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More on the University of Florida
setzman writes "According to this article, the University of Florida has implemented a software program known as ICARUS (Integrated Control Application for Restricting User Services) to monitor student activities on the campus network. If a user downloads music or videos the system deems to be illegal, they will lose their connection and be punished by being forced to watch industry propaganda, lengthy suspensions of access, or even a written reprimand. Yet the system hasn't resulted in an increase in CD sales? Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?" We covered this some months ago but the Associated Press is just catching on.
And, as others have pointed out, they were given no alternative to that policy: the students are, after all, the customers who pay the bills, and that kind of behaviour would not be acceptable in pretty much any other field of commerce.
Universities are lucky that businesses are still stupid enough to hire people based on pieces of paper rather than ability and experience: there's really little reason to support them otherwise given the nonsense they're pulling these days.
Well if this dosen't illustrate the need for a fully encrypted p2p network I don't know what does. Can you say... tunnel it all through SSL? IRC has been doing this for ages...
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
I'll give you the run-down.
It monitors your connection to the kazaa network. It's nothing too fancy. If you connect, you get screwed. They run the check like every 30 minutes or something. Once detected your internet is immidiately shut off with no notice. A flier will be sent to your dorm finally informing you of what happened. The first time I had to go see the head RA of my dorm complex who was also clueless on the outage. He contacted the network people who let me know that it was the new ICARUS system and that I had to go to a webpage to reactivate my account. Upon visitning the site you are told exactly what happened, and the first time I think I got my net cut off for only 30 minutes.
The second time wasn't so pretty. Same routine (although this time I KNOW i wasnt even downloading anything or sharing, just connected to kazaa... what's the crime in that?) but different sentence. My net was cut off for 48 or 72 hours (cant remember which), and I had a judicial violation. If I violated again, I would have perm. account suspension and I would have to go before a review board.
So basically, if you are on the UF network kazaa is blocked for all intensive purposes. I don't know why they don't just BLOCK kazaa instead of screwing students over in this manner. However, I'm a student, not a suit, so what do I know, right?
>The easy way to avoid either penalty is to STOP STEALING.
Actally the easiest (and cheapest!) way to avoid those penalties is to start stealing.
Shoplifting a CD from a record store carries far, far, far fewer penalties than downloading even a single track from the same disc. Even if they hit you with the maximum the law allows you're still way ahead of what most people get for settling out of court with the RIAA.
Think about it. Who's really doing the stealing here?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
That's more or less what my university did. First, they outright blocked it. Then, someone clued in OIT about some bandwidth-throttling hardware. Now, during the day, P2P gets the dregs of bandwidth left over from normal usage, and everyone is mostly happy. This ICARUS program (from reading the comments) appears to be a roundabout way of blocking indiscriminately, except with more overhead. Go figure.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
F'rinstance if I see traffic on port 1214 I can be reasonably certain you're running Kazaa. If I see traffic on port 6667 it's pretty safe to assume you've got an IRC client running - if I wanted to do a bit of packet analysis I could even tell if you were running ircd on the school network.
sysadmins can monitor the network without monitoring content, I'm afraid.
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
At my school, Cornell University, they simply charge you for any bandwidth you use over 2GB/month. (At about $3/GB). Basically, you can do what you want on the net, but if you're a heavy downloader, you're going to pay to support that habit. (There have been a few people shut down, but those were the idiots downloading several feature-length movies, etc. a day, and they were shut down for using WAY too much of their dorm's available bandwidth).
And yes, there is an acceptable use policy, but as I use iTMS, that doesn't really affect me.
I don't know about the US but in the UK it's not stealing because theft is criminal law and copyright is civil law. You will not get arrested for copying files but can be sued. You will get arrested for shoplifting a CD.
From what I'm reading it seems that if you simply connect to Kazzaa you get kicked, doesn't even bother checking what you're doing. I can't wait untill they start doing this for BitTorrent. Because we all know that anything that can be used for something illegal has no possible legal use
The university I'm at has a simple policy to avoid running out of bandwidth: they monitor bandwidth use per IP address (or per physical network socket, I'm not sure which way they run it). If you consistently use too much (where "too much" roughly means "enough to inconvenience everyone else"), they tell you to stop. In theory, if you keep using too much, they disconnect you, but in practice most people get the hint after the first warning or two. Formally, we aren't told what the limit is; informally, I've heard the computing service start taking an interest once you break 1GB/day on a regular basis.
As a matter of policy, they don't sniff network traffic (they'd rather not be responsible for it).
They do block a couple of ports, but only the ones you really don't want to use over the Internet (NetBIOS) and a couple they need to block for policy reasons (SMTP to the outside world is blocked, to make sure that if we spam, it goes through the central mail relay, so they can tell who was responsible; it's a little annoying, since I can use my web host as an authenticated relay from any network except university, but I can live with it).
I think it's even possible to convince them to unblock those ports for your IP, if you can come up with a good enough reason, although I've never tried.
It's a good policy IMO; you can't transfer huge amounts of data all the time, but you can have very impressive bandwidth for a short time (I've downloaded Linux ISOs from another college at about 40MBit/sec!) and pretty much any network protocol is allowed (good for computer science students and like-minded people).
According to the University of Florida ICARUS FAQ, this is actually entirely false. Students get their Internet access cut off for increasingly long periods of time, and thats it. Apparantly after several times, they have to go through some sort of student judicial system and it goes on their permanent record. However, it explicitly says that ICARUS is entirely dependent of any corporate sponsors or influence.