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Web Censorship on the University Campus?
Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"
For what it's worth, I am a masters student at George Mason University and regularly take advantage of free wireless on campus. I have had no problems accessing any sites although there are times when it just runs slow in general. Maybe this is because there are people streaming large media? I'm not sure.
If this is a trend, the only thing disturbing is that a new football stadium is probably a higher priority for a University than better network equipment and bandwidth. My undergrad was at the U of MN and they constantly wanted their own football stadium--they would spend any amount of money and create any parking problems necessary to get it.
My work here is dung.
Even if your University is in the minority, it is part of a disturbing trend.
Most of those filters are designed for corporate or under-18 environments.
Universities have wildly different needs.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.
But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.
Even during the heyday of Napster, the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.
[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.
It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...
Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.
I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.
I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.
It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.
Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
There was a time when information was distributed with books. Students would read them and learn... Too much to ask?
part of a disturbing trend, yep.
.EDU are doing it. there are ways to use
0 0&hl=en&newwindow=1&btnG=Google+Search&as_epq=&as_ oq=&as_eq=&lr=&as_ft=i&as_filetype=&as_qdr=all&as_ nlo=&as_nhi=&as_occt=any&as_dt=i&as_sitesearch=&as _rights=&safe=active
Corp and
proxys to get around it.
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=web+proxy&num=1
Itawamba Community college in Fulton, MS also censors. The block certain web sites and MMOs like World of Warcraft.
Can you access p0rn?
My Uni doesnt block anything
But then Im not studying at a Yank or Chinese uni
Do they block the "proxy avoidance" category? That is, can you get to Tor and download it? Or, run an ironic tor server behind the filter.
... that in a facility full of teachers and information, students would still have to make network connections to outside sources, in order to learn. ... that in an environment in which huge amounts of learning occurred for over hundreds of years before the Internet was even invented, it only takes one generation for people to become convinced that learning is impossible without the Internet.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
...there is definitely not anything like that. I go to a small private school in Tulsa, OK; and I know that not only would the student body throw a fit, but the Computer Science department would not tolerate such hindrance to learning. Does your school have some sort of religious affiliation? Maybe that has something to do with it.
Do they do this because of costs? Liability issues? Something else?
/rant
I can understand throttling bittorent but this is taking it a bit far.
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout... and some teaching assistant just "checked" a box and initialed it. After all that work? It was sort of an insult. Universities are not the places they used to be...
This is disgusting and misguided.
Every Canadian University I know of has unfiltered access to the Internet. This US-based universiy obviously has no concept of "academic freedom". How can they expect their academics to be able to do any valuable/legit research if they are censoring what they can read?
I attended The University of Akron and Kent State University both in north east Ohio. Neither of these schools had any sort of content blocking. They did however block IRC and p2p applications.
Stay right where you are. Personnel will be along presently to, er, explain why this is a Good Thing. You will understand then.
and the only time there was any interference with our Internet was when Napster (which was invented there) was being used to such extremes that Internet effectively stopped working. They reduced the priority of Napster and other file transferring services so people could still check email and reach web sites.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.
Get professors on board the "students need access to the world in order to do their homework" bandwagon, and have them get the deans involved. Once the deans get involved, they can pressure the President who in turn can tell the CIO that his job is to serve the needs of the university, which includes providing students access to the materials he is blocking.
:)
Now, as for MP3 and p0rn sites, I suspect those will be restricted to students who have a letter on file from their professor.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
thats horrible. they aren't a univeristy if they do shit like that. leave now. they're doomed.
are they even accreditted? if so, they shouldn't be. revoke their status.
I would quite welcome Slashdot polls that would answer the question:
Are you restricted to viewing certain content at your primary internet connection? or
Are you unable to download: mp3? video? anatomy sites? cowboyneal?
~psybre
Authority questions you. Return the favor. -- d474
my university blocks out all torrent files and bit torrent traffic. At least all unencrypted files and traffic
OH! OH! I grew up in San Antonio. Lemme guess! Is this private school St. Mary's University, the school with a crucifix in every hallway? Gee, do you think they'd really censor your internet access? Gee....
You mean it doesn't smack of censorship in delightful ways? That's too bad.
Wouldn't a more practical question have been "What can we do to change this situation"? What exactly do you teach, anyway, commiseration?
Way to turn your anecdote into a culture war! This is a small, PRIVATE college in San Antonio. I don't really think it is part of a larger trend. The OP didn't mention it, but for all we know it could be a religious institution. How many small private colleges are you talking about in Canada?
Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"
Monstar L
It's hard to look at what traffic is coming through and not block some good stuff when all you're trying to do is keep bandwidth hogs at bay. I don't see why they can't just have strong user ID's, and go after people individually who seem to use a ton of bandwidth; after all, the university's computers could be a monitored network, and there's nothing that says they have to give you free, unfiltered wi-fi on your own personal laptop.
stuff |
I work in ITS at TSU and, other than some QoS, I have encountered no censorship/blocking.
If students are so worried (and have admin access to the PC's they use), they could use JAP, or any number of other software(s) that redirect at least http requests through proxies to get around such restrictions.
I don't agree with the message stupidcensorship puts out (aiming it primarially at jr/high schools), but for college settings I see nothing wrong with it, for the stated purposes.
It's when such services are abused in the way Bennet (hope I got that spelled right) is doing that I dissagree. He actually removed me from the mailing list becuase I disagreed with him. Good thing I was (and am) signed up under a handfull of different addresses!
The short version of the story is that he feels minors ought to be allowed to circumvent restrictions placed upon them by the people paying for the internet connection *and* computers they are using. My idea is that 1) They are minors and have limited rights and 2) they are not paying for *any* of the access and should therefore be subject to the restrictions placed.
Both my views don't work for a college setting (where the kids *aren't* minors and their tuition pays for everything.
bork bork bork!
Even my old Tech school (North Metro Tech) in the late 1990's blocked site content for various reasons ranging from adult listed content (even if it wasn't an adult site) to MP3's and movies. The US Military currently blocks certain web servers and services, which is something many MilBloggers have ran in to as they discover that for some reason their web hoster is blocked from remote access. Many corporations block various outside sources (Wal Mart Information Systems Division for instance, allows access only to CNN, Fed Ex, USPS, and even those are restricted via outside links, unless you have a specific password past the fire fiewall) Several college's in the Northwest Arkansas area also have restricted use web. I think it really comes down to what a CIO feels they can do. Looking at it from the security perspective, would you really want to be personally responsible for data integrity and security on a Network where everyone had unrestricted Internet access? I think the latter question has more to do with the situation than any conspiracy theories of a "distrubing trend" hinting towards rights infringement, etc.
The truth does not change by our ability to stomach it -Flannery O'Conner
Because I swear I could have read "China."
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
Give students in on-campus housing the same speed they would get in off-campus housing for the same price, with maybe a minumum speed, say, 1.5-down/384-up built into the rent. If your equipment permits it, don't count on-campus traffic towards that total.
If someone wants to pay $30/month for 6-down/1-up or more for even higher bandwidth, they should have that option, assuming your equipment allows for it.
After all, if they lived off-campus that's what they would have to do.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX.
So.... What is Picante Sauce SUPPOSED to taste like?????
Agreed, I went to Sherbrooke University (in Québec) and we had no form of censorship whatsoever.
Furthermore, the bandwith issue is completely irrelevant... I mean there a much more effective way of managing bandwith issues than blocking webpages. Its more than probable that every student uses an account, so you only have to monitor the bandwith usage of each user and if it goes over a certain threshold deal directly with the wrongdoer...
my 2 cents
Do you have people ripping pages out of library books to prevent students seeing "bad" information?
I don't really know what a private university is, but where I go to university (in the UK) I don't think they could even get away with doing this because of the students... I'm a little amazed that they've not been campaigning to change this.
I don't think that this is "normal" though, because as you rightly mention, there is so much to learn on the internet and I think that you achieve this goal best by allowing the free flow of information. Hell, you're screwed if your studying medicine at that uni. You seem to be bothered about this so I would advise you try and get this policy changed, try producing information for the upper "management" levels of people, if you can consult the Vice-chancellor or Chancellor directly (although I know this can be very difficult). Arrange a department meeting where you can raise your concerns or consider inviting your students to protest
One word of waning though, this advice, like everything else in the world, applies only "when others are so to", which is to say don't be the only one who cares and is prepared to do something about it - it'd be a fast way to lose your job
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
The only small university I know of in San Antonio would *never* filter content like that. At least I hope it wouldn't. Why in the hell should the Village Voice be filtered out?
Does this school charge an ISP fee to students? If so, your students should cease and desist payments until the University un-breaks its interwebs. There is no excuse for that crap in an institution of higher learning. I'd be torching some Deans right about now if I was a student there.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Campuses do not filter web content!
.mp3 files...seemed to have been blocked or limited for a brief period, then opened.
.pdf files in their labs (wtf?), or how to tell when toner needs refilling, or how to lock-down the non-OIT managed labs, they have had the sense to not block any content, at least that I've seen.
If they are filtering due to bandwidth and any HTML is a victim, they clearly are in over their heads.
UT-Arlington blocks most file-sharing apps, including bittorrent. For a while they blocked IRC, but I believe that may have been opened again. Same with
Although they can't figure out how to print
a major private university is my ISP - the university censors nothing. no blocks based on ports, protocols, or content. so i can browse eonsex whenever i want.
Just keep on making noise! Enrollment will drop. Then maybe your CIO will get the hint.
I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.
It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.
1) you ARE the professor.
Well, if you can fit it into your lesson plan, "accidently" require them to do some research that "oops" they can't do on campus. Politely request that the specific sites needed for your class be unblocked to your class members, or that a lab be set up on-campus that is unfiltered.
Do this every semester, with a different list of sites that need unblocking.
If internal politics at your university allow, talk to your fellow professors about the issue and ask how they are handling it.
Being a private university, you may be, what is the word, screwed?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Union College (www.ucollege.edu) in Lincoln Nebraska has similar censorship issues. I'm graduated now, but while in school there I had difficulty finding online information for my research paper on the Holocaust due to sites being blocked for "racist/militant" content. A Christian youth ministries site was blocked due to "sexual content". Often news stories were blocked as well-- so much content was. Retarded. The funny thing is, the firewall mostly blocked incorrect sites--- the "bad" ones they wanted to block "porn/illegal downloads etc" were often missed by the firewall.
I guess they think you can make people to be "better people" via force.
> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.
My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
I work in a school enviroment, and here it what it comes down to for us. It is far less expensive to filter content than it is to monitor student use of the equipment. We block everything that isn't directly related to school work, and we have an easy system for requesting sites to be unblocked. With the filters in place, legitimate use is about the same as before, but illegitimate use is nearly eliminated. We have found that we don't need to add more computers or bandwidth.
Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain
Print some labels with "censored" in a big courier font and walk around campus sticking them over random information (signs, notice boards, fire instructions). Then do the same to any legacy (dead tree) copy in the library.
Web content filters don't care about context and neither should you. If anybody attempts to reprimand you, tell them it's common policy, protects students and reduces the liability of the university. If they ask for examples of this, then the more ludicrous the better.
You open with a complaint about 'horrendous bandwidth issues' and then bitch and moan about the admins attempts to free up some bandwidth. Jeez, what a bunch of babies we have in modern universities. Not many provided examples, but yea, blocking mp3 is something that I can see happening. And 10 to one the winging about "Electronic Art", especialliy considering the capitalization is really about "www.ea.com" Again, duh. You want to game you might be forced into buying your own connection for that if they are really short on bandwidth.
The days of everyone just buying more and more bandwidth are coming to an end as everyone realizes it is a dead end. Buy more and the users will simply USE more. P2P apps will react to increases in bandwidth by making you a supernode and simply laying claim to every bit per second available to them. Sooner or later, and it is looking more like sooner, the free ride ends.
Democrat delenda est
My impression is that computing resources at universities have always sucked. When I was in a computer graphics course at a school that was very reputable for Comp Sci, back in 1997, the SGI machines available to us in the lab were nearly unusable. I don't completely remember the deal, but they were slow-ass X terminals, and there weren't many of them available. My friends and I were more productive programming at home, on our Windows machines using Voodoo graphics cards, and porting our work back to the school machines using GLUT. We weren't leaving campus to learn, but we were definitely leaving campus a lot to complete our coursework.
:-)
I'm sure it's like that at nearly every school, at least for Comp Sci programs. You pay huge bucks for tuition, and use your own home resources anyway. I'm sure the off-campus students at the submitter's school have cable/DSL, and their on-campus friends just come over to use it when they need to. It's cheap, no big deal.
Anyway, you're at University to prove you can achieve your goals. You jump through whatever hoops you need to, in order to get that piece of paper. Cynical, I know.
No pr0n for you! Graduate, hippy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
No known attempts to filter due to content. Probably infeasible given the size of the network.
"The Devil does not know a lot because He's the Devil, He knows a lot because he's old." -- unknown
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout...
That's what I got when I graduated from Stanford in 1985. I finished at the end of a quarter, but not at the end of the academic year. So I got a printout on a dot matrix printer. It was a real letdown. Eventually, many months later, the fancy diploma showed up in the mail.
I think this just underscores that students should be very careful when considering going to a private college/university. Private institutions do not have to stand up to as much scrutiny as public ones. Doesn't matter where the school is located -- the old "I'm privately funded so I can do whatever the hell I want" mentality is a common problem with private institutions.
A large state school. We do no filtering based on content. What we do to manage bandwidth (other than buy enough):
1) Rate limit the dorms. Each dorm has a cap, 5-10mbits I think, for the whole dorm. That mean that we can know for certain that the bandwidth used by residents won't exceed a certain amount.
2) Reflexive access lists on all dorms. That's a permit out, deny in kind of thing like you'd get behind a NAT. Means that while P2P apps work, they aren't the demons that they can be (fast computers with no firewall get hit the hardest on many networks).
3) Deprioritise all P2P traffic with Packateers. Actually we might have stopped that with the new line we hooked up as I don't know that they can handle the traffic. However before they sat in line and just made P2P lower priority than everything else. If we weren't maxed, nothing changed, however if we were, P2P couldn't blot out other kinds of traffic.
However in no case do we filter based on content. We aren't interested in playing network cops. Students are allowed to use their connections in the dorms for having fun, surfing porn, whatever makes them happy. We aren't about to play morality police. If there's a criminal complaint, we'll deal with it, but we aren't doing a priori blocking.
... is a PHB.
I work at a medium-sized public college in Canada and we do the same thing here, though its more blocking of ports/services and certain file types (i.e. mp3,iTunes store,etc.) than actual web sites (I don't know of any web sites that are restricted).
The reason comes down to bandwidth, and the budget for it. While its gotten better, typically the pipe here is saturated during the day; even the over-zealous use of in-house page caching hasn't helped much. Students who can bittorrent down huge files and transfer tons of music will do it on campus rather than off if they can (wouldn't you?). As to the degree this interferes with legitimate use, any educational institution I've ever worked with is a bureaucracy first and foremost (as bad, or worse, than government), and as such they're far more likely to lean towards protecting the general interest with blanket measures than try to fine-tune the type of access specific students might need.
While blocking specific web sites certainly smacks of censorship more than blocking specific high-bandwidth services/actions, I'd bet this is more of a sloppy band-aid to protect their resources than a school exercising an agenda.
Simple solution is to just set up a ssh tunnel...
Got Code?
I work on one of the UC campuses, and there is no such censorship here. The tradition of the university, and of the UC system in general, makes me believe that if a CIO dared suggest similar censorship here, the faculty and students would cry that this is against academic freedom, and the CIO would be sent packing in very short order. But this is just what I believe, since to this day, no CIO has attempted such censorship (he would be stopped before implementation).
We do, however, keep track of network usage, and if we see huge network usage from specific users or groups, we typically ask whether there are instructional or research reasons for it. If not, we try to bring the usage within some reasonable limit by discussing with the users. Not as a matter of censorship, but as a matter of sharing of an expensive resource.
It's only censorship if 1) the students are prevented from leaving campus to search for information and 2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. Otherwise you and your students are free to do what we've been doing for hundereds of years: bringing in outside knowledge and incorporating it into our education.
I can't speak for every university, but the private university I attended never had a hard copy version of the Village Voice or other such material on campus (my college years were pre-internet). If I wanted such material, I had to go off-campus to get it. I knew where to find it, but I had to go off-campus.
The above-cited just seems like juvenile ranting from a teacher. Is the only way to learn to leave campus?
As a system administrator of a web host that servers over 220,000 domains I COMPLETELY agree with the campus in blocking certain sites and mime types etc. This isn't an access to information question, this is a network issue. You don't let your network get clogged with crap because people want access to everything. This is a network not a free speach issue. Come on?!?! Next thing we will be hearing about how they can't accesss their porn and gambling sites that they need for "research". Enough of these ridiculous posts!
And I have never seen any kind of blocking or censorship. I think it is outrageous for a university to do so and would not attend one that did.
To those saying you can learn without the internet, etc. Of course it is possible to learn everything one might need without it, but isn't the point to stay on top of current trends and to learn to take advantage of technology? Isn't that a large part of what school is about? You can learn without books, too, that doesn't mean they aren't an important aspect of learning in today's environment.
We have no network stability, or any interest in increasing it. What's even more ridiculous is that my university *encourages* students to report "inappropriate" sites so that they can be blacklisted. My fellow students, being the self-righteous jerks that they are (sorry, I don't like it here), have happily risen to the challenge. Well, I guess it's nice to know that the university can protect us from the horrors of Maddow and SomethingAwful, even if they can't keep the RESNET up on weekends.
Can anyone recommend an effective way to force competence on a college IT department?
The solution is simple: Throttle ports commonly used for torrents/P2P from 9-5. Let the poor students download their pr0n and Warez at night.
Surely one of the reasons for doing this is not to preserve bandwidth. I'm an undergrad at MTU (http://www.mtu.edu/) in the middle of nowhere, MI. We are so far north from the rest of the world that we got 7" of snow this morning (not even a record for today). Even here we have no problem getting a fair amount of bandwidth, even if it's in a single bundle of fiber than happens to get cut a lot. So being in San Antiono, access to some fast connections shouldn't be any problem.
I know of other universities that block files like MP3 files, and while at UVA, they did not block MP3 files (or anything else to my knowledge), the internet in the dorms went so slow that it stopped me from downloading just about everything, including songs from iTunes.
Most of the time, bandwidth was down to lower than a 56K modem's speed, with similar upload speeds.
There is no content blocking even of things like Bittorrent and limewire. Daytime bandwidth is limited, nighttime is not metered or limited in any way, I can get downloads up to 10mbps or even higher.
Your university is doing a disservice to its students by blocking.
As far as I know, here at the University of Illinois at Chicago, the extent of our filtering is standard don't run a server type stuff and we're flexible when it comes to that. There is a very strong bias here against any unnecessary restrictions on the network. So no, I don't think it's part of a trend.
Is there another solution? Perhaps hosting the student's web pages on a University web server?
If not, it's time to "escalate."
Who is the lowest-level common manager for the dean of technology and the head of IT?
It's his call.
Odds are, someone is going to choose to seek employment elsewhere once he makes the call.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I can say that this is not typical in the University System of Maryland, which includes the University of Maryland, College Park, one of the larger schools in the country. I'm never heard of such a thing at any of my friends' schools, either (e.g. Stanford, U. Penn). I think it's not uncommon to do "traffic shaping" or even to block specific ports, but actually filtering content is very unusual. Of course, most schools, like mine, have something like an "Acceptable Use Policy" that specifies some prohibited uses of the network, but these rules generally don't rule out content (further than requiring you to comply with the law) and they are not enforced by filtering AFAIK.
My school did not block any websites that I was aware of. What it did do is throttle bandwidth to students who used to much of it (if you downloaded too many gigs of stuff in a single day, you would get your bandwidth throttled down to Dial-up speeds for a day or two, and then it would reset). The bandwidth levels were high enough that you could play video games online all day without reaching your limit- unless you were downloading several movies a day, you weren't going to be affected.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
I work at a small, private Presbyterian college, and they use an internet filter here which blocks many webpages. When it first got installed, biology students were out of luck if they wanted to do internet research on campus. However, when something legitimate that's being blocked but shouldn't be is brought to the attention of the administration, it gets unblocked. So it's not really a big deal and hasn't caused too many headaches except when it was first installed.
Additionally, bandwidth is a huge issue here as well. At the beginning of the year there was a mere 128kbps of download bandwidth (not sure about upload) available to students. After some small outcry it was increased to 256kbps. For my school this is more an issue of cost rather than stinginess. As it is, our pipes are full. We're working on increasing the bandwidth but it takes time and money. However, if I was a student I'd probably be upset at the amount of bandwidth currently allowed to me. After all, they do live here on campus, and I would expect most any living space I might occupy in this country to have a decent internet connection (1 mbps or more) available to me. I know the portion of their tuition that covers internet access is probably worth a lot more than 256kbps.
"Me? Lady, I'm your worst nightmare -- a pumpkin with a gun."
I went to a midsized Uni in TN(aprox 18,000-22,000 students) no real censorship but they would start blocking protocols that they felt chewed up too much BW irc, BT, and other p2p things. Of course there is a very large Recording industry college at this uni and being about 30 min from nashville and the Music industry the IT people tend to cater to them since they would pull all funding(Blackmailing a Uni good job RIAA). So in my experience this is a common practice. The other problem I saw at this UNI and probably most others is that there were easily 12,000 computers on campus(not counting personal PC in the dorms) and a grand total of 8 IT people. Thats right each IT person was responsible for ~1500 computers. So when problems arise BW or otherwise they tend to go overboard.
All in all they are probably doing the best they can with little to no resources and little to no competence.
The day UofToronto trys something as assinine as censoring web access, (beyond the obvious attempts to block bittorrent and kazaa), They would have protesters at Kings court Circle the next day. Lets just say I would no longer attend an institution that beleives they have the right to censor what the people who are paying them should see.
Then again, I have friends who attend schools that charge for bandwidth usage exceeding the student's weekly allotment, and others that attend schools with access policies as stringent as the one described. At this point, it seems like policy varies along with the institution.
DeVry has been making use of WebSense because of issues with certain individuals abusing their privileges on the computers at our campus. This made it hard for the Game and Simulation Program since we need access to Games sites, which were mostly all blocked. So what I did was create a php site which I gave to the students in our class and they would add links to the site (just stored them in a mysql database), we gave that list to one of our professors (ended up having 1000 or so sites), they have been caving in and reducing the blocks since then.
Simply put you just need to take action and if enough students / professors take action, the IT departments cave in.
I've only seen it happen in high schools and elementary schools
I too went to a private school which censored the internet. It is very frustrating for students, but I would have to guess that this is becoming popular among private schools.
It would certainly be interesting if that was the case, particularly seeing as how St. Mary's is apparently so desperate to get "wired," that they give you (and charge you for) a new laptop every two years, whether you want one or not.
Anyone else want to speculate as to whether this is the place?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Having recently graduated from college, and having friends who have attended a multitude of other colleges, I have noticed that content blocking is very rare. The only blocking I have heard of with some schools, was to block file sharing programs. Not quite sure if they just blocked the sites to download them, or blocked the protocols, or what, but this was all roughly four years ago when Kazaa and the like were hitting peak usage. Schools were getting sued and campus networks were swamped with traffic. Another answer to the file share problem at one particular university was to implement bandwidth quotas. No individual could exceed xGb up or down within a given time frame. Recently, the girlfriends college started messing with AIM use on campus(not fully sure what they were doing), probably to prevent virus. I was lucky enough to have completely unfettered web access and am very greatful for it.
When it comes to blocking "questionable" content as seems to be the case with you, I have not heard of this practice, at least among most east coast colleges. I for one think it is a bad road for a higher education institution to walk down. Colleges and Universities are about education in all its forms. They are also for students that are usually legal adults and are mature enough to use their own discretion for what web sites they visit. Blocking P2P sites cause you don't want to get sued, or limiting bandwidth for the sake of keeping the network usable are perfectly legitimate practices in my book (as annoying as they may be). But colleges and universities should by no means censor web content and do not let them tell you that it is a common practice among the colleges and universities.
"It's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get." -- H. J. Simpson
Correction: Human Resources. There is no more Personnel! Re-education is clearly needed.
I study at a big private university ... and yes we get blocked ... well not the univ as such but my department does. and it is very irritating since it is a naive blocking algorithm that blocks based on keywords ... which means that even sites like sourceforge get blocked. I can understand porn sites being blocked, but blocking open source software sites is stupid.
As an IT worker for a private university I have to say it sounds like a budgeting problem. We get a lot of legal issues with bittorent, cease and desist sort of things. An IT department on campuss has a lot of work and needs funding to be able to provide a safe and secure network that is fast and relibale and at the same time be able to handle the legal issues. Our department has these policies that do not distrupt the entire network but makes more work for us. Thus limiting with filters is a less costly and easir way. At times I wish we could do it, however, that would be limiting the educational aspect of a University. I think the problem with this issue of blocking content is about cost of having a well funded and knowledgable IT department. It seems when thing work companies aren't willing to add money to the IT area but when they don't work are limited they also seem not to add funding.
Please Note: This is an anecdote, not a suggestion! At my former place of employment, I worked IT. We had a SonicWall setup. The IT staff was divided, by boss and his second-in-command, and the rest of the IT staff. We were unable to convince the boss that he should let our section of the subnet be uncensored, so I set up a proxy server with Tor and everyone on the IT staff, aside from my boss, set it up to use the proxy while at work. While not a perfect solution, and possibly dicey legally, it certainly got around our censorship issue.
Every Canadian University I know of has unfiltered access to the Internet. This US-based universiy obviously has no concept of "academic freedom". How can they expect their academics to be able to do any valuable/legit research if they are censoring what they can read? At least they teach us how to spell.
As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.
Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, which... what the hell?"
I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Ryerson University didnt censor very many websites, but George Brown College censors too broadly. Institutions in Canada do censor the internet on public terminal machines, but Im going to take a guess that its less severe due to the current Law/liability situation...
I actually worked on a small public campus where similar practices were in use - traffic shaping, site blocking, content filtering. We never did it to censor anyone, we had limited resources and tried to ensure that the students doing work could A) get a terminal and B) get bandwidth for educational purposes. If we blocked content that teachers thought was legitimate we did our best to try to fix the problem by revisiting our policies and making any exceptions possible. We also used different bandwidth sources for student housing and the educational lan segments which things easier. If you can make a rational reason why a source is needed you should formulate a request and deliver it to your IT and they should be willing to evaluate and work on the items on their merits. Just remember, just cause your parents dont let you watch cartoons when your supposed to be doing your homework - doesnt mean that they are censoring the cartoon - trying to call that censorship is a dysphemism IMHO.
I was crazy back when being crazy really meant something. (Charles Manson)
My guess is that it's not intended as censorship, but rather, intended to reduce traffic. Somebody looked at how much traffic there was, and said, "Holy crap, this is expensive and it would be great to somehow cut it down," and someone else said, "and look at all the useless crap unrelated to studies that they're downloading, like porn and music and movies," and then someone else said, "hey, let's filter out the crap and that will save us the money."
If they're censoring all mp3-related stuff, rather than so If they're censoring all mp3-related stuff, rather than songs about killing professors, then it isn't exactly censorship. It's just mindless senseless (but with a purpose) content-neutral (but not form-neutral) filtering. Sure, it's perhaps undesirable and not ideal, but when I think about real censorship, I think about trying to kill a message, such arresting people who say "Fuck Kings about killing professors, then it isn't exactly censorship. It's just mindless senseless (but with a purpose) content-neutral (but not form-neutral) filtering. Sure, it's perhaps undesirable and not ideal, but when I think about real censorship, I think about trying to kill a message, such arresting people who say "Fuck King George and his damn taxes -- let's break off and form our own government."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It strikes me as odd... that in an environment in which huge amounts of learning occurred for over hundreds of years before the Internet was even invented, it only takes one generation for people to become convinced that learning is impossible without the Internet.
As new media are deployed, progressively more informaion is published initially, or exclusively, on it. The Internet is now the medium of choice for cutting-edge publication of all sorts, and hardcopy academic journals, in addition to being slower, are beginning to be supplanted by their online replacements.
If you want to limit your students to learning only things printed in books, your attitude is understandable. But IMHO doing so will leave your student body "stuck in the Twentieth Century".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It looks like this little hokey-pokey college makes money forcing you to buy a laptop computer.
You have to buy it, but then you have to give it back. It's like a permanent fuck you from jesus.
Honest to god, why go to a rat-hole like this?
I can understand a college wanting to block porn, and warez. Also to a certain extent I can understand blocking music. When the school is on limited bandwith, these things can chew through it rather quickly. My old school kept us behind a proxy server, and gave us one port, 8080 for http. They also allowed instant message and IRC trafic. that was all we were allowed to do. They also filtered the websites we could go to. We had cable access in the dorm rooms, that could be activated by buying it from the cable company, who also offered internet access. The really messed up part about my schools internet policly, was the fact that the cable company's contract with the school forbid them from selling us cable internet over those same lines that brought us TV. In effect there was no possible way to get unlimited internet access on campus. Well none that didn't involve a tunle through the http port to an outside proxy.... :)
"University censors educational websites"
I think that says it all.
What humorless moderator moded this down?
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
It's a shame that with all of that "academic freedom" you don't have access to a spellchecker...
We do not block anything and we never will. Someone once proposed it a few years ago and it was quickly shot down. The number one issue was that the faculty would raise hell about it being an infringement of their academic freedom and it would severely impact our academic reputation. The number two issue was free speech concerns since we received government funding. The number three issue was that the students would be majorly pissed off. I am amazed that any university has actually done this and gotten away with it - I actually asked a few faculty how they would feel if we did something like this and they were pissed, even when I said we would only block websites known to spread viruses/spyware.
Unfortunately it is perhaps more common than one would think, and well hidden behind a smoke screen of other issues - a fine political tactic... Most of these places probably do not provide their own service, but rather contract someone else. Some of these contract companies, are primarily about supplying a service to students. Others may be supplying the service thru their own filters. I know of one private university in Nashville, Tennessee which allowed it's telephone service provider to get away with demanding they disallow students from using VOIP services on the schools own network. Obviously this was to limit any competition. The added benifit of course was less traffic on that network. They made a point of course to say it was a phone company idea. That is probably true, but the IT manager had every reason to go along. The censorship may not actually be intended, but the result is the same.
One of the stipulations the U of Texas required before joining the Big12 conference was that TV money was NOT split equally. You only get TV money when you are on TV. And guess who is on TV the most? UT.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
The college I go to seems to block legitimate things like yours. Even Google Cache is blocked.
Anything that is considered "tasteless" is blocked.
I hate it.
I work at the campus NOC at the University of Utah... this is definitely not "normal" IMO. We don't have anything nearly this restrictive... so I think you're getting fed a line, for what it's worth.
Your points are certainly valid... ask your administration for examples of other schools that are doing this. It's likely that they'll balk if you ask them for real information.
Research and learning is what we are about and I don't see that content such as this will ever be blocked. MP3s can be used for more than just music. It can also be used for presentations of useful information. There are other ways to deal with bandwidth problem such as throttling (if that is their concern) but that would then impact the speedy delivery of information they need to obtain. Maybe they need a more robust connection to the Internet.
I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.
If bandwidth is the problem, that is best solved by bandwidth throttling rather than content filtering. Content filtering, no matter how you try to do it, is ultimately a form of censorship, which no respected institution of higher learning should be involved in.
Have your CIO read those two articles, then explain to you again with a straight face why they use web filtering to control bandwidth.
If this is an accredited University and they accept Federal Financial Aid, it is my believe that they must adhere to the Freedom of Speech principles. Blocking access to selected internet sites is not it (e.g. China).
It is a Private institution; they own the computers and the network. If they want to block stuff, it's their prerogative. If it is enough of an impediment to learning, students and teachers will go elsewhere.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
At Abilene Christian University, our internet is blocked as well. We can even get 'auction' and 'entertainment' sites (eBaum's World) blocked. The blocking seems to be sporadic though. Not always blocking the sites consistently when visited.
I attended 2 small private religious colleges in the Midwest. Internet was censored at both schools. At my first college they had it closed down pretty tight but you could recommend sites to be unblocked. When I got there discovery.com (discovery channel's website) and the local community college's website were blocked. We negotiated the over all loosening of the blockade but didn't get it removed. At second school things weren't much better at least they used web sense which didn't block useful sites (too many at least) but they did restrict the type of media and if when we complained the said it was a bandwidth issue and morality issue (Christian school I can accept that, maybe). On more than one occasion I used a dial up to gain accesses to blocked sites then one day the dialup numbers were blocked, that was to far. As a general rule some sites need blocked for security reasons, block the crap that slows my computer if you are goign to block other things.
Not in over 30 years on campuses, which takes me back past the dawn of the internet age. Not at Harvard, not at state schools (Hawaii, Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Mexico), nor at smaller private schools. I have heard of bandwidth being restricted to computers in dorm rooms, to cut down on bandwidth overload due to MMGs and downloads, but never the whole campus. And never specific sites, as far as I remember. Just overall bandwidth limits. I think I may have heard of hardcore porn sites being blocked, but I'm not sure. (Then again, maybe I'm just oblivious. It wouldn't be the first time.) I would think that if you can't get at given sites even from supervised terminals in the library, then there's a Supreme Court-level academic freedom issue.
Universities _must_ be bastions of information flow. Sociologists study porn, artists and biologists look at naked people, musicians seek mp3s, and lawyers study criminal activities. I work at a university in the northern US. We have unbridled internet access because of acadamia's unique needs. Throttle bandwidth, block malicious sites, but please please please don't censor content. If I was a student or prof I would protest and maybe even file suit depending on the agreements I signed when I enrolled/hired.
As the CIO of a university, I can tell you that there are two trends in this area going on at colleges these days... depending on the type of college that you are. Every college currently faces bandwidth challenges. Mainly, these come from P2P technologies like Bittorrent, Ares and others. But, more and more problems are coming from sites that offer Flash video and the like. There are a lot of tools that automatically detect these uses and can "prioritize" the traffic on the network. In general, it is best not to attempt to block these tools entirely as this causes some clients to port search... and that can do more harm than good. Plus, these tools in and of themselves, are not bad. The other trend for more conservative colleges is to content manage. Generally, it is religious institutions who place in these restrictions. Further, these tools do not, in and of themselves, manage bandwidth use at all. That is not their main intended purpose, after all. Their purpose is to limit access to what the college deems as "inappropriate" content. I can say that in public institutions and private universities, like mine, that are not strongly tied to particular religious beliefs, there is no trend to install content management systems. That would generally be viewed by those institutions as an affront to academic freedom. For general reports on trends in colleges and universities, I would check out Educause at www.educause.edu. They produce excellent reports on current trends in IT at universities. I hope this helps! William M. Oglethorpe University
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/harvard-university- undergraduates-study-religion.html
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.
Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts, in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?
Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.
I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?
Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.
Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .
And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).
I'm betting you haven't:
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
I'm a system administrator at a college in Alberta, and at our institution, academic freedom is a very key consideration in any technology we bring on campus. We can encourage and suggest from the administrative side how the academic side should use technology, but the faculty do not have to use any given piece of technology unless their department requires it. Also, we could never implement something like websense style filtering, there are legitimate reasons to look at almost anything on the net from a research point of view sometimes.
There are rules about what you can surf for in the labs and library. Those are enforced by the lab monitors and library staff, and if necessary, via non-academic misconduct proceedings. In the case where a faculty member or student knows they will be viewing potentially offensive material, for example, research on pornography or hate speech, etc, there are protocols in place for how they can get what they need without subjecting others to having to see it on their screens. Additionally, when research type things might violate the terms of the Acceptable Computer Use Policy, there are systems in place for users to get specific pre-approval to violate the ACUP for research purposes.
Basically, here the academic freedom of students and especially faculty to investigate, learn about, research, and publish on any topic is more important than any other concern. It's our job as an institution. What we do have is bandwith shaping to prevent inappropriate uses or entertainment uses from eating so much bandwidth that they prevent others from using their freedom for academic uses.
I too went to a private university and found its Internet filtered all in the name of pornography. While I agree that people ought to be protected from things they don't wish to view, a proper balance need be struck between protection and education. The funny thing about the filtering is the most draconian filetering actually occured in the library. They not only filtered porn, but games, *search engines* (I kid you not), anything having to do with MP3, etc. Their justification for this blockage was 'to drive you to credible sources' ie. books and periodicles.
The result for me was that I never went to the library. I never checked books. I did all my research from home. It was irritating to say the least, but it was a lesson in diseducation.
I went to a state (public) university for a year and found things to be quite the opposite. The Internet was completely unfiltered. The only thing was a little slip taped to the monitor saying that if we were engaging in child pornography we would be prosocuted to the fullest extent of the law.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
This seems to be the case. When I go to my Fiance's college, the websites for Michael Savage and Sean Hannity are blocked, as well as I have been in public places where the (real) Whitehouse's site has been blocked.
Web censorship DOES seem to be a trend, especially at the numerous colleges I have lectured at or visited in their bids for donations.
Erutangis ym si siht.
I'm at Saint Louis University. So far the only traffic policies I have nocticed here are throttling down user speed to ~120 KB/s, irritating but still doable, and completely shutting down bittorrent just this year (curiously, Gnutella2 and eDonkey still work though) Aside from the particular type of p2p service they felt like shutting off (I would have figured that LimeWire would have far more users and bandwidth costs) that there has been no "censorship" per say. Just makes updating KDE and fetching stuff fromd distrowatch more irritating that nesessary. Here's hoping the status quo won't change any time soon.
I'm betting it's San Antonio's University of the Incarnate Word. The same insightful people whose head librarian cancelled their copy of the New York Times out of protest.
This is a temporary solution at best to an infrastructure that is taxed at or beyond it's capabilities. Already I would wager several students have developed work arounds to bypass these new censor tools. Bandwidth will jump again eventually and then they'll be faced with the same problem all over again.
I work for one of the larger tertiary providers here in New Zealand, and we heavily restrict the surfing of staff and students. Our baseline policy could be described as "personal surfing is allowed within reason" but the reality is we barely tolerate it at all. Our policies basically ignore the students, its targetted at keeping the staff inline and the students just cop the side effects. We block all streaming media, pretty much every audio/video format, major archive formats (zip, ace, rar, etc), exe's, msi's, I could go on. Every week usage reports are compiled, and any non work/educational related sites in the top 100 are added to the banlist. This is all ontop of using commercial blocklists as a base. I suspect however that we are not the average tertiary provider, and that our blocking is positively draconian compared to many of the others.
it is my believe that they must adhere to the Freedom of Speech principles
University? Free Speech?
That's the funniest thing I read all week.
The 4 year university I attended had this same policy of blocking anything and everything. Thank goodness there was a cafe not 10 minutes away that had free (and free - wide open) wireless. I can understand some blocking (it's a Christian school, so they don't want people looking up "adult" content), but most of it is just annoying (they currently use WebSense and I graduated so I have 8 meg cable all to myself).
Just the opposite in fact -- "I'm privately funded so I have to do things that garner more funding or appeal to my existing donations base"
Being privately funded gives you less freedom, not more.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
I go to the University of Waterloo in Canada and we have no such censorship in the least. They occasionally clamp down on people on the residence internal network who share a ton of copyrighted material but by and large you can torrent and such (assuming you have the bandwidth) all you want. There's even a rez DC++ channel for intra-residence file sharing. As for blocking sites, no sites are blocked. You can look at porn in the CS lab if you want (and i'm sure some do).
Universities have historically been the epicenter of progress and liberalism. I wouldnt say that the administration drive that progress, rather the student body does. Unlike other entities, the University is unique in that the student have most of the power. If the president of my university outlawed "offensive" websites, there would be student protests, bad press coverage etc until the policy is changed.
Honestly this is unimaginable for me, as a senior undergrad student. My university does no filtering whatsoever. They do shape packets for peer-to-peer networks as they leave the LAN because these networks use to completely choke the internet pipe.
University campuses should facilitate the congregation of intelligent and mature individuals. That can only happen without senseless anti-progressive restrictions like net censorship. Why are they protecting?
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Some clarification-- as one of the peon-level network types at the University of Utah where the parent poster teaches, the network administration paradigm is based entirely around encouraging as much freedom as is feasible and assuming that users will not abuse that privelige until proven wrong. To the best of my knowledge, the following are effectively the only restrictions placed on users who haven't already been very very naughty:
The only campus-wide blocking is a limited number of addresses and protocols blackholed at the campus gateway for being clear and present risks to network security. (known botnet controllers, outbound SMTP, inbound remote access except to legitimate access points, etc) Other than that, no filtering at the top level. More importantly, workarounds or exceptions are available for anyone who can demonstrate a legitimate reason they need to use something that is security-blocked.
The only bandwidth limitation currently in place is 2GB per day of outbound traffic through the gateway for residents in campus housing, (yes, 2GB per *day*) with no restrictions on inbound traffic. This policy is currently being re-evaluated due to the trend of *legitimate* non-infringing uses occasionally reaching the limit, and will likely be raised or removed entirely in the future to avoid restricting legitimate use. As far as I know there are no hard bandwidth limits whatsoever on staff.
The only monitoring in place is automated stuff for bandwidth and for promiscuously-infectious malware trying to spread itself, and no individual traffic is checked on without a viable complaint against the user.
The TOS can be summed up as: 'No illegal use. No commercial use. Don't try to break things. Have fun and learn stuff!'
Overall, it works quite well, especially considering that it's being applied to a large public university with something in the neighborhood of 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. I can't recall ever hearing any complaints lack of access to anything that was being intentionally kept blocked.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
--Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, actual quote. I quoted it from:
http://www.youaredumb.net/node/634
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
I attended a small (~3000 students) private university in the midwest, and it has no censorship. School policy is that academic freedom overrides other concerns. They do, however, limit bandwidth to filesharers (six T1 tubes still filled up quick sometimes).
Funny, I assumed all schools were the same way (apart from obviously religious places).
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.
Get corkscrew and use the following in your .ssh/config
ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").
Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).
And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)
PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I don't know is this is the school mentioned, but if so, by the looks of their web page regarding network access, Trinity has a horrible set of computer access rules. Trinities rules would be more than sufficient reason to live off campus if one were compelled through some misfortune of life to be forced to attend such a school.. asp
http://www.trinity.edu/its/policies/tigernetusage
Universities "making money" for the general fund through sports programs is a myth. Check these guys (second review) for the dirt. Of those, Duderstadt's book is probly the best, since he's tactful, respectful, and the former president of the Big House. It boils down to: the beneficial football team is a myth. College football and men's basketball may make more money than they spend, but what little "profit" is then passed to the (more worthy) other collegiate programs. I say (more worthy) because collegiate sports' influence on academics is really twofold in Division I programs. There's football and basketball, where BS majors (and by that, I do not mean Bachelor of Science) are invented, and men who have no interest or business in university of study are exploited for the Greater Good of Fandom. Then there are the other sports, where the athletes actually perform higher than the average for the student body.
Having done my time as a grad student TA at a Big Ten school, I must say there's some overlap. Non-"semipro" sports athletes ranked right up there with the folks starred "GI Bill" on the attendance roster as people I wanted in the classroom, in general (there were exceptions). Among the "semipro" players there were some genuinely engaged students -- and when an athlete gets engaged, the competitive spirit comes alive, and it's my lardass opinion that even if those guys earn C+s (which happens), they kicked a hell of a lot of ass to get there --, but there were a lot of slobs who had no business being there. I once sent "upstream" an F for the coach's son. Never did find out if he failed. Somehow I doubt it. Force Majeure
By Private, I'm guessing you mean "Bible Thumper".
No respectable place of higher learning would ever consider censorship (of any type) acceptable.
But being a religious front, you place a higher value on myth over facts, so no big surprise you'd want to limit access to the truth.
Sure, I support this statement. Just tell the profs to stop surfing pr0n and downloading pirated software thus getting their systems riddled with spyware. Then everything will be fine.
I've noticed a rather knee-jerk reaction here on SlashDot when the world censorship is used. Censoring is the supressing or deletion of something considered objectionable, as simple as that. It can mean using a spam blocker (because you object to spam) or a P2P blocker (because you object to file sharing) or any of a number of things.
In the case of the college, one presumes there are books on the college and sources of information OTHER than the internet. The internet is just one tool among many for students to use. The college is paying for the internet connection and seems to have determined what sort of uses they want to put it to. Remember, College is not about unlimitted learning, it's about learning the information the school is trying to teach you so you can pass and continue in your chosen field.
Yes, they could have chosen to use packet shaping, bandwidth throttling, and a number of other methods to achieve their goals.. but it is in these very forums where people discuss ways to get around packet shaping and bandwidth throttling. Everything from modifying your modem hardware to encrypting and port shifting has been brought up for ways around these very methods of preventing use (or abuse) of a network.
Personally, I am a firm believer that NO network should be fully open. This includes home networks as well as college campusses. The umpteenth time some user contracts a virus by going to someplace or doing something they shouldn't do on the internet and then infects every single other computer on the same network is enough to drive any IT professional insane.
Does blocking, packet shaping, filtering, firewalling, etc.., stop everything? Of course not. But if it can reduce the work you have to do on a network down to a manageable level I think it's worth it.
I do think reducing the discussion of Colleges and Universities filtering access to the internet down to "Censorship bad" is doing a disservice to all the myriad of reasons, on both sides, that the topic has to offer.
Boojum
I've had computer access at five universities in the past two years, and none do anything like this. Each in a different state, three private, two public, all in the top 50 (USN&WR), all but one in the top 20. Maybe it's common, but not at good schools. Which schools does your CIO really want to emulate?
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
At Iowa State University, there were very light firewall rules, and students actually had external IP addresses. The only outbound connection that I know of which was actually blocked outright was SMTP, to prevent the school from getting blacklisted for spambots.
BitTorrent was throttled, but not quite to oblivion. I got about 5 kilobytes per second before I discovered Azureus' "encryption" feature, after which I was able to use about half of the 10 mbit pipe. Still, it did the job effectively enough -- I rarely downloaded anything (maybe once a week), and I'm guessing most people didn't know about this option.
BitTorrent seemed to be the only thing throttled. HTTP obviously had a priority, because I was able to absolutely saturate the pipe -- 1 megabyte per second downloads -- over some HTTP downloads. But I was also able to get respectable speeds with SSH, and I never noticed significant lag with gaming. In fact, no one else ever complained about the Internet except when it was down.
Outages did happen, more often than a private ISP, but more like 2-3 hours at 2 AM, and not every day. Towards the end of the year, they were pretty much on top of it.
But as for outright censorship? Never.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If the Village Voice is a real source of information in your area of expertise or study how can you expect to be taken seriously. There are far better sites to get your Madonna concert information...
I went to a small, private university and even as far back as 1998, they were filtering huge amounts of content. I was taking a gross anatomy course and the filtering software wouldn't even let me look up anything to do with genital anatomy. Vulva was even blocked. Regarding .mp3 blocking, the IT people said that because of the way they got their T1 lines onto campus, they could be held liable for any impropriety that went on inside their domains. Does anyone know if that's a load of crap or not?
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
http://www.boingboing.net/censorroute.html
As a student at Purdue University I can tell you that there is not the censorship here. .mp3, file sharing (legit of course), any website you seek, it's all available. But purdue is a public university so that may have an effect.
Im from México and our school does have an Internet filter to a lot of things. Sometimes critical information. It first started about 10 years ago with the excuse of cutting unnecessary use of bandwidth by taking away all ports but the ones needed for web surfing and opening basic ones for REGISTERED and justified IPs. Once they had that controled, they added a filter for web content, the filter is called N2H2 and blocks anything that has things related to games, nudity and whatever other not-academic content. If you want to access a website that is mistakenly blocked you cant go to the university network people, you have to contact the company that makes the filter...
Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. -- Carl Sagan Sh!fty
Wow, a topic on Slashdot that directly affects me for once. I attend a private Christian University with very strict and conservative rules. The 1AM curfew, not being able to check out overnight to a friends house if they are the opposite sex, and extremely stringent rules about never ever ever being able to say anything bad at all about any of the clubs or fraternities on campus for example, are bad enough, and I can deal with them, but the web censorship is crazy. All instant messengers are filtered and logged, and you can't use webcams. Even one of the most harmless phrases, which I USED to use quite often, "Check this out," is blocked because it might be used to spread malware. When browsing the Wikipedia page on Public Domain music, several of the downloads pages were blocked under reasoning of "OH NOES HE'S DOWNLOADING MP3S OFF THE INTERNETS!!!11" (to paraphrase...). All of this seems to me to be a very blatant disregard of my right to free speech, and it is a shocking invasion of my privacy. But, it's legal. I'm on their network, they can watch whatever I do. Right? I certainly don't think so. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if their were ways around these things, like stopping them from watching my IRC conversations by using a shell, but SSL is blocked on everything but port 8080. So the first thing I thought is, "Why use their network if they are going to censor and watch everything I do? Surely they will let me buy my own internet connection to the dorms as I have seen others do at different universities!" But no, they don't even allow that. So why is this legal? One might argue that they pay for and maintain the network so they have a right to listen in on it, but telephone companies can't listen in on our conversations and UPS can't open our packages whenever they feel like it (unless the President tells them to of course...). Is there no way to defend our right to secure and uncensored communications?
The private college I've been at for three years uses SonicWall to block content. The only filter flag I've seen has been porn. Other than that, everything is fine. In all reality, I don't see not being able to access porn as hindering my academic education!
Xhentil Do'ana
Often, IT departments get the brunt of the blame for these kinds of "censorship" or "bandwidth preservation" decisions, but that's the wrong target.
This is an administration/policy issue: No way should IT be responsible for deciding what gets blocked and what does not. If there are hard data (which IT is responsible for gathering) that shows that bandwith concerns are an issue, then the administration needs to decide what to do about it, e.g., block all streaming mp3s or go after the 10 students hogging most of the bandwidth). At that point it is then IT's job to implement that decision.
Faculty and students have the right to know the thinking that went into the decision, and the people to look to are the administrators: President, Faculty Board, whatever. Not IT. A decision on allocation of resources and how it affects faculty/staff/students should be congruent with the mission of the university. If it's not, the institution can count on negative publicity, sharp questions by prospective students, and, potentially, lawsuits and a big hit to fund-raising efforts.
Administration is paid to be at the point of that spear, not IT.
The point is, if a school that suspends students for swing-dancing can allow its students unfiltered internet access, how conservative would this college have to be to censor its internet access for religious reasons?
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
Re: Our trials & tribulations in dealing with a South Australian ISP
(Powerband Networks)
We were surprised to receive an Overdue Notice from our ISP (one WITHOUT stating the amount alleged to be owing).
It claimed that the ISP was "having trouble" extracting its service fees from our Credit Card (as we'd authorised
it to do), and that our account was seriously overdue, as a result.
Surprisingly, NO amount-to-pay details were supplied in the eMail that delivered these allegations;
instead, something of the form: "If you cannot prove that you have paid your fees, we'll terminate
your Internet services very soon" was there instead.
We quickly (in fact, within minutes of receiving the above allegations, on the day they were sent by the ISP)
contacted our credit card provider, to see if there were any payment problems.
There were none; in fact, the ISP had never attempted to debit its fees beyond the first one
(succesfully billing us for connection & the first month's service fee).
Naturally, we passed this info along to the ISP, and also requested a Statement that we could check
and, if we agreed, we'd happily pay any amount owing; we even offered (in advance) to pay in cash,
at the ISP's nearby office, if/when we agreed that an amount may be owing on our account.
We were told: "We don't do Statements" & we not given any opportunity to check their claim
of "payment(s) overdue" or to make payment.
(This matter would soon prove to be a matter of censorship, not one about about money.)
No previous statements had been sent by them or received by us.
After some too-ing & fro-ing, the ISP indicated, in a short eMail, that it didn't appreciate
some of our public comments [on its service/fees].
We had responded to survey questions asking for suggestions for new Service Plans, &
we described the ISP industry's "low-end" plans ($20 - $30 per month PLUS over $100 per "excess" GB downloaded)
as a trap or stumbling block for "financially illiterate" users.
We had (earlier) noted that the ISP's "Usage Meter" ran so slowly (if completing at all)
as to be useless to Users wanting to avoid "excess download" fees.
The ISP had (at the time) repeatedly replied that there was nothing wrong with its "Usage Meter"
- at least when they ran it, at their office for our username. (Since they don't publish an office
address & didn't invite us to come & view this, so, how to prove or disprove?)
Nevertheless, they modified Usage Meter (after a public call for its repair, by us, et al.),
improving its performance a bit; but it still ran very slowly and - at our end - often failed
to produce a complete usage report, thereby leaving us unsure of our usage to the moment.
(Although we weren't on a "low-end" service plan, there was still a risk of paying around $5 / "excess" GB;
so, we were moved (by the poor- to non-performance of Usage Meter) to upgrade to a service plan
that had no "excess fees" at a considerable cost to us.
Perhaps having a "broken" Usage Meter was "good for business" - one way or another - for this ISP...?
Of course, we were quick to give feedback on the "modifications" - stating that its problems had not been solved.
We even offered a suggestion for making it produce a quicker report (ie, saving any previously computed "partial usage"
sub-totals, rather than re-computing previous days' usage, each time the meter program ran,
ie, as it seemed to be doing, in the few times it did run to end).
Again, a reply of the form "Usage Meter isn't broken" came back; and again another "improved" version of Usage Meter
was eventualy released for use by the ISP.
This time a bit faster, but still not always completing at our end.
Finally, the next (at least 3rd) repair cycle brought us a working Usage Meter, that met our needs
(if not those of the ISP's...?).
And we said so -
I use: http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/
I use CGIProxy to fix censorship problems. For best results, uncomment the code for URL Scrambling. It has some good features, and is stable.
Here at Arturo Prat University (in Iquique, Chile, Southamerica, Earth) we had that restriction with anything with "msn" or "chat". But today that restriction was removed because now we use Mozilla Firefox. They used the Internet Explorer options (...) and they don't know how to do it with other browsers. But they are watching what pages we visit already.
St. Mary's or Incarnate Word? What do you expect when you're sitting with your god? Slashdot? I think not. Pr0n? I think not.
Do you want to be a college or a university? Websense made perfect sense at the primary - grade 12 level where I contracted. While traffic shaping may be a neccessary evil, WebSense for a university is asinine.
I don't mean to be insulting, but is this a religious institution or military college? Seriously, unless your education merely serves an ideology, this makes no sense. If academics are primary, restrictions like this are silly. Sorry, but there is important information at the periphery, besides the terrible collateral damage these services incur. Like anatomy, breast cancer still exists even if you can't see any breasts.
If your CIO's peers are at places like Oral Roberts University (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) or military institutions (where boys are not allowed to have long hair) then he's probably right. That paternalistic world is the exception, not the rule.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I have worked at two different (British) universities in the last five years and network traffic was controlled in both cases. The universities' networks are funded, primarily, by public taxation and the bandwidth is provided for purpose of the students following their stated courses. As the universities are accountable to the public for the (mis)use of funding, it is right that the bandwidth usage should be restricted to that required for the course being taken. Those students who wish to use additional bandwidth are at liberty to purchase it from any ISP. Disputes are settled by asking the student to get his/her (staff) supervisor to confirm that access to the disputed site is required for the course.
I went to a State School in Ohio, I still live in the city where i went to school and i have many clients that are affiliated with the University. When i was in undergrad 99-03 the nework was flat out open. No blocking or anything. Once P2P starting going rampant they tried blocking a few P2P ports like Napsters and such but once there were so many flavors and work arounds it was useless so they stopped blocking them. They would never stand for blocking any information on the internet b/c its more of a headache than its worth, and in the end does it really matter? We're all adults here. In the past 2 years they've updated their campus infrastructure and routers. Now to curve bandwith so everyone has a zippy connection they do bandwidth prioritization. Where the main offices/classrooms/buildings get bandwidth priority durring the day and then after 6 or so it goes to the dorms. The dorms have bandwidth durring the day thats still pretty darn fast they just do more load balancing then they used to and this has kept everyone happy. These are just my experiences. I will say that a CS prof i know was researching bandwidth traffice and stuff at the university and lets just say the top hits on the nameservers and incoming traffic were for porn sites. lol Cheers
Guess this is something only universities can afford. Working currently at the IT research arm of a big car manufacturer, we've got completly free access (well, it's NATed, and it has a transparent http proxy, but that does only speed up with caching, no filtering). From my university experience here, no filters are usually installed. (Well perhaps malware filters, but I've mostly stopped using MS products over an decade ago :) )
Cowardly yours,
Anonymous
I have recently returned to my native land (that's Scotland, that is) from Denmark having attended University both there and here. The Scottish network policy seems to be to ram the Computer Misuse Act down people's throats and then set up filters so that they can't break it anyway. That and the constant threat of expulsion for minor transgressions. Technically I cannot access anything that is not directly related to my studies as to do so counts as misuse. This includes checking private email and using *MY* print credits to print out non-academic material. The Danish attitude is that "you are an adult so behave like one" and they leave the network unrestricted. As long as you do not break Danish law then you will not be bothered by the University or anyone else.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
I used to work for a company that made the type of web censoring appliance/software you are talking about and Universities, espeacially private Universities were one of our biggest customers.
They just block gnutella ;). They even leave Bittorrent open, and we have plenty of bandwidth. But then again, we're also an internet2 university and the guys running the IT know what Unix is.
This is just absurd. I guess there exist good reasons to block p2p (bandwidth issues, copyrights, potential legal problems, etc) but what's with the other sites? Of course this is sensorship. This must be one of those small religious schools whose administrators can't stand the thought that the campus network can be used to download a picture of someone's boob.
Does the university *at least* have an exceptions policy, for granting access to sites which are blocked, but for which a student or teacher can demonstrate an educational need? Most companies today with similar filtering will grant an exception for a site if it's justifiably related to business, and not a porn/gambling/warez site.
I understand that the appeal / exception process can be time-consuming, and annoying in the case of legitimate news & information sites, but imagine how quickly the university will reconsider their choice of filters if they're flooded with thousands of requests to access legitimate information, which some poor schlub in the IT group will spend weeks wading through. If you can show that there is a real problem accessing LOTS of educational content, then they should at the least be inclined to seek out a better filtering device / service.
And if turns out that only a handful of requests are submitted to unblock a handful of sites, then your students should also learn how to work within the established system for addressing these "false positives". Learning how to work within a system of limitations and rules is also a valuable workforce skill... most companies out there are going to filter / block at least some sites.
I'd have to say that what's going on is unusual for a higher education institution. I've been on three college campuses, and none of them have done this. One was a community college, another was a statue university, the third is now private. Mind you, they do block ports for most P2P, and severely throttle down anything with .torrent in the name. However, they don't block anything outright.
Rawr
As a point of comparison, my university leaves everything open, except the common peer-to-peer file trading applications (gnutella, fasttrack, ares). They also rate limit bittorrent to about 10K/s. The rest is fair game. There are packet shapers in place for individual users of enormous (>25GB) amounts of bandwidth, and uploading more then 10GB will get you a kicked off until you call so we can warn you not to do that again.
As I understand it, our policy is generous, but not overly so, and in line with most other top 20 universities.
The School papers are censored, the athletes can not create website profiles that are derogatory of a school that doesn't meet the student who pays them expectations, and the schools dorms treat the kids like prisoners denying them their due process rights as American citizens, overselling students parking spaces so they can make their campuses a walking campus.
Hum did i miss anything? Oh yeah lacking leadership in the quest for renewable energy, and eco friendly design at most campuses.
Sure Colleges get your foot into many doors if you graduate from them with a 3.5 or better. But look at the examples they are setting for your child to follow, do not just go to the first place you get all glossy eyed over i think folks can do much better. Stop supporting schools that censor, impede the student with legal threats and other crap. YOUR PAYING THEM not the other way around quit supporting their Marxist agenda.
The prestige of being accepted is not worth being treated like crap!
in that bastion of free thought, texas.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I go to St. Mary's College of California, and as far as I can tell, it doesn't censor anything at all. I know a guy that downloads gigs of movies and cheerleader porn a day, and they never caught him. They do give out warnings (no specific targets) about file-sharing but I haven't seen anyone get in trouble for it.
This is just the sort of narrow-minded thinking I expect from this buggy (the horse kind) town after spending over a year here. This place is the smallest big town in america. The people are conservative. The city is lame. The tech market here is almost non-existent. What is here (aside from Server Beach, I hear) is weak and lacks challenge. Texans have the whole "it'll get done when it gets done" attitude about everything. This is perhaps why my last employer (who I dropped like it was hot) was 5 months late delivering a finished product to the state of Illinois. Combine the conservativeness with the weak tech workers and you get misguided tech policies.
Don't even get me started on Texas roads and highways. I'm leaving for the midwest next week. Seriously.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
... between ownership and censorship, or between your rights and your wants. It's this kind of ignorance that lets others get away with taking away your rights. How would you know?
The school owns the system. They get to say what it can and can't be used for. And no, the taxpayers do not own it (assuming not a private college). They forked over their money to the government to do with as they saw fit. The government spent it for their benefit, not for their ownership. They gave it to the school along with the right and responsibility to run it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
For NCSU, the answer is, it depends, but mostly no. In residence halls, the only thing censored is kazaa/limewire/etc. In public labs, it depends on the administrator. The administrator of that lab may choose for it to be an "academic only, no personal use" lab, or they may choose for it to be "free for any use". Meaning if they want to ban porn, they have to ban all personal use on those computers, but if they want to allow personal use, they have to also allow porn. Most of the labs on campus are open for personal use.
Overall, no censorship.
Proxy Autoconfig - lets you write code that looks somewhat like this -
works a wee bit better than switchproxy, because you can filter "selective" websites. But there are ways to detect people using this, so really switchproxy (or foxyproxy) is better in some ways.XU also blocked accessing a website via its IP address- which kept me from accessing proxies to work around this issue.
There isn't a University in this country that doesn't also take government fund in one way or another, be it research grants or federal funding. Private schools are not private in that sense.
A case can be made that this is censorship and I will guess that at some point someone will press the matter.
i am a studend at a university in fla and nothing is banned, and bandwidth is incredible, the other day i was downloading some crap at 500kbps which i would say is pretty damn good (note bytes! not bits)
are they censoring republicans too?
p ?ARTICLE_ID=52405
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.as
Let me guess it was this state college that wants to act like they arent.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And no, this is not uncommon. I know that my friend, who administers a primary/high school network, censors his school's connection. He's had plenty of complaints, but he knows what happens when the filters go down. Horny teens look up porn, try to hide it, teachers catch them, write home to their parents, parents complain, yadi-yadi-yadda...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Berkeley and AFAIK other UCs do not censor the net as a rule. You have to be a student or hold a valid authentication credentials to access the net from the libraries. From what I know, the bandwidth students get in dorms is limited. I haven't had the pleasure of living in dorms, but also I think some ports may be blocked to prevent file sharing after a number of high-profile cases a few years back. As for internet itself, I don't believe it's censored. But then again, this is berkeley, where exception is the rule, not the norm. (Although in this case I certainly hope I'm wrong :))
-Palal
Tor. That is all.
USA = China.
Just that the US is closing in (and just (re)starting with torture again?), while China is going in the other direction.
As far as I am concerned, political correctness is the act of phrasing your own speech in a less offensive manner. Censorship is muzzling someone else's speech which you don't like.
While here in Virginia no state funding can be used to support athletics by law, I'm sure colleges elsewhere are similar. Usually athletic programs are supported by the two "revenue sports" football and basketball, and the rest of the athletic programs (Track, swimming, fencing, etc) are funded by the profits of the revenue sports. Caltech and MIT may not have football teams, but places like Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Harvard do. Hell, GT's team is pretty damn good. And don't forget NCAA athletics provide more scholarships (again, paid for by the revenue programs) than all other scholarships in the country combined, Gov't grants notwithstanding.
The only universities I know of that do something like this are universities that feel the need to promote one particular viewpoint over others - primarily religious colleges. Almost all universities that are dedicated to open exchange of ideas go out of their way to say they will not do this. Here's an example from another university in Texas (this is TAMU): in the computer use policy it says "The University should not limit access to any information due to its content when it meets the standard of legality." Similar statements can be found in most university computer use policies. If they know that the mp3s they're blocking come from a site that exists to illegally serve up copyrighted content, then it would be understandable that they would block that (although the more pressing problem from a university standpoint is with people on campus serving up copyrighted content to others). But blocking the Village Voice? Come on, that's just ridiculous.
If the original poster reads this and wants some support from a faculty member in Texas, reply and let me know. I'm not at TAMU (despite using them as an example above) and I'm not in San Antonio, but if I can help I will...
I recently left my position as a university network administrator at a site that had 11,000 machines on the network. I left to go somewhere where the CIO/Administration made decisions based on current technology and information, as opposed to shooting from the hip and kneee-jerk reactions.
Where I was at, I often had to justify my position with surveys of other colleges in the state/country. Your CIO is most definitely overstating the position using the "but everyone else is doing this" reasoning.
The reality is that I would have liked to block a huge amount of items for bandwidth or security reasons. However, I don't believe in censorship, so I had to actually do my job and find ways (regex, packet analysis, protocol detection, etc) to find and filter actual malicous code/sites/programs. without impacting legitimate use (legit here being defined by the faculty and students, not me). While I had a staff of 7 working for me, I actually did most of the authoring of methods of doing this.
Second, to manage bandwidth, I didn't block a bunch of clearly useful sites. Instead, I did protocol detection, and threw certain types of high volume traffic into limiting queues. The guy with the Squid proxy who blocks everything....what you've just done is reduce the bandwidth usage for legit sites and filetypes you can identify easily, while allowing students in dorms to use the various P2P apps to suck up all your bandwidth. I can assure you, the P2P apps are far more capable of moving huge amounts of data than web sites are. BitTorent alone can eat your pipe if it isn't throttled.
Nope, what you need is a semi-effective off the shelf solution from packeteer or one of the various others, or you need to do some actual creative work to manage things.
That said, back to my really good paying, intelligent decision maker job:)
I have taught at every level, and I have only seen the kind of filtering you are describing for young kids. It is definitely overkill for the university level.
When I taught at a private Catholic school for Pre-K - 8th grade, we had filtering at that level. We used our ISP's filtering tool and still had some control over it. I could add sites and phrases to permit and deny lists. Even at that level we sometimes had trouble when students were researching legitimate subjects like reproduction, Hitler, the Holocaust, etc.
At public middle schools and high schools in our city, the filtering is done in-house, and things aren't just blocked wholesale. One time I pointed out to an admin that I could get to Penny Arcade from inside the school. I think it is funny, but I don't think the humor is appropriate for most students. He thought about it for a while, and then decided not to block it. His reasoning was that he hadn't had a complaint about it, and presumably he wanted to leave it open to those kids who could handle it. Believe me, these kids see and hear worse every day. In the end, a lot of it is up to the teachers and students.
I also teach high school students at a summer program at Wesleyan University where nothing is blocked. Not only do the students sign an acceptable use policy, but I spend the first class going over it and giving examples. I tell them that I am the final arbiter, and if I say, "Get off that site," they get off, the first time I ask. I tell them to warn me if they are researching something controversial so that if I look over their shoulder and see a swastika, a naked body, or the word "nigger" I won't freak out. I also understand mistakes. More than once students have ended up somewhere they didn't expect, like whitehouse.com. I have never had any serious issues, and again it is up to the teacher and the student. If I want to let them go to miniclip.com during a free period, that is my decision.
If high-school students can handle the responsibilty, there is no reason for your university to be restricting adults.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
I am an IT person for a large university in New England and we don't filter or censor any content as such. We do have a list of applications which people are not supposed to use on computers connected to the university network and that list includes some P2P software like Gnutella and Limewire but we specifically decided that Freenet is OK. The reason was that we were being contacted by the RIAA on, roughly, a monthly basis telling us that we needed to shut someone down who was serving copyrighted content. This policy is not enforced uniformly across the many areas of the University.
The enterprise editions of all the major antivirus vendors are starting to add a feature where you can make your own list of Presumably Unwanted Applications (PUA). It remains to be seen whether we will use that feature to automatically remove P2P software or not but the idea is under serious consideration. This would enforce the policy to some extent since we require antivirus to be on any machine connected to the network.
Some ideas: Take a survey during an open house to see if having a web content filter would be something that would make the students avoid a school. You could also take a survey of the students where you ask, "Does the content filter make you consider changing schools?"
No, I will not work for your startup