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BitTorrent Inherently Illegal?
Nohbdy001 asks: "Today I received a letter from my university's network administration advising me that my network access would be terminated due to 'illegal P2P activity.' The P2P activity that the e-mail cited was BitTorrent and the file being transferred was an update to the Azureus BitTorrent client. The letter stated, 'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,' implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal. It seems such misunderstandings are common, but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field. How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?"
I don't have any advice in particular. It's unfortunate because this really amounts to censorship and stifling academic freedom. Who's to say that the content you're accessing with a network tool - say, even a web browser - is appropriate? Sure, you can say that downloading pirated software or movies is inappropriate, but, in my opinion, academic institutions should have as hands-off an approach as possible. Illegal content can be accessed via the web, or email. Most would say it's absurd to suggest blocking port 80, or port 25. Why? Why is that any more absurd than blocking something such as BitTorrent, especially as BitTorrent's legitimate applications are increasing?
During the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison had a difficult decision. As it watched the traffic for Napster consume over 70% of total inbound bandwidth at its peak, we asked ourselves: do we start blocking Napster? After all, it's mostly used for stealing music. Right?
Fortunately, the answer was a resounding "No," but not because we condoned illegally downloading copyrighted material. It was because the university didn't want to become de facto censors of information, in any form it may come. We decided that things like Napster were part of the cost of doing business as a major public research university. The solution was to add bandwidth, and deal with the technical aspects of the problem separate from any social aspects that may exist.
Granted, some smaller institutions might not have been able to afford - economically or legally - to take this stance. But the University of Wisconsin felt it important enough to allow academic freedom and freedom of exchange of information to trump any other potential concerns, real or imagined.
The university does respond on an individual basis to people clearly running warez servers, owned machines used for warez, specific C&D orders or other notices from copyright holders, etc., but we don't take a proactive approach. In fact, ironically, a proactive approach could be more dangerous, because it may mean that safe harbor provisions of some elements of copyright law (e.g. DMCA) won't apply: an ISP can't be held responsible for things it doesn't know about.
There is already legal precedent that P2P file sharing technology in itself is indeed legal. The Federal Appeals court that ruled was talking about networks like Morpheus and Grokster, but I would think the precedent set also applies to Bittorrent.
Here's a quote from a news story back in August:
"History has shown that time and market forces often provide equilibrium in balancing interests, whether the new technology be a player piano, a copier, a tape recorder, a video recorder, a personal computer, a karaoke machine, or an MP3 player," Thomas wrote. "Thus, it is prudent for courts to exercise caution before restructuring liability theories for the purpose of addressing specific market abuses, despite their apparent present magnitude."
Make sure you do not have any "warez" stored on you computer.
No more than any other piece of open-source software out there.
My digital rights don't need management.
You won't win. They are covering their collective asses.
My college does the same damn thing. I can't even do wnload from bittorrent. But my school is also using a stateful firewall, and a lot of those P2P programs break behind a firewall.
On another note, anyone know a way around that?
Did you send a reply back stating, or better yet actually showing, legitimate uses? Game patches, legal multimedia distribution (Red vs. Blue for example), and so forth...
Ask them what you were doing that was possibly illegal. If they can not name any possible source of infringment, you might be able to do something. As for all file sharing being illegal, point out to them that a webserver (such as the universities webserver) along with google does essentially the same thing.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Although a P2P application may not be illegal, the department providing your computing services has decided they don't want to allow you to use a P2P application on their network.
Although their reasoning may be questioned - it is their network, and you are probably going to just have to put up with it.
Dave Bell
Aren't courts mostly interpretation -- there is nothing black and white --
Still, it's probably worth a polite note to the network administrator to request "clarification". State your case concisely (they're usually busy) and politely, and you may get lucky.
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Your best bet would surely be to explain it's role in reducing the load on servers, however the university probably has no interest in that given that it only results in them having to put up with more traffic...
I don't know about defending it's validity, but as far as still enjoying the use of BitTorrent is concerned, netcat is your friend. ;)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Only a terrorist would be against Linux!
My digital rights don't need management.
And how do you patch WoW, as it uses bittorrent for some patches.
I think the next step will be to have bittorrent encapsulate itself and possibly even be encrypted...
Universities just don't want the big bandwidth bill. They know they don't want to put themselves on the hook for monitoring traffic and being responsible for illegal filesharing.. in the past, universities have almost always used the argument that they are not responsible for the content of their networks. This is a smart argument because it prevents them from being liable for sharing illegal files on p2p.. this kid's university is being stupid by admitting that it has a responsibility to filter illegal files. So, when an illegal file does get throgh, the **AA gestapo can now go after the Uni in addition to the student...
Was the bit torrent client the only file you ever transferred ? The university did not shut you down just because of this one file. I wouldn't be taking a big chance if I guessed that you had music and/or movie files also being transferred on your bit torrent connection at other times. That would be copyright infringement, and that's illegal.
"P2P" means "person to person". So now I need to wait for permission from a court before I can communicate with other people?
When will this end? When everyone is in jail? When everyone has left the US because it's not safe to live here anymore? When the US economy collapses because we need "opinion letters" and court rulings before we can communicate with our friends?
Sorry, it's their network, and you signed up to use it. You have to play by their rules. In a university setting, the goal should be to promote academic research, and unless administrators see BitTorrent as helping (I don't know whether it does or not), they will probably regulate it. If you have a legitimate academic need for the client, it might be allowed. You'd also probably be surprised about how much p2p traffic there is (music/movies) on campuses, and what kind of cost this incurs on the university.
First of all make sure what your downloading is legal. Try trying an e-mail to the admin telling him or her what you were downloading and prove that what you were downloading was legal. Also put something in the e-mail that it was the only way you could get the file you needed(FTP server full, or there is no other way). If you can prove that you need it for your studies. If that fails goto other students and people that work at your college and have them complain that they need bittorrent.
Okay, first the good news. Proving that it's not illegal is relatively simple. If something isn't explicitly rendered illegal by an act of law, it's legal. Ask them to point out the law that states (and here's the key point) that use of this particular protocol is illegal for distribution of freeware that is also available for unfettered download via the web. They obviously won't be able to...problem solved?
Not exactly. This isn't just a matter of legal versus not legal, it's a question of whether it complies with their own Acceptable Use Policies. And depending on how those policies are written, Bittorrent may be a no-no anyways, "Because we say so." And I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that when they say "illegal," they don't mean 'criminal,' they mean 'against our own policies.' Good luck to you, man (or woman, whichever).
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Keep in mind that your definition of "legitimate use" may be quite different from theirs. University IT departments tend not to consider anything to be "legitimate" unless it has a valid academic application. Do you know of any academic uses for BitTorrent? Not trying to rain on your parade, but "I need it to download X" probably won't cut much ice.
Especially since you were tranferring free/Free software. If you got caught distributing illegal movies, software, music, et al. then you really don't have much to defend yourself with.
Best solution to the problem: BitTorrent something really helpful, like the XPSP2 standalone installer (even though you may not like Windows). This shows how your individual connection can help release the burden of large files from servers. That's the whole point of BitTorrent. Prove that it works for good, not just for evil.
I would suggest getting a copy of the Acceptible Use Policy and any network related documents. Being familar with your University's policies can come in handy when dealing with the IT staff. Also, is it absolutely necessary to use Bit Torrent? I know it's a good thing (I use it myself to download Linspire) but the ratio of legitimate / illegitimate ussage is probably tilted pretty far one way.
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One good way woudl be to not trade any type of audio/visual stuff... just fetchyou rlatest linux distro, or whatever software. For me torrents are only used when everybody is stressingthe download servers, and mirrors, so this is where bittorrent shines.
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Dear IT Department,
The "P2P" traffic you refer to consisted of me downloading updates to legal software. I will also use P2P technology to download Linux ISO's and other legal products.
I am not using P2P to download Movies, music or any other content unless the copyright owners have, as is the case with GPL software, explictly authorized unrestricted digital transfer.
You might as well ban FTP and HTTP traffic, as the materials I download can be legally acquired through those protocols as well.
You have not banned any illegal or debated downloads, only the download of software and content that all parties involved agree is legal to transfer.
Sincerely,
The student seeking a transfer to a more competently run University.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Whine. Loudly and often.
Your ISP (in this case, a university). Can put any restrictions on the network. You've basically agreed to the terms and conditions by going to that university (many uni's have you sign an agreement). If you don't like it, get a new ISP. My evil ISP still lets me download Debian and NetBSD ISOs using BitTorrent, and I'm just using Comcast which has a user agreement as long as your arm.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You could say that Bit torrent is the best method for getting the new versions of linux distros, which lets be honest, it is. If you are a computer science student, this is an extremely good excuse to use bit torrent
I though it was declared "illegal" checking packets of traffic going through the routers. I guess P2P will have to pass a really long time before it can be considered as illegal.
It comes to a problem that the illegal issue is violating the copyright laws. (unfortunately, these P2P applications are mostly used for it, but it is unclear yet how to define that w/o "spying" your packets - which is illegal too)
IT departments will *always* err on the side of caution. They don't care to differentiate between legal and illegal p2p activity, so they just port block or implement QoS.
There's really nothing you can do about this, other than perhaps setup a VPN connection to a machine outside the University network.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Open-Source software is not only evil, but infringes on copyrights and patents ;)
Move off campus. You're probably paying a pittance for your network connection, and the University has to keep from being sued into oblivion, so they'll keep themselves covered and won't be bothered with your whining about "freedom."
I go to a different university because obviously these IT people are ignorant.
How will you get your WoW updates??
I would probably go into withdrawl and die in my dorm room.
It's their network. If they dont want you using BT, then dont use BT.
However, I'd send a letter back. State that while illegal files can and are downloaded using BitTorrent, you were just using it for legal purposes. There is no laws governing protocols at this time (as far as if they can or cannot be used).
Also put something in there like "However I do respect that this is your network and will abide by the rules. I apologize for any issues I might have caused."
But that's my 30something mind working.
= Grow a brain...
I would be willing to bet that by being enrolled in the college and connected to their network that you are inherently bound by some sort of acceptable use policy that usually includes wording that allows them to allow or disallow any type of activity. I don't think that you can do anything about it. You can however always try to "enlighten" them by emailing them articles, and news precendents like the one listed in an above reply, hoping to change their minds.
...you university is protecting itself for the off-chance that they could be held liable in some way, shape or form... ...or maybe they need to cut back on the amount of bandwidth used and this is an easy excuse?
always mosh clockwise
WoW is one great example of BitTorrent is a legal way. They use it to push out their game updates, and it usually works. You can also bing up the Linux Distro CD's.
%70%75%72%70%6C%65%00 %6D%6F%6E%6B%65%79%00 %64%69%73%68%77%61%73%68%65%72%00
Have you tried speaking to the IT department of your University? Because it sounds like you cut-and-pasted this from an email they sent you. Perhaps it was only a warning to get your attention. Speaking to them about your connection, in my opinion, would be the quickest (not to mention, most effective) means of ensuring that you're not cut off from the internet as a college student. Because believe me -- you never know just how many things you do online on a regular basis (legal things, for that matter), until you're stranded without the internet for a few days. You should really try to speak to them before they actually *do* disconnect you.
My digital rights don't need management.
Unfortunately the university network is a private network, and they can set nearly any policy they like. If that policy is that no applications that have explicitly been ruled legal are allowed, they can do that.
In my opinion the best you can do is to to publicise the fact in your school and/or community papers. It might help if you got it in writing that the school has a policy of banning all new applications till courts rule that they are legal. It ought to warn prospective students that far from encouraging creativity, the school has a policy of stifling it, and they ought to stay away.
Are they blocking Bittorent at the firewall, or are they just logging BT activity, and then shutting off users based on that?
If they're shutting you off for "illegal activity", you could fight it. You'll lose, of course.
Sounds like they're idiots. If they don't want any P2P acitivity on their network, there are at least a few traffic-shaping appliances that can do it for them.
Something to possibly look at, wrather than arguing or finding a way around, is to see what papers you signed when starting school. You may have signed something saying you won't use certain programs or use the network for X reasons. Also somewhere in small tiny tiny letters is something stating, we have the right to refuse network traffic and/or the right to change our minds and use your signature as a way our of liability and troubles.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Right now, for World of Warcraft, Blizzard has been using a bittorrent to distribute updates/patches. Several university students have had problems not being able to get patches. Right now, for many of those customers, they have to wait until someone posts the file on a website so they can download it from there, as to the best of my knowledge, Blizzard never ponied up with an alternate distribution method. So, some people are using P2P legitimately.
It's all illegal. None of it's legal. It's P2P and the RIAA tells me that's illegal, so it must be illegal.
Tell the pirate to burn in Heck.
Damn thief.
I doubt there is anything you can do with the IT deptartment. You could try demanding which of their terms of service your violated but you might find that their terms of service ban all P2P traffic (you did read their Ts and Cs didn't you?).
If your college has a student newspaper (in Britain this is generally run by the student's union) see if you can get a bit of coverage in that.
Raise hell.
Get students together; you'd be surprised what 200 students outside a dean's office can do. Be respectful, be truthful, but make it clear that you are in the right and they are in the wrong and you won't lay down until they correct it.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
and I can tell you that the larger issue is the amount of bandwidth used by students. Universities pay by the bit and budgets are tight. The network has two purposes: first, it is there to help with your education. second, it is a recruiting tool - nobody would want to attend a school without network access.
But beyond that, it's an expensive utility and the school really can't afford to open it up 100%. So, they are always looking for some way to justify restricting its use. It's sad that they have basically called you a theif, but don't take it personally. They're just trying to save money. It's wrong and it sucks for you, but that's the bottom line.
Don't worry. college is only four years, and then you can get a good job and a real internet connection. For now, just concentrate on beer and girls
and grades of course.
It is the University's network, and they can decide what goes over it and what doesn't, illegal or not. You could try petitioning IT for this, but I doubt you'll get anywhere.
Why not move off campus in protest?
If the software is not part of the corporate standard I would say too bad. I'm a big Linux user at our office and I administer the network. We have a good amount of control on what apps users run. If they install something else, I see no reason not to tell them that we will block it.
Most universities have an appeals process for such an action. That would be your best bet, because legally, they can do whatever they want with their network for any reason what-so-ever [as long as they don't prevent you from getting seperate internet access,in which case things get far more complex and in the student's favor].
My university banned all P2P in its network. If you install an unauthorized P2P client (you can get a permission to run one if it's a part of an official research project) and get caught, you'll be expelled/fired after one warning. Why? In short, the reasons cited were: "It's eating up our bandwidth, it's mainly used for copyright infringement, some P2P programs are an unnecessary security risk and - most important of all - because we say so." Makes sense to me.
The owls are not what they seem
Mandrake Linux uses BitTorrent as it's main method for downloading for Mandrake Club members. To quote them directly from http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/ "Early and privileged access is provided, before public release, to ISO images of the latest Mandrakelinux, using the fast BitTorrent technology." However I sould strongly suggest being able to substantiate the legal use before you start a discussion with your University.
- Paul
See, this is why I live at home with my mommy and daddy...
Oh wait... I shouldn't have said that.
Of course, they assume you're an ignorant fuck (afterall you're at a university) who will just go "OK yessir I'll stop"
And why should student P2P be any less legal just because a student does it?
Now, if the letter had said something to the effect that P2P is consuming too much bandwidth, I could understand them.
Well, this all comes down to the fact that the uni is tracking usage of the network, without finding out exactly what its being used for. In this case you might have a foot to stand on. If you can pointedly prove that you were using it to support FOSS. If you have logs you can take it to them and show them without a doubt that you were not doing anything illegal, and far from it something that supports the growth of community. However depending on how hardline the university is deciding to be you can be out of luck entirely. That's about the only way i can think of that you might have a snowballs chance in hell to prove that you wern't using a "university deemed" illegal application for illegal purposes.
I ran into a similar situation about 3-4 months ago. I go to a private university who terminated my internet access because I was using BitTorrent to download a Phish concert. I wrote the IT manager with the taping and trading policy of Phish (they allow such downloading) as well as the terms of use of BT (stating that they do not allow illegal activity to be downloaded). I was reinstated immediately and my IP was flagged so it wouldn't happen again. Worth a shot.
I would find any usage terms that were given to me and ask for a copy of the list of approved uses of the internet. If the rules they provide you don't appear to back up the admins statement, call them on it. Of course your case will be bolstered if you can demonstrate that your use is legitimate as it was in that case. If the rules are against it, look into seeing how to change the rules. You shouldn't have to put up with the restriction if you are using bittorrent for non-infringing downloads.
Also it couldn't hurt to make sure you don't suck to much bandwidth outgoing.
I work for a fairly large IT department at a state University. We have a much more hands off approach than most places, I think. Every student is rationed off their allotment of network bandwidth in their dorm or VPN connection. What they do with it is their own business. The only time our security office investigates is when a user is reported to us as breaking a law (DMCA or anything else). Then we take action, generally blocking the MAC address until the user is in compliance with the law.
Saying Bit torrent traffic is illegal is asinine. For example, World of Warcraft (not to mention The Broken, Slackware and various other quite legal files) uses BT to transfer updates rather than having a couple servers from which to get out updates and making everyone wait.
The legal onus is on YOU not the university. BT is as illegal as your actions you take with it. You can use a car to murder people at random, or you can use it to go to work. BT is the same, if no less drastic.
Common sense should be your best appeal to your system. I'd cite all the legal uses that their blanket approach precludes. Failing that, hopefully you have some sort of ombudsman you can report this to. But you *SHOULD* make as much noise as possible. No court is going to rule that Bit Torrent or Grokster is illegal, just like BetaMax was ruled legal many years ago.
Damn, that so should have been modded "funny" instead of "flamebait". I guess some people just don't understand humor.
Someone asked if I had patched against MSBlast; I said yes, I installed Linux.
It's getting to the point where it's hard to run open source software without using bittorrent.
I'm not saying it's impossible (that would clearly be overstating things) but more and more things are being distributed via torrents.
I think the reaction should be that you know they have a problem (traffic and piracy on their network), but that you have a problem (there is stuff that's legal that you need torrents to get), and see if you can come to a reasonable solution.
I would try to emphasize the direction of the trend, too. A couple of years ago, bittorrent didn't factor into downloading linux iso's very much at all. Now I think it's clearly the best way to get most things, although more traditional downloads are still available. But eventually, I wouldn't be surprised if people without torrent access have real trouble getting large legal files.
If your school doesn't want to hamstring its students' ability to participate in open source, they'll have to open up to torrents.
Take something big like Fedora Core. It is distributed via Bittorrent and is perfectly legal too. Also suggest to the school that they actively encourage Bittorrent use. As a student researcher, I often transfer HUGE files across the Internet; a p2p system could conceivably reduce the bandwidth costs for the school. Good luck!
I'm not sure why a university would even want to get into debating or mentioning these issues. The legal issues are of concern, but they don't want to deal with the massive bandwidth of student downloads and uploads.
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?" If you have to ask for ideas and excuses for legitimate uses, you must not have many. Leave it to those who really do have legitimate uses to come up with their reasoning behind continued usage. It just seems like you're looking for justification as opposed to a valid defense.
Crapdot
News from birds. Stuff that splatters.
It's an Internet connection you're paying for. IMNSHO, you should be able to do whatever you want to do with it.
I don't moderate anymore. Karma penalty for 90% fair mods? Can I mod that unfair?
I went to a small school and got them to ease back on the bandwidth restrictions for Bit Torrent because I was doing my senior seminar paper on the program.
Getting a professor to talk to the Network Admin about the legal uses. If you can convince a professor to use it in a class you might actually stand a chance.
Citoahc
What Nohbody's situation is. Student, dorm resident, instructor, professor? Anyway, assuming he's a student: If you're at a big school the network IT department almost certainly doesn't actually have the authority to impose a punishment on you, though they have the power. The trick then is finding someone in the bureaucracy who can and will tell them to either back off or bring you before the disciplinary board.
You're not going to explain this to them logically and change their minds. It will never happen. You can show them legal precendents showing P2P is quite legal, you can invite them to scan your computer for illegal activity, and they still won't care. What they're doing is covering their asses.
You can choose to stop using BitTorrent on their network. You can choose to continue using BitTorrent and face whatever sort of consequences they threaten.
If they prevent you from accessing the university network, and you can PROVE (as in, to an actual judge) that you have not violated any of the service terms of that network, then you can probably sue them. They took your technology fee and did not provide the promised technology service. They owe you a refund.
Then again, check those appropriate use terms. Usually they are written foggily enough to basically translate into "appropriate use is what we say it is". In which case you're screwed.
Talk to a lawyer if you really want to fight this. It's your only option.
because it sees some slight possibility of being sued, has succeeded in killing all the innocent bystanders before the enemy [*AA legal staff] fires a single cease-and-desist]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Make your tuition dollars work for you, and find educators who answer to you, not to the media corporations.
The quote from the letter shows that the university is clearly blowing smoke and either did not talk to their legal department, or if they did, they ought to fire their lawyers. Although you sometimes have to wonder about the sanity of the US legal system, there is still a basic principle that something is legal unless it is determined to be illegal. Therefore, courts do not have to rule P2P activity as legal before you can engage in that activity. Even pending litigations do not constitute that P2P activity is currently illegal (unless you break the law using the P2P stuff).
Also, it is very unlikely that any court would rule specifically on student P2P activity. Students are strange animals, but in general rulings like this would apply to everyone, not just to students.
They are obviously playing on threatening people, and hiding behind vague statements in an effort to simply avoid the entire risk of people potentially using P2P technology to download (or upload) illegal materials. I'd personally recommand replying back to the university, explaining your legal use of P2P, and explaining that their letter seems to be based on some flawed assumptions, both legally and factually.
But do not expect to win unless you really want to fight this desperately. It's their network and though you pay tuition and all that, it is still their network, and so they get to decide what goes, whether it makes sense or not.
You can get anything under the sun in binary newsgroups, easier then P2P. So why don't they block port 119? It is because these new fangled P2P apps are the hot new item I guess. Just shows how uneducated these people are. Same people that thing IM and chatting is new. They have no clue about IRC.
You might convince them that the traffic is legal, but they may still ban it for a variety of reasons, including traffic and that it's hard to police. If you make a legal case out of it, you will very quickly find out that in most schools, the university is under no obligation to give you any computer network access at all beyond what is needed for your studies. Their only obligation beyond that may be to treat you the same as all other students, i.e. they can't shut off your access just because you are complaining about their policy.
They might be open to a compromise, whereby P2P traffic would be limited only to students who have attended seminars on "safe, legal" P2P usage, signed a statement that they will comply with the law and university policies, and agree to have traffic throttled during busy times of the day.
Contact your student government and campus newspaper and see if they will help support your cause.
By the way, there may be office and real/legal politics involved that are forcing the IT administrator to be draconian - he may fear for his job or worse if any students ever use the campus network to commit any illegal activity that he could've prevented by imposing such a policy.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
this is functionally equivalent to banning FTP.
Is this a private school or a state school? The answer determines how much you have in the way of legal rights at the school.
A private school can ban free speech, force all their students to wear uniforms and only use their computer network for "sanctioned" purposes. If it's a state school, you might be able to spin a "free speech" angle out of this. Check with the EFF or local ACLU for help.
If it's a private school, sorry, you're SOL. You have no rights because you're using private property and are subject to the owner's rules.
Welcome to Bush's America: guilty until proven innocent.
Don't forget, the official (the ONLY official) way to get patches for World of Warcraft is via BitTorrent.
BitTorrent has significant legitimate real-world applications (unlike pretty much all the other p2p technologies, where such applications tended to be theoretical).
I got a note in my box from the (local western Pennsylvania) LUG, which describes a talk from a state trooper who said that wardriving was illegal. After years of debunking, talking nicely to less-informed journalists, and even having an FBI agents on video say otherwise, there is still a lack of understanding.
I heard at my last contract that they didn't use SSH because it was "inherently insecure." They used telnet instead.
Best thing to do, is be patient, try to educate the uninformed, and convince others to do the same.
Just don't get too angry, or they won't want to listen to you in the first place.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Write something original.
Publish it via bittorrent.
Sue them over free speech restriction.
Go to them in good faith, asking for the restoration of your network access. When they tell you no, ask them for a copy of their documentation of your illegal activities, so that you can show it to your lawyer. Once they give you a copy, show it both to a lawyer as well as the entire Internet -- if the school provides space for a personal web site, put it on there as well as an explanation of the whole thing.
The great thing is that news travels fast, and the school will move quickly to avoid bad publicity. That kind of thing has a big chilling effect on prospective students; would you consider going to a school for four years that has a draconian/possibly illegal network policy? You probably won't ever have to get the law involved, as the school will fix the problem itself.
Get MS to use bittorrent to assist in distrobution of patches through the windows update system. Garunteed within 30 days there would be a federal law that makes blocking bit torrent a crime.
The letter stated, 'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,' implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal.
No, they are not implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal. They are stating that they think BitTorrent *may* be used for illegal activities and they don't want to regulate BitTorrent traffic on their network, and are erroring on the side of caution.
Like it or not, it is the University's network, and they administer it as they see fit. Don't like it? Tough. Use another network.
If the MPAA finds a bunch of students pirating movies on the University network, the University will be held responsible at some level. It could become a massive headache for the Network admins, which is why they are taking this move.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Post the letter. Remove your name if you want,
but post the letter. Prove it.
I recently had a conversation with an MPAA lawyer in regard to a case I'm involved in against them. The MPAA lawyer said that understood very well that bittorrent had significant non-infringing uses. That seemed, in their view, to distinguish it from kazaa etc etc. They even viewed it positively fom a non-infringing perspective!
If even the MPAA take this view then the university is using illegality as a mere excuse to conserve usage, or they are being ultra-cautious or they are stupid. I reckon one of the first two.
-he who laughs last, is a bit slow.
journal
Secondly, buy the school all new state of the art switches so they can enforce QOS and charge for bandwidth usage. This will have the immediate benefit of reducing everyone else's tuition and fees since they won't be subsidizing the bandwidth hogs anymore.
your football team is now has gone to last place, but strangly enough at the same time, with a mysterious mass migration of kids with glasses from accross the nation, UofW suddenly has become the dominent university in IT research and alternate media, surpassing even Berkeley and MIT.
No one uses BitTorrent "legitimately."
This is kind of like the very tiny zip-lock bags.
Are they illegal? No. Is their major use for the transport & packaging of illegal substances, yes.
BitTorrent is an excellent P2P technology. Unfortunately, the majority of its users, especially on a college campus setting, are using it for illegal purposes.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
from a while ago
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32256&cid=348
As a senior in high school and one of three student administrators in my 2000+ student high school, I have seen (and helped) with many issues such as this. However, you are not going to be able to resolve this problem with technology only, there needs to be other policies in place.
Any actions you choose to take or network policies you implement will be very unpopular. Almost daily I get complaints from people who wonder why their 2 gigs of ISOs were deleted from their network drive, or why they can't download mp3s at school. It usually takes a week for someone to figure out a way around new policies or some alternative way to download mp3s or whatnot.
However, we do have an AUP that everyone must sign that states these activities will not be allowed and will result in disciplinary action. Unfortunatley, they are rarely enforced and as such people get away with just about anything.
After three years of helping resolve these issues and spending hours trying to limit network traffic to what it should be used for, we have adopted a new policy that I am very dissappointed in. Our computers previously all had their own public IP address, but we are now switching every computer to a private address. Not because we have run out of IPs, but for more control. The only network traffic allowed now is internal traffic, and the ONLY way out is through a private http proxy.
This means I can no longer telnet into my linux server at home, I can no longer download my computer science homework from my home computer... you get the idea.
So, I urge you to seek support from the district's administration, implement an AUP, make sure the consequences for violating it are clear and strictly enforce those. Once someone loses their account and computer access for a month, they will think twice before downloading that VCD at school again.
there is your answer, written by your own fingers
or not... contrast the sentiment "well at least They're not pressing charges" with "if They feel I did something illegal why don't I get protection under due process and trial by jury law?"
"but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field"
Big suprise, there are retards in the IT field too!
-Rick
An insight into our tax dollars and tuition at work.
"During the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison had a difficult decision. As it watched the traffic for Napster consume over 70% of total inbound bandwidth at its peak, we asked ourselves: do we start blocking Napster? After all, it's mostly used for stealing music. Right?"
What the administrators *should* have done is an analysis on that traffic, and examined what exactly it was being used for. If 70% of your bandwidth in one direction is being smoked because of non-essential traffic, in any business, you stop that traffic...period. It doesn't matter whether the traffic is legal or illegal. If it could cause others to not be able to get their jobs (or in this case their bonafide homework) done, then you put an end to it.
I'd say they didn't think too hard about this one...nor do I think this applies to the original post at all. Napster was used for downloading music...that's it...that was always illegal.
Bittorrent is used for downloading all kinds of content...basically anything you want to create a torrent for...whether that be CD images of legit software (Linux), software updates like someone alluded to for gaming, or anything else. It can get used for legit as well as non-legit purposes. However, Napster was pretty much illegal, whether anyone wanted to admit it or not. I'm not passing judgment on anyone who used it...hell, I used it. But I KNEW it was illegal, and I still did it. It was used for nothing but *sharing* music...not distributing software updates. Bittorrent can't even be compared to Napster...it's completely different, and it's uses are endless.
My overall gist? Napster has nothing to do with academics, so your analogy is laughable at best...it's about increasing your music library for free. Bittorrent IS about freedom. It gives you a way of getting and distributing any type of content (legal or otherwise) by using the rest of the world's bandwidth if they so desire.
Hmmm... let's see, they accuse you of illegal activity... so that would be slander.
Second, they penalize you for taking part in a perfectly legal exchange of data. It could be a First Amendment issue. But that's only if your university is state-run.
Give your local chapter of the ACLU a call and see what they think. You never know, they may be interested in representing you.
That is, of course, unless they *had* given you warnings in the past, and you merely neglected to include that information in your post.
My digital rights don't need management.
What better time for an all nude student protest? You can write catchy slogans like "Keep your hands off my Bits" and "Save My Torrent!" on your protest signs/naked parts.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted
Innocent till proven guilty? Nope, never heard of it...
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Many univeristies have an Ombudsman, whose job it is to talk advocate for those trapped in meaningless rules which do not or should not apply.
Do your TOS permit arbitrary blocking of legal data exchange? If not, make that point. If so, try to reason with your admin. Be nice and polite.
If your TOS allow it, and your admin follows through... you could do the American thing and sue. Or you could suck it up and move on.
Move to a private home, subscribe to an independent ISP, run whatever program you want... Either that or use one of the many bittorrent-by-email services that are popping out. :-]
As a University Network Admin, we see lots of file sharing traffic. We're in the middle of nowhere, so bandwidth isn't cheap. We chose to block the high-bandwidth using protocols, such as bittorrent because they make the legitimate network access unbearable. We do provide mirrors of the major linux distributions and other free software, though.
Illegal or not...they can stop access (or try to) to any protocals they want on a private network. Does your school have wifi? I'd invest in a $20 usb adapter for your pc and use Bittorrent on that. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but you don't really know if the "legality" is even the problem. You may have a change if your machine could stand the scrutiny of a search (man that wouldn't be worth it), but the school is probably trying to protect itself, while increasing the bandwidth for other students. As an alternative, you could try looking into a DC hub that may operate on the lan at your school.
Tech News, Reviews and Tutorials
I would highly recommend sending a short, simple email to an admin. Detail: a) how you were NOT using it illegally (if you in fact, weren't) b) how bittorrent is important in your studies (i.e. I need open source files such as _____ for academic reasons) Surely you can find something... whether it be a linux distribution that is too large to get otherwise, maybe a video of an experiment... Surely you can find something to send to them that would apply for b.
Further, courts cannot simply generate law at their whim--any decision they issue only creates precedent to the extent that the decision answered an actual question of law rendered in the case at hand; in other words, although the court is free to opine to its heart's content on any and all topic they wish, their words only have legal effect where they decide an issue actually presented in the case being decided by the court (such spurious discussion is known as "obiter dicta" and although without effect, can be useful as an insight into predicting the outcome of future cases). So, for example, your local traffic court has no authority to start generating legal precedent in the field of copyrights, unless of course a genuine issue of copyright law came up in a case before the traffic court...
Therefore, a decision issued by, say, the appelate (that is, the court of appeals) court of the ninth circuit is binding only on federal district courts within the ninth circuit because the district courts are below the appelate court. Further, there are several circuits in the federal court system, each covering a different geographical or subject-matter jurisdiction (in the case of the Federal Circuit, which decides all patent case appeals, for example). In turn, the various circuits are inferior to the Supreme Court.
Getting back to the point, if a court issues a ruling which includes an interpretation of law on point in the decided case, then that interpretation is binding law in that court's jurisdiction (unless overturned by a higher court) and theoretically has the same legal effect as a statute passed by Congress or your state legislature. So if the courts in your area decide that, for example, use of BitTorrent implies illegal activity, that can be treated as though legislation had been passed to that effect.
What University are you at? I know the University of Florida blocks all P2P activity no matter what. Legal or Illegal.
Previously covered: here
If you live on-campus (and most places force you to the first year), then legitimate would encompass much more -- after all, they are providing you living space and any legitimate use for internet access from an off-campus apartment should qualify as legitimate use in a dorm. That would certainly include entertainment.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Unfortunately, I have the same problem and there's nothing I can do. My University even went as far as claiming that the P2P programs are illegal , no matter if they are used for perfectly legal purposses. But as long as you (and I) sign our contract for network usage, there is only one thing: trick them and hope you are smart enough not to be caught :)
"People's problem is not that they are mortal, but that they are suddenly mortal" Terry Pratchett
While not the most popular approach among Slashdoters, I highly recommend talking with your student government. Having served in one for way to long, I can tell you that most of them are just waiting for the perfect issue to come by to fight the Administration on. Network censorship is an easy issue to understand and they are obviously overreaching in their interpretations of "the Law."
The other important question is whether this is a state or private school. One poster said you had no recourse because it was "their network"... but such is not the case is if this is a state school. There may be certain laws that protect fair access. Again your student government can be a valuable source of information in this area.
-Sean
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
I thought the big problem (for the record labels, at least) with P2P was the way they make it possible to find any file you want to download. Napster maintained a central DB, but I thought its successors also had a way to search for files.
Anyway, Bittorent doesn't work that way, does it? Don't you have to have a base URL to start the download? If so, then Bittorrent is no more of a 'piracy tool' than ftp.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Being a network administrator at a small private girls' school, I know all about this issue. Network bandwidth is not finite and we need to prioritize traffic - sometimes this means eliminating things like PtoP or even Skype.
It's especially hard when the best connection you can get is a 3Mit/768K ADSL line. Saturate that upload speed and we're smacked down to 768/768. Bummer.
The girls have a hard time understanding why it can't be like it is at home. Unfortunately some of their home connections make our one shared connection look pathetic - but here in the backwoods of PA our only other option is a T3 - not gonna happen.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Just tell them that you're downloading the 1.3.0 patch for World of Warcraft. Blizzard uses BT to distribute it's content patches. Somebody in your IT department has got to have heard of WoW. Last I checked, transferring data from Blizzard to play a game you paid for was considered legal activity.
Unfortunately for college students, colleges sometimes seem to impose their own laws and regulations that seem to supersede real federal and state laws.
I would be curious to find out who could make them change their policies.
Hey its their network, they make the rules..
If tomrrow they decide that slashot isnt allowed, then you lose access..
You signed the agreement. Thats the breaks..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What is the name of this school? Most schools make a effort to have some form of due process, they should not take away your internet access without a hearing. Go to the dean file a complaint, demand a hearing from the schools Disciplinary board!
This is what the modem was invented for!!..
56k should be fast enough..
You should've mentioned which school you attend. Then we can sick the Slashbots on them and watch them respond to the traffic AND the PR it generates.
"Suchansuch State not open source friendly!"
"Unnamed U against technology!"
"U of XXXX IT Dept found incompetent!"
Start out something like this..
...
Dear IT services(or whoever you decide to write),
I am disappointed by the disingenuous nature of the letter that I received. I believe that the characterization of my activity as illegal is dishonest, and prevents me from getting full use of the services that I am paying for. I really wish that the IT department would dedicate the resources necessary to separating illegal activity from legal activity, and block usage appropriately.
While I understand that it may not be feasable for the university to separate law abiding users of bit torrent from those who are using it for illegal activity, it is wrong to classify everyone that is using this software as a pirate. You should simply state the problem as it really is, and that is, you should say that you don't have the time to track down those who are breaking the law, and not that all such use of bit torrent is illegal.
Sincerely,
Maybe the real issue is the hits that the network is taking from the P2P traffic. The number of transactions that P2P clients put out is amazing. On our network they have brought routers to a grinding halt on numerous occasions.
I don't see the "legal" issue being an issue for the university even if the files being shared are copyrighted material. I would think that the common carrier arguement would still apply. Any legal types have insight on that argument?
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
They are probably just bocking the default range of ports for bittorrent, and that's probably how they identified you, by looking at the ports the traffic was on. If you move these ports to a different range, that will get around the block and the detection issues. To my knowledge, ALL bittorrent clients have the option to change the port range, and a few of them come with specific instructions to change the port range to "something creative" before you start using it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You say that you were using BitTorrent, but you didn't specify what you were doing, and your wording is ambiguous enough to make me wonder. (I don't see why anyone would have Azureus installed for the sole purpose of downloading updates to it. :)
Also, keep in mind that bandwidth is a limited resource, and BitTorrent is to bandwidth what Halon is to oxygen. I know a few people that administer networks at large universities, and it seems that in the minds of all of them, bandwidth concerns far outweigh legal issues.
I've also seen enough people banned at my own university to know that it follows the usual pattern of tragedy of the commons-type situations: they go after only the worst offenders. If you're streaming data at maximum speeds 24/7, of course they're going to go after you. Not only is it an extremely inconsiderate usage of a communal resource, but you're probably using more bandwidth by yourself than a hundred legitimate users would. If I were a student at your school, I'd want them going after the 10% that consume 90% of available bandwidth. It really sucks to be unable to do some legitimate work at a reasonable speed because the jackass down the hall is too cheap to pay for the first five seasons of South Park. Did you put a cap on your transfer rates? I'd be very surprised if you did.
If you were distributing something other than Linux ISO's (and face it, most of us do it) and you got caught, there's not really a whole lot you can do. I don't like the intellectual property laws in this country any more than the average Slashdot AC does, but that doesn't make them any less potent.
with steganographic encoding in HTML&PNG. That should take care of any blocking efforts.
-Max
it's about RULES in _some_ networks, they probably have a lot of other rules like "don't keep ftp servers", does that make ftp servers inherently illegal? of course not, it's just against the rules in that particular network.
the solution: buy a commercial line and fuck the nazi network for which you're probably paying couple of bucks but not getting your moneys worth in return, since you can't do what you want in it.
(however.. here's a kicker: it may or may not have been illegal for the network admin to scan the network activity without permit from court for wiretapping. depends how he figured it out that they were using bittorrent)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I am an IT student
Last I checked, "IT" wasn't a major. "Computer Science" might be better.
as required by my "computer programming in linux" class
How many accredited four-year universities, especially state ones, even offer Linux-specific classes?
"to research the differences among kernel distributions"
They might go so far as to ask for proof of this needed, directly related to classes.
Ok, I did way too much research (I found his livejournal), and figured out that this guy goes to Transylvania University, in Kentucky. They have the worst website addy ever:
http://www.transy.edu/
I scavenged their pages and found their AUP.
This is all I could find that would even vaguely relate to BitTorrent:
7. The Residential Network is a shared resource. Thus network use or applications which inhibit or interfere with the use of the network by others are not permitted. (For example, applications which use an unusually high portion of the bandwidth for extended periods of time, thus inhibiting the use of the network by others, are not permitted). Users may be asked to cease any system activity that directly or indirectly creates interference in the operation and administration of the network.
8. Use of Residential Network facilities to make copyrighted materials available on the network in a manner contrary to copyrights or license agreements is prohibited regardless of the source of the copied materials.
Interestingly, the University is using packet shaping (which some suggested the school might try in order to avoid the situation they are in right now.)
13. Residential Network connections are subject to packet-shaping which may affect speed performance in certain applications that are not deemed supported by the University.
It sounds, to me, like someone low level person at the university probably did something they shouldn't have, and that this kid will end up getting off scott free (although his access may get cut for a few days while the bureacracy sorts itself out.)
I'm using shaw cable, I've just checked by downloading ET 2.60 via BT (zerowing.idsoftware.com tracker) and I don't see any problems. Or was this meant as a joke of sorts?
isn't the use of telephones possibly illegal? and how about email? perhaps we should build some more concentration camps for the perpetrators just in case...
If what you were downloading was something you had authorization to copy anyways, then you weren't infringing on copyright. Period.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I used to have to fight with my ISPs to let me keep my MP3s up on my website. All mp3s were assumed to be illegal, ignoring the possibility that I actually authored the content myself, which I had, and was giving it away for free.
Change your ports - Shad0ws Bittorent Client has random port selection.
I Believe Bittorent is entirely covered by Sony vs Betamax in the USA - it has substantial non-infringing uses - I just finished downloading Ubuntu Linux with it and I am now going to download the 3.2 GB of music from SXSW that has been legally made available.
This is an important issue, academic freedom is crucial to the richness and diversity of thought.
If Sony Betamax is ever revoked then Never mind Bittorrent your computer will be illegal as it has infringing uses.
Hell, Even the **AA aren't suing Bram Cohen they know that would lose.
Of Course if you are infringing copyright then you are a very bad person, but do they have a transcipt of that content? It is well established Similar File names mean nothing - a transcript of the data in question is required.
Ask Nicely then Kick up a fuss - I sure a lot of the staff at your institution care passionately about Academic Freedom.
A manager need only cite one example of a bad use (viruses or tighter bandwidth, for example) and that school's board of education will approve locking down access for everyone. For example, various types of e-mail attachments are often blocked because of the potential for worms and viruses. This is the way many worried IT managers deal with new technologies they don't know anything about.
Is there anything that can be done with BitTorrent that can't be accomplished with HTTP or FTP? I know that many schools block ports 80 and 23 for incoming traffic for the same reasons stated above.
Live wrong, impostor.
Actually, they just yank your IP address. No warning. You might get it back later sometime. Doesn't matter _what_ you're grabbing via Torrent. It's just deemed harmful.
They also do packet shaping, and all files being transfered with a filename ending in ".mp3" are throttled to almost nothing. Even for legitimate classroom use (podcasts, interviews, etc...) I get around that by downloading the AAC version of the files, at screaming speeds.
They also managed to somehow block the iTunes Music Store - a fully legal way to be acquiring music. But it's deemed illegal and blocked.
Asshats.
Acknowledging that there is a LOT of piracy thats bittorrent related, there's also a fair amount of legitimate usage. Ever tried downloading Fedora Core on release day from an FTP Mirror? Pretty slow. Step in bittorrent. One or two seeders with 4 or 5 mb upload and everyone gets it at a decent speed. Also, the idea of the bittorrent protocol being 'illegal' is even more dubious. Is http liable because it was used to send pornography through your telephone line to someone underage? Try enforcing that one
maybe just stick a DSS dish out your window...would get there attention and is already specificly protected by law.
Next, they'll prohibit students from borrowing each other's books
Send them a message asking when they'd like to meet with your lawyer to discuss their fraudulent accusations of illegal activity.
Seeing as they don't have any evidence of such behavior, that ought to remind them that going around accusing people of committing illegal acts sans proof isn't kosher. Suspending an account because of violation of the TOS is one thing, but suspending it with an accusation of criminal behavior is a whole 'nother.
They've infiltrated our schools!!!
Bittorrent is the same thing legally as downloading a file from the WWW, or hosting the same file on your machine for others to download. It is not on shakey legal ground like the p2p search services.
BT sees an awful lot of use in totally legitimate applications. Anyone play world of warcraft recently? Blizzards patcher uses bittorrent. This is far from the smaller niche uses (i.e. Linux distros) often cited.
So if theres any shakey legal ground on the mere use of bittorrent, someone should tell blizzard.
When I was in school (1999) I requested a static IP address so I could run an FTP server off my PC. At the time, I was hosting about 20 gigs of live recorded music. None of this was illegal, since I only had music from bands that allowed the recording and distribution of their live performances. A couple of months later I got a letter from the IT people telling me I had to take my site down since I was illegally distributing pirated material. I sent them a letter back explaining the legality of my site, and received a somewhat sheepish respsonse explaining that I still needed to take my site down. It seemed that I was using approximately 50% of the college's outgoing bandwidth from my computer. I don't know why they didn't just choke of my outgoing connection from their end. But we reached a compromise and I agreed to put limits on my FTP server's outgoing bandwidth, without them having to take any action against me. Basically, I would suggest that you engage these people with an open mind, keeping in mind that they are trying to stay abreast of changing technology, and that they are also trying to make sure there's enough network for everyone. If you play nice, you will probably end up reaching a solution that's beneficial to everyone.
I'm going to give my perspective from my experience managing a network of 90,000 clients. It's virtually impossible for them to tell the difference between legal uses and illegal uses of P2P. All they know and can measure is the bits and bytes being transfered. I don't have any hard numbers but I wouldn't be surprised at all if more than 80% of P2P is used for illegal purposes. The thing about P2P is even if your using it for legal purposes you're still wasting network resources. I guess if you don't like it move out of a dorm.
As has been mentioned here before - Blizzard uses P2P technology to distribute patches for World Of Warcraft. You might want to mention that to either your IT staff or Blizzard or both.
Next, they'll prohibit students from borrowing each other's books
When I was doing my undergrad, I was on a judical board. Any student who felt they were unduly punished could appeal their punishment to a judicial board for decision. This kept administrators from running amok handing out nonsense punishments out of ignorance/laziness/malice.
Our school even had a group of prelaw/political science majors that were certified by the school as "advocates" and could present your case for you. Check with your student government association and find out if such an option would be available to you. This may not solve the problem outright, but it would give you an opportunity to state the facts.
You can't argue with ignorance, but you can go on the record with the facts.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
They should embrace BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a godsend. It allows faster file transfers. If that doesn't work, blame Metallica and Jack Valenti and tell them, all this is because of money-grubby artists and crap.
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
This slashdot post showed some sites using BitTorrent legally e.g. CommonBits, LegalTorrents et al.
Tell us which University you go to. Someone there made a bonehead maneuver, from a legal and technical standpoint. Shame them publicly on Slashdot.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Isn't that like blocking FTP traffic. I no a lot of companies that distribute large files via BitTorrent. This seems like a rather rash decision to me.
"Help me Obi-/.-Kenobi,your my only hope!" -$
To distribute a music video by the indie rock band The Decemberists. It was intentionally broadcast using bittorrent. Wired article. We deliberately posted it on bittorrent knowing that the band couldn't afford the bandwidth to host a high quality version of the video and we would hardly get air time on MTV2 anyway. I thought at best their hardcore fans on the message board would download it, maybe a few hunrded. We should clear 6000 downloads tonight. So there are examples of artists using bittorrent legally and legitimately.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Universities are now run by "System CEOs" who are much more concerned with the financial and social stability of their empire than the freedom of information for what they see is a group of drunken kids looking to fill their hard drives and iPods with free music and porn. The freedoms of those lowly students to be innocent until proven guilty of stepping on the toes of their school CEO's financial buddies are the last things on the minds of the administrative staff. They want that cold hard Alumni cash and some big beefy corporate donations to rename their football fields with.
All your stadium are belong to T. Boone Pickens, yo!
IMHO, of course.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
World of Warcraft uses BT to patch it's game. Guess you could use that as an example.
I have a fever baby and the only cure is more cowbell!
You are obviously not a professional yet. Sat in school a bit more. Maybe when you graduate and get a job somewhere you will have to explain to the USER why they can't run p2p programs.
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?"
Do you have access to a muck-spreader?
I believe the posters definition of "legitamate uses" is something along the lines of ...whackety whackety whackety.
well... its legitamate in my book anyhow.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Guilty until proven innocent. Welcome to George Bush's America, pal.
I was like, WTF? The format itself isn't illegal, you douchebags.
"Until the courts decide that student web browsing is permitted, we will continue to block this activity on our network"
They are most likely doing this to save their bandwidth, many p2p sessions will kill even a fairly robust network. You should talk with them and find out if the real problem is their bandwidth being killed by p2p and them, they may be using the legal problems as an excuse. If so you can promise to limit you peak usage bandwidth/and or the time to late at night. Also you can suggest to them a hardware solution such as those by Sandvine (http://www.sandvine.com) so they can trim down the bandwidth used by p2p instead of killing it off totally. If you show your concern instead of being an ass, and show your willingness to help their situation, you will be surprised what kinda of exceptions the IT department might make for your usage as long as you let them know you are concerned about your usage and how it effects the network.
Copyright infringement has exactly the same relationship to BitTorrent as forgery has to writing, pens, and ink. To be consistent we're going to ban the use of the latter are we?
Just tell them that you can't efficiently download Fedora Core without BT. I'm more of a fan of Gentoo, but the point remains the same.
I have been browsing your internet site for several hours and am generally impressed with your coverage of IT related issues. However when I saw an article on Bittorent I just had to voice my opinion.
I would just like to say how increadibly appalled I am with the Bittorrent computer software. Not only it allows distribution copyrighted material, but by doing so it inadvertently cause excessive use of bandwidth. Now you might say that this is fairly harmless, but is it really? The effects of electromagnetic radiation pollution caused by this cannot be underestimated. Just think of the millions of wired and wireless connections lighting up and emmiting those deadly electromagnetic rays and all the innocent men, women and children being exposed to them.
Every bittorent user has blood on his (or hers) hands.
This is all, thank you.
"it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field"
This is good preparation for when you get into the workforce. If the IT department isn't making it more difficult to get your work done, they're not doing their job.
What my university did (which helped to some extent) was place a bandwidth cap on downloads/uploads from Napster and similar services. Still, some chose to download illegal content/movies/etc. at insanely slow speeds (or through other venues).
At some point, they shut down some internal networks that shared files pretty openly. Others continue to run so there isn't as much of a crackdown as at some places. They operate under the mode: "If you do illegal stuff and get busted, we're not going to protect you."
This sounds pretty fair to me, because the Internet speeds were really slowing down in general because of around 70% of bandwidth going toward file-sharing. With those caps in place, it's helped to increase on-campus speed.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
It's ridiculous, I use FTPs almost exclusively for a website I work for and since I've gotten to this school cannot use it, nor can I use any downloading service and every single irc port is blocked(which I've never used for an illegal purpose)
Don't ask them what exactly you're doing that is illegal.
Ask them what law exists prohibiting the download and use of of BitTorrent for any purpose.
Hell if I were you, I'd just write back saying you aren't breaking any laws, and refer them to several on-campus law professors if they're still clueless. If I were in your shoes, I would tell them I won't stop using BitTorrent, and they can call the cops if they want to.
But thats me.
I wish you luck.
Only informed people can properly react to such a troublesome statement, on a universety they should understand this...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
(let the flames begin...)
I block BitTorrent for all my lab machines on campus.
We spent a few months monitoring torrent traffic to have a look at what exactly it was being used for.
Less than 0.5% of traffic involved legal and/or appropriate downloads.
I'm not particularly happy about having to do this, but the reality is that torrents are almost entirely used for dodgy downloads.
We have signs up about it, if students have something they wish to download that is only available via torrent, the computing staff will do it for them.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
After all, it's their network, it's their rules.
Look for an alternate network, or sign up for DSL with the phone line.
If you don't have a choice because they are the exclusive provider, fight for alternate network access.
Lack of an alternative is the root of liberal use of censorship in school networks.
Maybe it was a poor choice of words, but they have the right to limit the activity on their own network, whether the activiy is legal or not.
How do you respond? It's pretty simple. I would start by either writing a letter to the director of IT or by meeting him or her in person (schedule an appointment). Usually, these types of things are simply a misunderstanding. Of course, if you are using said BitTorrent copy to pirate stuff, you are probably not getting much sympathy. But if you explain why you need BitTorrent access, I'm sure the IT people will not object. Keep in mind that they are concerned about getting sued for copyright violations, so give them a reason to believe that you will not be breaking copyright laws.
See they didn't say "Legitamite use" they said:
"Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,"
The courts. They didn't come out and say it was illegal, but they sure did imply it. And downloading is a legal right allowed by law because it is expressly not prohibited by law in general. No law says you can't download using bittorrent, therefore it's legal.
If the school tries to take him to court for using BitTorrent claiming he's downloading material, it's a simple matter of this student to say "prove it." And if all he downloaded was open source software and linux distros, then the school has no case.
If the student is expelled, the student can take them to civil court and demand documents be produced as to why he was expelled, and the school will fail to produce activity that's strictly illegal. The courts should rule in his favor.
Obviously, this student should take steps to avoid the court situation but should they be put in that situation, they should be covered.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"But do not expect to win unless you really want to fight this desperately. It's their network and though you pay tuition and all that, it is still their network, and so they get to decide what goes, whether it makes sense or not."
It does not make them king of the world, just because they own the network.
For example, if a network admin decided to block traffic only for black students, would you say they had that right, simply because "they own the network and can decide what goes on?"
Their rights do not entitle them to absolute power, and they are still subject to the superior authority of the law of the land.
Somehow I doubt Blizzard would agree that their use of bittorrent by their clients in this case is illegal!
If you don't like their network policy, take your business elsewhere.
The file you have is legal and legally distributed. Period. If they wish to limit your free speech rights on legal speech, that is a first ammendment issue and should be dealt with in a separate court battle.
If you can find a lawyer to write a letter to that effect for you, it might get their attention. I'm sure you could find a classmate whose parent relative or family friend is a lawyer willing to put a note like that under his/her firm's name. No explict threats -- just a letter from a lawyer.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I use Bit Torrent to download GPL'd software
LEGAL MP3's
LEGAL Video (although there's not much of that around.
LEGAL Podcasts
LEGAL USES!
Bit Torrent is NOT just for grabbing illegal content. The University IT Staff are NITWITS. Where I work, the staff are currently blocking the torrent ports because they don't want the students sucking up bandwidth.
Gorkman
Doesnt' World Of Warcraft use BitTorrent to do updates? How dare they!
TT
freedom of exchange of information
While I might be convinced that a small portion of that Napster traffic was ligitimate, I think it's a bit disingenuous to suggest that pirating copyrighted music is tantamount to "exchanging information." It isn't. You wouldn't allow students to walk out of the bookstore without paying for their books (in fact they'd probably be arrested), so why would you rationalize that it's ok as long as it's on the internet? From the get-go, the premise behind Napster was to provide a means to acquire someone else's property easily - but most often, illegally.
As the material you are downloading may, as you claim, be acquired through other protocols we see no need for you to use P2P. Seeing as we are neither banning FTP nor HTTP traffic, your ability to pursue your academic interested will not be hindered by our decision. Please discontinue all P2P activity immediately.
Kindly, IT Department
iHow can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?
You can respond by getting all (and I mean ALL) of your fellow students to stop downloading movies and music that attract the attention of the RIAA/MPAA.
This is truly a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, there are legit uses for BitTorrent. But so many people use it for illegal purposes that the only solution left to IT staff is to block the use of BitTorrent for everyone.
In the past, I have blocked P2P apps for *everyone* (things like Kazaa, Gnutella, WinMX) behind my firewall because it is impossible to tell if a person is using the P2P app for legal purposes. Nearly all of the P2P usage is for illegal purposes (for the purposes of this discussion, we are talking about the laws in the U.S., I have never worked outside this country).
How could you respond on a personal level? Approach your friendly neighborhood I.S. person and ask him for a personal exemption to the BitTorrent block because you are going to (swear on your momma's grave) use BitTorrent for only legit purposes. He/She may decide to give you a special static address that is magically exempt from the rules that crush BitTorrent for everyone else. If you betray that trust, expect to be dealt with quickly and severely.
In an educational setting, the rules are a little more relaxed than in a business environment. Sometimes if you block a certain program or protocol, people cry "Free speech!". Then all you need to do (as an I.S. person) is tune up your handy-dandy PacketShaper to give that pain-in-the-neck protocol so little bandwidth that it's basically unusuable.
"I.T. Guy, are you blocking the student from using the Internet?"
"No, Dean Wormer. But we are using traffic shaping tools to proritize the various protocols on our Internet link."
Dean Wormer does not hear the word "block" in your response so he moves on to more important university business.
In a business environment, things are a little easier to deal with. The company exists to make money. And one of the tools it needs to be successful is a working network and Internet connection. If the I.T. group finds a user running a P2P app, Zing!, it gets blocked. No chance for appeal. Working for a business does not give a user the *right* to run eMule, WinMX, or anything else. The other issue is that companies have a great aversion to being sued. If a user is found doing something with company resources that would invite the attention of hostile lawyers, that activity gets stomped quickly.
Sorry for the long diatribe. How can a student respond? Please your individual case with the I.T. department and hope you catch the network admins on a good day.
You are, after all, at that particular institution to *learn*. The Internet connection is not for downloading music (unless that would be part of a class), gaming or swapping movies.
I'm glad that at least the US has a Second Amendment to give some back-up to all the others. I just hope we don't need it.
Dear Sh1theads at teh Campus IT department!
As you may already have noticed my name is Ian Rockefeller. That is because I'm a member of the Rockefeller clan (yes, THAT Rockefeller clan).
To refreshend your memory, those are the people who sponsor this Campus, own the ground it stands on, own the building company that built it, the company that delivered the bricks that it was built with and also own teh g0dd4m quarry where the material comes from with which those bricks were made. (I think Jenny, one of my cousins, own's the county that quarry lies in aswell, but I'm not shure about that...)
My Uncle Bob is the guy that sponsored your last hardware roundup (2 million worth of xserve pizzaboxen, wasn't it?) and it was daddy who had that arm thick bundle of T1 lines conected last summer when I asked him if he could do that for me. It's the ISP at which I personally hold 51% (my little project to ge me ready fo the real world when I've got my PhD) that subventions the campus' bandwidth.
Having to read this mail from you during my 11 o'clock morning latte in the library makes me super pissed. I strongly suggest you inmediately open all the ports on my account again, file this whole thing under 'F' for 'forget' and pray to god that I don't have your dumb asses fired ASAP.
l05ers.
Sincerely,
Ian Rockefeller, Student on Campus (0wnz0r of j00 a553s!)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So why can't they simply restrict the amount of traffic on that port?
-Valiss
That a man caugth his wife cheating him with his best friend on the sofa. What he did? He trow away the sofa.
And that is what most IT departments do... It doesnt matter what kind of protocol you use to share your data. If there people out there that want to share, they'll find a way to do so.
What if some one devellop a p2p software based on HTTP? Should we block it too? There is Peer2Mail, lets ban SMTP, POP and IMAP altogheter!! Better yet, lets get rid of TCP/IP as it is cleary the foundation of those evil sharing technologies.
How about add value to your products, so people will actually want to buy them? Do you think people are stopping to buy CDs because piracy, or online sharing?!? No, its because the lack of quality, and the abusive pricing!! No one will buy for an entire CD when they just want one song or two...
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Just curious if you read the system requirements on the box before you bought the drive? It may have specifically stated that it will only work under Win or Mac OSs. Just because it happens to work in Linux doesn't mean that they have to supply you with a firmware update tool for an OS that they don't support.
Get cable, dsl or maybe just a modem for your home, pay for the service and do not waste time with stupid network administrators. Life is too short for that. Just make sure you know what you do. P2P services are of course not illegal. Even sharing MP3 files is not illegal. Just sharing copyrighted material without prior permission from the author of the title is illegal in many countries.
If you have a legitimate interest in a P2P service at your university, then maybe you want to contact your advisor, supervisor or the dean. Your boss should take care of nonsense regulations. If not, then maybe you are wasting your time working with someone who does not support you.
When I use the WOW patcher it uploads at about 50k per second, while downloading about 100k per second. And if I do not close it, it continues to upload after it's done downloading.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?
Bit Torrent has lagitimate uses? Well, why the thell am I using it, then...Oh sorry, the topic at hand.
Personally, this sort of sillyness hacks me off to no end, and 'The extreem always makes an impression', so I would get a couple of file stealin', er swappin' buddies, make up a few protest signs and march through the guys office chanting things like, 'Don't tread on me!' through megaphones for maximum effect. Throw around a few provocative phrases like 'censorship thought nazis', and 'internet facists'. While this will likely get you tossesd out of the the administrative building by campus security (not really a big deal, provided you behave yourself when they show up and leave nicely when asked), it will cause the IT folks to more carefully considder their decision more carefully. People aren't going to want to irritate a vocal minority. The squeaky priate, er, wheel gets the grease.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I have two words for you:
Des Proxy
(It's a method to tunnel obscure ports over 80)
My UID is prime. Is yours?
There are some distros that provide BitTorrent versions. http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/ As with anything else, it is what people due with the tool. Should we band fire since some people smoke crack. BitTorrent is as illegal as a CD-ROM that reads audio CDs.
The campus provided internet is a computing SERVICE. It's not just to enable students to browse the university web page from their dorm room.
Downloading and installing operating systems such as Mandrake or Knoppix is EXACTLY what students should be using their campus internet service for. If students don't have well functioning computers, how can they learn on them?
So yea, downloading "X" (windows) is a very legitimate use.
Bork!
Dear IT Departmint,
.44 magnum holow point does
It has come to our atenshun that youse has been leanin too hard on some of our more
favorbul akwaintances. Me and Jimmy the Fish knows where you live. That and your
famlee too. We think that youse has never seen what a
to a guy's body niether.
We would appreshiate that youse would over look our akwaintences P2P trafiking
no mater what it is and in turn we will provide you with our graditude.
Sincerely,
Frends
--
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
Your country has been co-opted by a ruling class that exerts their power by threats, intimidation, and influence peddeling. There seems to be a pseudo-monarchy in control. I don't mean the government, they are just pawns in the game.
When will this end?
I seem to recall that you guys had a "tea party" once that started a significant change.
Who shall we invite for tea this time?
I'm not wild about college students wasting lots of time and money downloading junk off the web. If I ever got around to taking another course again, I wouldn't want part of my tuition to pay for that sort of stuff (inevitable with universities these days). But this sounds like the sort of draconian decision making that only our weak-minded public school principals are capable of. It certainly doesn't help matters that the entertainment industry thinks suing everyone in sight (instead of producing content that someone would want to go out and buy) is good business and the judges are going along with it, but someone has to have a backbone here.
Given how well dormitories are run in most universities (mine was a noisy rathole, no A.C.), I'd say the sooner you can get off campus and reduce your dependence on the university for room, board, network access, etc, the better.
i heard recently of a case where BitTorrent was declared by a court to NOT be inherently illegal. i don't recall if it was a Canadian or US case, but perhaps you could show them that?
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
You might as well ban FTP and HTTP traffic,
:-)
And you think your local BOFH would not like to do that. Give him a reason and he will.
Perhaps better is to ask what movies he likes and burn them for hime. Look at the real world: bribing works.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You've got to understand that it's your university's network. That organization is ultimately responsible for their network traffic-- legal or not. Sure, there are completely legal uses for BitTorrent (like WOW updates, etc). But what about the illegal side of it? The reason your university is blocking it alltogether is so they don't get sued. It's easier for the RIAA and MPAA to target organizations than individuals. We also block it, along with other P2P clients, here at my job.
...it for 'legitimately'?
:).
Not "what CAN you use it for legitimately" but "what ARE you using it for legitimately."
Just curious really. Personally, I don't have much legitimate stuff to share with random people on the internet that suggests the use of p2p code, but I sure love the torrent
Loading...
Your goal at this point should be to gather information. On one hand, you want to gather as much information about what you're being told as possible. Is it a policy? Is it written or informal? How long has it been in place? Who is responsible for setting such policies? How can you reach that person?
Be very polite and very positive. This is not to challenge, but to gather information. One reason not to go over their head right away is that by being pro-active, polite, and engaged, you may actually gain allies. At the least you won't piss them off by going over their head too fast.
At the same time, you want to be gathering information about legitimate uses of BitTorrent--both in general and in your own life. I highly recommend that you got to WashingtonPost.com and find the recent article by Rob Pegoraro regarding BitTorrent and its legitimate uses. What you are looking to build is a case for the university to not block or discourage BitTorrent. A big part of that is supporting evidence from the outside world or (even better) from other similar universities.
Think of it like an informal court case. Get your info straight, your arguments clear and coherent, create organized documentation to leave behind, and dress up nice when you meet with the policy person.
Typically most if not all Academic Institutions have some document that describe how you are allowed to use the network.
In the unlikely case there is none, you could argue that you have the right to do anything you want with your network access.
In the probable case there is one, you should first check (you should have done it before). If P2P is not allowed, then you should not have used Bittorent no matter how useful it is.
IMHO you should not have registered to that University since they are obviously clueless.
If P2P is not forbidden then you should go to your student union, and protest, you could most probably sue the university in the "small claim court" to get them to pay your personal broadband access, since obviously without network access you cannot study efficiently, and concidering the probable price of tuition you pay in the US you could expect adequate service.
Anyway the issue is not "is P2P good or bad", but what contract do I have with the University.
Then if the contract forces me to use the Internet in an ineficient way, it's my duty to protest and either change university, or change the university.
Even if it doesn't work, it will be probably the best opportunity your university will give you to have a real education.
And if you cannot be bothered, well keel over and admit that you want to join the sheeps.
Find a way to get in touch with all those donor alumni and urge them to reconsider donating to a repressive and backward school.
Contact your local papers and tell them you are being falsly accused of a crime.
After High School, college is one of the most repressive environments you will ever be in, if you dare to oppose the political or social orthodoxy.
In short, fight the bastards. You will feel better for it, and you will learn a lot, win or lose.
As a rule, administrations don't like the light to shine on them. They will use thugish tactics to silence you. Read the FIRE guides and other information to understand your rights.
[Asshat] Do [asshat] you [asshat] have [asshat] any [asshat] idea [asshat] how [asshat] often [asshat] you [asshat] use [asshat] the [asshat] word [asshat] asshat [asshat]?
Bittorrent is massive, many computer users including myself use bittorrent to download the biggest of files including game updates, demos, movies, etc. Im not a professor, but if you ask me. If they want to stop you from getting these potentionally "free" things just by using a program that makes it easier is pretty obserred. I havent heard much about the RIAA and any recent lawsuits but ive always had this thought in my head. Say one day you go out buy a "RIAA'd" cd. You bought they're content its now yours to listen to freely right? Now we all know that letting somebody borrow the cd is "illegal" in some form or another and yet noone has done anything about that. Now my thought to this is. Since YOU bought the cd. Say you have friends over and they were listening to the cd you bought. Wouldnt that be someway "illegal" because they didnt pay for the cd and have the "rights" to listen. I may be wrong, or right in some way. I just think bittorrent and other file sharing programs is an easier way of extended borrowing. :)
Computers dont last forever, and im sure the Industry has plenty of money to spread around. Foucs on making better music, not sueing the buyers.
(its not very well thought out but thats my shot)
You agreed to the schools Acceptable Use Agreement. It is well within the rights of the school to protect THEIR network as they see fit. If you dont agree with them that is fine, use your home computer on your own network to download to your hearts content.
Have you read your university's TOS? Odds are, it IS against their TOS. Many universities ban P2P to conserve bandwidth.
-Amalcon
A separate issue that you haven't addressed is what other material you've downloaded using BitTorrent. Some people only use it for legally downloadable material like open software ISOs and trade-friendly music like the etree.org stuff (I certainly do; there's way too much stuff I like there to have time for piracy), while other people trade warez and pirated music. If you're one of the latter, please slap yourself on the wrist, clean the stuff off your PC, and be *very* careful when you talk to the university admins. If you're one of the former, you're in a much stronger legal position. There can be a big difference between what legitimate uses you *could* use BT for and what you're actually doing with it.
Illegal downloading is potentially legally dangerous to the university, whether it's done with BT or FTP-over-carrier-pigeon. If they're saying that the *issue* is dangerous to *you*, that sounds to me like a threat, and you really need to talk to your ombudsperson.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network'
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
MSOE works the same way. Every port on the network is open for student use, this causes an abundance of problems (viruses, trojans, etc), but it also lets the students take advantage of the entire network system. It pains the IT folks but I think the mentality is that if it is best of the student, it is best for the school.
;-)
(oddly enough, the majority of bad PCs we see are full of pr0n and everything else under the sun...so..I suppose that is GOOD for the student
...students in their pursuit of P2P nirvana. The university network is to aid in the forwarding of the purposes of the university not the likes or dislikes of the students. It's not "freedom of speech" or "freedom of expression". Its a tool (like a typewriter used to be) supplied by the school at their discretion to the students for use in furthering their f**king education. Personally I would QoS p2p down to 56K and see how useable they find it. Businesses (real world networks) don't allow this kind of horseshit, why in hell should a university have to.
Dear IT Department,
Thank you for blocking all ports besides 25, 56, and 80. You have given me the opportunity to learn how to set up and utilize OpenVPN software across a large private network, and the opportunity to develop a loyal client base from my fellow students who wish to continue using BitTorrent but find their normal ports blocked.
Please disregard what appears to be an extremely high volume of encrypted DNS traffic coming from my dorm room, as it is probably just an error in your reporting tools.
Best regards,
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
This sounds like exactly what the senile moron who runs the IT dept. at the University of Texas at Dallas would say. He tried and failed at banning wireless access points, as many might remember. Currently at UTD, all major P2P software is blocked (common outgoing ports are filtered at the border). We have received threatening sounding letters that all file sharing is illegal and that we should stop, etc.
If you don't mention the school, it will be hard to coordinate students and taxpayers (if its a public uni) to solve the problem.
The student seeking a transfer to a more competently run University.
You'll have to use HTTP or FTP to transfer, since BitTorrent is prohibited.
paintball
Time for a feature modification for Bittorrent. Switch to port 443, SSL. (STunnel source is open.)
They can't even tell what you are doing if this is done. If they can't tell, they cannot be dumb azzes about it.
Put the trackers on HTTPS also. Allow self signed certs.
Of course, self signed certs are illegal in some countrys, but not the USA. So it would have to be optional.
You sound very educated. More like you failed in college and want to take your frustration out on successful college students by trying to make college life into some kind of strict hellhole.
PS, you don't have to asterisk out foul language, fuckhead.
Tell him World of Warcraft uses BitTorrent for it's updates.
If they make BT illegal you won't be able to play WoW after the next patch. I bet that could cause a riot on some campuses.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Damn right!
A big advantage of BitTorrent in an environment like that is that it not only reeks of officialdom and academic freedom, but it can help the university's bandwidth problems by putting copies of the material on the university's LAN infrastructure, so students aren't hauling multiple copies in from outside (and they can get their stuff a lot faster.) A reasonable infrastructure is probably one machine with a fast CPU and lot of memory to act as a tracker and torrent-tracker-translater, and a few white-box PCs with lots of disk drives to act as storage/distribution. You do risk ending up with a job as a sysadmin at the library department if you're not careful :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Back in my college days, Napster and Gnutella was banned by the computing and networking services not because of the legalities, but because all the students in the dorms running this stuff were pounding the crap out of the network. They also limited the number of hits your personal website could have in a day.
There's no place like ~/
EFF's index of Computers and Academic Freedom - CAF isn't directly an EFF project, but they provide hosting space for it. They've probably dealt with some other schools about similar issues.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Years ago, I saw this coming. It hasn't reached critical mass yet, but the ISPs will be forced to monitor users soon. It'll be years, but the internet will go on lockdown.
Universities, with their exceptionally chickenshit administrators (it's the vicious culture that makes you keep your head covered) are the canaries in this coal mine. They are dropping first.
I can only think that building new, covert, independent networks with simple technologies is the answer. Encrypted wireless mesh networks, with gateways to the internet maintained off-campus ( a rented apartment?). Cheap ethernet cables run where they can't be spotted. Radio relays run from the rooftops, broadcasting from building to building, highly directional. Lasers. Microwave relays. Powerlines. Waterpipes. Mesh cell phone bandwidth somehow for temporary burst-and-go networks. Use meatnets, by using people to move large amounts of data around. Use that cute ethernet-over-flesh trick: someone touches a transmitter, downloads a batch of files to a hardrive in his back pocket, then walks the data over and uploads it elsewhere. The possiblities are limited by how much you really want uncensored communications.
You're the first to go lockdown. The rest of us will be with you soon. It's not just about bittorrent and file sharing. It's about the censorship to come, if things go as bad as I think it will under President Cheney/Rice. Develop tools to communicate, because you're going to need them.
That's not really the point.
The point is: once you start blocking ports, where do you stop?
What would happen if Napster started to use port 80?
"Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network"
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty? If the courts haven't decided that it is illegal, who is he to decide that it is otherwise? I really dislike it when people spend that much time covering their pathetic fat-asses.
Of course, it is their network. Surely you can get your own phone/cable line and then you can have your own private internet connection.
Well, about a year back, the my University blocked all of the BitTorrent ports. I sent an email to the help desk to complain. They ignored me. About 6 months later the unblocked it.
I suspect that something similar will happen to the submitter.
Point them to this article in the venerable, conservative, even stodgy British magazine "The Economist" which indicates that kneejerk opposition to peer to peer may be stifling innovation. Point them to corporate products such as Sun's JXTA, research project such as seti@home and folding@home.
Wait, this is Wisconsin? Nevermind, I think progressivness went out of style there in the 1920s.
Most universities mirrors certain sites or just files.
So, how about suggesting that university adds certain files or sites (currently available only as torrents) to their regular mirror system.
That way university saves in bandwith, and students get the legal files. Everyone wins and nobody get sued.
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?
Do what we did concerning a slightly different issue. Do a rabble-rousing call to action. Hold sit-ins (when you're comfortable and don't want to move, make it a political point), and block doorways (which you do normally anyway). Boycott classes (like you really need an excuse). Hold protests (sitting or marching optional) with lots of signs. Smoke 'em if you got 'em. Get shot at by the ROTC. It's all good if you survive and will give you tales to tell your (grand)children. Graduate. Get a job. Get married. Have child v.1.0 and 2.0. Get a new job with a major company that wants you to use your expertise to institute DRM to protect the company's so-called "IP". HTH.
Hmmm... I hope you weren't hoping to play World of Warcraft... Blizzard distributes all their patches and updates through BitTorrent. Sure, there are usually lots of alternative download sites up within hours of a new patch...but those are usually BT downloads as well. I don't think I've seen a regular FTP or HTTP download for a patch yet.
You've got a lot of advice here telling you that you can sue for libel, threaten them with the RICO act, claim a denial of the first amendment (if you're at a state school), and so on. I would personally suggest going to the IT department and talking to their director about this. Just a friendly chat -- there's no need to threaten anyone. Tell him why you want to use BitTorrent.
Of course, if your IT dude has any sense, he'll reply that the linux distribution/patch/whatever you're after is also available via http/ftp. And he has a point about that. Of course, you might argue that you're putting an undue burden on the linux/patch/whatever distributor's servers, but if the IT dude has any sense, he'll tell you that the bandwidth you'd be giving away to help them isn't really yours to give. It's for every student to use, not just you.
Don't be whiny. This is a non-issue unless you're trying to pirate.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Those farking bastards! How DARE they tell you how to use THEIR network? My GOD! The GALL of them to have network policies in place prohibiting the use of an application which is responsible for the lion's share of copyright violations today! How DARE they???
I think you should sue.
I've seen baseless assumptions, but wow.
Tell us what University you're speaking of and what the contact information for the IT group. ^_^ I'm sure there are plenty of University IT people (including me) who would be happy to ask them questions about the incident and their general practices. At the very least, we'll get you traffic on general university security mailing lists (where RIAA subpeonas are currently a hot topic).
Contact the ACLU and they'll get you a lawyer. This is the most insidious consequence, (and not at all unintended,) of the RIAA's crusade against the P2P technology. And make no mistake: They're attempting to thwart the technology, not the stealing. If they really cared about the stealing they wouldn't have been attacking a 12 year old Australian girl.
Stockpile all the evidence of your legal uses for bittorrent protocol, and then sue the a$$ off of the inept, small minded bureaucrat masquerading as a network admin.
Either that, or just change the port you're using. Any network admin stupid enough to post those kind of rules is too stupid to realize bittorrent can be run on nearly any port. If you're going to do that, however, I'd reccomend you also download The GIMP, and use it to edit a photo of your network admin to make him appear to be in the act of coupling with some sort of barnyard animal. Then create a torrent.
under which this constitutes 'illegal' activity", might evoke in an interesting response.
;-)
Are you sure they didn't mean 'illegal' in the sense that it violates some university policy? Because it certainly isn't unlawful.
If you really want to rabble rouse you might point out that bit torrent is no more and no less capable of transferring copyright infringing material than ftp or nntp. Prior, you might want to see what's available in the way of binaries on the universities news server
This happened to me at a University i used to go to. They completely blocked Bittorrent and if you uploaded to much you had to have a network administrator come check your computer to see what you were doing, mind you this was on their time. So you could be without internet access for 3-5 days, which is a major drawback for any student who is doing homework. I myself was seeding a few homemade movies of my neighbors and some game movies i had made myself, Hence my own media.
This made me annoyed beyond my belief, because when the administrator came i would have to prove that i had a legitimate copy of every piece of software that he would "Randomly" find. He wouldn't take into account ISO's i had burned to DVD so i didn't have to carry all the discs around.
So i looked for other alternatives, such as DSL and Cable. What i found suprised me. My Campus was so cheap that you had to pay extra for cable TV which we already were doing, so i called my provider and asked to have their Cable Internet installed in my dorm room (3meg down 256k up) They REFUSED stating they weren't allowed to do that. I also found the same thing from the local Phone company, stating that they couldn't install a DSL connection in the dorms because of contracts they had set up with the college.
So the University had a Monopoly on my choices of Internet Connection, So what did i do? walked around my dorm and gather signatures from every other student in my dorm and the one next to mine and went to a Student Senate Meeting. I told of my story and what had happened to me, showed my petition to the Student Senate, and amazingly they backed it. It became a major issue fairly fast,(I found out that the network administrators were doing this to many people. and some people that lived in the college apartments would be without internet for upwards of 2 weeks!) and the administrators were eventualy forced to drop their Iron Fist approach to monitoring the network. They had to send you a warning first before they shut you off, and then they gave you a chance to explain your network activity. If they haven't come out to your room within 2 days they are required to give you internet back until they make their way out to our rooms.
you oughta sue their asses....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I generally advocate raising hell in issues like this. Especially on college and university campuses -- the corner stones of any good hell-raising movement. Shove the issue down their censorous throats and show them how without merit it is.
An idea might be to make the issue public on campus, and advocate the over-use of the service for legal purposes: i.e. on wednesdays everyone downloads a linux ISO or five, on thursdays they pilfer legal torrent sites for independant music, short films, and the like. Combine that with the information on what legal options you have for forcing your net access back (particularly from the "How Unfortunate" thread, among others), and you have a powerful weapon.
Good luck mate. Give 'em hell.
The Acceptable Use Policy at my college didn't have anything that states that use of the network for downloading using bittorrent specifically for legal purposes weren't allowed, even though they have the ports for that specific protocol, along with kazaa, morpheus, etc., throttled so low that no one uses them. However, they'd probably counter anything with this one bullet that include actions that are prohibited in the AUP:
"Use of the College's technical resources in a manner that causes degradation, incapacitates, compromises, or in anyway jeopardizes the teaching, learning and business missions of the College for students, faculty, and administration."
So, you could be "chewing up bandwidth" downloading some linux iso's, which compromises the available bandwidth for someone who is trying to access their online classroom.
CowsAnonymous: We're here to help moo.
Uh, in business(or real world networks as you call it) THEY PAY US to increase their bottom line. In this wonderful world of college, WE PAY THEM, those non profit organizations. So, unless someone wants to provide a cost breakdown showing that somehow they are paying for the bandwidth and not my tutition dollars, they sure as hell better let me use the net as I please(within the law of course). Unitl they do, its MY money and MY bandwidth.
"There is no real right or wrong, just what the majority accepts at the time."
I was using IRC on an university account, and was contacted by them to stop using the service. I explained I was using the IRC for research and would remove it immediately if it was causing a problem, and received an email from the sys admin thanking me for my honesty, and telling me I could contintue using it.
They did not say that this student was a criminal or what they were doing was criminal. What they said was that, until P2P networks are ruled to be legal by the courts, they would not allow them on campus. That isn't saying that a P2P network is illegal, or that the student's use of it is illegal. It is simply saying that, barring a court ruling that affirms their legality, they aren't going to permit them at all.
Furthermore, there can be no libel or slander here because this is a private communication between the school and the student. Slander or libel is saying or printing something that is knowingly false about the student for others to see. It's a matter of damaging somebody's reputation. If the school and the student are the only ones privee to the communication, how can their reputation be damaged.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
you're considered guilty until it's proven that you're innocent? Is that new, because last time I checked, it was supposed to be the other way around. Weird...
Want some good stuff? Visit Project Gutenberg's CD page where you can download ISOs with thousands of free (public domain) eBooks, including via BitTorrent. Plus, each search for a Project Gutenberg eBook at the search page includes a MagnetLink, suitable for p2p clients.
The point is that this is all entirely legal, legitimate content -- including many of the great literary works people are already reading in schools around the world!
Especially citing multiple sources of legitimate use.
Talk to your friends on campus also. find as many people as you can that use BT for the same purpose, and write a joint letter, with lots of physical signatures.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Bittorrent is a 100% transparent protocol. The guys can indeed grab a sniffer, analyse the logs, and tell you which file you were downloading, from which tracker, and to which ip's.
If they can't prove using this evidence that you were downloading a copyrighted file, you can rightly accuse them of defamation. Sue THEM.
After all, you have nothing to hide, do you? Let this grab the public attention.
Burn and send him your pron collection, stating that bit torrent pwns!
Our courts will never declare P2P use legal. It's not what they do. The legal system in this country is designed around the idea that things are legal and people are innocent until laws make it illegal or you are found guilty. You are allowed to have and use bitorrent under US law. It's a first amendment right. You are not allowed to share copyrighted works however. By way of analogy it's like having a printing press. It's ok to print your own work, or works you are contracted to print by the creator, or works in the public domain: as long as you dont start printing copies of things like The Lord of The Rings (which did, in fact, happen and resulted in legal fights and too many editions wandering around). You can share free software and your own works with the tool. So you have some recourse. And you might want to investigate whatever student and academic tribunals that you have at your disposal. This is a right worth protecting. I should mention that IANAL, but I do follow this closely as I did have articles censored in my High School paper, as well as other students at that school. So this is an issue near and dear to my heart. There are things to condsider... Is this a private or state run school? That may make a difference if this ever has to go to court. Usually the courts have taken the position that the school is publisher in student censorship cases and so has a right to edit the content of what they publish. So they might have the final right to say no to all P2P sharing on their network as it is "their" bandwidth. However, you have not committed a crime, right? And you might want to be careful on that count, it would be embarrassing to go before a student/faculty review board and claim you only use it for legit purposes...and then have them show that you spent 2 weeks downlaoding the entire series of Porky's movies. So, be careful. Or build your arguments carefully. You might want to contact the EFF or the ACLU, they both deal with this kind of thing. Finally, I expect your best course of action is to try to protect your rights at the academic level. Get an academic review board together and present your case that the tool and the file quoted are not illegal, and show the license that allows you to share the file. Allow the IT deparment to make their case that they have limited bandwidth and dont have time to determine which files are legal and which are not. Demonstrate that you are a responsible citizen, not a wily and witless media bandit and try to paint the IT dept's policy as draconian and possibly a violation of civil rights. Let the students and faculty decide and they will set policy for the school. Then you will know what kind of school you really go to. Or...host your files off-campus. ---Gorehog
I assume you live on campus. I recommend you take your case to Housing, the Dean of Students, or someone else in Student Affairs. We're generally much more sympathetic and student friendly (it's our job). We're professional student advocates who should be able to help you navigate the processes and translate the language of the higher education bureaucracy.
In particular, if you can make your case to Housing you may be in a stronger position as we are typically a self-sufficient or lightly subsidized auxiliary service and dependent on your rent for our budget. Unhappy residents makes our lives more difficult and if it impacts the bottom line strongly enough it may make our jobs nonexistent. But more than that: most of us are in this profession to understand your concerns and help you convey them to the right people. It's part of the educational process. We honestly believe (and have the research to support) a huge amount of important educational and learning experiences occur outside of the classroom and labratory. This is one of those experiences.
IMHO, there should be a healthy tension between the Housing dept and the IT dept regarding the policies and use of the residential computer network. There is an inherent tension between needing to protect the network and keeping it open for legitimate academic and recreational uses. Unfortunately, it's usually the residents who get caught in the middle between these opposing viewpoints.
I've been involved in similar "fights" and discussions. There's no easy answer particularly in areas where bandwidth is expensive and public support for higher education is declining (i.e. nearly everywhere). And ultimately my responsibility is to all of the residents not just one or two of them. If that means I have to deny access to an application, port, etc. to a few residents to ensure the rest of them can use the network then I'll do that or recommend our network engineers do that. It's a poor solution and I wish we didn't have to do it but sometimes we have to make compromises. We can't afford (more realistically: YOU can't afford) to buy the bandwidth necessary to satisfy all of the academic and entertainment needs of all of the residents.
Best of luck! I hope your campus administration makes the right decision (whatever that is) and you learn something (hopefully positive) from this process. If it helps, I am dismayed by the situation as you have described it and would do my best not to allow a similar situation on my campus.
That's a load of garbage. Nobody owns information. Information is just a combination of ones and zeroes. Are you saying I don't have the right to order the ones and zeroes on my computer however I want? I own this computer. Information just floats around. When informed of it, I order the ones and zeroes on my computer differently. What moral crime have I committed? Who really owns my computer? I own my computer. No one owns information.
The pot called the kettle black.
I think if a campus network offers public access to its students which are paid for by student fees or otherwise by those who use it in some form, there ought to be a very precise outline of what you can and can not do with that connection.
When you then sign on the dotted line and agree to the terms, the question of what the university can ban and what it cannot would be pretty crystalline. If they want to ban you from going to cnn.com or pages with red backgrounds, and you agree to that, then fine, you should abide by it.
Those who have delighted in posting "tough crap" messages don't seem to take the fact that the network is being paid for by its users, for specific purposes, into account.
(What is it with this certain population of people who take such pleasure in siding with Authority, and who believe that there are never legitimate complaints or grievances; just whining?)
So the question is whether or not there is a specific AUP shown to the university community before they pony up for the fees, and whether it (ignorantly and stupidly) outright bans something like BT. I'm sure it's somewhere in writing or at bare minimum understood that illegal activity is prohibited, I'm curious whether there's a document somewhere that outright bans all Peer to Peer.
If on the other hand you paid for your network access with the understanding that basic internet services (and legitimate BT is one of these) were all allowed, and they just about-faced on this, I think at bare minimum you should have some traction to challenge it or else get some kind of refund.
The fact remains that these fees are being paid for by students (are they? If they're not, then this is a whole different argument), and as such students at bare minimum have a right to know up front what they're paying for. Or should have such a right.
Nice university administration, btw. Enlightened, discerning, technically knowledgeable and proficient. Fills me with confidence.
Idiots.
There's a whole population of people out there who'd take us back to quills and parchment if they could.
But he has of course been wrongly accused of doing something illegal. That's slanderous, and illegal in itself.
Oh, hush. You're not a lawyer, stop pretending to give legal advice.
What's the first thing a plaintiff's attorney does when filing a suit? Submits paperwork to the court alleging that the defendant(s) have done something illegal. (Or even before that, maybe they send a Cease & Desist order alleging the same thing directly to the defendants.)
How come we don't hear of plaintiff's attorneys being hauled into court in droves on Slander charges?
If the university KNEW that BitTorrenting WAS legal and still told him it wasn't, AND if the student had suffered actual damages, then MAYBE there would be a case for defamation here. But as far as I can tell, they don't and he hasn't so there isn't.
Regarding the cost involved for bandwidth, why not just charge the students $45/month just like any cable company does? Thats only an extra $180/semester.
If you used bittorrent to download ANY material that you shouldn't have such as music, movies, etc., then don't fight it and accept responsibility.
However, if you are sure you didn't do anything wrong, then fight it. Using bittorrent to download linux ISOs is not illegal or immoral and many people will back you up.
Let me just reiterate my first point, if you used bittorrent to download anything you shouldn't have, don't bring other people into it because you'll make them and yourself look like idiots. This will also set a bad precedent for somebody trying to fight a bogus "p2p charge".
The first thing that pops into my mind is to show large-scale, legal usage of BitTorrent. A site like FileRush (www.filerush.com) would do it. Game demos, game patches, trailers, videos, mods... all available via BitTorrent. They do offer direct downloads of some stuff, but their primary distribution method is BT.
Go to your University's IT department and show them that just because something CAN be used illegally, there are large-scale, legal deployments of the same technology.
You may want to mention that NASA uses BitTorrent (sorry, in Dutch) with the World Wind project - see e.g. the download page for World Wind.
I wonder how many other governmental agencies are using BitTorrent too?
"Better that a thousand should die unjustly, than one should avoid just punishment!" I don't remember where I read that, likely some SciFi book from the ages before time (1970s). -- John
Under most legal systems, something is deemed to be legal unless there is a law prohibiting it. Their position is a bizarre one.
Peer to Peer is after all, nothing more than a roadway; a way of getting information from here to there. I strongly suspect that the person making this decree is highly confused.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
$NAMED_UNIVERSITY, you may now find yourself listed as a co-defendent in any copyright infringement cases involving Usenet, e-mail, FTP, IRC, http, and any of the plethora of other internet protocols at your students' disposal. Speaking for all Active providers, I would like to welcome you. It takes real set of brass ones to toss the ONE thing that protects you from countless lawsuits that last for years and will cost you millions of dollars in legal defense. Thank you for joining our ranks, you are now member number: 1.
PS: I'll bet they started policing the network on advice from their lawyer... He's a great guy to ask since he has so much to gain by seeing them tied up in court for eternity. =D
PPS: I wouldn't bother with the whole 'legitimate uses' crap. They don't give a flying fig. They are worried about lawsuits. Just point out, from a liability standpoint, this is the ABSOLUTE WORST possible course of action they could take. Frankly, the university staff should be ashamed of themselves for coming down on the side of Hollywood in 'Librarians v. Hollywood' but that's a whole other rant.
Universities pay by the bit
This is intersting; I am pretty sure we don't; I would guess that no public university in Germany does pay for each MB. They certainly don't want any trouble with the law and some throttle or block p2p traffic, but the economics are different from rented serverspace.
Many of the other posts to this article have addressed issues of whether or whether not the letter the student received constitutes slander, the various aspects of university IT departments, or how the student should approach their universities' IT department.
I think what is at issue here is much larger than legal minutiae and university IT departments; I think it goes to the heart of one of the cornerstones (or what should be, but may no longer be, one of the cornerstones) of a university: the free and open communication of ideas.
One of the most important ideas a university can (should) encourage is the free communication of ideas. This should not only extend to tenured university faculty, but should be a principal the university encourages both its faculty and its students to practice. By declaring BitTorrent, a tool that can be used for the free communication of ideas illegal " '[u]ntil the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted' " the university, through its IT department, is actively discouraging the free communication of ideas. And that is a very sad and troubling position for any university to take.
... since their patch delivery is Bittorrent-based.
(yes, for the pedants I know you can turn it off or get it elsewhere; I'm talking about what is the company's MAIN method of patch delivery)
-Styopa
The ISP will be required _BY LAW_ to block absolutely _ALL_ incoming data designated for a home computer that cannot be determined by any known protocols to be in response to one or more specific outgoing data packets in the recent past. There will be exemptions for home computers that are designated as servers for small home businesses, or even non-profit organizations, but you can be sure that they would be paying a lot more for Internet access than a home user would, and even those users won't be able to allow other users to access the Internet through their system unless they are also licensed as an ISP (or whatever more generic term they might come up with), which would then require that they conform to the law themselves.
Sure, when your ISP does this you might threaten to switch ISP's, but that won't really accomplish much because they will *ALL* have to do this.
You could always move to another country, but I wouldn't be suprised if similar measures aren't eventually taken in other nations as well.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If I'm doing research on, say, music history, it is perfectly legal to download, oh, a vinyl rip of 'I Saw Her Standing There' from _Please Please Me_ and compare it to the CD version.
It's even legal for me to include clips when I write it up.
'Fair Use' requires a judical decision to see if it falls within the accepted bounds. There's no way machines or even random person can decide if any copying is fair use or not.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
I believe that one you click the Patch button, it stops uploading. Let's be honest, the vast majority of users are going to click Patch as soon as they can, and aren't going to bother with waiting for a 1:1 ratio or anything.
It amazes me how many people start their reply with words to the effect of "they have accused you of doing something illegal, this is slander, sue them!" when in fact the parts of the letter that have been posted do no such thing.
Its also funny how many people say "they can't do that!" when the university owns the network in question, which means yes they can. There is no gray area, and there is ample court ruling to back that up.
Considering the legal consequences the school can face from the **AA crushing machine, I can't fault them for taking this stance. I think its unfortunate, and to an extent unfair, but they really don't have a lot of choices.
But then this is Slashdot. We never let a little thing like facts get in the way. Just like this post will probably get modded to "troll" because we also don't like it when simple truths are pointed out.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
This is, of course, a valid argument, but I think this issue exposes a deeper problem: who do universities work for? University administrations seem to have the attitude that they're doing you a big favor by even allowing you on campus; "keep your nose clean or else!" But really, it's the students who are "customers" of the university because they're the ones who are paying (increasingly large) tuitions; so where's the "customer service"?
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be rules or academic requirements, but I do think that schools should be more willing to support and protect their high-tuition-paying students rather than treating them like criminals by default.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
So no one at the posters University plays World of Warcraft? WoW updates thru blizards version of bittorrent, and works rather well. So no one can update thier legaly purchased game over the network...?
What? I can't bring this gun onto the airplane? It's just a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Don't I have the right to arrange my atoms however I want? And if I shoot someone with it, all I've done is rearrange some atoms, so they should quit complaining about it. They're just bits, they're only subatomic particles, who cares?
Said sysadmin obviously has no clue how the court system works. Courts don't decide something is legal, they decide something is illegal. Everything else is inherently legal, until proven otherwise.
Obviously, they are scared of being hit on by RIAA for contributory negligence, but flipside I wouldn't be surprised if they could be sued by the student body for various transgressions inherent in their current action. On the flipside, are they going to ban email due to it's inherent p2p nature?
I am well aware of issues involving fair use, and and I think it is an absolutely essential component of copyright law. However...you and I both know that downloading, storing, and using at will, copyrighted material without due compensation to its owners, is NOT fair use. It's no where close. It has, however, become an oft-used red herring when ever the topic arises.
Students and faculty need to let their IT departments know what they legitimate purposes they have for using P2P applications.
At Oregon State University, we ran into a huge problem with P2P sharing, in terms of bandwidth. One fall when the students came back, we were "in the straights" for several days - we were saturating our link to the commodotity Internet.
We discussed not allowing P2P on campus, but we learned from a few folks who were using it for legitimate research sharing purposes, and decided intead to use a packet-shaper and set a lower priority on P2P traffic. Additionally, our Housing group enforces pretty strict bandwidth limits (http://oregonstate.edu/resnet/policies.php). So far, this approach has been working great for us.
We do, of course, receive DMCA complaints on a regular basis (about 1-2/week for a University with 18,000 students - not bad, I think). When we get these complaints, we contact the person who owns the machine or webpage, find out if the file was really copywritten material, and make them take it down. Occassionally, we have gotten false reports from RIAA or MPAA, so we try not to assume that the files are being illegally shared.
yeah sue them
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Here we've developed an ingenious system, where the p2p network is limited to the local LAN. All the new stuff is being downloaded by sole individuals, and that is being shared with everyone else (this works exceptionally well with tv shows for example).
I think this is being realized by the administration also (I hope), the local bandwidth is almost free, but every single outbound byte from the LAN costs. This way everyone wins.
And no, people will not stop downloading stuff. It's only 1's and 0's, and ultimately easy to copy by definition.
If only Hormel's Spam had such a good excuse... Instead it's almost a Nazi experiment of its own....
What is thine amount of data downloaded?
Because sometimes even if the copies are unauthorized, they can be legal, thanks to Fair Use. Unauthorized != illegal.
And that's not even something that will ever be figured out by a computer, even if they have a fingerprint of every copyrighted work in existance. Because sometimes you have the right to copy information, copyright be damned, and when that is can only be decided by the courts.
So it's not just 'things you have legit permission to download' blocking stops, it's also 'things you have a right under the law to download even though you don't have permission'.
So even if there was a magical bittorrent filter that stopped you from downloading Star Wars but let you download a Linux ISO, it can't ever be smart enough to know you're downloading Star Wars because you want a four second clip of Greedo shooting first to go along with your dissertation on 'How the Digital Universe Allows Anyone to Edit History', and thus you're squarely in the Fair Use camp.
(No, you can't grab it off the DVD, thanks to the DMCA, which outlawed the tools in addition to using them. So you could legally rip it, but not legally possess any tools to do so.)
And before anyone says 'That's an absurd situation', I'll point that Fair Use covers a lot of things...you could even argue it covered, to get back my original example, downloading a no-longer-manufactured original vinyl rip to go along with your purchase of a CD, because it's for personal, non-commercial use, and obviously no sales have been lost, even without any aspect of research. You'd probably lose in court, because you copied the whole work, but you might not.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
P2P is banned outright at my government owned institute. First of all, the IT department has an application server set up to detect P2P applications based on the traffic, regardless of what port they are using. Here is why it's banned:- (1) It's a security risk. Most of the time people using P2P applications find themselves targets of port scans and other hack attempts. We really don't need this. (2) The piracy issue. Sure, you can argue for downloading Linux ISOs over BitTorrent, but let's be real here. When you already have some AMAZING bandwidth, downloading ISOs (And Debian as jigdo files) is quick by FTP or HTTP alone. There's nothing research related that can only be found on BitTorrent. Plus, allowing people to host illegal content becomes a liability for the IT department, and we have enough work to deal with. (3) The network issue. It hammers the network unneccessarily, and if allowed, it would create a chicken and egg situation for the IT department. As soon as we do an upgrade of the network, more people would use P2P to use up the bandwidth - requiring another upgrade, which more people would then max out. It's too expensive to keep doing this, we already have enough switches that need replacing.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
How can a student respond to such an accusation in order to defend the validity of BitTorrent and continue to benefit from its legitimate uses?
You can't. It's their network. When you're paying for the access (specifically for it, and you own it), then you can bitch.
Note that I strongly disagree with what they've done.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
But you've re-arranged someone else's atoms, which is unacceptable.
I'm not a lawyer.
.that EULA you clicked through? Courts usually say they're not worth the paper they're printed. . .whatever.
Contracts which a party isn't expected to read isn't considered to be enforcible. Basically, contracts are about mutual agreement, and if a party is expected to "sign or walk", with no real ability to bargain, then a court won't uphold it. (If you need the network connection, you might be able to get a duress argument in there as well). These contracts are called contracts of adhesino, and courts will refuse to enforce them. So, yeah. .
So why do they roll out such contracts anyway? 1) It's intimidating, and it works on most non-lawyers, who won't know enough to get legal advice from a lawyer. 2) Businesses ARE usually expected to read contracts 3) Plaintiffs can't make the argument "Well, they never TOLD me that I couldn't use P2P!" They did. Plaintiffs just didn't read it.
To conclude, your security policy is probably legally worthless, under the Common Law. It's also not likely that anyone is going to challenge it.
But here in the Netherlands you don't have to help in your own prosecution.
There's a counterpart in the United States, and it's called the fifth amendment. However:
So why on earth would you even consider letting a netadmin scan you PC just to prove you are innocent?
For the same reason that one who uses government-owned roads gives implied consent to perform a breath alcohol test.
I'd find a key package that the IT Department relies on and convince/bribe/blackmail the maintainers to switch to torrent-only distibution. Ooops... no security patches for the registration system? Bet the IT Dept. would change the rules then.
... hehehe ...
If I were an Evil Genius
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
If they make BT illegal you won't be able to play WoW after the next patch.
The Internet access TOS at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology already bans game playing across the Internet connection without express written consent of the administration.
I agree with the reasons for your policy. It would be nice if you could allow BitTorrent traffic but, as a secondary (or "thousand-ary") use of the network, it should be fully controllable by the IT department.
I would just like to point out that one of the important benefits of BitTorrent is to decrease the bandwidth requirements of the original file provider. For small businesses and independent developers this is a very important money savings instead of using only FTP and other protocols that require a significantly larger pipe.
In other words, do what you want with your network since it is yours. It is too bad FS/OSS and other independent and legal file sharing cannot benefit from BitTorrent to their users on your network.
are legal. (mostly)
You can use a good for good, you can use the same gun for evil.
It's illegal to kill someone with a gun.
It's legal to kill an animal with the same gun, provided you have the proper permits and follow the law. And you have the legal right to use that gun to defend your own life, with deadly force when threatened.
Just because you CAN use a legal device to do an illegal thing does not mean the device should be made illegal.
I can take bit torrent and download the latest episode of the Sopranos. That's illegal.
I can use the same program to download the latest release of Knoppix. That's 100% legal and no one can tell me otherwise or prevent me from doing so. If anyone tries to prevent me from doing a legal thing, THEY are breaking the law by infringing on MY RIGHTS...
That is false, at least in American law. You can be convicted of libel even if what you say is the truth.
Oh really? Wikipedia says of libel law in the United States and United Kingdom: "If a defamation lawsuit actually gets to trial, truth is an affirmative defense." Several Google sources concur. If the provable truth of a statement is not a defense to a charge of defamation, then please feel free to edit the Wikipedia article.
Or were you approaching the issue from the angle of the cost of a legal defense?
World of Warcraft uses Bittorrent to provide updates to the game. Seems to me that this could turn kind of interesting since apparently the school would ban you for running an update for the game. Without the update, you can't play the game, hence playing Warcraft would get you banned from the network.
There are no such things as "bt ports": with most popular BitTorrent clients you can assign the ports used yourself.
True, clients can pick their own ports, but tracker operators pick the port that the tracker runs on, and the majority of BitTorrent trackers seem to run on the default port. Blocking 6969/tcp out is already being done. At a particularly fascist provider, those trackers that don't run on 6969/tcp can be special-cased with a set of (IPv4 address, TCP port) tuples.
Instead kids prefer to download crappy songs in massive parallel groups.
Why?
I suggest you read Slashdot
An FTP or HTTP site will work equally well, if not better, without using up the university's upstream bandwidth.
A lot of the FTP or HTTP mirrors holding copies of GNU/Linux distribution image files have a very small limit of simultaneous connections to the public Internet, requiring a name and password issued by the mirror (and no, it's not a free registration) beyond that point.
Here's an analogy for your viewing pleasure:
When VCRs were introduced and the Sony case was in the court system, were colleges checking rooms to see if people had these devices? Using university electricity and cable service along with a technology that "hasn't been ruled legal" should obviously be stopped! (I know, I know, it falls apart a little bit with rooms being semi-private and such)
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
So yea, downloading "X" (windows) is a very legitimate use.
If you meant "downloading Windows", that's infringement, as Microsoft Windows operating system is all-rights-reserved proprietary software. If you meant "downloading X11", then what does X have to do with Windows?
you can mess with your ISP to avoid being blocked or throttled-down. see how long you can get away with this:
change the default ports that your bittorrent client uses. They probably blocked ports 6881-6999. those are the default bittorrent ports.
on windows or linux you can supply command line args to change the port range. set it for up in the 50000 - 65535 range.
I dont know how to change ports on other clients but suspect its probably pretty easy.
Contracts by their nature are negotiable. Otherwise it wouldn't be a mutual agreement by two parties on equal footing.
There are a lot of great places that you can black out portions of a contract before signing. If it's one of those meaningless contracts, like this one, everyone lets them through. Just whip out your sharpie and let it go. Sign it, and give it back.
If it's a more meaningful contract, you should negotiate with your employer. Explain your concerns, get them worried about their contract, and they'll usually accomodate in some way.
But the university "contracts" are the greatest. You can usually find the full text of what you are agreeing to. In a disused building. In the basement. With no elevator or stairs. Or lights. In a locked filing cabnet marked "Beware of the Leopard."
In the grand scheme of things the accessability of most University contracts are one step above the dead sea scrolls. Sure, some people have seen some of them, and everyone seems to think that all of them are around there somewhere, but has anyone you know read even one piece?
The ______ Agenda
It's not a red herring when talking about blocking access to unauthorized copies.
It is where Napster is involved. Napster was first and foremost, a conduit for trading copyrighted material. There are many ways to gain fair-use access to a copyrighted work. Napster doesn't sit high on my list of legitimate sources- mainly because it was designed to subvert the notion of fair use.
the argument that a technology should be allowed because it can be used for good is awfully close to the argument that it should be disallowed because it can be used to break the law.
However, the former argument is enshrined in U.S. federal case law (Sony v. Universal) and the latter is not.
Whatever!
Do you guys really believe this fool?
No doubt what he didn't tell you is that aside from the notice from his school, he was also downloading every movie he could find and sharing the files with the rest of the world consuming a huge amount of the schools bandwidth.
The problem isn't the tool, its the illegal actions taken using the tool.
The writer is simply trying to deflect his illegal actions by blaming it on bittorrent.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
"We're sorry to inform you that you will not be able to update and play your World of Warcraft account on our student networks as it uses a BT p2p system to distribute updates and patches."
So how can they deem all p2p activity illegal since it uses a BT system to distribute each patch file unlike prior mmorpg's update systems of d/ling them directly from the companies servers. Look it's just a CYA act on the IT departments behalf if anything comes down the pike where p2p is somehow outlawed outright.
But if I was to go digging through my ex's trash and find out that she hasn't paid her credit card bills in 3 months and publish that information, that is libel.
I've never seen the term "libel" used officially to refer to privacy violations, just as I've never seen the term "theft" used officially to refer to federal copyright violations. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law seems to have only the defamation definition.
There are legal uses for bittorrent? ;)
There are boxes you can buy to limit bandwidth used by specific protocols/users/machines/whatever.
Suppose you have a T1. Limit your users to 30% of that for bittorrent and/or make bittorrent packets last priority in QOS.
Sent them a honest and nice letter about the legal uses of bittorrent with a list of legal bittorrent links or websites.
One that I can think of off the top of my head is:
http://torrents.gentoo.org/
First of all, I'd say to myself "It's their network and they can decide what I run on it". Then I'd say "However, they didn't appropriately warn me that they didn't want me running BitTorrent. This is all a misunderstanding, let's clear it up." And then I would go to the networking office and say this:
"First of all, this is a misunderstanding. I wasn't downloading or distributing copyrighted material, I was just downloading an update to the software, and I had an appropriate license for it. So I haven't broken the law and I haven't done anything that'll get YOU in trouble, either. I only use BitTorrent to download Linux ISO's (or whatever), and I didn't think anyone would care about that -- it's all properly licensed to me, no laws broken...
I understand why you might not want me to run BitTorrent, and since you obviously don't want me running it on your network, I won't, ok? But do me a favor and restore my network access, because this is all just a misunderstanding and no law has been broken. I'm sorry if I've caused you any trouble."
I would be very polite and businesslike, I would show the network admin respect, and I would try VERY hard to not come across as hostile in any way.
Network priviledges are important to a college kid. And they don't have to turn the tap back on, remember that. BE NICE and clear the mess up, and maybe it'll all get settled in a friendly way.
Of course, if you WERE trading movies or music, you're probably SOL. But you probably weren't (you deserve the benefit of the doubt). Treat it as a misunderstanding that has to be cleared up, and you'll be ok.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
They are just trying to be on the safe side, legally. They aren't really implying that BT is illegal, but it is not allowed for the time being. They even stated that they would reconsider the decision when "the courts decide" whether it is legal or not.
Didn't you know that IT people are inherently stupid? That's common knowledge, dude. In a vain attempt to fake people into thinking they do things that a trained chimp couldn't master in 1 day, they try to hide what they do so it's impossible to figure out that they are, in fact, brainless chimps.
Find out who's responsible, and punch them in the face. It's as simple as that.
>>It seems such misunderstandings are common, but it is particularly frustrating when coming from people in the IT field. That kind of "laying the hammer down" happens all the time from IT departments even when they are flat out in the wrong. It's been my experience that many in the IT department get off on thinking they have power that they often its proven they don't really have. Two examples from personal experience: in one the IT department at my military base tried to shut down a user group email list of daily scripture verses and went so far as to put me (the list manager) on report. They got egg all over their face for that when the Chaplain stepped up to the plate and pointed out that their actions violated Freedom of Religeon - something the military has to protect - "seperation of church and state" does NOT apply to the military because the military is a lifestyle and the needs of the service member must not only be protected but co-operation must be met for. In the end the list was given official recognition and the C/O made me area Lay Leader. A second example was while I worked at an Insurance company. I had a good reputation with the IT manager of the office and we'd often talk computers - he'd actually usually ask my advise for personal computing. Well one morning he told me not to play games on company computers but that he'd let it slide this time. Confused I said "ok whatever". Well later that day my boss asked me to look at the multimedia computer because this management training program she'd been doing wouldn't work. A few clicks later I discovered that direct-x was missing! You guessed it - the IT manager had done a routine check on computers, saw direct-x related things on it, assumed they were for games and removed it (this was back in the day of dx3 i think before it integrated so much into the OS and broke down and was buggy all the time). In the end he spent the rest of the day trying to restore the program in vain, she ended up having to start all over again from the beginning - several days of work. Now, yes these are anecdotes and for every one I have of misuse of IT power someone else has 5 of proper use, my point is the origin writer of our thread shouldn't be surprised at all to see IT departments making foolish statements like P2P is illegal. Hell all it is is a new version of FTP. That being said though the college has a right to ban the use of any p2p activity if they want to, but I highly doubt that's actually written anywhere in the student guidebook and he wouldn't have a leg to stand on to ban the kid from the network. Could only suggest it be added to the student handbook and ask him not to do it.
I am a lawyer, and the first question that comes to my mind is whether your school is a public or private institution. If public, you may have a claim for a violation of your First Amendment rights. You have freedom of speech, and while using Bittorrent for infringement would not be considered protected speech, using it for lawful communications certainly is. One of the briefs filed in the Grokster case (by Video Software Dealers Assocaition) makes the point that the Firt Amendment protects the use of P2P technology for lawful communications. As some have noted, schools may restrict uses based on consumption (bandwidth issues), but to suppress a particular method of commuincation because they don't like it has traditionally been frowned upon.
Aire Libre
The Halo fansite Halo.Bungie.Org has recently been using BitTorrent more and more often to distribute Halo videos to the community. Since the number of people downloading these vids has increased dramatically, BitTorrent has become necessary. There are plenty of legal applications for BitTorrent, and in this case, one that is necessary. The beauty of BitTorrent is (as i'm sure everyone here already knows) that the more people are downloading a file, the faster the download speeds are for everyone.
10100111001
1. Until the courts rule that p2p is illegal, it probably isn't.
2. The internet is a p2p network
3. MPAA v Sony (Betamax)
4. Point to the large number of legitimate torrent sites, and explain how bittorrent's design makes it pretty unsuitable for copyright infringement.
I'm on shaw too, and i have found that the upload limit has been capped at 64KB/s, which very quickly saturates when you are using BT, and then it affects your download rate as you cant upload more.
But basically this boils down to Shaw being a bunch of dicks. You pay for a service and then they take away that service and give you a lesser service, but still they charge you the same. Now if you want to get your old service back you have to pay $X more.
Dean, what the hell is that? I know a guy named Dean, but he's a plumber. I'm pretty sure a Dean is not a plumber...
That is the most idiotic argument I've ever heard. Everything is foreign to people until someone explains it to them. "Essenital services" named in "clear terms" my ass. If you didn't have it explained to you, nobody would know what "911 service" is. Essential, yet not "meaningful" by your standards.
Please, quit making excuses for your ignorance and just ask questions when you don't know something.
They should just stop blocking everything, remove and QoS system they might have running, and any antivirus systems and just let it all in and out and let things crawl to a hault. As far as the linux issue, perhaps a middle ground can be found where the University would supply and keep an uptodate listing of ISOs. I know it wouldn't be perfect, but then less bandwidth would be spent going out to retreive these when it could just chew up the local network. There is only so much pipe and there are a lot of people and machines to abuse the pipe. Should be happy the packets continue to flow. If you don't like it you can always get an apartment and pay for you own :-).
There is a reason its ranked #1
http://www.google.com/search?q=eraser
Here's the sourceforge download link
If you use a Mac: ...don't worry about it. Hit "secure delete"
or not. Nobody really knows how to do data recovery on a Mac anyhow.
(Hint Hint, anyone planning to break Federal laws: use a Mac.)
If you use *nix: Figure it out yourself.
Do I look like tech support?
P.S. I coulda sworn that AZ updated over good 'ol http. doesn't it?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
...move to an apartment next year.
Which is probably what the parent poster implied in saying the "condition of using it." Many, many university TOSs stipulate this little gem and many, many students do not bother to read their school's policies. Lately, the courts have sided on the side of those who draft these contracts or policies, even the more ridiculous ones.
This even shows up on occasion in rental agreements where people are silly enough to sign rights for the landlord to enter the premises without notice at any time. People don't read, and they sign. Seems like an unreasonable thing to put in a lease, but if people are willing to sign it, the courts generally uphold it. However, in the example I just gave, some states are stepping up to protect the citizens who sign these things by creating laws that say that even if you sign away that right, it's not legally binding. (In the case of entering the premises by a landlord. However, college dorms are treated differently than apartments--I don't know why--and I have yet to see a single "you can't sign away your rights to maintaining the privacy of your PC contents on a network" law.) I generally maintain the stance that someone should be accountable for what they agree to or sign when what they are agreeing to is posted in a clear, conspicuous manner. And yes, I read EULAs. However, Iguess I can see the occasional reason for not forcing someone to abide by that agreement.
I know of a symposium that sorta (meaning, unofficially) recently conducted an experiment where they gave out TOS for their wireless connections to people who were standing in long lines, and took note of who read it and who didn't. One iteration of the TOS had "You are not reading this" written into it. Almost no one (all college-aged students) actually read the agreement.
I don't know if right-to-search is part of this school's particular policy, but it's something to consider.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
First point to remember, diplomacy is a great idea, and it sometimes opens doors you cannot open otherwise. It may be too late now when they are already criminalizing the guy like this, but it may still be worth a try:
At my college, p2p is similarly blocked. But at least nobody kicked me off the net for just trying it. In fact, I was able to do a little [social] networking and find out who sets these policies. I didn't follow up on it, but I was told there is a good chance he would allow me an exception for a legitimate download. Some netlords have heard of Linux, some haven't. YMMV.
Second point, again it is too late for this in his case, but ALL students these days need to seriously think about preemptively setting up some security:
1.) Use truecrypt http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/, and keep any questionable materials hidden on a plausibly deniable encrypted partition, in case your computer is suddenly grabbed by school authorities for inspection.
2.) Use tor http://tor.eff.org/ or freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ or whatever, encrypting your pipes so the netlords can't easily know what software you are using. Them blowing smoke about your bandwidth usage is legitimate, but puts you in way less hot water than p2p usage.
3.) Use (or develop) [if your encrypted tunnel doesn't already do this], p2p programs that do everything via port 80 http, since hardly anyone tries to block that. BitComet's UDP NAT-piercing technology is ingenious, but port-blocking firewalls still destroy its usefulness. Somebody needs to adapt the torrent algorithms to not depend on those red-flag port numbers. Heck, if everything was already on port 80, those netlords probably wouldn't have even noticed him--no encryption necessary!
Anyone got pointers to easy-to-install stuff along these lines? Or do we need to work on developing it ourselves?
Nobody really knows how to do data recovery on a Mac anyhow.
That is a myth.
This isn't meant to be snitty, but is an honest suggestion. You should read-up on the progress digital forensics has made. You might want to start here.
I will guarantee you that data recovery on a Mac is very doable.
The question is whether someone wants to spend the money having a good forensics team do the analysis. In this case, it's doubtful that someone will want to spend the time and money over a few MP3s, but who knows. If you're breaking federal laws that lead to a large financial/asset/information loss, you might find that it suddenly becomes worth the government's time.
However, I personally wouldn't mind that inaccurate statement being passed around. In fact, it's when the bad guys think their being sneaky about something and become sloppy that they're the easiest to catch.
But a Mac is certainly not the impenetratable beast that people make it out to be, cool as it may be. When they teach undergraduate college courses in how to do it, you know that the government can do it as well.
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
Mod parent way the hell up. :-)
Ack. Apologies for the grammar and spelling mistakes. I should have clicked 'preview' but failed to do so.
Because sometimes even if the copies are unauthorized, they can be legal, thanks to Fair Use. Unauthorized != illegal.
Not necessarily. mp3.com learned the hard way that even though the users could prove they owned the mp3s they were downloading, the transfer of mp3s was unauthorized, and thus mp3.com was gutted and bought out.
Easy. Protest such stupidity by playing lots of World of Warcraft. (WoW patches using BitTorrent)
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
Most people who consider themselves 'advanced' users of windows will probably be just as stumped.
The local police... well, you get the idea. What was really meant by the original comment is that its extremely unlikely the first people who get their hands on your Mac will have any idea what to do with it. Ditto for the second group of computer whizzes. Its a Win** world, why train the police about Macintosh?
I'll read up on forensics/etc, but my understanding is that short of an electron tunneling microscope, running 2x the number of passes the DOD reccommends should obliterate anything that might be found. Much less running the full 35 pass algorithm that gutmann came up with.
The best line of defense isn't a good offense...
Its a kilo of thermite.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You might have some fun looking at how the U describes it own peer to peer networking. Does it have journals that are peer-reviewed? Does the counseling center offer peer counseling?
Do they have some deeprooted objection to sharing among equals?
Resources might include thefire.org, chillingeffects.org, eff.
Hehe. Fair enough. And you are very much correct about the average joe being completely overwhelmed by the prospect of even turning on a Mac, let alone recovering data on it.
:)
:)
:) The university tried insisting upon my living on campus, but I never did.
As to the comment on the local PD, our local police department actually has a very well-developed cyber crime unit that works with the local information security group at the university. However, I don't know how well developed other units are. Just based on the articles I have read about their solving triple homicides based on digital evidence and what-not, and hearing about their use of iLook, EnCase, and all sorts of forensic tools, I would feel pretty confident in their ability to do a fair forensic analysis of a machine. As far as federal crimes go, it would be passed to the FBI, who have a very, very good team, who probably have a myriad of Mac tools. Again, extra info, but whatever.
But my facetious meter wasn't on today. It's been a very, very long day. I apologize the on-my-soap-box comments. hehe. I just hear that argument so much, it's almost reflex-reaction.
In any case, the point is moot. I doubt the university will invest time in searching the kid's machine, and certainly not for retrieving deleted files. I think his best course of action is to probably contact someone reasonable in their IS/IT department and explain the situation. Failing that, a more empty victory would be to do as I did and not use their network with his personal PC. I found the restrictive policies for dorm life disagreeable to what I found acceptable, and so I took my money elsewhere, and ended up with 3x the space, my own kitchen and bathroom, and am not paying much more in rent.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
is really moot if there's an policy that states that network usage must be for academic purposes only.
If such person is distributing his thesis defense through Bittorrent, then I suppose it isn't illegal, but otherwise, legal or not, it can land said student in a lot of trouble.
Be smart, stay under the radar.
Pay for your own DSL connection. They can't do jack shit about that.
At the university of Helsinki (Where Linux was born) we have a similar policy. I asked one of the admins about the issue with bittorrent clients. The response was simply that because the university has an insane amount of bandwidth, BT tends to transmit at full speed, to the point that other traffic actually suffers noticeably.
The "illegal" part is because enough people have used those to distribute unauthorized copyrighted material that the network disruption can be directly connected to them.
It is a major issue, because the university has to pay for the bandwidth it uses, and p2p clients use as much bandwidth as they get.
The admin mentioned that prioritizing them down does not work, as different clients popping up and changing ports all the time causes too much work. Because they don't serve much purpose to studies, it was decided that it is impossible to separate the legal from illegal uses with existing resources, and it is not feasible to pay for the extra bandwidth.
Here is a site (in finnish) explaining the effect of p2p apps on university bandwidth use, with graphs
Downloading anything is, by definition, an exchange of information. Whether or not that exchange is legal or not has nothing to do with that.
If you walk out of a bookstore with a book owned by the bookstore without paying for it or otherwise acquiring the permission of the bookstore to take it, you are stealing the book. This means that you gain a physical object, the book, and the bookstore loses that object. The bookstore no longer has the book in its possession.
On the other hand, if you download a music file over the Internet, no one has lost anything. No inventory will show anything missing. No bank account will read any less than it should. In short, there's been no theft. So, if there's been no theft, why should the case be considered the same as if you stole something from a bookstore ?
What property ? Napster acted as a search engine for information possessed by its users, and provided an easy method for copying that information from user to user. It didn't move a single physical object from anyones possession to anyone elses possession. It simply helped people exchange information, specifically information that described certain pressure waveforms - sound, in other words.
What Napster did might have been illegal and might or might not have been unethical, but there was neither property nor theft involved.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
First of all, yes, they are not agreeing. However, they are doing more than aknowledging. They are putting you UNDER an agreement with them (maybe they are agreeing; symantics, you know). Their active role is putting together the agreement and upholding it. Obviously, if you don't agree (and legally show this by NOT signing), then you do not warrant the services.
Hmm, what if the university promised network access when you enlisted and presents you with an excessively restrictive agreement afterwards?
Let us further assume that you refuse to sign and the university refuses access to the network in return. Would they be breaking the contract by this?
C - the footgun of programming languages
Downlaoding using bit-torrent is in essence running a server, and people are usually not allowed to run servers from university or college connections without prior permission.
But I do agree, people should look more carefully at things, I got a nasty letter from my ISP after someone complained that I was sharing copyrighted content (Openoffice 1.1.0 windows binary)... uhh...
It makes you wonder if futer verions of OS's will have the copy command removed cause it could be used illegally.
I hate network nazis too. They use blanket policies that do more harm than good. If you are a student, and you want to get around all this, use a https:// proxy, most all good p2p and bittorrent applications have proxy support. This way you campus network nazi will see all your traffic going to an encrypted web server, what can they say about that? I hate netowrk nazis, you pay tuition and in your tuition is the use of bandwidth, then some punk assed 20 something clueless jerk off makes over-reaching ignorant useless policy just to compensate for their lack of social skills or small penis and then you get a crappy on line experience. By pass the nazis with secure proxies. F' em and their law.
If you think about it, Peer to Peer isn't much different than any normal file transfers, except that it is automated. Do they block you from using FTP, or from running an FTP server that has fully legal software on it? How about an FTP server that allows for anonymous uploads and downloads of files without authentication?
The problem that most schools have is that they have a limited amount of bandwidth on their network connections to the Internet, and they need to avoid paying more just because students want to use peer to peer networks. They also need to avoid lawsuits so stupid rules go into effect.
It would make more sense for a university or school to put a limit on the upload bandwidth provided per interface to avoid problems like this, rather than putting down a blanket statement saying that peer to peer isn't allowed.
Show them some legal bt sources, not related to piracy and even to media. A supossedly legal music download could be doubtful for them.
Some people is using BT to distribute files otherwise provided using FTP. Slackware Linux is the only coming to mind right now.
Find a few more BT sources like that and you can have a chance making them change their mind.
Got Pike?
it's libel. Oh, and defamation of character.
Port 80, Port 80, PORT 80!
I didn't realize so many college students ran default webservers from their dorm rooms.
I guess the continuation of arguements tends to stem from an inability to effectily communicate the proper ideas.
Well, having a wanger and a libido means you can pepretrate rape, which is illegal.
If they are a women, then get them on incitement to rape...
Ask that they refrain from using their sexual equipment until a safe alternative is known.
Hey, if they aren't using logic, the Chewbacca defense to the rescue!
"Today I received a letter from my university's network administration advising me that my network access would be terminated due to 'illegal P2P activity.' What university? Were you trading any copyrighted material? (You can plead the 5th, but it does make a major difference in the administration's argument!) ...The P2P activity that the e-mail cited was BitTorrent and the file being transferred was an update to the Azureus BitTorrent client. The letter stated, 'Until the courts decide that student P2P activity is permitted we will continue to block this activity on our network,' implying that BitTorrent is inherently illegal....
This is totally wrong! What about substantial non-infringing use? A technology is currently innocent until presumed guilty. I would write about this to local / student newspapers. And tell Lawrence Lessig, maybe he can help you sue them or something.
Fair use rights are the rights copiers have. Copyright owners do not have fair use rights, they have, tada, copyright. Fair use is an exception to copyright. You can't subvert it by allowing people to copy, the only way fair use can be subverted is by disallowing copies when the law says it's okay.
I really wish people would learn what 'fair use' means. What it is is clearly defined in the law. (When it applies is not that clearly defined, but that's not important.)
Saying Napster subverts fair use is like saying ticketing someone for speeding subverts the felony murder law...it just doesn't make any sense.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You can even be given permission and not have the right to do so, although the only example of that I can think of is when the person you thought was the copyright owner wasn't.
Which is why DRM is so insidious. It claims to map 'copyright holder's permission' directly to 'right to make a copy', thus trying to remove centuries of American (and, hell, British) legal precedents and law that says that's not true.
And, as if that's not enough, in practice it's mapping 'permission of the person who gave the work to you' (as witnessed by public domain works distributed as ebooks with DRM that is illegal to break) to 'right to use' (as witnessed by the whole DeCSS thing).
It's really far out there, legally. 'Permission of the person who gave it to you' has never been required for a 'right to use'. (In fact, nothing has ever been required for a right to use.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
For quite a few of us, wouldn't downloading linux and seeding it be considered an academic use? I mean, you can do a lot more with a computer with an os >.>
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
It was going to say but I changed it because thermite would fix even that mess.
Well, thermite and a good anti-tamper switch.
God Bless the internet.
G4TV Thermite Vid Clip
Anyways, its too bad that you were driven off by your uni's situation. My former institution went through its growing pains while i was attending. They started with 6xT1 and switched to a full T3.
At some point they blocked bittorrent's port:6969. My gut feeling is that I and a few other students helped shape this policy.
Since, as you said, 'contacting someone reasonable' wouldn't work in my situation, I did the next best thing and used torrents/trackers that called upon alternative ports :O). Having access to that rediculous type of bandwidth has spoiled me.
Back to the point, my suggestion was aimed at prepping for Plan B (which means he was DLing warez/porn/movies etc). Plan B being the "wasn't me" defense. That way he can install a virus scanner and not relinquish the moral high ground even if they do have the server logs.
Is it just me or are soap boxes much smaller these days? I wonder how big they used to be back in the day.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Alternatively, as long as your university doesn't have ridiculous rules requiring you to live on campus, rent an off-campus apartment and sign up with a commercial ISP instead. You might enjoy the change in perspective that living outside the bubble brings as well.
As a faithful slashdot'er, I read this post thinking, "hmm.. that sounds a lot like what my network administrator (whom I work for) would do." Come Monday morning's 8:30 Computer Science class, a classmate admits he had written the post. Is this campus the only place you may find a network admin with a degree in philosophy? "I think it's wrong, therefore it is..."
In the U.S. one is presumed innocent, until proven guilty. Of course, school administrators are a curious lot; They will fight to the death to keep a job whos sole purpose is to "dot i's, and cross t's."
If you don't want to compile it you can get a binary package there are debs and I assume RPMs. So, it's not difficult to install per se, the issue is what you want to do with it after you get it installed. There are already good tutorials on using it with Azureus. It's true they're a bit long winded but that's because there are many different configuration possibilities.
But if you are just doing a bit of downloading here and there you can use the command line client in a terminal with btdownloadcurses. That is explained in the tor docs and as long as you're using linux it's not complex. It's not necessarily convenient or pretty but those problems rarely detract from reliability.
With any luck, this will disuade anyone from trying the fubared WoW update method using BitTorrent ever again.
A more ill-conceived "burdon the users" approach to software maintenence could not have been devised by the devil himself!
You could always try arguing that BitTorrent saves campus bandwidth for popular downloads like Fedora Core, Knoppix, and Firefox.
Two of these trackers are actually run by universitites..!
It is unfortunate, but the good things will gradually push through. The important thing about order is that it changes with time.
Find a sympathetic professor, and have them distribute class materials via torrents. Ok, so they're probably not distributing anything large enough to warrant torrenting, and residential networks often have their own rules anyway, but IT may not brush off tenured professors as quickly as students (then again they might).