. Then their connection goes away. If they do it twice, we just hand the RIAA their name to persue legal action.

We also scan computers for vulnerabilities. If a computer is vulnerable to $worm_of_the_week, we disable their connection by MAC Address until they get it fixed. Sorry, but we DON'T want to be a part of spreading the next RPC DCOM virus. We certainly don't want to see our SMTP servers (yes, multiple) backed up over 10 hours because of a Swen like virus, so we insist that everyone install our virus scanner, too (advanced users are excepted from this, but they get a stern talking to and a disconnection if they are owned). Why is this a bad thing? Our network, our rules. Don't like it? Get other Internet access. Fixed-point wireless is available here....

Shouldn't it have been called Daedalus?

[*weasel]

Because Daedalus was the worrywort engineer who kept trying to prevent Icarus from flying to close to the sun and getting himself in trouble?

It'd be a much better analogy from that angle - as it would equate the file sharers to Icarus, the wings to Kazaa and the Sun to the RIAA.

Calling the watchdog app Icarus... well it's just begging to fall into the Ocean and drown.

or maybe that was their actual intent...

Avoid Florida!

[HMV]

Any Dawg can tell you that the University of Florida is a school to avoid. Who wants to wear jean shorts?

Just do your own networking...

[EvilSporkMan]

Run some cable down the hall or use ad-hoc wireless networking, and continue as usual on your own private network. Either physically switch cables, or find some way to separate the two networks in software.

Re:Wil for Governor

[jasonzzz]

Yahoo.

That's a grand idea. WWDN knows tech, he and Georgy can get together, fix this up, so it won't happen with the California schools.

Now I don't know if I should vote for Georgy or write Wil in.

Sounds like a classic...

[Rahga]

"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."
=-------------=
Meanwhile, somewhere in Florida:

Student - "Hey, why did you guys disconnect my network connection?"

Administrator - "Didn't you read the e-mail we sent that explains all of this?"

Re:Sounds like a classic...

[weileong]

hahaha... you got a point there... if I had mod points I dunno if I'd give this a +Funny or a +Insightful :-)

Semi-related old hillbilly bluegrass song

[WTFmonkey]

Well, there's an old holler tree,
Down the road o' here from from me,
Where ya put down a dollar or two.
Come back again and when ya come round the bend
There's a jug full o' good ol' Mountain Dew!

chorus
They call it that old mountain dew,
And them don't use it are few.
Well, I'll hush up my mug if you gimme a jug
Of that good old Mountain Dew!

Well my old Uncle Nort,
He was sawed off & short,
Measured 'bout five-foot-two.
But he felt like giant when he got him a pint
Of that good old Mountain Dew!

must we again state...

[wmaker]

... that p2p has other valid purposes other than piracy.

Re:must we again state...

[BattleTroll]

Why dont you tell us what percentage of all P2P usage bandwidth is actually for legitimate purposes? Then your argument will have some validity.

Re:must we again state...

[RockClimbingFool]

that is not the foundation this country is built on. period. one of the basic premises of our law is rather 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be put in jail.

Dang!

[GeneralEmergency]

If this isn't a perfect application for WASTE, I don't know what is.

hmm, who long will it take...

[dargon]

for someone to compromise the system and turn it into a DDOS box :). After all, it's only written in VB

the punishment should be harsher

[fudgefactor7]

Call me an insane fucktard, but I think the penalty as listed is too lame. My plan:

First offense: lose net for one week.
Second Offense: lose net for one month.
Third Offense: suspension for one month, automatic 1-GPA point deduction on all current classes taken.
Forth Offense: explusion with prejudice (no readdmittance.)

These "kids" today think that the University is their private network and that bandwidth is infinite and there's no penalty for abuse...time for a surprise. Can't wait for them to tell mom and dad that they got busted for downloading pr0n and illegal MP3s and now get kicked out of college. As far as I am concerned, it's their problem and the University has to mitigate the possibility of lawsuits as well as catering to the genuine student that is not violating the laws. All I can say to those foolish students that do get hammered is "It sucks to be you!"

Re:the punishment should be harsher

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice trolling, assfuck.

The kids are forced to pay for university network access, and no other options are available. I also love how lots of people are for UF telling you what programs your computer can run, but they get all pissy when MS tries it.

Re:the punishment should be harsher

[RockClimbingFool]

why the zero score? he is completely correct. alot of students on university networks HAVE NO ALTERNATIVE SERVICE PROVIDERS.

Re:the punishment should be harsher

[snarkh]

Ah, but you forgot the punishment for the fifth offense, which is too terrible to utter.

Isn't this hacking?

[IcePop456]

All of use who lived in dorms with high speed connections probably at some point signed an Acceptable use policy. However, part of that policy usually says you cannot hack other machines or run services on unverisity machines that is against their purpose. For them to run a program on MY machine, wouldn't that require some form of hacking? Even if I leave the computer completely unsecured that does not give them the right to install something on it. Thats like saying you took someone's car out for a joy ride because they left it running. Sure, there's no permanent damage (if you decide to return it), but it is still illegal.

Baloney

[Anonymous Coward]

" Using the campus network from dorms is a privledge, not a right. "

Breathing air from dorms is a privledge, not a right.

Playing music on your guitar is a privledge, not a right.

Staying up past 11 PM on a weeknight is a privledge, not a right.

What, in your twisted little world, exactly is a right?

Re:Baloney

[jayhawk88]

Breathing air from dorms is a privledge, not a right.
It might be, if certain individuals could breath in such a way that it makes breathing for everyone else 70% less effective.

Playing music on your guitar is a privledge, not a right.
Very true. For an example of this, turn your amp up to 11 on a Tuesday night and practice your Jimi Hendrix.

Staying up past 11 PM on a weeknight is a privledge, not a right.
Again, if you staying up past 11 PM somehow forced everyone else to stay up past 11, it might be.

The thing you seem to not grasp is that network access is a shared, limited resource. Yes, the students are indirectly paying for it, but they are indirectly paying for a lot of things, such as parking, furniture in the student lounge, and trees in the campus quad. This does not mean that students can start parking wherever they want, steal couches out of the lounge, or transplant trees as they see fit.

Do students have alternatives?

[RockClimbingFool]

"It's the universities network, they can do anything they want. You have to agree to their policies or don't use the network." If there are alternative ways to get on the Internet, then I agree. However, a lot of universities require incoming freshman to stay in dorms. The university is the only provider of cable television, phone and Internet access for those particular students. So dictating what programs they can and cannot use is definitely infringing on some freedoms.

They have a right ..

[nurb432]

Its in school owned facilities, and you sign away privacy rights when you move in anyway..

its THEIR place.. not yours.. and they have the right to prevent illegal acts on their property.

Should they do this, no. its in bad taste, but legally they can..

Re:They have a right ..

[Surt]

There are certain rights you can't sign away when you are renting a residence.

For example, go out and try to exchange yourself via slavery for a place to live.

There are privacy rights that you retain no matter what you sign to move into your place of residence.

Re:They have a right ..

[kgarcia]

So, providing room & board plus a small stipend in exchange for maid services is illegal... There are several thousand live-in servants that would disagree with you....

Re:They have a right ..

[BigBir3d]

Apparently you are under the impression that the USA is a free country. Please look around for a bit, and tell me if that is really true.

There is no such thing as privacy. People need to get over it. Just as there is no seperation of Church and State, or freedom of speech (ask Rush Limbaugh about that one), etc etc. All the tenents we hold near and dear to our hearts as the core idealogy of what it means to be an American are false. Some more than others, but definitely false.

Re:They have a right ..

[Phillup]

Ever been in the military?

You give up a lot of rights to protect the rights of others...

Re:They have a right ..

[plugger]

But they can leave whenever they like, at least in theory. Slavery would involve the servant giving property rights in their person. The contract would be void.

Re:They have a right ..

[willtsmith]

Rush Limbaugh exercises and undue share of speach on a daily basis. When Rush deeply offended 1/2 of the ESPN audience (minorities and civil minded whites) with his little diatribe, he was asked to leave as his presence would end up losing ESPN money.

No one can sue Rush Limbaugh for what he said. Thats free speech. However, Rush does have to live with the consequences of that speech and the people that he alienated through his typical thoughtless, paranoid blather.

Oh yeah, and we DO have separation of church and state. Remember the whole "Ten Commandments" Georgia courthouse kiosk case. Even this extreme court couldn't abide such a flagrant violation. Last time I checked it was still improper for schools to sanction religious activities.

Our laws are influenced by religious concepts. But it's not solely directed by them. There are no court cases charging that US law is wrong because only TWO of the ten commandments (theft, murder) are now reflected in standing law.

Re:They have a right ..

[BigBir3d]

church and state

president sworn in over a bible
all currency - 'in god we trust'
prayer in congressional sessions
plege of allegiance - 'under god'

the list goes on and on. it is nothing but a ideal. it is not actually practiced.

Re:Huh?

[mmmjstone]

Being a dorm rat, I can say that I have a large group of friends, including myself, who stay in the dorm becuase of the network. It's a lot easier to play games // connect to servers from the dorms. With this restriction on P2P applications, they'll push out the students stay in the dorms there for the high speed connection.

And, really, the showers aren't that bad.

Re:Can I moderate...

[killerc]

We're talking about college kids here, not research scientists. Don't be so kneejerk.

"special packets"

[MrChuck]

I've read stevens. I've read comer. I've perused the triple digit RFCs that created IP, and TCP and UDP and ICMP.

I'm intrigued about what s "special[ly] created packets not destined for any port" looks like?

Certainly there are broadcast and host destined packets that address the stack, but what you're implying is that they send non-TCP packets (feasable when you own the local segment) that "magically" take down a server.

That's not possible with TCP/IP. Or if it is, it represents a brokenness that should be addressed immediately.

Perhaps they send an ARP packet on the local net that tells the host that the router's IP is a different MAC address (that would hold for a 30 second ARP cache timeout).

So U.Fl folks, if you're running an application capable of doing peer to peer file sharing (one might describe most of the TCP application suite as that), run it on some art students' port with a sniffer.
Let them get "taken down" and pass the magic packet to those who write ipf and ipfw and pf.

Me? I'd assume that the admin just logs into their Switch and turns off your port.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
A.C.Clarke

perhaps this is just over the heads of student level knowledge of how networking works. Schools have certainly used that to advantage before.

INDEPENDENT florida alligator

[Anonymous Coward]

Like its name says, the florida alligator is NOT run by students, or affiliated with the university in any way. It's an independent company that makes a living by selling its paper to students. That is the only respect in which it is a "student" paper, and the views found in the Alligator bear little or no resemblance to reality. They want people to read their paper, so they can sell your eyeballs to their advertisers, and that's it.

Re:Schools to avoid!

[njdj]

40 copyright violations a month is a pain in the ass to deal w/

BZZZZT!

There were not 40 copyright violations a month. In fact, you do not know whether there were any copyright violations at all.

There were 40 accusations of copyright violations.

What if I'm sharing GNU stuff?

[Quietti]

That assumption that any and all P2P is systematically used to share non-free goods thta are meant to be purchased is preposterous. It's same the sort of assumption that associates Telnet/SSH with crackers and associates encryption with criminals. All of it is bull.

Re:What if I'm sharing GNU stuff?

[RatBastard]

Set up a web page. There are alternatives and sharing FSF/GNU/Linux doesn't make you special.

Re:What if I'm sharing GNU stuff?

[Quietti]

You missed the point entirely. Whatever the univeristy claims doesn't justify its "guilty until proven innocent" attitude against filesharing applications.

Privacy is a right

[Tony]

Considering that universities are heavily subsidised by federal and state dollars, and that most students pay heavily for the "privelege" of living in the dorms, this constitutes an invasion of privacy.

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.

As the saying goes, your right to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose. The rights of U of F do *not* supercede the rights of the students.

These are complicated times, but as citizens of a "Free" nation, we should not readily give up our rights for a little bit of perceived "safety." As a rule of thumb, no policy or action should interfere with the right of an individual in favor of the rights of a group.

But of course, that's probably just my continental libertarianism peeking through.

Re:Privacy is a right

[ajakk]

This is not an invasion of privacy. To be an invasion of privacy, you must have a reasonable expectation of privacy. No one has a reasonable expectation of privacy for their P2P shares because they are SHARING THE FILES TO THE PUBLIC! If you want your files to be private, then don't put them on a P2P network. You are not giving up any of your "rights".

SOCKS Proxy, anyone?

[Adrenochrome]

Yes, all my P2P traffic appears to originate from an open SOCKS proxy server in China.

I may have an abnormal amount of traffic on port 1080, but it's really some research for my thesis, I swear...

Western Oregon University

[descil]

... recently needed to take in all the computers of students in the dorms.

This was a brute force governmental-style tactic. We didn't bother with network scanners or anything like that. But the purpose was expressly not to check for kazaa or morpheus or any kind of file sharing software. This wasn't a RIAA-sponsored move, or anything like that. WOU is far too small a university for the RIAA to really pay us that kind of attention.

No, we were just replacing the virus software with Norton corporate, making sure everyone had up to date versions so their computers couldn't be easily compromised. And upgrading windows. This was so the network wouldn't die. I like to think it kind of sent a message to the students. Sure, we used brute force, but we did it to help them, not to hinder them or enforce the regulations of some stupid private company.

I think that's the way government should work, it's just unfortunate that far too often, everything gets fubar, and people get out of control. Like the U of F. Too much power, they should learn how to control it properly within themselves.

Re:Western Oregon University

[Zed2K]

Do universities really force their students to run university sponsered software on the own student bought and owned pc's (aka the students own private property)? I'd be screaming bloody murder if when I was in college some university network admin tried to install something on my computer without me being able to refuse. Thats the equivelent of the university coming into my room and searching my backpack.

Re:Western Oregon University

[descil]

No, the only requirement is that students have an up-to-date virus protection software, so that our network actually works and isn't bogged down by things like Blaster. We require up-to-date MS patches too, for MS users. Linux computers aren't touched, neither are Macs, because neither of those are targets, generally speaking.

One Could Argue

[Eezy Bordone]

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

One could argue that the school is only operating within the boundries of protecting ITS network from virii and lawsuits, it doesn't hurt that the students get protected from these as well. A little tough love never hurt anyone. We live in a technological rich world, some people have no idea what their machine is doing, maybe this will enlighten a few of them.

My biggest question about P2P useage...

[FrankNputer]

...is exactly what legitimate uses are being blocked by a rule like this?

C'mon, college students - tell us. I'm really, truly curious. What are the most compelling, legitimate uses of P2P software for you?

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[Zed2K]

No matter what anyone says you have already made up your mind that they can't be wrong. So why ask the question?

Its called entertainment. Like watching DVD's or playing video games. College is not just all about going to class and getting the grades.

Forget the whole college thing. The students that go there and live in the dorm have chosen that location as their home for 4 or 5 years. In doing so they should be given the ability to act like its their home.

Just because you think P2P applications have no legit use for you doesn't mean some student somewhere doesn't consider their entertainment as a legit use.

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[RatBastard]

Forget the whole college thing. The students that go there and live in the dorm have chosen that location as their home for 4 or 5 years. In doing so they should be given the ability to act like its their home.

So they should be allowed to crank up their stereos as loud as they want? How about smoking in the hallways? Why not let them crap in the sinks when they feel like it? It's their home, isn't it?

No, it's not. It's the collective home of everyone living in the dorm. As such, the residence of said dorm should behave in ways that do not unfairly infringe on the comfort and livability of other students.

And just like students should be respecting the rights and comfort of other studnts, they should be respecting the access rights of other students. Hogging the network downloading boatloads iof music and DivX rips of movies is hardly fair to the students trying to do research, read email, or do other "legitimite" business on the network.

The network, like life, isn't just about you. Stop being so selfish for a while.

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[Zed2K]

"So they should be allowed to crank up their stereos as loud as they want?"

Sure, this is college

"How about smoking in the hallways?"

If its a smoking floor then why not.

"Why not let them crap in the sinks when they feel like it?"

Now your just being stupid for the sake of being stupid, although shitting in the sinks among other gross things tend to happen. Thats why there are cleaning people.

"No, it's not. It's the collective home of everyone living in the dorm. As such, the residence of said dorm should behave in ways that do not unfairly infringe on the comfort and livability of other students."

So in other words if some student were to get the permission of everyone on the floor it would be ok. Sorry, this is college. Shit happens, things get crazy, its not a perfect world. Did you go to a same sex college or not go at all?

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[omega_cubed]

Gentoo and Knoppix ISOs.
Stuff like the Blood Gulch Chronicles
or the LoTR and Matrix trailers

Bittorrent speeds up the downloads for these by quite some factors. I believe the speed up might even be linear to the number of users for the first 4 or 5.

I am not kidding. P2P just doesn't do it for me. The music I listen to are either too old or too obscure to find on p2p networks. It is much easier to borrow a CD from the music library or talk to your friends and listen to their CD's.

W

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[FrankNputer]

So you'd rather make assumptions about what I believe & attack me rather than answer a legitimate question? Very mature...

Just because you live in a college dorm doesn't make it your home. There are restrictions - often, you can't have a hot plate, for instance.

If you want the right to do whatever you want, then shouldn't you pay for your own home, rather than living in subsidized student housing?

Re:My biggest question about P2P useage...

[FrankNputer]

Ok - I might buy Bittorrent, but of course a lot of Universities have ISOs on their servers already.

Don't know what the Blood Gulch Chronicles are, so I can't comment there...

Movie trailers are available without using P2P, though. I watch them all the time on my lowly DSL connection, when I'm choosing what movie to go see.

P2P doesn't really do much for me, either. :)

How to bypass this easily

[Hackie_Chan]

Use a non-WIndows operating system.

Re:How to bypass this easily

[BSDevil]

Why will running a BSD/Mac/Linux/BeOS/whatever box bypass this?

If they pinpoint scans based on volumes, then P2P programs running NetBSD don't consume any more/less bandwidth than Windows ones.

If they portscan, what stops them from portscanning your Debian system?

If they disable your jack, I don't care what OS you're running, you got nothing.

And if the point you were making was that people who run non-Windows systems don't run any P2P apps, then just say so, and don't pander to the "I hate Windows" crowd.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Xerithane]

As an ISP, the university has a duty to provide fast, uncrippled access to students, who ARE paying for this service.

Universities aren't ISPs nor do they try to be. They are... Educational Institutions. Internet access is provided for educational purposes. I'm sure if you check the ToS they say that is why they are giving you the ethernet drop.

The fundamental problem here is that people are forgetting that P2P filesharing applications are a legitimate, important use of the resnet

How is a P2P filesharing app legitimate? It's copyright infringement 99% of the time. It's so they can grab music, porn, and movies off the internet.

It is no more acceptable to disable P2P access, much less suspend accounts, than it is to turn off HTTP or E-mail to save bandwidth.

The difference is HTTP and EMail aren't used to exploit others copyrights with huge files. You don't have a "right" to internet access, anyway. You have a right to whatever the University says you have. Nothing more than that. You connect to their network, you are their bitch.

is there any software like this freely available?

[rm -rf /etc/*]

I haven't been able to find anything yet. I'd like to be able to see who is running kazaa/gnutella/etc on our local network so we can contact them before a higher up does. Is there any software that can do this easily?

Bad EFF

[Rick Zeman]

"This is what happens when you try to fight the peer-to-peer revolution," said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "You either ban the technology completely or censor people's access to content."

When universities start to make decisions about what students can read, watch and listen to, they are changing the nature of student research and thought, Schultz said.

"It's essentially turning interactive computing into television. This has huge implications for academic freedom," he said.

Give me a break. Since when is P2P = student research and thought? That's sophistry.
Their stance on p2p makes me regret giving them money. Good thing they do other good deeds that compensate.

good ole boy Schultz is confused

[e_lazardo]

"...they are changing the nature of student research and thought, Schultz said."

'research and thought' at UoF...

Ahahahahahahahahahah!

You keep avoiding the question.

[pclminion]

The question is, do you believe people should be treated as innocent until proven guilty, or do you not?

Since P2P use is not a crime (whereas copyright violation is), it seems you should have to prove that a user was trading a copyrighted file before the P2P use becomes unacceptable.

Drugs like oxycontin and vicodin are massively abused, but we don't treat anyone who happens to hold a bottle of vicodin as a criminal. Lock picking equipment can certainly be used for all kinds of evil, but we don't ban that either. Drunk people cause many deaths every year yet we do not ban alcohol. I can walk into a BSDM shop and legally buy equipment to tie up another individual and torture them. None of these things are illegal, because in this country we have this concept of innocent until proven guilty. Just because a tool can be used to commit a crime does not mean that those who have that tool are criminals. This surely is idealism, yes, and it is very important idealism.

Perhaps a "realist" such as yourself would be happier in a more "realistic" country, such as Iran, where they don't have these pesky ideals.

I think you are avoiding the question because you actually don't believe in the idea that you should have to prove someone's guilt before treating them as guilty. All you have to do is answer the question...

But I'm tired of arguing with an AC.

I highly doubt it.

[fireboy1919]

You do it right, and this won't be a problem. You have to connect the router wrong, since most won't answer DHCP queries on the uplink port.

You won't actually be able to use the internet in this case, either, since the router will be unable to get an IP address for itself from the DHCP server.

Why would someone leave a router connected like that if it wasn't working when they turned it on? They'd fiddle with it until it worked, at which point no one would have any problems.

Alternatives?

[wikthemighty]

Wow, what a wonderous world we live in where students can recieve e-mail when their internet connection is hosed *goes wide eyed*

Doesn't seem that wonderous to me, but maybe I'm just getting old.

I can remember being on the Oregon State University campus, and being within 5 minutes walk from no less than 4 student computer labs, one of which was open 24-hours!

On top of that, when I worked in IT and we used to kill someone's dialup account (remember dialup?) if they were connecting with a terminal they would get a message to call us so the situation could be resolved. When the dorms were outfitted with network jacks, there were technical people living in each dorm to help coordinate this sort of situation, you could just walk upstairs/downstairs.

And if you weren't a total recluse, you could probably get onto one of your neighbor's computers to check your email...

Re:Schools to avoid!

[TopShelf]

That's right, 40 accusations of copyright violations. In terms of actual violations, it was probably closer to 40,000 per month!

kick if RUNNING, not just having the software

[VEGETA_GT]

Well In my collage, some nut in a dorm crashed Sheridan entire network somehow by being a huge P2P hog. Find, but others in the school using the network trying to do work get screwed. So yes if you are RUNNING any P2P software, then sure kick them off the network.

Now say I do have p2p software on my laptop that I own, and take home. If the software is never run on the schools networks, just on home net, then there is no issue. The way this reads to me, I would be hit because I still have the software. So there are cases this is a little bit much. Personally in collage, I ran into this case, Only used schools networks for schoolwork (and some games, hey stress relief) and home ran a little p2p. So change it to RUNNING p2p then kicked off network.

UF isn't the only school to do this...

[MadAnthony02]

almost every school does some form of this. Either they don't allow P2P at all, or they throttle bandwidth. The only difference is that UF has a nifty automated tool to do it. So if you pick another school based on this, you probably are going to be in the same boat.

As an employee of a college's tech support department, I have mixed feelings about the P2P blocking, but the virus blocking is great - especially with fun worms like Welchia and Blaster that spread superfast with no user action.

Wireless network?

[richieb]

Wireless ad-hoc network will let you share between students. Will FU start jamming that too?

Time to start using VPN

[Mustang Matt]

I kind of think vpn tunnels are going to be the only solution to problems like this. Sure it's slower, but better than not at all.

Unconstitutional behavior of a State College.

[kulakovich]

I seem to remember this being a big issue in law somewhere. It is a public institution receiving public funds, and therefore must abide by no internal rule that comes into conflict with federal law. (or something like that) - And crossing the line into the users machine, well, that certainly doesn't sound right. Don't you need a warrant for that?

I guess the question is, is this school public or private? If public, they could get paddled. Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA1986) may actually have some value here. - Because they sure as hell can't squeeze this under the Patriot Act.

(all opinions of this humble correspondent should be presumed wrong until proven otherwise.) kulakovich

Re:Unconstitutional behavior of a State College.

[RatBastard]

Nowhere does it say they actually scan the contents of your computer. They analize traffic to and from and scan the ports on your system.

Cool!

[Andrewkov]

Where can I get this program? I want to run it at work! That will really piss off the users! hahahaha! (Evil BOFH laugh)

Re:kick if RUNNING, not just having the software

[cybercrap]

Obviously you didn't learn how to spell in collEge.

Re:Uh, sure it is

[TrbleClef]

Choosing UF for its proximity to beaches is one of the silliest things I've ever heard.

Florida's public state university system is comprised of 10 universities and a college and the MAJORITY of them are closer to any beach than UF. FSU, FAMU, UWF, UNF, USF, NCF, FAU, FIU are all within a relatively close proximity to FL's beaches.

UF happens to be one of the most established and respected universities around. Except for FSU.

ObNole: I go to FSU.

Re:This is flamebait

[stevew]

"Use of Kazaa to transmit certain material *may* be a crime."

Look - if a person is using Kazaa to transmit to others who haven't paid for it - that IS a crime. Whether you like the fact that it is illegal or not is irrelevant - it's still a crime.

Others have argued that the school needs to prove that you're committing a crime.

THAT is nonsense.

The school has the right to control how their network is used. PERIOD! Resnets are NOT the same thing as the DSL connection I have to my house. There is a completely different set of requirements and legalities that apply.

If I use Kazaa to commit a crime from my DSL line then the carrier isn't liable - I am. The student can't say the same thing - the Resnet provider is likely going to be held equally liable.

Let's draw some lines here. I hate the DMCA just as much as the next slashdotoid. However, I also tend to act responsibly and within the law. I think it should be legal for me to copy music onto another format for my own use. The same is true for movies or any other "entertainment."
That doesn't mean it is right for me to give that material to others who haven't paid for it.

Another way of looking at it - The P2P world and their tendancy to share music, etc. is why I have my rights being infringed by RIAA and MPAA! What you say? (Yeah I know Valenti thinks he won the betamax case...excluding that detail ;-) They would have the strength of claiming rampant theft as the excuse for abortions like the DMCA!

So - if the resnet decides to crack down and they use a broad brush to fix the problem - the bad apples are the ones that caused the problem!

Sounds OK to me

[retro128]

I know there are a lot of naysayers who say that this action is rather Draconian, but I am inclined to disagree. It would be one thing if an ISP did this, but this is UF's private network we're talking about here. They should be permitted to operate it however they please.

I am sure that being a university, that high speed access to the 'Net was meant to be used as an academic tool, not for hosting warez and game servers. Universities also have big problems with security. The network admins have virtually no control over the systems that get put in the dorms, and all it takes is one Joe to download an email and infect the whole network with the latest baddie of the week.

Let me put it this way, if YOU were in charge of UF's network, would you be down with the kiddies sucking up 90% of your netfeed downloading warez, setting up servers, and exposing you to legal liability? I sure wouldn't, and Icarus sounds like a great tool to automatically track down open these people, whether their ports were opened intentionally or not.

(Uhm, no. It's a contract) Re:Good for them

[kulakovich]

No offense meant, but I believe your tuition puts the college or university under contractual obligation to provide a service - until of course you pooch that service by being a jerk and get your access revoked for violation/abuse of your end of a user agreement.

But you can't call it a privledge, I don't think.

kulakovich

Re:(Uhm, no. It's a contract) Re:Good for them

[Theaetetus]

No offense meant, but I believe your tuition puts the college or university under contractual obligation to provide a service - until of course you pooch that service by being a jerk and get your access revoked for violation/abuse of your end of a user agreement.

Out of curiousity, if you violate their ToS and lose your service (or if you just refuse to accept the ToS and refuse the service), do you get your 'technology fee' of your tuition back? Or do they continue charging you for a service you've refused to accept? In which case, isn't that illegal?

Anyone tried this? I'm out of school now, and my school wasn't filtering anyway, so it's not an issue for me. What about others? Maybe friends who don't have computers yet are still paying the fee for an active network port?

-T

Re:(Uhm, no. It's a contract) Re:Good for them

[sexylicious]

The school I went to charged everyone a tech fee of $45. They said that it covered the use of the campus-wide computing resources. We had many computer labs, a few parallel clusters, and many libraries. They always said that's where the fee went.
Even though a couple of students protested that they never use the campus facilities, those students still had to pay the fee.
And it is the university's bandwidth, so they can do whatever they want with it. I even had to sign a little document that said that if I logged into the campus' network (or my department's network), then they could cut me off at any time for whatever reason.
This was the University of Washington's Seattle campus.

Re:(Uhm, no. It's a contract) Re:Good for them

[jayhawk88]

The service you are paying for is an education, not unfettered broadband access.

Use the parking example I mentioned above. Say I suddenly decide the campus is my own personal parking lot, and I start dropping my rig anywhere I damn please, like right in front of Stedmen Hall in the middle of the quad. This obviously is a disruption and inconvenience to everyone else, so I get a ticket. But I don't care, I just keep doing it. After about 100 tickets they tow my car, revoke my parking pass, and tell me that I am forbidden to park anywhere on campus from now on. I either have to walk or bum rides. I still get the education service, but because I'm an asshole I have lost my parking privledges.

I will admit that the university smacking down everyone it detects with a file sharing program seems bit harsh, but then they do get a couple warnings before things . And let's be honest and call a spade a spade here: out of all the computers they come across with port 6699 or whatever open, how many do you think are actually using it for legitimate, legal file sharing, or research purposes or whatever. 5%? I'd be shocked if it was that high.

Re:(Uhm, no. It's a contract) Re:Good for them

[Fred Ferrigno]

Even though a couple of students protested that they never use the campus facilities, those students still had to pay the fee.

Much like my student body fees, which support on-campus activities that I rarely attend because I spend as little time on campus as possible. It's bullshit. No, I do not want my tuition used to subsidize a video rental store. The freshman can go to Blockbuster like everyone else.

It's a privacy issue. Period.

[mikedaisey]

So I assume you wouldn't mind if an ISP which had a 100% monopoly on the local market regularly climbed into its customers computers and looked through their files, shutting down their connections if they found anything amiss?

That's what I thought.

Re:It's a privacy issue. Period.

[jasonditz]

Moreover, why stop at that?

Overuse of electricity is a similar problem, so why not just have the power company break into your house while you're sleeping and see if you've got any electrically inefficient appliances hooked up?

Or let the telcos monitor phone calls to see if people are talking about something worth talking about?

Re:It's a privacy issue. Period.

[sketerpot]

Normally tact can accomplish the same result if your user base is small enough. Call someone up and get them to run an anti-virus program, or turn Kazaa off, or something. If that fails to work, charging extra in the bills usually helps.

Re:It's a privacy issue. Period.

[willtsmith]

If the student has a telephone, they are able to dial into local ISPs. It's not a monopoly.

Re:It's a privacy issue. Period.

[LMariachi]

Do students get any refund if they don't use the campus network?

Re:It's a privacy issue. Period.

[MaestroRC]

Well you see, that's the problem. There are so many students on resnet, and so few admins. If they spent the time to call up every student and smack them over the back of their hands for sharing files, an IT army would be required. It's much easier and more efficient to disconnect the fouling user, and wait around for them to call. Sure, it's nice to be able to put my PC online in my room, but there are hundreds, if not thousands of PCs available for FREE that are IT owned in labs for me to use. And lots of people use them. When you plug into the network, you take responsibility for your and your computer's actions on the network, period. Just because its a public institution doesn't mean the other 400 people living in my dorm should be able to swarm my computer with viruses and worms, and eat all the bandwidth for no reason. If they aren't knowledgeable enough to take care of it themselves, then someone has to, and that's what this is for.

What operating systems/machines does Icarus run?

[Skapare]

What operating systems/machines does Icarus run? Will it work on my Sun Sparc machine running NetBSD?

Open-source

[BSDevil]

I'm curious - all articles on Icarus seem to mention that it's an open-source piece of software, and yet they're quoted as saying that they hope to keep the internal workings of the thing a secret so "hackers" don't figure out how it works. How do these two corrolate with each other? If it's really OS, then show us the source (under whatever license they so choose) and rely on the stregth of Icarus' logic to preserve the integrity of the system . If it's not OS, then stop marketing it as if it is.

Re:Open-source

[forkboy]

They probably mean that they used the code from another open source project. Since they're keeping this program in-house, they don't need to show you the source, only if they release it for use by others.

It's a dumb idea, in the end. The student are going to quit living on campus or quit coming to that school. Either way, UF loses a ton of money. Guess they shoulda put some consideration into separate internet connections for academic and dorm users.

Re:Open-source

[riffer]

It's a dumb idea, in the end. The student are going to quit living on campus or quit coming to that school. Either way, UF loses a ton of money. Guess they shoulda put some consideration into separate internet connections for academic and dorm users.

I'm sure UF would save a TON of money if on-campus housing was eliminated. It's an expensive service to provide and all the residence halls could be retrofitted to become classrooms, or torn down for room to build other facilities... But frankly, lazy college students need to not have to walk/bike/drive 2 miles to campus waaaaaaaaay out-weighs their indignation of not being able to fileshare porn.

And remember, UF is a State school system. Student tuition is only a fragment of its total income. You want to see UF suffer financial losses? Find a way to pull all their lucrative collegiate licensing and athletics program (UF athletics department carries quite a bit of financial clout and power on campus). Or look into getting all the grants and research dollars from private sectors turned off.

Re:Open-source

[forkboy]

Hmm...I'm not so sure I agree with you here. I'll concede that the academic costs are far past tuition costs at state schools, but dormitory costs are most cases a profit. Tuition covers just that....tuition. Room and board are always separate expenses and for state schools far outweight the cost of tuition.

It doesn't cost the school very much to put a student (or two) up in a 10' by 20' room and give them 3 cafeteria-style meals a day. Considering even state schools get around $4000-5000 a year for dorm room and a meal plan,(ballparking this number based on a couple random state school websites) they're probably coming out ahead for your basic two-student dorm room. (Ever wonder why singles in the dorms cost more?)

Now figure in the profits from students spending money at the campus corner-store and non-mealplan eateries, you're talking even more profit. Even if the cafeterias and stores are operated by a third party, that third party still pays significant cash for the space and utilities.

The cost of internet access is paid for out of a student IT fee. At most schools, the dorms use the same connection as the rest of the campus, so that's not really a factor in the school's overhead for the dorms.

I doubt that their internet usage policies are going to cause anyone to pull funding from academic policies or sports...sure that would hurt them, but it's not going to happen. When they can't keep the dorms filled up, though, you're going to see them start changing their tune real fast...state schools are really hurting for money right now because in this wonderful country of ours, education funding is the first to go when money is tight. Once their budget gets even worse because of their gestapo monitoring policy, they'll change their minds.

Re:Open-source

[riffer]

Hmm...I'm not so sure I agree with you here. I'll concede that the academic costs are far past tuition costs at state schools, but dormitory costs are most cases a profit. Tuition covers just that....tuition. Room and board are always separate expenses and for state schools far outweight the cost of tuition.

You are correct sir, at least regarding tuition and room-and-board being separate. I'm unclear on what you mean by room-and-board outweighing tuition... Do you mean state schools consider it more important? Or that it's a bigger part of the budget?

It doesn't cost the school very much to put a student (or two) up in a 10' by 20' room and give them 3 cafeteria-style meals a day.

Physical maintenance of facilities, security, plumbing, electricity, and of course the Internet access. Space is at a high premium at UF campus (the land was actually donated to UF due to its unsuitable conditions for building... Lake Alice isn't artificial, despite various claims by assinine UF ex-presidents).

Now figure in the profits from students spending money at the campus corner-store and non-mealplan eateries, you're talking even more profit. Even if the cafeterias and stores are operated by a third party, that third party still pays significant cash for the space and utilities.

All the UF eateries are indeed run by a third party company, with the exception of a few kiosks run by various student organizations. But using the term "profit" is misleading.... Again, this is a state-run facility we're talking about here. The money isn't going to a bunch of stockholders. But there is a well-established "Good 'Ol Boy" network in Florida's state school system, as any Florida native can tell you...

My original point wasn't that UF was hurting for money. Just that UF's economic stability is not resting on the back of the department of housing by any stretch of the imagination. THe UF athletics department is FAR more critical to the future of UF.

(I grew up in Gainesville, FL. My mother was an executive secretary at the Dept. of Housing for 17+ years. I'm not just talking out of the side of my mouth here, folks...)

MACs are assigned to students

[KalvinB]

If a student changes the MAC they'd be completely off the network.

MACs at Arizona State are registered to students. So changing it requires contacting IT to get your connection running again. Unless you manage to steal someone else's mac that's already registered with the school.

I'd imagine Florida has a similar system. You can't just slap a computer on the network and be on-line.

Uni's aren't run by hacks. They know how to trace connections and simplistic "hacks" like yours have obviously been considered.

Ben

"You've got trojans"

[Ilan Volow]

When the less technically-inclined students unfamiliar with geek lingo start getting e-mails informing them they have trojans, I can only imagine what kind of responses the IT department will get.

Re:"You've got trojans"

[LittleGuy]

When the less technically-inclined students unfamiliar with geek lingo start getting e-mails informing them they have trojans, I can only imagine what kind of responses the IT department will get.

Especially when they play Southern Cal....

Drawbacks

[MBoffin]

So as far as I understand, if it detects that you have a trojan or virus, you get disconnected.

Moral issues aside of whether they should be running P2P software or not, doesn't this cause a problem for the person who now has a disconnected computer with a virus or trojan and can't go do his "auto-update" to get the latest virus defs?

Bzzz.

[mikedaisey]

Actually, they are looking inside the computers themselves, identifying files, viruses and apps.

Re:Bzzz.

[omega_cubed]

Is it really possible to "scan inside the computer"? I know that with many of my peers, the computer is so poorly locked down that anyone on the subnet can get read/write priv. to their Windows boxes. But there are also a great number who pay attention to such things. And wouldn't bypassing security/privacy for PC's constitute cyber-crime?

Since the article didn't really elaborate, my best guess is that for Icarus to be legit, all they can really do is to do a port scan on the machines. The "worms and viruses" they refer too often open up otherwise unused ports, and the classic 6*** ports used by P2P apps can be easily determined.

The article mentions that

Icarus then scans their computer, detects any worms, viruses or programs that act as a server, such as Kazaa.

One way to read is the program scans the computer's contents and look for files, viruses and apps. Another way to look at it is the program scans the computer's ports and see if there's anything listening on ports that is "not allowed" to be open, i.e. worms that act as servers, viruses that act as servers AND apps that act as servers.

My school implemented a similar policy last year, when they monitor the traffic going to and from common p2p ports, and only allow us to have one upload going on at a given time. (The school acknowledges the legit uses of p2p, and so long as you don't violate copyright, you are wellcome to use it, if you do not overburden the university network. It was a purely bandwidth issue.) Other servers, such as the ones for games, or http or ftp (and as far as I can tell, SMTP too) are left to the owner's discretion.

My reading of the article is that the school created nothing more than an automated Portscan->Winpopup->Email->Access-Shutdow n system.

On a different note, I found it quite perculiar that no student have spoken up against UF's guilty until proven innocent stance. And blocking LAN games? That hardly consumes any bandwidth (going in and out of the university infrastructure), and I certainly hope that the Dorms are not so crowded that half a dozen guys playing Unreal Tournament drags down the network for the entire building! If that's the case, you wouldn't want to live there to start with.

Then again, I loved the quote

The no file-servers policy has actually been in place for several years because several enterprising students had used the university network covertly to run their own commercial websites, some of which were illegal, according to Bird.

"One of the more popular websites for creating fake IDs was run off one of the student computers in the residence halls," he said. "It was up for about a month and a half. That example highlights exactly what you don't want to happen.

"The peer-to-peer file-sharing policy is a direct extension of that," he said.

Yep. University life should be just like real life. We banned the making of bicycles because some hoodlum terrorized pedestrians and committed robbery on one.

W

Re:Bzzz.

[John Courtland]

I got a friend at Valpraiso in Indiana, and we tried playing system shock 2 over the internet. No way, no how. I couldn't find him (even though he has a public IP) and he couldn't find me. His school shut off ICMP so I can't ping him. I set up a SSH server and he was able to log in so I know he can get into my system, but they lock down so many ports it's amazing.

Re:Bzzz.

[bakreule]

Actually, they are looking inside the computers themselves, identifying files, viruses and apps.

RTFA. Icarus just scans open ports on students' computers looking for any kind of servers, or viruii/trojans that are acting as servers.

Re:Bzzz.

[ePhil_One]

His school shut off ICMP so I can't ping him

ICMP is used in numerous DOS attacks, and with hundreds if not thousands of student machines exposed to the internet, it could easily become a farm for DDOS attacks. So its not unreasonable.

However, with a bit of work they could allow pings and some other key ICMP services while still guarding against this

Re:Bzzz.

[John Courtland]

I definitely understand the reasoning behind denying ICMP, but they other services they deny are amazing. He cannot receive incoming port requests, nor can he send data on most "service" ports. It's just a little if not a lot overzealous to me.

P2P bad, spyware also bad.

[Nucleon500]

P2P causes a lot of traffic and is expensive, and often results in C&D letters. Obviously colleges have an incentive to get it off their network, or at least throttle it. But there are much better ways.

Florida's current solution is much too invasive, and not very effective. Does the app run in Linux? Wine? Mac? Limiting operating system choices is a very bad thing for a university, especially for the computer science students who are trying to widen their experience.

It's also not effective. What's to stop someone from running the spyware in an emulator? Renaming their P2P programs?

The problem is that a university network has untrusted (in the security usage) clients. But it's not a problem: It's easy to tell who's running P2P programs, and who's infected, centrally. This is more effective and less limiting.

Re:Alternative OSs?

[m3000]

As I'm typing this in Linux, I can assure you that it works with alternative OS's. Just a simple firewall rule adjustment, and there's no problem. They even have instructions on setting up duplex and firewall settings on the DHNet webpage

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

[Swanktastic]

And, like Icarus, the rocket foolishly soared too high, and lost control of its servo guidance mechanism, leaving us with some... six hours to live.

So, let's go live now to the charred remains of the only bridge out of town with Arnie Pie and Arnie in the Sky!

So why did they name this project Icarus again? Some clever IT worker is "fighting the power" perhaps with a subtly fiendish stab at the administration?

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 ;)

Re:And what about legit uses?

[RatBastard]

If you can present a valid reason for having a server doing a particular job, then take it up with the IT departments and see if you can get a server colocated in a server area. With the eeception of SSH, any valid server functions you listed above can be setup in a centralized server environment.

As for your SSH client disk, why are you running your programs on someone elses' computer? If you really want transportable data, put copies of your files on a USB thumbdrive.

Re:And what about legit uses?

[archnerd]

I'm going to UF next year, so I've done quite a bit of research into their computing policy. I agree that it's a little draconian, but they do have a standard procedure for obtaining exemptions to the ban against servers. I plan to make use of it in order to run an ssh server. Think about what a tiny minority of would-be servers really have legitimate academic use. The remaining 99% are going to be running P2P servers for their porn and their "music". While I'd like to be able to run P2P, I'd rather give it up than have my bandwidth decimated by file-sharing traffic. As long as exemptions are handed out sensibly, I don't really have a problem with the policy.

Re:And what about legit uses?

[bishiraver]

And the most sensible and simplist way to limit abuse of bandwidth is through bandwidth quotas and caps, not through shutting down servers.

Re:And what about legit uses?

[viperblades]

Because some people have these things called laptops. These people like to transfer files from their laptops to their desktops remotely. Also sometimes people do work on their friends computer and like to transfer the files to their computer.

Privacy, privacy, privacy.

[mikedaisey]

nice story. What you neglect to mention is that in the case of the U of F, they are actually looking INSIDE the computers on their network to identify apps and files.

So while network shaping sounds good, privacy invasion does not.

Re:Privacy, privacy, privacy.

[valdis]

So you're complaining that they looked in *THE OPEN SHARES* to identify stuff?

That's like leaving the blinds open and complaining about peeping toms across the street.....

Re:Privacy, privacy, privacy.

[willtsmith]

That depends on how they're doing it.

If they have a standard Anti-Virus (McAfee, Symantec) program that "phones home" that's OK. If they remotely scanning files from another computer, then thats bad.

I doubt that students will get free broadband if they move off-campus (if they can get broadband at all).

Beyond that, there are likely ways to secure regions of your computer against scanning (via user account privleges (in Win2000/XP)).

Yeah, right

[KalvinB]

It's pretty easy to tell the sniffer is being blocked. In which case your connection is killed.

Ben

Wireless Network NOT effected.

[Penguinoflight]

UF has a grassroots wireless network that I am told will be awesome in another year. The Icarus progam isn't supposed to run on it, so that's awesome. I hope people don't abuse it though, I'll be going to UF in another 2 years..

I'm a mile away from UF

[Chatmag]

Our offices are about a mile away from UF. We chose this area because of the University, among other reasons.

When SoBig hit, we saw a lot of bounces in our mail queue, all originating from one UF IP. I called their tech support, and they took care of the problem. That was over a month ago, and since then they changed some of their policies regarding P2P. It was school funds (taxpayer money) that had to pay for the cleanup, not only of that one box but the entire system. UF isn't just in Gainesville, it has branches across northern Florida, and all of that had to be cleaned up.

UF has a private network, and I would imagine that they have provisions for legitimate research projects that would include file sharing applications. I'm just glad they cleaned up their systems when SoBig hit. At its peak I saw over 400 emails an hour bounced, with the majority coming from the UF systems.

They're blocking IRC

[_KiTA_]

Another student was blocked twice for using Internet Relay Chat, a chat program that also allows for some file sharing.

What a bunch of asshats. These people are blocking IRC and kicking people off of it. I'm sorry, but if I got punted from my school's network for chatting on IRC -- something that uses like 1k of bandwidth every 10 minutes or so -- I'd be telling them some creative uses for Cat5 and their spinchter.

In Other News....

[chef_raekwon]

LRP makes a resurgent comeback, with a particular thrust from University and College students, aiming to block intrusions from Port Scanners.....

Computer Science

[foo(foo(foo(bar)))]

What about computer science students who have legitimate assignments writing TCP or UDP servers. That is a very reasonable (and common) assignment for an intro to networking class?

Can you go after the University when they cut out you internet access for doing your assignments? Or can you refuse to do your homework because your professor has assigned something that breaks school rules?

Alternative to completly restricting all server trafic, wouldn't it be possible to fingerprint the protocols that you don't want and only scan for those?

This whole thing just seems way to far reaching...

Cute: See their rules on firewalls

[Adrenochrome]

AUP Policy

On page 3...

Don't most modern operating systems include at least basic firewalling functionality?

Uhh, non-issue?

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Last time I checked... my network, my terms. No excuses, no exceptions. I don't allow people who visit my building to join their typhoid-mary laptops to my network, ever. I don't allow our employees who bring their typhoid-mary laptops to join my network, ever. If the box is out of my control, its hostile. Period. (Welcome to Windows, btw...)

A college LAN is different, why... exactly... the school is accountable for the network, and therefore must have authority over it. OTOH, with a student who has no accountability for its use, HOW can they have any authority over how it's used? Would YOU accept being on the wrong end of that relationship? With someone else using your stuff? And you're responsible for the results?

Problem is... students have full authority, and it's pretty much unchecked. So, FL is implementing a measure of accountability. Yep, real far-fetched.

And sure, a few knee-jerks will say that the students pay for the school, and that money allows the network to exist, so it's theirs.

And god bless 'em. Here, we've got a couple hundred thousand people per year who cause our income, so the next time you walk into a business... just sit down at a keyboard, and start typing. See how far your "I paid for this" argument gets you in court. No, really... see if they buy it.

P2P is *horrible* for networks

[Alioth]

I disagree with scanning people's PCs.

However, P2P sharing is the *worst* thing your network can be beset with. The leeches hog incredible amounts of bandwidth. Kazaa et al. are also very network hostile with measures to get around a sysadmin's attempt to shape traffic.

It takes more and more admin time just blocking malware and P2P music sharing. The university network is there primarily for academic purposes, not wholesale music piracy.

It's a frigging nightmare. If I were a University admin, my goal would be to not block ports or traffic because I want proper end-to-end connectivity. But then you get the cancer that is Kazaa which actively tries to evade your attempts at sharing traffic. The only route left for the admin is a strict anti-music sharing policy. If only the leeches could control themselves instead of getting not only their mouths in the trough, but their front trotters too, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But of course, they show no restraint.

If I were a university admin, I'd make it very plain what the policy is when students get their connection. The policy would be no music sharing, no spam, no malware (if you want to share legitimate music, then you either put it on the music department's website or rent your own server). Anyone caught sharing music otherwise would have their account locked and would have to come to me for a bollocking. Three offences and it'd be disciplinary action.

Re:P2P is *horrible* for networks

[danila]

They are not "leeches", they are "users", damn it! In the same way I can say that WWW is the cancer of the Internet, because it wastes so much resources. And I can call you a virus, because you are wasting perfectly good oxygen... Do you see the flaws in my reasoning? If you do, I hope you also understand that opposing P2P on the grounds of resource use is simply insane. If you had a 2400 modem access shared between 100 users, would that mean that images on web-pages are a plague? No, that would simply mean that your technical capabilities are inadequate for the needs of the users.

I absolutely hate it when network admins play this holier-than-thou game and pretend to know better what everyone should be doing. Surprise! Surprise! It's not for you to decide. If you work in the university, then students are the clients and they should have the final say in what is and what is not allowed on the network.

And if there is not enough bandwidth, well, then get more bandwidth. Charge students extra for the network connection if you have to. When I studied in LUT I paid 17 euros to Sonera for the 1024/256Kbit connection in my apartment without any limits whatsoever. You can also set up trafic shapers, give higher priority to non-P2P traffic, do anything else, but please don't bitch about P2P. If you are a taxi driver, it's not your fucking business where I want to go to. Shut up and get me there.

Re:P2P is *horrible* for networks

[Alioth]

Oh for crying out loud, what's the university network there for? Wholesale music copying or _academic uses_? They are LUSERS, not users.

On a university network, music copying, playing games MUST take second place to academic uses. Increasing the pipe size to accomodate uses that the network is NOT there for just diverts money away from things like buying new computers for the university. If users download reasonable amounts of music, or only play games where it won't be stopping another student getting their coursework, fair game. But when the leeches just max out the pipe with a use that cannot even be vaguely justified as a proper use of the university network, the line has to be drawn. If you want to download music 24/7, buy your own sodding bandwidth.

It IS for the network admins to decide. You are wrong. They are leeches. Having your big pipe maxed out for music copying is leeching. There's absolutely no need.

If I was a taxi driver, it IS my fucking business where you want to go. If you want to go to Liverpool docks at 2am, sorry, I'm not taking you there. Similarly, if I'm running an _academic_ network it is my fucking business if you abuse that network for non-academic uses. A university network is not, never has been and never will be there for sharing commercial music. The only time a university network can legitimately be used for sharing music is where it involves the music faculty. And they have a perfectly good webserver for that, and don't need Kazaa.

Re:P2P is *horrible* for networks

[danila]

Yeah, sure. Next you'll be arguing for forbidding any parties on campus, because in the university people should be studying, not having fun. :) Guess what, it's the campus network. If people download music in computer labs, hunt them down and kill them. ;) But if they do it from their dorms, that's perfectly reasonable activity. I understand perfectly well that campus network may be a part of the larger university network, but there is an important distinction. Even though the university is reponsible for providing connectivity in both university buildings and the dorms, the purposes are different. Internet in dorms is for fun as much as TV in dorms is for fun and as common rooms are for fun. People pay for a place to live there 24h. Obviously, they do not intend to study there 100% of the time and university should understand that. If the university is providing Internet access to the dorms, it better do well, otherwise students have a valid reason to be angry.

You also use several times the term "maxing out the big pipe". Well, let me tell you. If you are a network admin, it's your responsibility to manage the network, so that it's technically impossible for one user to take over the whole pipe, denying access to everyone else, not by blocking legitimate traffic (P2P in dorms is legitimate traffic), but by limiting individual connections so that a user gets 10Mbps downstream when there is no other traffic, but is limited to 256Kbps when the network is more heavily used.

Re:P2P is *horrible* for networks

[Alioth]

I have nothing against *reasonable* usage i.e. people maintaining a bit of self-control. If I had my druthers, the dorm networks would all get very high speed Internet access.

But the leeches have to spoil it for everyone else. I have nothing against people gaming from the dorm rooms. True; no single user can max the pipe out, but a handful of leeches who are downloading music 24/7 can. If these people could excercise some self control and maybe limit themselves to a couple of mp3s a day, everyone would be happy (well, perhaps not the RIAA, but everyone else would be). Instead they have to get greedy.

Is the Internet any fun when the addicted music downloaders are hammering the shared network resources so hard that you can't have fun playing games? Or surf the web? Or IRC? Or get the latest Debian updates or Red Hat ISOs? I'd argue that it is no longer fun at that point. If the dorm rooms are still to get really high speed access that the admins would prefer the users to have - policy decisions have to be made to enforce reasonable use.

And that's without even getting into the matter of the percentage of P2P filesharing that is trading copyright material without the permission of the copyright holder.

Good Idea, but wrong approach

[QuietYou]

A better solution is to use something like Bandwidth Arbitrator to throttle back the network bandwidth that is available to users that are abusing resources.

Research institutions don't require Kazaa.

[xplenumx]

Amen to the University of Florida! Many of us absolutely require fast internet connections for our work - downloading journal articles, nucleotide searches, etc - and programs such as Kazaa only serve to hinder legitimate work. In fact, I'd strongly support the University of Florida in their actions even if downloading RIAA music was legal. My field must be unique - not once have I heard a story where Kazaa (or other P2P program) was required professionally. If something is required for work, there are far better, and faster, ways to obtain it than through P2P.

What I find absolutely amazing though, is that after reading slashdot posters calling time and time again for net admins to cut off virally / worm infected computers from the net, I haven't seen a single post saying "You go U of FL! Thanks for trying to curb the propagation of malicious programs!"

Re:Research institutions don't require Kazaa.

[Zed2K]

Uhhh...these aren't grad students working on thesis papers or conducting research. These are college kids in their rooms with their computers on their off time relaxing.

Re:Only 3 false positives?

[Schnapple]

How are you supposed to tell me that a linux iso isn't going to overload your "high bandwidth"?

Yeah but isn't what hoses bandwidth not so much downloading but uploading? I download something at 180k and my Wife on our same network doesn't notice much, but when I open up a BitTorrent session that also uploads at 25k, things crawl. Downloading a Linux ISO isn't uploading (unless you use a BT to do that, too). Besides, you don't download Linux ISO's 24x7, but people do with music.

The main thing is the number of people who do it. If you have cable or DSL, the odds are really good that not everyone else in your neighboorhood is doing P2P. But at a college campus, nearly every kid is doing P2P. That's the rate of incidence that creates a problem. Those who really dislike it can move off campus. Plus, notice how it's really bad at the beginning of a year - all the freshmen are used to doing P2P at home with no problem.

Encouraging the wrong form of solution

[Laughable]

It seems UoF is ripe for some undergrad to write a peace malware. Something that has the automated Icarus application automatically cut of key administrators seems simple enough.

monitor network scan patterns, forge some IP packets, shouldn't be too difficult..

Maybe just spoof key router's IPs to have it shut down whole networks... If they were dumb enough not to include whitelist functionality, then one might even manage to have it cut off its own router... sort of like those looney tunes with the character cutting the branch right out from under itself.

If they (UoF) want to engineer a technical solution to a social problem I would point them to the nazis and warn them that their popularity may falter somewhat.

Re:Encouraging the wrong form of solution

[PotPieMan]

Maybe it wasn't clear from the article, but Icarus scans only the housing network, to which the president, provost, etc. do not connect. Think of the housing network as an entirely separate segment of the overall UF network.

And assuming you were clever enough to say, spoof a housing network router's IP, you'd probably (1) get a lot of your friends pissed off at you for taking them offline, and (2) get kicked out of campus housing for violating the living agreement.

Re:Encouraging the wrong form of solution

[D_Gr8_BoB]

Icarus scans only the housing network

I believe many UF students get shell accounts on shared servers, correct? Since these servers aren't on the dorm nets and can't easily have their bandwidth limited, I think the correct workaround is to run PPP over SSH from the shell server to your dorm machine.

Re:Encouraging the wrong form of solution

[PotPieMan]

Yes, shell accounts are available for students under certain circumstances. An undergraduate student either has to pay for one each semester or be in a college that provides shell access. FWIW, I'd be surprised if a student got away with tunneling for long, but I'm basing my opinion on the notion that activity outside the norm will make people interested in you.

Are we surprised...? Are they...?

[khenson]

Historically the college campus has been the bastion of liberal mindsets. A mindset which is stereotypically supportive of relinquishing personal rights in favor of collective support.

(Translation: collective support = big brother).

Consider this learning venture to be "socio-economic repercussions 101" - when personal control is relinquished, culpability reassigned and/or positions of responsibility abdicated in favor of the security offered by those in authority we may find that those decisions created for the control and oversight of all are not as digestible as those which prompted us to adopt the mindset in the first place.

For those requiring a simpler explanation: The fox makes a great guardian for the henhouse - it just sucks when he starts eating the chickens you asked him to protect...

Re:Only 3 false positives?

[Penguinoflight]

Hey, theres some really good points there. Well, in my neighborhood, odds are I'm the only one on DSL... I was very blessed to get it here. Yeah, dorms are mostly freshmen too. I appreciate your comments, but at the same time, I'm thinking more about the zinger I put at the end of my post. If p2p is banned on the dorm network, it might really shoot up in the wireless lan. I don't actually know if the wireless lan has a internet backbone or not though.

Re:How would they do the scan??

[cayenne8]

Ok..I'm a bit puzzled, and maybe I picture it wrong, but, how could they scan your computer for server apps...virus..etc? If you are running Linux...just how are they going to scan your system files, or running processes? I can see they could check the ports you have open, and sniff traffic...but, I don't see how they could do the rest.

Or, do they force you to run win on your computers you connect to the dorm's network..and have you install icarus software on your system?

LEAF/LRP to the rescue

[pantsmonkey]

Other than changing schools, a savy user should set up a linux router and keep their P2P machine behind it. This should be the rule for anyone, at any university, that wants a little privacy and a whole lot of security.

Doesn't go far enough.

[Dean Edmonds]

I for one applaud U Florida's decision to move
ahead with this. After all, it is their
network which is being used to commit these crimes.

However I must admit to being disappointed at
the limited scope of their action. U Florida
still allows students to use its phone
system to plan criminal activities. Students can
freely board the campus shuttle, using it to
transport contraband. And the privacy provided
by the University's bathroom stalls is an open
invitation for illegal drug use.

Until UF begins monitoring all phone conversations,
strip searches anyone boarding a bus, and mounts
surveillence cameras in all of the toilets, their
facilities will continue to be used for criminal
activities and the university, by association,
will be responsible for all that occurs.

message pop up?

[fdawg]

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. So they are going to turn off my firewall, turn on ssh, then echo "BUSTED!" > /dev/pts/2 just for running bittorent? Sounds like they have too much time on their hands.

research ??

[merseault]

I think we're fogetting one crucial point: 99% of students living in residence are first-year students. Let's not pretend for a second that first year students are actually doing research.. they are too busy playing drinking games, sleeping, screwing, and finding ways of cheating without being caught! ;)

(is there a -1 mod for gross-generalizations? )

It doesn't matter

[Stalemate]

It's never going to fly anyway.

OK, that was bad, I admit.

Play By The House Rules or Move Out

[reallocate]

It's their network. They get to make the rules. They get to enforce the rules.

If some kid doesn't like that, seems to me he can use another network (like, just maybe, a local ISP) or hire a lawyer and sue the school.

Or, just move out of the dorm.

Condos and apartments also have rules. Why should students be expected to be treated differently.

And please don't whine at me about all those poor, poor students who can't afford to move out of a dorm or even pay a local ISP. Shoulda read those rules before moving in.

Ditto for the "but they need the Internet to further their education" whine. These guys aren't using p2p to download Plato.

It's FREE

[yndrd]

The Alligator is free. They don't make their living selling it to students--they make it through advertising.

A necessary step to protect

[Anonymous Coward]

Working for an IT dept at a University, I can see why this is a necessary step. --maybe not this particular implementation, but there needs to be some management of network resources.

1. The University owns the bandwidth--it's their decision on what constitutes authorized use. Period. You can complain, but there's an appropriate use policy.

2. The academic mission does not include providing portals for illegal downloading--they're accountable to the law--like or not, it's not free to download MP3s, or other copyrighted materials. It's not legal. Bitch. Moan. Whatever, it's the law and "due dilligence" is required by the University to keep it from liability by the rabid dog lawyers of the RIAA, etc.

3. All of our efforts to stop worms and viruses from getting through our border were comprimised when "promiscuous" machines were moved in and plugged into the network effectively spreading their disease to the yet unpatched and causing massive network saturation.

Call me a Nazi, but I think it's a GOOD idea to run a tight ship on PUBLICLY owned network. It's still not as stringent as the large corporations.

Don't give me that free speech BS. If this were an ISP, this would be an infringement, but this is a public university which reserves the right to set policies. When these things go unchecked and Lusers keep spraying the network with worms, portscans, hacks/cracks, and copyrighted materials being shared, you've got to blow the whistle before the lawyers come down on you and what little money you have for IT begins to get sucked away.

We IT folks at universities are underpaid and over-worked. It's a good thing to draw a line.

All this sounds a bit draconian, but you have NO idea what a mess it is with zillions of users saturating the bandwidth with Kazaa and worm packets. It affects everyone.

If you don't get it, well...you don't. Your idealism is blinding you from reality.

Slashdot: mostly missing the point...

[geekwench]

Having read the effin' articles (and no, I'm not new here), I find this policy reprehensible. Moreover, I find the overall /. reaction a bit -- hypocritical, not to put too fine a point on it.

1)UF has instituted a ban on any and all file sharing, regardless of intent or content.
2)UF is scanning students' private computers to look for violations.

Slashdot reaction: No problem; these damn kids are just downloading music and pr0n anyway. (And, they'll be competing with us for tech jobs once they graduate, so three cheers for them getting hosed!)

[rant] Excuse me? Is this the same place that collectively does the wave when the RIAA comes up against any sort of opposition? The same place that actively discussed hacking Sen. Orrin Hatch's website when he advocated developing spyware, and remotely destroying the computer of anyone caught with copyrighted files? Did my DSL open up a wormhole, and somehow I've managed to log onto the Bizarro World's .\ ?? [/rant]

*regains composure* Yes, I'm certain that college dorms are hotbeds for distributing copyrighted MP3s. So is off-campus housing. The fact is, there are many legitimate uses for P2P. The person trying to obtain public domain photographs for a history research project is tarred with the same brush as those trying to download the collected works of Britney Spears. Someone sending a friend a shareware MP3 (provided by the band for the purpose of downloading) suffers the same penalty as someone looking for warez. Since FU has gone after IRC, I suppose that the next target will be ICQ, since both allow for file sharing; if you prefer using an IM service besides AIM, tough luck, kid. But we can't take the risk of you doing anything illegal.

True, bandwidth is not free. Handing the worst offenders a bill for their usage would provide an immensely powerful real-world lesson. Big Brother tactics, however, are not the solution. And to see /. endorsing such things leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Believe it or not, this is not an attempt to flame or troll. I just find it incredibly baffling that this policy is drawing large numbers of cheers from the same crowd that roundly condemns other attempts to infringe upon personal privacy.

Re:Slashdot: mostly missing the point...

[Ionized]

That's a whole lotta whining, but let's look at the facts.

1) Uploading of copyrighted material is illegal
2) The University, as an ISP, is legally responsible for what its users do, thanks to the DMCA
3) ~90% of file transfers over P2P are copyrighted material and illegal
4) There's no realistic way to tell if any given file being transferred over the network is legal or not

Based on the above, why exactly do you feel that the University should expose itself to lawsuits from the RIAA just so a small percentage of the student body can use P2P for legitimate use?

What use can you come up with that is not available elsewhere, such as using an FTP site or website?

I dislike the RIAA as much as anybody, but there is not a lot of leeway without the potentialof being sued.

Re:Slashdot: mostly missing the point...

[base3]

1) Uploading of copyrighted material is illegal

Non sequitur. All file sharing is banned, whether legitimate or not

2) The University, as an ISP, is legally responsible for what its users do, thanks to the DMCA

Just the opposite. The DMCA gives a safe harbord to any ISP, UF included, provided they comply with requests for takedown and/or subpeonas, which they would have to do anyway.

3) ~90% of file transfers over P2P are copyrighted material and illegal

Even if that is correct, 10% is a more than substantial non-infringing use.

4) There's no realistic way to tell if any given file being transferred over the network is legal or not

And that is not a business UF should be in. Neither should it be in the business of blocking any collaboration between individuals on the chance that a student might do something illegal. Prior restraint of speech has no place at a university.

Re:Slashdot: mostly missing the point...

[danila]

1) Uploading of copyrighted material is illegal
It's only illegal if the copyright owner is against it. If you have any reason to believe that he will not complain, you can safely upload as much as you want, even though technically you will be "violating copyright".

2) The University, as an ISP, is legally responsible for what its users do, thanks to the DMCA
Thanks to DMCA it's not responsible. It only has to remove the offending material when notified by the copyright owner. It's called "safe heaven" and was especially designed to limit the liability of the ISPs.

3) ~90% of file transfers over P2P are copyrighted material and illegal
It depends on which way you want to look at that. :) First, we can argue that all downloads are legal and thus 100% of file transfers are legal. Second, do you have any sources to back up this number, or are you talking out of your ass? And third, the US is not the only country with P2P and in many countries filesharing is not illegal.

4) There's no realistic way to tell if any given file being transferred over the network is legal or not
And there is no realistic way to tell if any student is a serial killer or not. Guess what, it's not the responsibility of the university to police the students. Until they somehow managed to violate university's copyright by sharing (oh horror! teaching notes or lecture slides), the university has no business at all, knowing what its students upload and download.

Re:This is flamebait

[rbird76]

Schools have a right to control their networks, not my computer. Why not control bandwith usage rather than the applications; if the applications are sucking down bandwith like a diner at an all-you-can-eat spaghetti dinner, pull the plug. It should be easy to do and require no intrusion into my computer. People with specialized needs for bandwidth can get specific dispensation. The fact that there is a less intrusive alternative (and probably more effective) measure to control bandwidth hogs and that the school has chosen instead a highly intrusive one implies that the intrusion is part of the purpose. So, in addition to paying through the nose for school (tuition increases in OH are double digit % of tuition) I also agree to give away my rights for search and seizure. Wow. What a deal. I get to give away rights to unelected unaccountable administrators so that I can live in cramped dorms. Sounds like Microsoft's EULA.

The RIAA didn't need the pretense of "file sharing" to enforce Draconian DRM - they wanted the ability to rewrite copyright law without the pretense of buying politicians. Again, choosing the most controlling method to do something rather than the least means that the control is part of the desired outcome. Going after people infringing copyright might help, but the people doing much of the copying (and profiting from it) are in places that couldn't care less what the RIAA or their labels think. Killing the housecats to scare the tigers doesn't do a whole lot. If it can be heard, it can be ripped - that is the lesson the RIAA hasn't learned. The methods you claim are motivated by file sharing to prevent copyright infringement won't prevent this. Even if the ends did justify the means, the means won't achieve the desired ends, and so I am giving away my freedom for no one's profit except the school. The school now has the ability to take away even more of my rights later for whatever else they see fit, and probably with methods no more effective than this.

Finally, your cause and effect reasoning is more than a little flawed. If winter robberies are occuring where the robbers wear ski jackets, by your logic, the police could arrest and shoot people in ski jackets and say, "It's the robbers' fault." Actually, it's not. If you choose an onerous and intrusive method to pursue a goal in the presence of less intrusive methods, either you intend to intrude (in which case you deserve the bile you are going to get) or you didn't care (in which case, you deserve the bile you are going to get).

By choosing this route, UF is teaching its students a very important lesson : in life, the Golden Rule is "he who has the gold makes the rules". I'm sure the students will remember this when their time comes around. Hope you don't expect much privacy in your retirement village/assisted living facility.

hey

[smatt-man]

If they block P2P sharing, how else am I going to be able to download hot young co-eds in shower.mpg? Someone is out there with a web cam living the life us guys wish for, it's his right, no DUTY to share with those less fortunate than himself.

Gator Country, chaw chaw

[Wansu]

There's a gator on my hard drive. He's scannin' my files. ...

Thats nothing

[tgordon]

At my school (Stetson University...also in FL) they monitor you internet usage and send you an email of you visit to many porn sites. I never thought I would be glad to have not made the grades to get into UF...

Linux users getting cut off ?

[sirmikester]

It didn't mention it in the story, but I think that it would be logical to assume that linux clients would get cut off from the network because ICARUS probably doesn't come in a flavor that scans linux file systems. So besides robbing users of using p2p for legitmate purposes the system also prevents them from using a free operating system? Am I missing something here?

Hey, they gotta protect themselves...

[FatSean]

School must protect it's systems from viruses and trojans. Also, must protect itself from lawsuits from the RIAA. I'm sure the contract these students signed when they enrolled spelled this all out.

Re:Hey, they gotta protect themselves...

[be-fan]

You can't sign away basic rights. Protection against illegal search is one of those rights. There is a fine line employers walk, but it falls on their side becaue they one the hardware and they are paying for your time. This might very well be falling on the other sie of that line.

Re:Hey, they gotta protect themselves...

[Izago909]

This is definitely a grey area. Most of the rights people cry about are protections from the government and not from schools or corporations. There ay be various laws that limit or regulate these "incursions", but it is not a constitutional matter. Besides, there are legitimate (and good) reasons to scan students' computers. Despite how much you hear about kids and their knowledge of technology these days, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority are limited to games and office apps.

For the longest time, I worked in the University IT Services department, and have seen many horrors. I remember one kid who spilled a drink on his laptop and so decided the thing was oven safe. Another set up an unsecured WAP in his dorm room and then got mad at me for his account being suspended for sending spam. The most common was a result of our school adopting ethernet patch cable in its early days. Instead of using STC patch cable; this school requires a different wiring scheme. I can't remember the name, but conductors 1-3 cross over to 4-6 on the other side, and 7-8 are straight through. Because the network is half duplex 10mb, and the school cuts corners on what they give out, CAT3 used for the free cables in the dorms. This means that the connector on the cable that reads "WALL" must be plugged into the wall. I don't need to tell you that this is the #1 problem beginning each semester.

Sometimes children need to be protected from themselves. In the case of a network serving thousands of people, a proactive solution to worms, viri, security, and so forth sometimes becomes necessary. Especially in the case of people who can't figure out how to click on Windows Update. The P2P scanning is probably just a political tactic to keep the RIAA at bay. The traffic overhead is highly exaggerated, especially if most of the traffic stays inside the local network. In most cases, advertising a bandwidth or data volume cap, and giving students the tools to monitor and warn them would probably work just as well.

If they really want to do P2P

[theolein]

There are, as you know, still, many ways to do P2P, such as using a VPN to an outside server or ssh tunneling. The fact that you've just blown the real method of discovering the P2P and that is by way of bandwidth, means that those who want to do P2P simply have to reduce the amount of P2P they are doing to amounts that equate to "normal" net use, whatever that may be. A good way to find what that may be, would be to experiment by raising the bandwidth until it hits your app's limit and gets a first warning, upon which you could reduce the bandwidth again.

grr.

[medelliadegray]

to all the tards who claim its the schools bandwith. the students are footing the bill directly for a connection. the schools in turn should be acting as an ISP does..

people who say go find another provider should shut their pie holes. Most college people i know are pretty damn poor, and i cant see them being able to justify spending even 15 a month for a SECOND internet connection.

if they gave the ports those utilities use a very low QOS, that in my eyes would be acceptable.

there is a ton that can be done with traffic shaping to alleviate the problem of a certain app or virus whoring all of the bandwith...RED, givign packets a certain QOS, etc. Those admins are tards if they figure out how to implement RED and QOS on problem ports.

they outlaw one program.... then who's to stop them from outlawing another one that they just dont like people using ... or some other application that takes up a lot of bandwith but it perfectly legit...

Free speech != free leech

[Anonymous Coward]

> Just wait until you have your first First Amendment case. I assume UofF is a part of the State of Florida. They are bound by free speech rights.

And, presumably, the university is more than willing to allow students to exercise those rights on their own dime. That you're permitted to speak your mind does NOT mean you're permitted to make someone else pay for it.

Besides, no judge in the world will believe "but I wanna download the new Britney video!!!!" is a matter of free speech.

What the?

[TLouden]

" 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."

So, send and email and then disconnect them to make sure that they can't read it?

Stanford, unpatched comps, open ports, firewalls

[SkewlD00d]

I worked at Stanford over the summer in an IS dept, where their centralized "ITSS" NOC dept. disconnected every machine via scans every two hours and switch rules that did not apply the MS03-039 patch before an arbitrary date, which created an unnecessary and artifical emergency in our dept. Stanford is definitely run like a non-profit, the people there dont really know what they're doing. There's no firewalls anywhere and everyone's machine is a public IP, so anyone can host an FTP warez site. Most every machine at Stanford is a Mac OS 9.x or Windows 2000 Pro, and a few OS X's and XP machines. Additionally, many other universities do not have firewalls, including UC Davis. I believe that MIT has most of their student's machines firewalled.

But, in support of UF's position, schools have cover-their-asses when it comes to I.P. and P2P issues since their big corporate donors can threaten to withhold funding. Also, it is almost ethically justifiable to block P2P, since the only few legitimate uses are (but not limited to) finding patches and sharing public-domain works. But, if colleges start blocking certain sites, then the line between protectionism and censorship begins to blurr. If these schools would firewall

Tough luck if...

[soccerisgod]

...you happen to be running one of them intrusion detection systems that keep all those "interesting" ports open to see who might try to connect there. I guess u can forget about that in that dorm...

Re:Rate limiting

[kescom]

That's not always possible, depending on the level of traffic. We tried it here at [an Ivy League University], and our Packeteers couldn't handle the load.

Also, UF's policy doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. I just spent the afternoon tracking down a trojan that is letting spammers use three student machines in our residential network to offer penis enlargement, and in the process, returning so many bounces that our postmaster server (that's right, we have a server just sorting mail to postmaster) has been killed a few times this week. On the order of 10,000 bounces per hour...lots of fun.

In any case, Windows vulnerabilities are causing more and more troubles for everyone on our network. We're already moving to port-scanning, but aren't knocking users offline--yet. People pay for network service, and when they sign up, they agree to an AUP/TOS, so there's nothing illegal or privacy-invading about it. Users can get RoadRunner if they don't like our TOS.

concern about your computer being "scanned"

[rock_climbing_guy]

If I understand this correctly, the concern is that network admins are running programs that poke at your machine over the network to see what ports are open, right? I guess they could go on to see what services might be on open ports. If, for example, a machine on the network has a virus that makes the computer send tons of spam, then for example, they could detect that there was an abnormal amount of traffic from that node; then poke at the computer from outside, and see that there is an SMTP server there. How does that invade your privacy?

Technically, couldn't someone check what services are running on my PC right now without violating my rights legally.

Can I not say that checking for P2P is just like entering my IP into a web browser to see if there is an HHTP daemon on my machine? Finally, couldn't you install a software firewall to make sure the machine can't be "scanned?"

Someone, please fill me in here.

A funny thing

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to hear a legitimate use for P2P?

An assignment a music appreciation professor (yes a professor) gave his students.

He asked each and every one of us to find at least 3 indie bands, name the song we liked, why we liked it, and how the band came to your attention.

Not one single person in that class completed the assignment without using a p2p app...the prof even suggested it at more than one point.

The sad part about it was several locals didn't get mentioned at all...and the even sader was the girl who went on and on and on about this band until someone pointed out it was Metallica ;)

Perfect Example..

[xchino]

..of over engineering. This is seriously just a stupid idea from a network management point of view, all ethical questions aside.

UofF IT: Let's build a killer VB app that automagically disconnects connections based on bandwidth usage and port scans! It will be new and exciting and make us look leet.

Competent IT: We already have several options available to curb p2p abuse and prevent viral infection, used widely throughout the industry with great effectiveness while keeping end users happy.

I realize I don't know the whole story, so I can't say this wasn't their only option with any certainty, EXCEPT for this..

Disconnecting the user is ridiculous. The punishment doesn't come close to fitting the crime, actual copyright infringement not withstanding. In the real world, where companies don't have the luxury of giving a big "FUCK YOU BITCH!" to our customers, bandwidth abusers are capped, not severed from the network. Keep the policy but change the rules to

1. The first time a notice will come up to cease
and desist.

2. Second time bandwidth is capped at 28800bps. Let them live with old modem speeds for a few days, and see what life will be like.

3. Third and final infraction: Bandiwdth permanently capped at 28.8. If they want a greater level of service they can either pay for it, or find another service provider.

This seriously smells like a case of too much self importance of the IT staff. This can (and quite possible should) be maintained and managed away from the application layer.

Or maybe Icarus is just some super duper app that we'll all be switching over to windows to run on our corporate networks, because it is just that badass.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[hobbesmaster]

How is a P2P filesharing app legitimate? It's copyright infringement 99% of the time. It's so they can grab music, porn, and movies off the internet.

All I know about the subject is that I couldn't get Slackware 9.1 isos until some of the mirrors got them up, about a week after the torrent because available.

Bittorrent appears to be the savior of the slashdotted oss project...

thats a little extreme

[steak]

at my school they have this thing called a packet shaper and it has killed most every form of file sharing on the network, except irc :)

not even a prank

[_avs_007]

I was a CS major in college. Many of my projects involved socket programming, some of which were Client-Server, others were P2P. This would really suck if the CS guys suddenly started getting their connectivity shut off because their class project was mistakenly identified as something else.

Good for them...sort of.

[Penguin2212]

I don't agree with their method, but I do think that the school network admins have the right to try and erradicate their network of worms. When I returned this year for school, the network was completely unusable because of so many worms circulating. Now they've started revoking peoples' internet priveleges just for having worms. I say, good for them, why should I suffer because somebody has a Windoze box that they didn't patch, or were too lazy to install a virus scanner, especially when the school has a coorporate license for Norton Anti Virus?

New solutions for the problem?

[Dukeofshadows]

Where I went to college there were about 10-15 people running so much bandwidth that they began regulating times that all students could use the comps. Privacy violation sounds extreme and probably unconstitutional since UF is a government-owned institution that mandates certain people live on campus. I propose the following as alternate solutions:

1) check total size of all files transfered in a given period on a port-by-port basis. Anyone breaching a limit (say, 1GB/week as an example) pays for additional bandwidth at a specified rate (say, $5/extra GB/week). Anyone doing legitimate reserach could appeal to a committee/get special permission or designate a lab to run these programs from.

2) If research and campus business is being disturbed, restrict student internet access between 9am and 5pm in all dorms, allowing them to access only University websites. Most research I ever needed was done on-campus, and if people need to they can wait until businesss hours are closed to go off campus. This would be a temporary fix but it gives the professors and bureaucrats an out and prevents them from complaining more than they do now.

3) Notify incoming freshmen that the university reserves the right to observe what files are being uploaded/downloaded from their computers. Anyone caught trading music, porn, etc. will be asked to verify that they own a copy of the files being traded with an initially stern in-house warning then reference to the local police authorities as punishment. This is extreme, but most of the bandwidth hogs are trading illegal copies of movies/porn/music anyway.

4) Note the top 50 people using bandwidth and publish their picture in the school newspaper. Enterprising students can deal with the individuals in legal means as they feel appropriate.

Finger-pointing is easy, but does anyone else have potential solutions/thoughts on how to solve this problem?

Re:New solutions for the problem?

[Wolfrider]

1 GB/week? Have you ever DL'ed a Knoppix ISO?? Try 3GB in two days as a limit.

Re:New solutions for the problem?

[E-Rock]

I work for a public institution and several times in the past two years the campus network has slowed to a crawl due to dorm activites. When admin departments can't open e-mail or get to shared folders because of people swapping MP3s, porn, or the obviously bullshit example of downloading ISOs of public software it's gone too far. The problem where I work is that the dorms weren't segmented from the rest of campus. The solution is that we monitor what is coming out of the boxes (no invasive scanning). If your port is impacting your segment the switch dynamically limits your port. If the traffic looks like a virus they notify you. If the traffic is a DOS they shut the port off.

Re:Only 3 false positives?

[The Wing Lover]

Btw, what were you people smoking? A open source VB app? that's seriosly messed up.

Wow, you don't understand anything about Open Source at all, do you.

You want the inside perspective? Here it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the architect of ICARUS, and I felt a need to address some of the overall comments in this thread as I have watched them develop.

0. Downloading large files, etc. will never trigger ICARUS. This is not a simple matching system, by any means.
1. ICARUS is not some magic bullet super scanner. We use, and promote all open source tools, open source operating systems and free speech. We do not install a client package, we do not "hack" systems and we do not look at files, process tables, etc. on the client systems.
2. ICARUS is a system for integrating a vast array of tools together, making complex policy decisions based on data collection, and then taking complex actions. Yes, it can stop P2P apps in a wide variety of ways. It can do a lot of things regarding management. In that regard, it's not focused at all, it's something you use to manage everything around you. For example, you say you want to determine who has patched themselves against some certain vulnerability? Then select the appropriate methods for collecting the data you need, and decide what actions you want to take. Actions are limited by...perl.
3. "You are responsible for considering the moral implications of what you create, and how it is used"
I simply can't believe this statement. We DID consider the implications of it. Extensively. In fact, my co developer and I wrestle with it all the time. Vastly more good comes from what we are creating than bad. ICARUS is a policy enforcement tool...that can encompass a number of things. It is the policy of the University to prohibit illegal activity on their network. We are simply able to enforce it.
4. Florida Sunshine Law: Actually, this is explicitly covered as a mechanism of security policy enforcement. There is no legal access under this law to source code or anything else.
5. We will likely be making this a public open-source project in the spring. We intend to offer it free of charge, although the licensing itself has not been determined (likely GPL).
6. The individual claiming to know how it was written (re: VB, subpoened database, etc.), fabricated every part of that post. Only a tiny handful of people have seen the source code or been involved in a discussion about its internals.

Calm down, folks. Some day, you'll probably want to use it for something, I promise ;).
Take care,
Rob

Re:You want the inside perspective? Here it is.

[riffer]

Rob,

Wasn't trying to imply the Sunshine law applied to the software UF developed (though it would be highly amusing if it did). My point was more along showing that UF has responsibilities to the state of Florida. I'm sure the Regents weren't too happy with complaints from the RIAA...

Re:You want the inside perspective? Here it is.

[bhmcintosh]

You know, Rob, I used to get nostalgic for the whole thing, especially after Dr. Lombardi found all that MONEY for a PROPER DHNet buildout, rather than the partially-derrierred approach I was constrained to take. But nowadays, I drive by your office and think, "There but for the Grace of God go I!" :-) There is no sum of money that could EVER induce me to want that job back. :-)

Firewall your PC and use SSH?

[CodeBuster]

The more technically savvy students could probably bypass these measures. For example suppose that the tech savvy student (he is an engineering major ;) runs PuTTY to SSH to a host outside of the campus network which has a cable/DSL connection available. Then he runs Kaaza or whatever file sharing application he likes via the remote desktop or x-windows session and transfers the files to his dorm machine using ftp and everything is tunneled through the SSH session. Finally, the student runs a firewall on his PC in the dorm so that his drive cannot be remotely 'scanned' and the only thing visible to the outside world is an SSH session running on port 22. There are even P2P apps out right now (Earth Station Five) which have integrated SSH support so as to maintain the privacy of their users (excellent). The point is that file sharing is a social problem and social problems cannot be solved exclusively through the use of technological measures. The only purpose this serves is to instigate a technological arms race between the students/P2P providers and the copyright holders/universities.

Avoiding a drop due to lack of browsing...

[Wokan]

Just set up a script to run lynx and dump the results to /dev/null. Have it sleep for a minute or two. Rinse. Repeat.
The system sees port 80 traffic and you can bump the hit counter on something like the schools own home page.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[DunbarTheInept]

How is a P2P filesharing app legitimate? It's copyright infringement 99% of the time. It's so they can grab music, porn, and movies off the internet.

So what? Until that figure is 100% rather than 99%, it is still wrong to assume all P2P users are copyright violators and treat them accordingly.

Actual information

[Anonymous Coward]

I am the architect of ICARUS, and I felt a need to address some of the overall comments in this thread as I have watched them develop.

0. Downloading large files, etc. will never trigger ICARUS. This is not a simple matching system, by any means.
1. ICARUS is not some magic bullet super scanner. We use, and promote all open source tools, open source operating systems and free speech. We do not install a client package, we do not "hack" systems and we do not look at files, process tables, etc. on the client systems.
2. ICARUS is a system for integrating a vast array of tools together, making complex policy decisions based on data collection, and then taking complex actions. Yes, it can stop P2P apps in a wide variety of ways. It can do a lot of things regarding management. In that regard, it's not focused at all, it's something you use to manage everything around you. For example, you say you want to determine who has patched themselves against some certain vulnerability? Then select the appropriate methods for collecting the data you need, and decide what actions you want to take. Actions are limited by...perl.
3. "You are responsible for considering the moral implications of what you create, and how it is used"
I simply can't believe this statement. We DID consider the implications of it. Extensively. In fact, my co developer and I wrestle with it all the time. Vastly more good comes from what we are creating than bad. ICARUS is a policy enforcement tool...that can encompass a number of things. It is the policy of the University to prohibit illegal activity on their network. We are simply able to enforce it.
4. Florida Sunshine Law: Actually, this is explicitly covered as a mechanism of security policy enforcement. There is no legal access under this law to source code or anything else.
5. We will likely be making this a public open-source project in the spring. We intend to offer it free of charge, although the licensing itself has not been determined (likely GPL).
6. The individual claiming to know how it was written (re: VB, subpoened database, etc.), fabricated every part of that post. Only a tiny handful of people have seen the source code or been involved in a discussion about its internals.
7. We don't terminate user access, we restrict them to campus-only access. Termination is an temporary action in last resort cases with multiple violations.

Calm down, folks. Some day, you'll probably want to use it for something, I promise ;).
Take care,
Rob

Re:Actual information

[mabu]

Don't you guys have anything better to do?

It seems to me that you're opening up a Pandora's Box, potentially making the university more liable for the activities of its users. Without all the active scanning, it might be easier to distance yourself from liabilities associated with the activity of those on your network.

Think of all the time you've wasted on this system when you guys could be coming up with a new color of Gatoraid!

two words...

[SonicBurst]

prove it. That's a student's word (a student possibly violating every copyright / DMCA law at that) against university staff's word. I work at a college. Even if the student is 100% telling the truth, it will likely be regarded as a lie (at least at any college I've been to).

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Alereon]

Universities aren't ISPs nor do they try to be.

A university offering resnet access is legally an ISP, which is the way they want it. Furthermore, students are paying for their Internet access when they pay for their dorms.

How is a P2P filesharing app legitimate? It's copyright infringement 99% of the time. It's so they can grab music, porn, and movies off the internet.

P2P filesharing programs are tools, just like HTTP and E-mail. The fact that they CAN be used to commit illegal activities does not make it okay to block them. Usenet, anyone?

The difference is HTTP and EMail aren't used to exploit others copyrights with huge files. You don't have a "right" to internet access, anyway. You have a right to whatever the University says you have. Nothing more than that. You connect to their network, you are their bitch.

Bullshit. HTTP and E-mail can generate huge traffic loads, just like P2P. And yes, I DO have a right to Internet access. As a tenant of university housing, I have a contract guaranteeing me certain utilities in exchange for the large amount of money I'm plunking down. If the university wants to break this contract, they will begin refunding an appropriate portion of my payment. Landlord/tenant law applies here (to a varying degree depending on your state).

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Xerithane]

So what? Until that figure is 100% rather than 99%, it is still wrong to assume all P2P users are copyright violators and treat them accordingly.

So you are saying that because 99% of the people on P2P are fucking over the bandwidth of the university, we should let them do that because 1% of the people on P2P have a valid reason to use it?

Instead of using other systems of distribution?

Right.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Xerithane]

A university offering resnet access is legally an ISP, which is the way they want it. Furthermore, students are paying for their Internet access when they pay for their dorms.

When did anybody promise or guarantee that an ISP allows unrestricted access against the terms of service?

HTTP and E-mail can generate huge traffic loads, just like P2P. And yes, I DO have a right to Internet access.

A right is something you can get on your own, assuming another person doesn't stop you. You can't get internet access on your own. It is granted to you. As a privledge. And no, HTTP and EMail doesn't generate a tenth of what P2P traffic generates.

If the university wants to break this contract, they will begin refunding an appropriate portion of my payment. Landlord/tenant law applies here (to a varying degree depending on your state).

Why don't you read the terms of service for your internet connection? Is your contract guaranteeing you unfiltered internet access? Have you actually read the contracts?

It's painfully clear that you are still a student and don't understand how the real world business works of running an ISP, datacenter, or bandwidth arbitration.

You aren't entitled to shit. You are given what they decide to give you. Until you own it, that's what you deal with. I doubt you will ever own an internet providor anyway, so just get used to taking what other people give you.

Responsible Computing

[4iedBandit]

This article has only served to remind me what an old fart I am. How many people out there are posting that this is invasive and looking at the contents of students drives? How many of those posting such messages actually understand how this works?

I re-read the article thinking that I missed something, and then I re-read the editorial. Nope didn't miss a thing.

Folks, viruses and P2P apps open ports on your computer. Those ports do things. Well known things. Any network admin worth their salary can tell you what your box is doing just by watching the traffic coming from and going to your computer, and don't get me started on active port scanning.

The University can do all of this without ever acessing the contents of the students hard drive. You want complete privacy? Unplug your network connection.

So Students can't play games any more. Cry me a river. For $100 bucks they can buy a switch, some patch cables and throw a lan party (which would be more fun anyway). So you feel that you're stuck in an ISP monopoly that is so unfair? Cry me a river. Get a dial up ISP if you have to get your fix. In the real world we don't always have a high speed ISP option either. Got a CS project? Then justify your use. OSS project? Host it off campus.

There are rules. You learn to play by the ones you have to, and to work around the ones you have to. Stop complaining and get to work damnit.

Re:How would they do the scan??

[mliesenf]

I'm a user of DHnet and I use Gentoo Linux with a vanilla 2.4.22-ac4 kernel. They under no circumstances exploit a users computer to examine the file system or processes. If you have a server or a worm that inappropriately uses the network then they will isolate and restrict you.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Alereon]

Wow, you sure are hostile for someone defending the rights of an entity with substandard infrastructure to defraud its paying customers.

A right is something you can get on your own, assuming another person doesn't stop you. You can't get internet access on your own. It is granted to you. As a privledge. And no, HTTP and EMail doesn't generate a tenth of what P2P traffic generates.

Priviledge my ass. It is something I've paid for, thus something owed to me by the terms of the contract. And why don't you ask the sites linked to by Slashdot about how much bandwidth HTTP uses? Anyway, P2P services are legitimate uses of bandwidth, thus it is unacceptable to block them no matter how much bandwidth they're using. Let me remind you, if the STUDENTS, the people PAYING FOR THE INTERNET ACCESS are consuming all the available bandwidth, then the university in question must BUY MORE. Period. You'll note that I'm not making unrealistic demands that a university magically create more bandwidth for free, I am simply requiring that they fullfil their obligation and provide the service that they are being paid for, charging more if necessary.

Why don't you read the terms of service for your internet connection? Is your contract guaranteeing you unfiltered internet access? Have you actually read the contracts?

Of course I have. As long as I do not commit illegal activities or suck down an extraordinarily huge amount of bandwidth, I'm in the clear. Furthermore, it says INTERNET access. Not WWW. Not E-mail. INTERNET. If an Internet application doesn't work because of their network misconfiguration, then I am not recieving the service that I am guaranteed.

It's painfully clear that you are still a student and don't understand how the real world business works of running an ISP, datacenter, or bandwidth arbitration.

Coming from someone who is obviously incapable of comprehending the simple concepts of providing adequate bandwidth and service to users, this comment is very amusing.

You aren't entitled to shit. You are given what they decide to give you. Until you own it, that's what you deal with. I doubt you will ever own an internet providor anyway, so just get used to taking what other people give you.

I am entitled to what the contract guarantees me. As the contract guarantees me working Internet access, I WILL recieve this, or I will be paid off. Failing this, the university will pay far more for legal fees in a contract dispute that I will inevitably win.

Good point

[HangingChad]

Or what's to stop someone from NATing them off with a cheap router? That must be some pretty freakin' impressive software that could invade a NAT'd Linux box. You'd think a university would be the last place you'd want to start a shooting war with computer users. They're smart and relentless. They have more time than the under-funded administrators. Someone will have a wireless AP somewhere and the smart ones will air snort their way in with a pringle's can and coil of wire. You can't win that fight.

Once again only the stupid get caught. It took a real Republican to think up that bright idea.

Re:RTFA!

[orthogonal]

Maybe I'm just not easily frightened, but "stop p2p leeches from sucking up all the bandwidth and making the network unusable for everyone" fails to terrify me. Sorry.

Ok, but why not just cap bandwidth and be done with it?

Scanning PCs (which from the article appears to mean scanning for content, not just port scaning) goes furthr than needed, and opens the door to arbitrary and unchecked abuses.

You missed one(+)

[Mycroft_514]

Your list of abuses is pretty good, but you missed a major hole in this setup. If the Icarus software is scanning the PCs, then by default it is scanning all the files in the PCs.

Let's say that John down the hall decides to "get even" with you for something? He sends you an MP3 file to your e-mail. Even a short one. After your machine is taken down and comes back online, he does it again. The third time, you are diconnected permenantly. Yet, you never did anything.

By storing the MP3 on a CD and only putting it online long enough to mail it, John is pretty immune from getting scanned himself. Send the file after you go to sleep, and he has 8 hours for it to be scanned before you wake up and find it.

Re:You missed one(+)

[orthogonal]

Let's say that John down the hall decides to "get even" with you for something? He sends you an MP3 file to your e-mail.

Good point, but thi'll only work if your email client automatically saves attachments. I don't think even Microsoft does this.

Re:You missed one(+)

[Mycroft_514]

E-mail has the attachment on your machine, until you read it and delete it. Many e-mail programs work this way. The attachment is simply a file in your inbasket, but a dumb enough scan would still catch it and blame the receiptiant.

Getting too close to the sun...

[euxneks]

Seems kinda like a poor choice for the name.. Icarus? Seems to me like it's going to crash and burn! heh...

P2P != Sharing Illegal Content

[dstillz]

In my experience, running a P2P program is neither equivalent to running a file server on your computer (unless it's configured in a particularly odd way) nor necessitates sharing illegal content for which the user does not hold the copyright. Furthermore, on high-visibility, high-bandwidth networks such as a major university's LAN, isn't it possible that machines may get infected by some novel virus/worm before there's a widely available countermeasure? And what about students who desire to legally distribute large files to which they DO own the copyright, such as design projects or self-made media, and do so over direct IM, via FTP/DAV, or with e-mail attachments?

UF Has Big Pipes

[bwindle2]

Check out this page

They have at least 160+30 megabits/second to the regular net, and a pipe of what looks like 450megabit/sec to Internet2,

what they do at Cornell

[PureCreditor]

here at Cornell University, instead of blocking P2P or port scanning, they came up with a nice little schema to defeat ALL internet traffic - charge dorm access by the MEGABYTE !!!! You're only allowed 2GB of non-intranet traffic per month, which is like NOTHING. Just keeping AIM in the background while browsing a few sites already can take up 2 GB. Solution? Do all large downloading at computer lab, and use a USB flash drive to bring it home. Not only this kills p2p, but it kills Internet access as a whole. So great, CIT!

NAT box w/Firewall

[chiph]

Why not buy a NAT box with a built-in firewall? That way they can't scan your PC. Of course, they could still monitor the traffic thru your RJ-45 port, so you can't share (and I'm one of those people who think you shouldn't anyway). But at least you'll have *some* privacy.

Chip H.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Xerithane]

Wow, you sure are hostile for someone defending the rights of an entity with substandard infrastructure to defraud its paying customers.

No, I am just hostile. If anybody ever told you I was anything other than an asshole they were just playing a practical joke on you.

Coming from someone who is obviously incapable of comprehending the simple concepts of providing adequate bandwidth and service to users, this comment is very amusing.

Here's a little side project for you: Find how out much it costs Slashdot in bandwidth. Find out how much bandwidth your school consumes in an average month. Do some math and statistics.

As the contract guarantees me working Internet access, I WILL recieve this, or I will be paid off. Failing this, the university will pay far more for legal fees in a contract dispute that I will inevitably win.

Even if they block and forbid the use of P2P clients, you still have internet access. You have complete and unfettered internet access depending upon what they decide you can run. I'm curious what school you go to because I bet I can find a few terms of service that prevent you from getting what you think you are entitled to.

Icarus?

[gblues]

Don't they know that Icarus is an AI developed by Majestic 12? I hope nobody tries to send Daedalus up against it, because everyone knows they'll merge into a super-AI that will join itself with JC Denton and rule the world!

... or maybe I've just been playing too much Deus Ex ...

Nathan

Re:Only 3 false positives?

[Penguinoflight]

No, it seems like I'm the only one that does! What good is an open source application going to do you, if you need a microjunk compiler?!? Besides, VB is definatly not designed for network operations, and a few other languages would do a much better job. C++, and perl come to mind.

Re:Thank you

[jayhawk88]

I guess that means I'm a whiney, clueless little liberal huh? Are you gonna tell Rush on me?

Of course, if you have a decent firewall...

[Kjella]

I'm sure the Icarus will be blocked as a potential hostile port scanner, I know my firewall does.

I know that my Uni (ok I graduated last summer) is keeping a rather tight eye on external bandwidth, in order to keep it blazing fast, as it is. But as far as I know, they're looking at total and sustained bandwidth usage, nothing else. Mysteriously, the internal DC++ hubs (IP limited to internal only, difference is only GB limit) are doing great and contain so many terrabytes, there's little reason to go anywhere else. I'm sure it stands out as a red herring on the internal LAN stats, but the networks admin don't want to look. And word-of-mouth spreads pretty quickly to those who haven't caught on.

Personally, I think that if the goal is to provide a network that is the most useful for all the students, that is the way to go. While I'm sure they "know" that illegal stuff is going on over their lines, they're acting as a good ISP and common carrier and don't nose around. I'm sure you wouldn't appriciate your cable company or telco to do so either, I'm sure they "know" too.

Kjella

Re:Switchable MAC address

[toast0]

you know, most dhcp clients can configured not to touch /etc/resolv.conf (or whatever)

icarus?

[ianmorris]

wasn't that the name of an evil AI in the game deus ex?

I deal with the program everyday

[Cardoe]

So here's the low down on this program. As a RA (Resident Assistant) on UF's campus and also being somewhat of a knowledgable Linux user (read: former Gentoo dev).

Basically they port scan you. If you've accidently left WinXP's default Shared Doc's folder shared or anything shared then they say in the Housing Agreement you sign that they can log in and look at anything you have openly shared.

Now just cause they know people will run their own firewalls to block them out and then still run whatever apps they want.. they require you to leave certain ports and accept certain packets (i.e. ping, netbios stuff, etc).

The message that they pop up on your screen is actually a net send message.

In actually application, it has slowed down the max speeds of the network and latency is about the same. It does kick you offline for very short periods (long enough for IRC to reset sometimes and GAIM to definitely have to reconnect)

Morals 101

[trolman]

How about directing all the mail and voice messages to the sociology department as a start in teaching basic morality?

Um, wrong.

[HoneyBunchesOfGoats]

Sorry, you may be correct in general, but not specifically about UF. I live in the residence halls. Last year I lived in on of the better halls as far as internet connections go. I was able to get sustained 7MB/sec transfers (yes megabyte) if the person on the other end had great enough bandwidth (and no, it wasn't through P2P). UF sits atop a tremendous connection, so in effect it's a resource like water.

On a side note, ICARUS sucks. What last year was a 5Mbit effective connection to the 'net (on a 10Mbit network) currently tests at half a megabit (just tested for this post at bandwidthplace.com). It has tested as low as 57Kbit earlier this year. Outages are frequent.

I'm not happy.

who cares about P2P ?

[Tom]

Seriously, who cares about P2P - this is a great application to take care of those damn windos machines that get infected with a virus and are never patched, cleaned up or taken down, but just continue spreading the malware happily.

I work for an ISP. We would love to have an easy way to identify and shut down those customers who are this negliegent.

(and before you yell we as ISP shouldn't bla bla - if you can't drive without endangering everyone else, then get off the road, no matter if it's the highway or the information superhighway)

There's a better reason....

[duckpoopy]

I thought this article would be about the abysmal CS department at UF.

Schools are like corporations

[pensivemusic]

and in both, it is not yours, it is theirs! a solution? form your own non university wireless networks and servers and do what the f____ you want. hint; when you graduate, you will be doing that anyhow so why not get some experience in hands on building, system setup, and problem solving and creatively make the world a better (insert your definition here)place where you want to live. peace!

Here's an analogy for you...

[FatSean]

While the computer is the user's private property, the way that computer works can affect everyone else on the network. Similarly, your house is private property, but if your septic tank is busted and dumping raw sewage into the ground water you are affecting others. The state reserves the right to check things like this when you buy/sell the house because of the potential impact on others. Of course, they don't do daily/random poop checks but that's because it's not feasible. If the technology was there I wouldn't mind having automated checks of my scumbag neighbors' sub-standard houses and systems....I don't want their feces in my well water!

Not perfect but you get the point.

And this isn't even the government!

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Dun Malg]

You have complete and unfettered internet access depending upon what they decide you can run.

Errr...If they decide one cannot run anything that uses a certain port, then it's not complete and unfettered access, is it.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[Xerithane]

Errr...If they decide one cannot run anything that uses a certain port, then it's not complete and unfettered access, is it.

It was tongue and cheek, really. My point is that internet access just means you have a connection to the internet. People say they have a right to drive, but they all get punished by the speed limits.

To me, this is just the same thing.

Some relevant, useful links

[riffer]

Here's someone posting to the Campus Computer Co-Ordinator's list about the topic popping-up in Slashdot and wired.

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions

Scanning computers?

[42forty-two42]

Does this mean they'll only allow Windows machines on their network? Or will Linux and *BSD users be ignored?

Internet2

[yerricde]

I'm guessing that in order for a download over I2 to work, both ends of the connection have to be on I2. Not all schools are on I2. Do sourceforge.net and savannah.nongnu.org have a mirror on I2?

Gun club

[yerricde]

I don't know about U of Florida, but Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology had a gun club during the four years I went there.

At my school they just firewalled it

[Stevyn]

At my school, they put up a firewall that blocks all p2p software from connecting to outside networks. That is why we had to resort to using a local Direct Connect hub that allowed easy file trading among the students. The good part was it was very fast at 800 kbytes/sec. The bad part was the limited selection of songs.

Re:If the bandwidth is exhausted, buy more bandwid

[bhmcintosh]

That's an unrealistic approach to the problem. UF is not exactly made of (or Endowed with) endless streams of cash, and Gainesville, Florida is not exactly a Mecca of high-speed bandwidth providers. It costs UF ENORMOUS sums of money, that have to be justified to the administration every fiscal year, to provide external connectivity. The University can't just keep adding OC-3cs just to keep up the flow of bootlegged music and movies. It's kind of hard to sell the Provost on an OC-12 to Qwest just so Johnny Dormroom can snag the latest System of a Down CD without having to actually go to Bleeding Wallet Records and buy it.

Re:Only 3 false positives?

[Penguinoflight]

No, you're a clueless idiot! the problem is that it's VB, not that it's open source (duh!).

Re:Schools to avoid!

[njdj]

Oh, please. Do you really believe that more than 10% of these are likely to be false accusations?
I don't "believe" anything about the % of false accusations, because there's no evidence beyond some specific cases which demonstrate that some accusations are false.

And it doesn't change the point any way you look at it. 40 false accusations are just as big a pain as 40 true accusations.

The point isn't that it's a pain, the point is who to blame - who should suffer the consequences of a proposed solution. It makes all the difference whether the accusations are true or false.

why bother with p2p apps?

[Magius_AR]

If you're on a college campus, simple Windows network shares will get you loads and loads of whatever you might be searching for on Kazaa equivalents.