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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?"
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.
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.
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."
I agree with this premise, and further I agree with the ideas presented by IU. If they want students to stop using p2p, they had better get their act together and put together a good looking package. I don't really see what's wrong with providing students with deals on legal downloads while strongly recommending it. This is okay as long as they don't actually stop p2p use. If they stop p2p, then many times many legal actions I do would be impossible. Unless they shut out more than just p2p useage (i.e. other used ports, SSH for tunnels etc), then there will be even more issues with general usability of their network on top of general disgust with conventional p2p blockage.
Nothing in that article really defines what they intend to do with real infringement, I think people assume far too much when somebody cries p2p. As a student of IU, I also know that treating their students as criminals will cause issues. I'd just assume go elsewhere to finish my schooling if they start doing that.
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.
Not planning to stay until Thanksgiving then? :-)
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.
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?
Why on earth not? If I couldn't do so, I'd have been royally pissed off at my university.
Now, *commercial* sites are a different matter, and almost all educational instutions have rules against them, since some of their federal subsidies depend upon not hosting commercial sites.
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.
What objections would you have to a competent netadmin prioritizing non-filesharing traffic over filesharing traffic?
May we never see th