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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--
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".
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.
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.
They tried this at penn state, initially just on uploads(it wasn't cuz they were pissed about file downloaders, they just wanted to protect their bandwidth) but eventually they put the cap on downloads too, you could only go 1.5 gig/a week, the first time you violated it they would warn you, 2nd time you were down to 56k the rest of the week, 3rd time 56k for the semester, and if you managed to do it a 4th time you lost access. I got to #2, I don't know anyone that didn't get #1, and I don't know anyone that went hardcore for #4.
Eventually they just went for a very secretive firewall that prevents people for using IM to send files they need for classes. What a waste....
Start a separate underground internal ad-hoc wireless network or something... the coffee can antenna does work, and it isn't that hard to make 'em.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
Hi admin.
You did not mention that it is 1GB upstream per day. And even then it seems to be more of a running average tally, over what seems to be a 3-5 days.
Being a student, and a violator (warnings only) I have to say that I approve. 1GB upload hurts a bit on certain legal filesharing. (I used to upload foreign movies that had no distribution rights in the US). And it forced me to write a CBQ based watcher/limiter that keeps me constantly under 1GB. The last time I went over the limit is because the damn thing overflowed, and did not limit anything. I have no hard feelings for this practice, and appreciate my huge ISO downloads finishing in less than an hour.
Now the wireless caps are a different story.....
(I guess I understand....but....)
Anyway, in general, it is a good practice...it works, and there are few problems. I suggest unis will pick up on this practice (with possible addition of additional bandwidth for pay). It is way better than any subscription thing will do. I personally do not share, download, or even listen to music (with very small exceptions), and would probably revolt if I heard that I am paying for something that I am not using.
Keep up the good work. And yes I know where you work, I did not mistake one college for another. Thanks for all the packets.
PS> When will we get ipv6?
badness 10000
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.
You can tell that people don't want to accept personal accountability when they start trying to tell you that it isn't "really" pirating or it isn't "really" wrong. Suck it up and accept what you're doing. Don't hide behind some weak-ass excuse for a justification that you made up when posting on Slashdot. Some kid in class tried to tell me that MP3s were originally 24 hour trials and then you had to delete them. Yeah, I'm sure people back then actually did that, too. :)
Ooooh, whats that? Thats the sound of my karma dropping rapidly because I don't support rampant copying. Oh well. Anything's better than the Slashbot groupthink that dominates these threads.