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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."
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....
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.
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.