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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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
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.
... because we all know how difficult it is to write a P2P system. [/sarcasm]
Methinks it is time to switch careers!
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.
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
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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