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Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System
sukottoX writes "Penn State along with MIT and the University of British Columbia are developing a P2P application (called LionShare in the PSU incarnation) to be used only by students, faculty and staff. According to this article at the Penn State Daily Collegian, the file-sharing program, which wouldn't be completed until 2005 at the earliest, would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced. The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. Funding will come in part by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as from the students' information technology fee."
If P2P isn't being used for illicit file-swapping, is it really that much more efficient or useful for university students and professors than e-mail attachments and the various online course management software packages that are already out there?
DecafJedi
my weblog: apropos of something
if you are going to be at a university, expect to be censored.
Arn't they supposed to be on "Internet2" at this point anyway? what happened to that?
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Just operate their own tracker with controlled access on who can add things. Standard apache logs will tell you who was downloading which torrents, and you'll ease the load on servers.
Where's your "no legitimate uses" argument now, RIAA?
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them.
That's seems like a waste of effort when bittorrent is already finished, proven, and can trace downloads.
as well as from the students' information technology fee.
I always loved that about going to a University. I was paying for them to keep up their Windows addiction.
I should think so. This is oddly top-heavy. How is it going to cut down on traffic if students are using Lionshare for class AND Kazasterwire for their friends?
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
How is this Peer to Peer if students can't send data to each other? Because only profs can post data on the network, it is more like a master-to-serf transaction.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
The funding is to controll what is exchanged with "bittorent".
http://ebgp.net/ccc/
When it comes to brains, they've got the lion's share.
...
But when it comes to brute strength (in number of users)
I'm afraid their network's at the shallow end of the gene pool.
i am a soviet space shuttle
The article doesn't even say it is. It says its a file sharing program. In fact, they say its nothing like limewire, Kazaa, etc.
"Students will not be able to swap files between one another, Vaught said."
It also says it will be authenticated, and transactions logged. That's going to require some kind of central server.
... because we all know how difficult it is to write a P2P system. [/sarcasm]
Methinks it is time to switch careers!
since joining the swarm is an http request to a tracker, you can get a log and parse it out just like an apache log. the tracker only gets a fraction of the bandwith in traffic, so then its just a matter of running a server with the files to start uploads from. there, done long before 2005.
when will people start looking to (google, freshmeat, sourceforce) before starting a project. granted it is nice to have a 40 different choces for the 'wheel' program, but atleast look before you invest, thats the whole point of this open source stuff. start where someone left off.
The initial version of LionShare used the LimeWire open source codebase. Good to see open code and open networks being used to build new applications....
smd4985
It's probably Italian.
I'll give you my translation based on my french. French and Italian are similar. This person is having a problem with a missing reference in Visual Basic (not sure what version) with ADO (DAO). This is usually because of not having the latest VB service pack installed. Hope this helps.
dozens of university networks(student housing) run local directconnect hubs for anything. helps cut the traffic out of the network too..
and as for legit uses, there's practically no need for such system. local data transfers are CHEAP, and so is hd, it's no biggie to have fast networks that make the need for it(p2p) practically nil(actually it makes more sense to have most such data few centralised servers).
oh well, i guess some universities run their storage servers off from dsl or something.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
why only 2005 ???
konspire (http://konspire.sf.net/) works and would be perfect for such an internal p2p network.
teachers become broadcasters, each course with it's channel, and students subscribe to the desired channels. Files are then served transparently by everyone on a channel.
Is it just me, or wouldn't BitTorrent work to ease the load on the servers when professors distribute material? I realize that there are times when BitTorrent isn't the ideal solution, but I don't see why it couldn't be used here.
The only reason I can think of is that what they are really trying to do is institute the transaction logging, and the file distribution is the official reason given.
The program is being designed as a way for students, faculty and staff to exchange personal and academic materials on a sanctioned, secure peer-to-peer network. Another advantage is that large files, which would be impossible to send via e-mail or another method, can be shared.
While it all sounds nice and warm inside, how long will it be before it becomes abused. Now wait before you think it's trolling of me to say this, think about how lax security is at colleges.
Problems aren't with p2p they're with the users of it, and while some may think sharing a file or two isn't a crime, the fact is, it adds up. So for this to work think about the kind of boolean settings someone is going to have to program to search for illegalities.
What is staff going to do when snoop|grep -i *.mp* doesn't work because users decided to rename files to madonna.zip or madonna.sda? It's just something to contend with when indeed they do get these p2p programs out. So while it all sounds nice, and the intentions are good, these 'foundations', schools, and business shouldn't advertise or rather expect no shady dealings to go on using p2p on their networks. Sure it'll be closed to the outside world for a minute or two before someone figures out how to use something like datapipe to break that theory.
Controlled? Sorry never heard of the word
MoFscker
Leave it to Academia to spend way too much money to reinvent something with less functionality than so many other *free* products out there.
Idiots.
Bittorrent, as it is, is poorly suited for serving large numbers of relatively small files, to a population in which only a small percentage of users will want any one file. This solution probably won't cut it.
However, the underlying protocol would work for this just fine. (In fact, you could probably just get away with changing the client; servers could probably be the same, though I don't know all that much about the internals.) I'd say that a customized Bittorrent client would probably be fairly effective.
I do wonder exactly how much use this would be. After all, the main reason why P2P is used is to distribute the bandwidth needed. At a typical university, most of that bandwidth is going to be the university's anyway. It seems that this is more a job for multiple servers than P2P technology; of course, that wouldn't involve any buzzwords.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
lame comment
What's the advantage of this over a course web page and personal web pages? I mean, isn't that what web pages were designed for, file sharing and information sharing among individuals? And we even have URLs we can include in mail messages to point people at things. And while for MP3 sharing web pages may not work and not everybody has web hosting, evey university student should have web hosting and the skill to put up a web page somehow.
Bets on how long until someone puts together a "gateway" program to connect this network to an outside p2p network?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
My friend's college (which is famously wealthy) has invested in technology to identify all p2p uses. He only has to use bittorrent once and they disconnect him! Luckily, since my college is much poorer, I can download whatever I T^&7td
I'm sure this will be popular. It will easily displace every other P2P system in existance.
OTOH, it could make grading easy in the future. To wit:
Got caught trading illegal files -- F
Didn't get caught trading illegal files -- A
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
mod this trash down!
mv Britney_Spears.mp3 Professor_Boring's_Presentation.pdf
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
Some days you get the Lion.
Some days the Lion gets you.
But always dress for the hunt (in your RIAA-proof underwear, no doubt).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
BitTorrent trackers keep logs of all downloads, just like Web servers do.
Logging assumes some central point where logs are kept. And it's detrimental to privacy.
Why not have clients simply check documents' fingerprints and digital signatures, and only share/download "legit"/"authorized" content? That's the truly distributed way to do this.
I wonder how overloaded those webservers can get from a handful of students downloading some PDF'ed powerpoint presentations though..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Oh logging? You mean as in DHCP logging? Sure but what happens when $USERJOE decides to hang out in $USERJOHN's room and oops uses his connection while there to share files with someone else? Aside from that, what happens when(if) users start doing stupid little things like hijacking addresses, arp hijacks, yadda yadda to try to circumvent the p2p programs, then you have an altogether other nightmare on your hands.
There are too many variables to contend with, and personally I see it as another method of someone 'getting even with the system' to an extent.
MoFscker
Why not a client that like Groove or something that allows more than file sharing? File sharing can only go so far. Since you are in a university setting, you can setup servers to host things. But oh wait, if professors need to share things with the students let's say....they can always use web server. So why P2P again?
Apparently I'm missing something really obvious here. I mean you're going to have a P2P system to distribute college material? Maybe these people have never heard of file uploads through http. Are you going to trust the english department to properly share their files? Are the clients going to do md5 checksums on the files to make sure they haven't been tampered with? Are their servers really suffering that bad from "legitimate" academic traffic?
I mean you're telling me that you couldn't take like 2 Linux/BSD Guru's + around 5 CGI coders and come up with a simple web based solution? Now I have to wait for a client for MY OS of choice which may be a PDA which hasn't even been invented for all they know. I seriously can't see what this thing does at all! What you get with "decentralization" and "lessening the bourdon of administration" you're probably going to get screwed twice over with playing traffic cop and showing people over and over and over how to use the system. I also don't see how "logging every transaction" will help anything. We all know college students have worm ridden machines already, like I couldn't figure out how to hijack someone else machine and start injecting porn in place of the philosophy departments files.
Hell give me just 1 million (10% discount guys!!!) and I could do it myself - I'll even through in the hardware of a couple servers =P.
So you think p2p would be the answer? How about load balancing the servers for the admins there. Look I don't want to sound grinchy or anything but p2p is definitely not the answer to the problems you're mentioning.
This would be a way to ease up on that. Plus, a well-done system would have very good classification of material and no spoofs (no porn instead of lecture notes),
That's a big if. Considering the pranksters running around such schools, think about someone getting into one of the machines and changing everything you read to something else. Wouldn't that be horrible. It's opening up another Pandora's box. As for spoofs, it could also lead to people cheating by sharing answers, etc, which one would have to normally research, which is one of the pros about getting an education. Wouldn't you want to learn it as opposed to being spoon fed it?
Plus, think of the sharing potential. One could share class notes (I have a friend who takes his class notes using a pda, writes straight to latex. The resulting .dvi files were VERY much sought after), material between universities, get data from a course I don't remember and I need to remember *right now*, etc.
Again sorry to sound trollish if I do, but if you don't remember apparently you need to do a better job for yourself instead of being too dependent on technology. In some ways I often think that the older generation scholars were much more smarter than we are. Mainly because of the abuses in technology, and this to me is sort of abusive. Learn something, study it, go out to the library get some air. Why take the chance of so called sharing when 1) information can be changed so easily so make sure that shared network is secured to the tee. 2) Wouldn't you rather socialize with someone instead of being crammed up on a machine?
Just my opinion...
MoFscker
Sowhat happend to plain email and html pages where you can download files? What wait until 2005 when you can do the same today ;)
Also, how long will it take before the students develop something that encrypts the name of the file as it is transferred, but offers another server somewhere to rehash the names? (I don't know the technical details of this so please forgive any ignorance on the matter).
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students...
What are they, idiots? WTF did we invent the web servers for?
No, a place of learning is the last place anyone should tolerate censorship. Without free speech, there is no accademic freedom. Whithout accademic freedom you don't get an education, you get an indoctrination. A free state depends on real education. Without it, we are slaves. Censorship of electronic publishing is tantamount to book burning. Shame on any University that implements this shit.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That's easy, you expell the students who run Kaza and what not. It's not right, but it can be done. If your mac address does not give you away, a remote call through IE to get your prcessors UID will. My fear, soon to be realized, is that only "approved" applications will be alowed on campus networks.
Anonymous speech is integral to free speech. If there is no anonymous electronic publishing, there is no free elctronic speech. Campus networks were the last bastion of reasonable networking. Moves like this eliminate the last hope of a free internet over owned wires.
Time to move to free air.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Accept that the first release is going to be the "Spoofed Client" Programming Contest.
Accept that you have just given students a great kicker to explore embedding seriptious content in the containing school-oriented files . Suddenly, the school is put in the position to declare random bits as being intelligent content or not. My personal container fav: That crazy TIFF
By forming a closed system, you have effectively removed spyware for the RIAA to inject into. Once in, this system is golden. I like it.
mug
Disclaimer: I am a Penn State student.
Most people on campus have never heard of lionshare, and the majority of us don't care. Students will still use kazaa for as long as they can.
BUT,
For those of you who don't know, our president, Graham Spanier, was one of the first supporters of setting up a separate college music network. Essentially, every student is FORCED to pay a higher technology fee. This increase will go to Penn State, which will use it to pay the RIAA/MPAA for legal movies and music downloads. This has been mentioned several times, and as far as I know it is being planned to be introduced next year.
Here is what I suspect may happen:
1) This may be what Lion Shrine is ultimately used for. You'd think that if we were paying for movies, we could download them from some sort of central server, but lionshare may be the main method of transport.
2) The IT people here on campus will start disabling/blocking all the P2P ports they can, except for lionshare. Of course they can never cut off P2P completely, but they can make it difficult enough that everyone stops using it.
3) Voila! Now everyone is using lionshare. Graham Spanier announces the program is a huge success, and this scenario repeats itself across campuses all over the country.
4) Profit
I always thought that a university should be educating me. Instead I find out that good old Graham thinks its his duty to charge me more to keep me entertained, even if I don't want to use his entertainment.
That fucker.
Oh, he writes directly to LaTeX source code... (it sure WOULD be a wet dream if a PDA could translate handwritten equations to LaTeX)
The funding is to block out all but the spyware they are building. That way they can track the little nits and crush the ones with double plus ungood thoughts. You don't want people at a University thinking, do you? This makes Carnivore look innocent.
They are destroying what the internet should be. By placing a central inteligence at the core and forbidding alternate services, they are creating one giant collection of dumb terminals. Nice work Penn! Shame on you MIT for letting youself get tarred by association with this kind of junk.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Illegal P2P networks? What law is their against Gnutella? Bridget, you got some 'spaining to do...
Motorola has (or had, ~2000) an internal application called Compass that could do something like this. Perhaps the schools could talk to Motorola (who could use some revenue).
I don't know what it was based on, but it also included CMS functionality (i.e., publish, view, edit privs, etc). It allowed users to create their own subscription groups for their own content, etc.
By definition *only* a government can do that.
Also, when you sign up at a school you willingly give up some of your rights to free expression and privacy. Same as when you accept a job offer..
They didnt take it, you gave it up.
Sure it might suck, but they are 100% within their rights to do so. If you dont like it, you dont goto school there. ( or work there, etc )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Students will not be able to swap files between one another, Vaught said.
Wow! What a super advance in technology this represents! Up until now, we have had to use this crazy "web" thing to distribute files and information. But hey, it's got MIT's name on it right so it must be good.
Hey MIT, for a mere $1 million, I will show you how to setup
In all this talk about tracking every file transfer to protect the rights of music publishers I think I'd have more sympathy for them if they'd disclose what percentage went to whom. One is much less likely to pirate a song if one can know the impact it has on a beloved artist. So how about it RIAA, as a good will jesture. Show us how much of these royalties actually get back to the artist. My back bristles at paying some slick production company $$$$ when Chuck Berry gets $.00000002. Why don't they launch a similar tracking project to show us that we really impact artists not just record companies? I didn't think so...
Bittorrent would, however, be good for those vaguely plausible 100 mebibyte powerpoints. I think that Waste would be a good idea for students to use if they get fed up with the whole "know who gets what files while still using the term 'P2P'" thing. After all, the university would have some trouble stopping them.
You can build a whole lot of file servers. And more importantly, back them up, so that when one of the less literate professors starts opening random email attachments and loses their hard drive they don't lose all their course materials along with it. Seems like it would be much easier (and cheaper) to teach people how to map a network drive.
Hell, I could have almost exactly what they want using dchub in a week or two.
You obviously have no idea of the enormity of a university like PennState. How do you manage who gets to add links and who doesn't? Do you want 400 emails a day asking to add/remove/modify a link? How about the students that forge being a teacher? You'll also then need to cluster the servers, because one server simply won't cut it. How about the "student volunteers". Where do you get those from? Especially when you have 5,000 applications? How about downtime? Who's responsible for that with student volunteers? What if this isn't really a "volunteer project" but more like a production environment? No, they definitely don't need funding! Any Linux machine is *obviously* free! Nobody should ever get paid for this kind of thing!
I RTA, and love these funny things:
It'll be authenticated so anonymous users won't be able to use it... Uh huh... I give it a week max...
It's not for student-to-student, but rather Prof-to-Student... Uh huh... I give it a day, max before some enterprising student discovers that his Prof's PC is open to sharing files on some other port and poisons the pool with some hidden directory... Oops, but I've said too much already...
This is the most assinine thing I've seen funded in a long time... Guess that means that I can get my concept for a dot com funded soon!
This doesn't make me particularly happy as a PSU student. PSU already logs the amount of bandwidth we use here everyday, it's not too much of a stretch to have them give us our own P2P so they can track that. I guess it wouldn't be so bad, but to force all students to pay for such a service is wrong. And, be weary of anything you read in the Daily Collegian.
Isn't there a reason Bittorrent was developed? Why are they reinventing the wheel to lessen the load of those oh so large PDF files that professors distribute? I don't remember the last time my professor wanted to send me a DIVX movie. Sounds pointless to me.
-----Zephyre
I guess knocker foundation was already taken.
Run your own student network in the dorms. Tell the administration to go back to their RIAA masters.
A few access points comprising an isolated network with authentication using a secure file transport client would be undetectable. When I was in university, we ran unofficial and against policy ethernet and cable lines with little difficulty. Wireless should make it a snap.
..don't panic
Now university students can download lecture notes that suddenly cutoff after a few pages, and repeat over and over again. Or they will download what they think is course materials, only to find it is just a file that repeatedly says "what the fuck do you think you're doing?"
#!/
-Carter
The problem with this implementation is that it is a "sneaky" way to do it which allows people to still get in trouble only to be caught at a later time. The job of a school is to teach not punish. They should just teach students not to abuse the school network. Whats so hard about that?
Clickety Click
Why not just setup a system like strangesearch and let people use windows/SAMBA sharing?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This would be so easy to get around. All you have to share legal files...but embed the "tsk tsk" stuff inside of them with something like Camouflage ;)
Not enough if you want to track / log / audit data exchange going on ...
Schools are blocking P2P programs all over the country, but I would have to believe that freeing up bandwidth is NOT their first priority. Look here at Universiy of Miami, where everything P2P we have tried, they have blocked. Even BitTorrent doesn't work, and I am wanting to use it for LEGAL downloading. Ah, but I walked into a Biology computer lab the other day, and what do I find? SETI@home running on practically every computer.
A much better use of their time and lessen the network load, let's teach some of the college professors how to use Acrobat (or whatever) to create PDF's more efficiently.
I worked in the computer commons in college and I can't tell you how many times we had to reset printer spools because of students printing 100 meg pdf's from intranet sites (yes students were taught to download then print).
It is true that graphics will increase the size of any document, however if I can get a 600-700 page apache tutorial in pdf and it takes up only a nominal amount of filespace, what is the deal with the 100 meg 5-10 page pdf!?
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
There is a FREE way to make PDF files, the information is all posted on the web and it uses EDU created programs (Ghostview, GhostGum, RedMon) to make everything. You just run your file to the printer, and everything is made into a nice PDF file. Any format can print/view and anyone with a braincell in the university level SHOULD be able to make a go of printing out the slides on their own from that point.
I had a professor who had us give him $25 a semester, sometimes $40 and he would have his notes printed @ kinkos. The $$$ covered his expenses for this, and when all said and done I STILL took notes, because his notes were:
Tort Law in society today:
Tort Law in actual use:
etc...
Seems like MIT and the other big boys would be smart enough to implement somehing along either one of those lines.
I noticed that penn state has some job openings related to this project for all you p2p folks out there.
As one of the developers of LionShare and a /. addict, I feel obligated to shed a little light on this story, unfortunatly I don't have time at the momement. I managed to post a quick journal entry to dispel some of the myths. In a few weeks, when we have detailed information on the web, I will see if the /. editors would be kind enough to post an accurate followup submission.
The funding is to federalize the authentication used in Lionshare. See Internet2's "Shibboleth" project and imagine that applied to a higher education filesharing project.
The idea is to create federations of like minded users (ie a bio professor at PSU has more in common with a bio professor at Ohio State than they do with a physics professor at PSU). Unfortunatly the current auth realms are set up as islands of universities, not islands of professions. Hopefully federated authentication can solve that and filesharing has been choses as the first non web application to try this with. Also with this fine grained acls can be applied to objects to handle authorization based on user attributes.
BitTorrent is a great app, but does not address any of these issues.
Finkployd
"The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. "
Okay, assholes, good thinking and all-- but I DIDN'T bring my computer with ME to college to DONATE it to you as a "part-time server" because you are too cheap to buy a few extra fucking servers to host the files students need to get off the LAN for their classes. I mean WTF, let the professor host it on his pc -- he can't have THAT many students.