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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."
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.
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
As a casual observer I have to say that this would seem to strengthen the RIAA's point. By developing their own solution when others would seem to already exist, these colleges lend weight to the notion that the existent services are not designed for "legitimate use", but rather for what they are used for now: Illegitimate use, in the eyes of the RIAA.
Anyway, thats just one possible view of this.
Yes, this is true. I make my lectures available to students as Powerpoint files, which get very large, especially with animations and videos. These files are too large to send via email. Right now we do it via a course webpage, but with the amount of data being distributed I can see how this is not the best way to do it. It would also be nice to share large datasets with colleagues more easily....
The reason I use it is because it organizes the information in the same way it is presented in class. (The idea is that the students can print out the slides and follow along without having to write down everything I say. Then they can focus on listening rather than writing.) There is also a lot of multimedia that can't really be adequately conveyed in text. Diagrams, pictures, animations, etc. It is covenient and all of the UCLA computer labs have it so the students have access to the software. I wish I didn't have to use a Microsoft product - I have tried Apple's Keynote but I do not find it to be a sufficient replacement.
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
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).
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