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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).'"
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.
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.
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.
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
Wow, what a wonderous world we live in where students can recieve e-mail when their internet connection is hosed *goes wide eyed*
Banaaaana!
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.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The program, dubbed 'Icarus'
What are the odds that this program is running on a Sun machine?
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?
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.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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...
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
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.
Except ... I regularly use P2P network programs for academic purposes. Almost daily.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Actually, they are looking inside the computers themselves, identifying files, viruses and apps.
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
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.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
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?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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?
In linux libertas
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.
Blar.
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.
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