Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the life-in-a-fishbowl dept.

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."

6 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Do universities actually need this? by Decaffeinated+Jedi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Do universities actually need this? by SoTuA · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Well, I have seen my university's servers "slashdotted" just before tests and such (when the _humble_ box serving the course management pages get lots of hits)

      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), so that one can download all of the pertinent materials of a given course, easy.

      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.

  2. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  3. Top Heavy by OECD · · Score: 2, Interesting
    ... if students can share with professors, they should be able to share with other students as well.

    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.
  4. as for illegit uses.. by gl4ss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  5. Controlled? I beg to differ by segment · · Score: 2, Interesting
    will allow the university to develop a technology called LionShare, a file-sharing system that requires students to log in each time.

    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