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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.
Wow. That is a name I want to base my business on.... We will have to see what the sun does to the wax that holds those wings together....
I wonder if this is one more sign of a doomed music industry. How long until they fall into the sea?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
... even more than the loss of student's privacy, is the fact that other universities have approached these people about buying this ICARUS program.
I'm all for respecting the copyright, but that doesn't extend to censoring my computer. It sounds a little shady to me. What they may end up doing is forcing students to add internet connectivity options to the college-selection process, which is a shame.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
Let me tell you first hand that this is one sneaky system. I lived in the dorms over the summer when it was implemented and they didn't even inform the students. All of the sudden my connection was just off. I wasn't downloading ANYTHING, I just had kazaa open in the background (not sharing any files).
I am one of the proud 100 students caught twice mentioned in that article. Now I have my own house off-campus with cable modem service. Hell, it beats using a proxy to destroy ICARUS (it isn't smart enough to monitor packet contents, just destination). Thank God I'm transferring to University of Michigan.
Maybe I'm missing something but I didn't think the University of Florida had a "...failing business model". Maybe they are just doing it so they don't get in trouble? They are a University and it could be argued they are well within their rights to limit their exposure.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
We covered this some months ago but the Associated Press is just catching on.
:-p
To be translated as --
We know you're gonna scream repeat, but we're gonna repeat it anyway.
This notice is to inform you that your access has been suspended to the campus network due to the fact that you have been browsing yro.slashdot.com.
In order to continue your so-called education you must sit with one of our thought process councilors to discuss your perspective on the illegal action of downloaded music.
Please go to the campus library and navigate to www.riaa.com/uflorida to register for your session.
Thank you,
Mr. Charrington
It is the universities internet connection they are providing to students, and is subject to their policies of use. If students want to download illegal content, they have the freedom to attain their own internet connection through some other means.
What's another word for Thesaurus?
-Steve Wright
Does the University of florida sell CDs? Is the drop in CD sales affecting the sources of income for the University of florida? If not, isn't this a stupid comment? If the RIAA were blackmailing the university into implementing this then I would agree that this is a rights violation, but get real: the University of Florida is perfectly well entitled to take steps to ensure it's network isn't used for illegal purposes, not to mention monitoring the use of it's resources. Yes, downloading copyrighted material is illegal, whether you think this is right or wrong. If you don't like this, go to a different university, or get a private net connection.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
It would be interesting to see if sales of CDR and DVDRs went up.
Also, what is to stop an informal, peer to peer wireless service starting up?
All the authorities probably want is to not be liable to the RIAA. They don't care whether you download songs or not, they just don't want the RIAA knocking at their door. They are also picking up the tab for all that bandwidth as well.
They probably realise that their students will get round it anyway, or if they don't, it doesn't say much for the ingenuity of UF students.
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
The only people profiting from the RIAA Shenanigans seems to be software companies that are designing anit copyright infringement technologies.
I only download stuff I would have never bought in the first place, or stuff I Can't buy because it hasn't had a UK release. Not allowingme to download these files doesn't make me buy the CD's or DVD's I just find something else to do.
I might not agree with what the university is doing, but in this case the university can differentiate between the private property (the computer) and the public property (the bandwidth). Note I didn't say I agree with them but at least they are making this separation to the students.
However, one thing I think the University is doing that they need to be VERY CONCERNED with for themselves (and not the students) is that they are now EDITORIALIZING. In other words, they are now saying they have looked at the content and this makes them RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. As soon as you do this, you are legally in a much worse position than you were before.
A bookstore that claims that it has reviewed the titles on its shelves is in a worse position than one that hasn't. It cannot now claim that it didn't know that there was lewd material in one of its books.
This is dangerous because once the law considers it the norm for a university to monitor its bandwidth usage (and not just the amount of bandwidth but the content), they are now open to litigation much more easily. In the end, it is possible that universities might just have to forego much of their Internet access to protect themselves legally. A lose-lose situation for everyone.
Sunny
Be my Friend
You may recall Icarus as the son of Daedalus. Daedalus was an early technological innovator, who developed wings to allow himself and his son to escape the prison they were confined in by King Minos. Minos was angry that Daedalus had given a citizen the key to the maze that Minos had required Daedalus to build for Minos' benefit. Unfortunately, Icarus tried to exploit his father's wing technology incautiously, thus bringing destruction on himself and grief and guilt to his father.
Not that there's a modern metaphor there anywhere...okay, maybe. Key:
- Daedalus = the
/. crowd
- Icarus = the general computer-using public
- wings = peer-to-peer networking
- prison = DMCA
- King Minos = RIAA/MPAA etc.
- key = DeCSS etc.
- maze = copy prevention
- incautiously = without adequate anonymity
- destruction = massive lawsuits, etc.
But you knew this...I suspect that this has very little to do with wanting to keep illegal content off the network, and almost everything to do with not wanting to deal with the administrative load of DMCA takedown notices. Network admins for a large university have much better things to do with their time than file/track/answer notifications w/r/t music that their students are sharing on well-known-and-trackable p2p networks.
The goal is noble, it's just not the one that the RIAA would like to trumpet.
I'm not even sure where to begin but I was caught by the system. The first time around it was simply a matter of them explaining why. They set the ground rules when I spoke with them, I learned well during a 20 minute conversation with the system network admin.
:( The system got me again.
I strayed off the path a bit just recently and fired up kazaa to see if i could find some music they were playing on the university radio station. I wasn't strong enough to stay away from the copyrighted materials
I've been without inet access for a few months now, sucks but I'm getting better now. I dont think about ripping off artists much anymore and the riaa video was actually quite informative (better than my psychology classes at least.) If I can keep this up for a few more months I'll be set, I'll hopefully never consider downloading music that I dont own... Downloading music aint right and thats the truth.
...downloading copyrighted material is perfectly legal if you have permission to do so.
Even more interesting: Icarus is the child of Daedalus (a technological wizard) and Naucrate (a government whore)!
:)
But that's okay, since there's no technological wizardry or governmental whoring involved in this one, right?
I don't think the other students should have to foot the bill for those who want to use huge amounts of bandwidth. Those who want to swap can get their own, private internet connection.
When a private ISP does this, I will care.
Didn't NPR run an article on this? But NPR's article stated that using P2P AT ALL will trigger the warning.
Thats got me worried.
P2P CAN Be used as a legimate software distribution medium. i.e FreeBSD and some other free software tend to get a lot of hits on my upload queue.
So, if users were getting Linux ISO's over p2p in the university/corporate network, and this software triggers false warnings, who knows what will happen.
...because 12 year old children get sued for thousands of dollars and students "will lose their connection and be punished by being forced to watch industry propaganda, lengthy suspensions of access, or even a written reprimand.".
Sounds fair to me
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?
I never know how to think about this sort of stuff anymore. On one hand they are breaking the law (no matter how unjustified it may seem) and it is the Universities network. I seem to remember many Uni's whining about how much bandwidth they were having to provide then finding out 80% of it was used to download music, pr0n and warez.
I mean, if you walk into a shop and steal CDs... we all know what will happen.
On the other hand, this whole music model with the RIAA (and similar organisations outside the US) sucking us dry has got to die.
So, it the downloading of music a form of protest or free speech, or is it simply breaking the laws of the land?
(Ok, is it the AP Journalist who has no idea what copyright means and has paraphrased Green, or Green himself?)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
how about good ol' newsgroups? sounds like ICA-R-US works only on P2P file sharing. or does it detect alt.binaries.****s? I doubt it does.
:p
you know, sometimes it's a good idea to step backwards, live in the old style, and survive well in this world controlled by a few in power. I'm talking about "school," of course.
With all benefits of ICARUS aside, can't it be circumvented with something like Waste?
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."
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 why they don't just BLOCK kazaa instead of screwing students over in this manner."
Ensuring that most people will be criminals by enacting laws that the majority will break (and allowing them to break those laws), and then monitoring such activities gives you a nice power leverage.
That way if anyone becomes uncomfortable for one reason or another (entirely unrelated to the issue), you can always 'get' them with the laws they did break.
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
Why not just setup traffic shaping.
At the school that I went to, when Napter and then Kazaa became a problem (i.e. was eating up too much of the colleges upstream/downstream bandwidth), the network admins just applied some traffic shaping to it. They gave 4500 students 30kbps of bandwidth. That stopped 99% of the downloading.
These sorts of content filtering seem silly, as all it will do is speed up the transition to encrypted, hard to trace solutions.
Yet the system hasn't resulted in an increase in CD sales?
More likely to have resulted in an increase in blank CD sales.
SpamNet - a spam blocker that really works
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).
There is a third solution, charge the students the wholesale (what you pay for it) cost of the bandwidth. The tech fee pays for the baseline tech expenses, and bandwidth is payed via a usage fee.
Although scanning for and blocking viruses might be nice, I do believe it violates the "common carrier" clause of the DMCA, and if you don't scan for viruses (as well as any other scanning), you wouldn't be liable anyway for copyright infringement of your users.
You're in a dorm with hundreds of other students, all with access to CD burners. Blank CDs cost $0.20. Have everybody chip in $0.25 for one copy of each CD you all want, then burn copies for everybody. Hey, if you're going to be treated like criminals, might as well do it right -- in this case it greatly lessens your chances of getting caught!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Why don't they hire detectives to tail the students to the local library? I hear you can check out CDs there and listen to the for FREE! Of course, the collection there leans more to classical than to Britney Spears...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If I understand this correctly...
- students may NOT opt out of paying for internet connectivity, regardless of their desire to use or not
- merely connecting to a Kazaa node activates the enforcement action (i.e., no downloading of illegal content is required)
- previously collected internet connectivity fees are NOT refunded on a pro-rated basis, for services that will never be delivered
- RIAA propaganda is force-fed to those whom this *ahem*... system has determined as violaters (are they bound to a comfy chair, with eyes propped wide open also?)
Makes you wonder if there are any lawyers actually practicing in Florida. I don't support illegal content downloading in general, but this UF solution is a huge load of crap, atop a heaping stinkpile of entrapment. Why the fsck don't they simply block Kazaa at the firewall? Doesn't their Kung Fu Master of Network Coordination (Rob Bird) understand how to configure a firewall? Guess not.
Who's really doing the stealing and profiteering here folks? Preying on a captive audience of ignorant youth who are not-so-worldly in a legal and business sense, shouldn't result in mass adulation and butt kisses? Where's the outrage???
These are the kinds of spineless wimps who (I pray) are whining passengers on that busload of RIAA scum, that fateful day when the lynch mob corners them on a cul de sac.
Ok... a little over the top perhaps. But I truly am praying for that day, when some smart and courageous kid figures out that they too, can have their very own ass-reaming lawyer.
Hmm... Maybe they will figure out another way to improve their failing business model?
A few weeks ago, we held a forum on "Net Piracy" here at my school of Texas A&M. It wasn't really a forum, with the connotation of public discussion, but more of a presentation by the speakers. Attending were a local professor of communications, an author of a book on the subject, an MPAA vice president, and US Representative John Carter. They gave some very good speeches and then answered some presubmitted questions.
I was a pretty frustrated that I was not going to get a chance to ask a question. I had some very good ones! Then someone from the audience said something about originality, interrupting one of the speakers. The moderator asked him to clarify, and this guy in the audience launched into a diatribe about how formulaic are all the current movies and music, and how people would be more willing to pay money for it if it was more original.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
There were a lot of things that needed to be said at that forum. The US Representative was using "steal" and "pirate" as if they meant the same thing as "download" and "share." This guy is making our country's laws based on a powerful, industry-sponsored misconception. Why the hell would someone bring up this originality bullshit? That's something you complain about with your buddies. It's not something you use as justification for copyright violations before a member of the United States House of Representatives. Way to give us all a bad name, idiot.
This "failing business model" crap is just one more example of the same problem. You can sit around with your friends (or on Slashdot, if that is your only friend) and talk about how weak RIAA's and MPAA's business model is, but you don't use that as justification for breaking it.
I think the ideal would look a lot like iTunes, with all music, movies, and TV shows available for download at a low price. That would be great for everyone. The people who produce it get paid, the people who want it get it whenever they want. Guess what? That business model has a lot of potential to fail. People will download the stuff, crack its encryption, and share it. There's nothing wrong with the business model, it's the assholes you see all around you that don't follow the rules.
I resent the whining camera prop commercial they play before movies as much as the next guy, and Britney Spears spews nothing but bullshit, but seriously, they really do need to get paid. Actors get paid too much (by my standards), and music labels don't compensate musicians well, but they REALLY DO NEED TO GET PAID. There's no justification here for downloading music and movies you should be paying for. If you don't want to buy it, you don't get it. Life goes on.
Additionally, colleges get away with various restrictions because they have a captive market (college students, fresh out of high school and quite often all-too-comfortable being treated without full adult dignity), but remember that colleges are ISPs. The students are not receiving free connections tied in big red bows, but rather are indeed paying for them, and no private ISP in the country would get away with these kinds of restrictions. Remember that students use connections for personal as well as education uses, and are not so simply defined-- Simply being a .edu ISP does not mean that the lame "they're using our network, it's our rules" defense is justifies invasive monitoring.
Again, compare to if a consumer ISP said that in defense of an ICARUS-like system. They'd lose half their subscribers in a month. The reason for this is simple: nobody should be forced to agree to private terms which will remove rights that are constitutionally protected in a public life, and such terms should indeed very very seldom be included in any contract. This applies to college ISP agreements just as it does to normal ISP agreements.
Rename all your warez, movies and mp3s to stuff such as "Submarine_engine_distortion.mp3", "The_development_of_a_maggot.avi" and "statistic_calculator.exe"
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
The reason Daedelus made his wings was to escape King Minos. He knew the risks and explained them to his son very clearly. He made wings for his son so that they could escape to freedom together, knowing the dangers ahead and the desparate situation if they remained behind. As they took off Icarus, Daedelus's son, was happy to be free and was enjoying his wings and flew a bit too close to the sun and the wax that held them in place melted and he fell to his death, in spite of his fathers warnings. The vehicle of his freedom cost him his life. The price of freedom for Daedelus was the life of his son, but he was free, and his son died free. The moral of the story is that freedom has risks and must be taken seriously and that life under tyranny isn't a life at all. Freedom can lead to self destruction, but freedom is preferable to tyranny no matter what the cost and no matter what the risk.
Ironically, the ICARUS system is all about imprisoning youth, shutting down college kids from the world and controlling them. They will never be offered the opportunity to be free. If the ICARUS system were to trully follow its Greek Mythology metaphor, it would be more aptly named the MINOS system, as it is a system of control, not a tool for liberation. It would be better to trust the college students, let them fly, and if they go too close to the RIAA sun, they will get burned, but it should be thier choice. Choice, good or bad, is an essential element of liberty. Liberty should not be restricted over something as trivial as music sharing.
I mean, if you have to take some sort of Copyright ethics class, personally I'd love to get busted and be forced to take that, just to point out exactly what is wrong with it.
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