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Solutions for University File Sharing?
bbulzibar asks: "Indiana University, like many other Universities, is struggling to deal with P2P file sharing. At a recent meeting, faculty, staff, and administration were convinced that 'the University is going to have to take some sort of action in the future [to eliminate illegal activity on the university's network].' With no student input, I can only imagine the worst happening (limiting data transfer, suing students, taking funds out of the student technology fee). What kind of a solution could be recommended by a proactive student in order to avoid an ugly 'solution' and loss of file sharing, yet reasonable enough that the University will accept it? IU has outlined 4 options at the meeting. Your thoughts?"
you 'inform' the students that they need to share files within the network, and then the geekiest of them will run to setup a Direct Connect hub that's restricted to the university network. of course, the IT departments can't control the content, but atleast the bandwith won't be clogged up.
--Mike--
As an IU Alumni, I support the position of suing the RIAA and MPAA for emotional pain and suffering. Other than that, I don't think anything sort of just blocking users one at a time will work.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
If bandwidth is the issue, then selective rate limiting is probably your only sane option. And I'm not talking about quashing speeds to 3K/s. It sounds like you want to be reasonable, and that's good; the students will respect you more, and will be less likely to try to overthrow their fascist IT overlords.
If piracy is the issue, (and it sounds from your notes like it is), there really is nothing you can do about it except block those ports. Even if you provide them with free & legal file-trading resources, the piracy will still continue.
And remember: no matter what you do, there will always be some smart stundent who finds a way around it.
How about you guys stop sharing illegal copyrighted files?
I am pissed off at the RIAA's tactics as much as the next man, but when I download music, at least I'm paying for the connection. It's mine to do with as I please.
When I'm at university, I play by their rules since they're giving me free LAN access. If you want to share files that badly, get DSL wired up to your dorm and pay for the connection yourself. It's not that expensive, even for a student.
You could do what Penn State did, and buy napster accounts for all your students...then firewall the shit outta them so they can't use anything else...leaves us linux kids in the dark...
worst of all, the napster money comes out of my tuition...friggin rediculous
Block p2p apps by default, but anyone who asks can have those ports unblocked. However, they must sign a form that says they will only share files they have legal rights to share, and understand that RIAA/whatever may from time to time scan for files they own, your name will be given to those groups upon request. Also make sure you demand they limit the bandwidth they use at the same time.
You can't really stop P2P, but this way you have done something.
Check with the lawyers before doing anything though, a mistake in handeling this situation can be far worse than ignoring it.
Unless you want to destroy the computing environment at the U, with firewalls between dorm rooms, port blocking, lawsuits, and the endless, pointless bullshit that comes out of this mess, you only have one choice:
Allow unlimited file sharing.
To keep the RIAA off your back, you need to pay them some kind of protection. Taking it out of a universal fee isn't going to work (as indicated in the linked document), so you have to include it in some other fee. Maybe anybody who uses more than a minimal amount of bandwith is charged the protection.
If anybody has their head so far up their ass that they actually believe it is possible to somehow stop or curtail filesharing, well, I have an unbreakable DRM scheme I'd like to sell them for only 500 million dollars per year.
There is no other practical, long-term solution, short of lobbying congress to legalize not-for-profit filesharing. Especially at a university, which should be the last place internet access should be limited in any way.
Note: When I was in college we swapped CDs and tapes. I feel sorry for the kids today who do it over the network where they can be monitored constantly. When I swapped a CD with my buddy down the hall, nobody knew about it. Oh well, that's "progress".
My college, shawnee state in ohio, is locked down tighter than.....something really tight.
All filesharing ports are closed, and we can't run any servers that will get past the individual dorm, or in my case, set of local dorms.
Its only me and a other few people who have figured out their wonky settings, and are sharing some stuff through samba.
It doesn't seem like any of these solve your two major problems:
1) Bandwidth issues are the same whether downloads are legal or not.
2) However you decide to pay for content, you're not going to provide everything everyone wants. To get movies, warez, porn, whatever people are still going to run Kazaa or the other piracy facilitation services and then you're back to square one.
Honestly, I don't understand what's wrong with simply holding people responsible for their actions. That's what everyone supposedly wants, until individual violators start getting hit and then it's "Waaaaah! The RIAA is being mean to kids!"
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
... I like the education option. "This is legal, this is not." I think lack of understanding here is a bigger chunk of it than people realize. Especially the "Dont you get us in trouble" bit.
One approach would be to limit the upload capacity, then create a high-speed terminal like in the library or something. If they really need to legitimately get a large file to somebody in a hurry, they can burn a CD/DVD and then carry it down to the terminal to make available on the fast pipe.
I dunno. I'm just glad this isn't my problem to solve. You really need for students to have the best at their fingertips. Cracking down in such a way that the non-guilty peeps get burned is a hard way to solve this problem.
"Derp de derp."
-Anyone who hooks up through Slashdot Personals -- you **MUST** post about it! Karma be damned!
... does that count?
Well I hooked up (and GOOD) via Craigslist (www.craigslist.org - pick a city)
I'm talking some freaky shit too, not your run of mill freaky but some stack overflowing, buffer overrunning, illegal exception throwing, divide by zero at runtime kind of freaky.
I would give details but it has absolutely nothing to do with college kids sharing P2P files - too bad. As for the OP: Ever consider setting up a massive archive of ripped music on a server in the Library, access limited to IP addresses within the university subnet? Limit access to each individual file one person at a time, just like the library. Buy a copy of each CD before ripping it to the server, just like the library. Go talk to your librarian, get her in the loop and make her feel like a hero, important - she may not get freaky like the one I met on Craigs but odds are she will figure out a way to make your fileshare on campus a viable project. Think the Gutenburg project, of music.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
At the university where I work, we've taken a multi-pronged approach:
-Education. We include a "sharing copyrighted stuff is bad, mmmkay" lecture for all incoming students, and we make anyone caught sharing illegal stuff sit through it again. We tell people about the spyware in most file-sharing apps. We also include "how to turn off uploading and be a leech" in our user documentation because we know they'll do it anyway.
-Per-user bandwidth limits of 1GB/day. We had to do this for other reasons, but it had a significant impact on file-sharing.
-We use a packet shaper to give popular file-sharing ports the lowest priority without setting a hard bandwidth limit. That strikes the users as reasonable (since there's no hard cap), and it keeps the network usable.
-We slap the users hard when an RIAA/MPAA/whoever copyright violation warning comes in. If we get a copyright violation notice, you lose network access for the rest of the semester (and next semester too if it's close to the end of the semester). You can still work from the public labs, but not from your dorm. We do this for one simple reason: the RIAA knows our policy and we have a reputation with them as hard-asses. This means that we can reply to their messages with "problem resolved" and they believe us without pushing the matter, demanding personal info, or taking students to court. The students don't like it until we explain the alternatives to them.
--
Software is given list of files owned by students, and their licenses. It then keeps track of files and licenses, making sure the number of copies used at the same time never exceeds the number of licenses (excluding of course freely distributable files).
We used something called the packeteer (google it). It runs an embedded version of Linux and basically allows certain types of services (e.g. P2P, FTP) to use a certain ammount of bandwidth. Additionally, the top bandwidth users were sent nasty letters (anyone downloading over 2 GB/day off the internet was sent one. Intranet traffic was not regulated, and since our LUG had a large and up-to-date file server (ftp.lug.udel.edu) Linux ISOs were non-issues). That takes care of the bandwidth issue.
If you simply ban certain protocols, people will always find ways around it, so I think in the end education is really important.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Bob, in his dorm room wants a movie. He downloads 1.5GB over $CURRENT_P2P_SYSTEM. Cool. Bob tells Joe, his roommate about the movie. Joe downloads 1.5GB over $CURRENT_P2P_SYSTEM. Rinse, lather, repeat for 3 or 4 or 50 other students.
Had Bob put up his movie in a shared folder on his Winblows computer, it would have been downloaded over the internet once. But Bob, and his 50 friends are stupid and unable to right click on a directory. So the movie is downloaded 50 times.
Had it been downloaded once, well, Im not going to say it would go unnoticed, but it wouldnt be an issue. Copyrights? Beh. Insane amount of traffic that happens to be copyrighted? Well, thats costing us real money. That is causing significant load on the network. Real users are complaining. Solution: Traffic shaping. Port filtering. Suspending insane-traffic users.
If your a student in a dorm stop being so fscking stupid. Keep it under the radar.
You can't catch what you don't see on the wire...
I am going to college this fal, and was thinking about putting together a huge RAID (200+Gb), and then putting up an anonymous FTP for anyone to create (no delete) of files. Anyone have any advice on that?
A university in this context is nothing more than an ISP, and accordingly, the university cannot be held responsible for the actions it's users take, illegal or otherwise. As with all ISPs, the university should produce an AUP, and activly discourage illegal activities, but no further action towards file sharing should be taken. Users who violate the AUP should be removed from the network. This however does not justify eavesdropping or port blocking. Students should be avised upon entry that they connect at their own risk.
Of course, the universities need to be aware that they musn't divuldge otherwise private information about their network users without a proper warrant, just as they would not do so with a student's records.
Don't get soft on this people, FILESHARING IS NOT A CRIME. There are countless legitimate needs and uses for p2p too numerous to list. Everytime you let someone take away your right to share or get a file, you're letting them take away one aspect of your freedom of speech.
Accordingly one should not abuse such freedoms. Trust me, the RIAA and the MPAA aren't putting out anything worth having anyway, so just go ahead and boycott them. And by boycott I mean do not buy, do not rent, and do not leech.
Being a student at a university next door to IU we also had problems with bandwidth usage. My freshman year bandwidth limitations were implemented to restrict data to 250megs a day, after that the download speed crawls. Even under modest use of surfing, listening to previews of music, the occaionsal porn and what not the limit is still reached even by those who didnt share files. Everyone protested this on campus and I believe the restrictions were removed.
The problem is, even with bandwidth restrictions, those with a little bit of know how easily get around them, there are no real solutions to this problem on campus's. If the students bandwidth is restricted, then it just gets routed through the schools servers itself, which of course are not bandwidth limited (for those of you under this type of tyranical bandwidth limit, there is a clue as to how to solve this problem). The only real solutions are the ones that are like Penn states implementation of actually giving the students an option.
Of course no awadays on campus the bandwidth isnt really used up so much by music, but more so by movies, but thats another topic.
Generally speaking, sharing files is illegal (copyrighted music, copyrighted movies, copyrighted software, etc). I think at this point, being proactive is equivalent to a thief complaining to the Better Business Bureau because the shop he steals from has put bars on the windows and security cameras in the corners of the shop.
Below is part of an email sent August 20, 2003 documenting per-host rate limiting at Indiana University.
Per-host rate limiting in the halls and Greek houses, will
begin limiting outbound traffic based on a bandwidth-per-host limit. Will start in Campus View this Thursday on a few subnets; will watch for problems, then will apply to all of halls and Greek houses. There will someday be a tool where users can check their usage. Symptoms for users to know when they're hitting their limit: slow response times. Doesn't affect e-mail attachments, because those go through the mail server, not from the individual host. Only imposed on outbound traffic beyond our border routers, moment-by-moment amount of bandwidth you're allowed to use. There's some allowance for surges, brief periods can go over limit. There will be bigger pipe to halls soon, which will also affect halls connections (should improve speed). Should be possible to lift rate limit for individual hosts/nets, but don't want to advertise this.
Filesharing is the equivalent of setting up a public internet server. Universities probably would not accept students setting up their own public website / FTP site and hosting that on the University connection - so why should file sharing be any different? Commercial ISPs don't like you running file-sharing systems, so why should the schools be any different?
You may not realise it yet, but you're at school to learn. Not being able to use filesharing tools has very little impact on your well-being, no impact on your studies - and will be a better use of resources. In case you hadn't guessed yet, I don't think that filesharing should be allowed - and I think that all outbound ports involved should be blocked. Get your music from iTunes or any of the other direct-download sites if you're really that upset about it.
And I don't even think that file sharing should be encouraged *within* the university network. When I was at uni a few years back, the internal network slowed to an absolute crawl at peak times - it was nearly impossible to use the network to get work done because so many people were copying files they didn't need.
Bandwidth costs money. If students want to use more bandwidth, fine. However, it's hardly fair to force other students (your random art student that sends emails and browses the Web) to subsidize his usage. Provide a couple of options, where students pay fair rates for the bandwidth they're using. If you're using a VPN setup or similar, it's pretty reasonable to do this securely -- most universities provide a "software pack" anyway for students.
Also, I don't think that packet shaping to block P2P is a useful idea. People *will* find a way around it, and tell/help friends to do the same thing. You *cannot* block P2P services effectively, though you might manage to shift uesrs from one P2P service to another that does better about slipping around restrictions.
Packet shaping to reduce bandwidth seems more sane (you can transfer N bytes in T time units until your rate drops significantly). N and T would have to be reviewed yearly to deal with current situations.
QoS is quite reasonable as well. If people want to do masses of low-priority data transfer, great. However, your router should be dropping those Kazaa packets well before it starts dropping ssh packets.
Any or all of these possibilities could be used in tandem.
May we never see th
Other university's websites often have a link to their P2P policy on them. For example my college's policy is fairly sensible.
Rich
how about educating your students?
What value does it have to a student's education to allow open file sharing in the first place? If I were a university admin, I would shut off ALL incoming ports on all internal computers, except those that are needed by the faculty, staff, etc. I seriously can't imagine any situation where a student's computer would need to act as a server.
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