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Ohio University Blocks P2P File Sharing
After receiving the highest number of notices from the RIAA about P2P file sharing, Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network. Some file-sharing programs that could trigger action are Ares, Azureus, BitTorrent, BitLord, KaZaA, LimeWire, Shareaza and uTorrent. Claiming that this effort is 'to ensure that every student, faculty member and researcher has access to the computer resources they need,' is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing?
I wonder what level are they blocking?
If its at the wall, won't internal sharing continue?
Just because you can stop the data coming in via p2p means doesn't mean the data won't be there (waste/DC can exist in a private garden without ever touching the real net).
Or is this an active process which does a portscans your machine continuously?
Failing everything else, there is always sneakernet. Expect a rise in blanks in the area.
liqbase
The Blizzard downloader uses Bittorrent to download patches.
They stop file sharing because it's clogging the network and people can't use it for real work. Please stop bitching about your perceived birth-right of file sharing.
It's not a "nail in the coffin" of anything. If college kids have to pay a bit for their own connection, they will. Hell, I bet most college kids these days all have cable TV. What's another $20/month on a $100/month cable bill? They call their cable company, tack on the service, and it's over. No controversy.
I don't respond to AC's.
My college, which is private, doesn't allow even iTunes sharing amongst the students, because the bandwidth usage slows everything down significantly. Now, this is a private school and we aren't rolling in money, but it's still an issue.
I think water would do just fine
Tomorrow's headline: TOR usage skyrockets at Ohio University.
like anyone smokes crack in those campuses or what?
this is exactly what they wanted you to do, and you did it for them.
the terrorists at the RIAA wanted to dictate your policy to you, and when you wouldnt do it directly they assaulted you with notices until you did, and they got it.
what lesson do we learn from this?
americans have become complacent. they are not willing to stand up for their fellow man or pay the ever present price of freedom.
This is beyond contraversial.
If the lifer movement kept bombing your campus would you include "anti-abortion" clauses in your admittance contracts?
If the christian coalition kept parading through your campus would you start refusing jews, muslims, and athiests?
for christ sake let your students make their OWN choices.
people like these should die in a fire.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
file sharing != copyright infringement != stealing
It's about controlling bandwidth costs that have soared as a result of the explosive growth of p2p traffic. I have spoken with several large ISP's in the past year and most of them quote numbers like 65-75% of their total traffic is p2p. Given the demographic makeup of most universities, I'd bet their percentage is even higher. Those big fiber pipes cost big bucks.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network
... is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing? >
Oh No! How will pyromaniacs share now? But seriously, it's kind of sad that a major error like that can slip through... twice.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
1 != 2 != 1
Copyright infringement is not theft.
I've worked at a college, in an average week we would get 10-15 riaa letters (with our seemly small number of 3000 residents), and responding to them gets to be a huge chore. Most campuses are taking the "we don't want to get sued, so we will not put ourselves in that position" approach, so ignoring those letters is not an option.
At the place i worked at, for a while we did try to block kazaa and the like, the problem was that there would always be a new protocol that would pop up to take it's place. We eventually gave up on blocking it because of this.
This story is really not a new thing in the university world, most have a policy of limiting the student's ability to fileshare (some through innocent means like NAT routing, others through throttling the bandwidth for those services).
So before we all get up in arms that people are limiting access, you'd think again when you have to call 20 people in a day, tell them why their access has been shut off, and have every one of them claim that they've never file shared in their lives. Only to get the call the next day where they complain that their their myspace is too slow.
Oh please. Besides the obvious infringement != theft, it's not a good idea for an academic institution to run a restricted network. Of all places where the Internet should be free and wide-open, I'd say that higher learning is right up there. There's 65535 ports available, and every one of them is going to be used by some system for some reason, most likely not P2P file sharing. Not to mention the number of legitimate things you might be downloading for educational purposes via BitTorrent (Ubuntu ISO, anyone?). Anything more restrictive than blocking ports at the firewall (which is pretty pointless anyway. uTorrent allows you to change the port being used) is detrimental to an academic institution's learning environment.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Except that Illegal File Sharing is not the only use of P2P technology. I use torrents to get all manner of things, linux distro's being the one that springs immediately to mind. Most educational establishments already have rules governing how and what is allowed on their network, but banning/restricting a technology altogether is a bit naff.
My friend and I go over to OUZ (Ohio University Zanesville) to use their wifi since we share a campus with one of the branch. Our college's internet is slower than dial-up. OU's wifi is so fast it's not even funny. Funny thing is we were using uTorrent today and didn't have a problem. We normally cap the upload/download due to the massive speeds.
The problem, though, is it's so very heavy-handed. This is a public university, remember, and to prevent any chance of copyright infringement they've taken away the students' rights to download audience recordings from torrent sites, or to use bittorrent to fetch a linux distro. Was it necessary?
Illegal ONLY if THE MAN Catches ME !!
Muuuhahahahahaha
I use p2p - most of us do but I'm certainly not suprised that a school has taken action to curb it.
Should all students carry guns to school because of the odd individual causing trouble? There's another alledged "freedom" violation.
Means to an end and sure, there will be some collateral damage.
when you do it on someone else's infrastructure all they have to do is hand over user information, and they are completely in the clear thanks to DMCA safe harbor provisions.
let's apply this to any other controversial morally loaded topic:
"a university expelling students for getting abortions is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their medical resources"
"a university blocking democratic websites is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their political interests".
Finally, downloading media != "stealing" media.
Theft involves depriving the owner of the object stolen, and no "potential sales" can't be deprived, or the same standard could be used to shut down lowes for "stealing sales" from home depot, or to burger king for "stealing sales" from mcdonalds.
These old buggy whip manufacturers dont deserve protection, theyre running an obsolete business model and their lobbying and legal efforts have and are still undermining the very foundation of free society and free markets.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
So a few weeks back, everyone finds out that Ohio University leads the country in file sharing. Now instead of taking steps to try to curb this, they just announce they'll cut it off all together. I'm sure they felt pretty embarrassed being on top of the list, but there are other options.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Applause to the BOFH that has pushed it through, though I would have done it differently.
Most university IPs are real on a really high speed connected LAN. As a result they get elected to supernode status by most modern P2P applications. As a result the university network becomes a jump point for NAT traversal for all leaches within 30-60ms rtt around it. As a result the resource usage is clearly disproportional to the actual on-campus usage. Essentially all small and medium corporates and home users sitting behind firewalls in the immediate vicinity live off that resource and steal a significant portion of the Ohio University network capacity.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately even if the protocols were easier to isolate, that may be quite difficult for a network the size of Ohio State. Most network equipment used at the bandwidths in question cannot do selective delays and probability drops very well. The P2P applications nowdays make the "if the protocols are easier to isolate" statement false anyway. All the developers know that they are committing a resource theft and they go way beyond what is considered spyware tactics to achieve their aims (current Skype is a fine example of this).
So on the balance of things, just banning them to hell is probably the most cost effective options. Congrats and applause. Can we have more of that please. A few more and the net economics will go back to where they belong so people actually start looking at things like multicast and frontline in-local-loop delivery instead emulating it through resource theft.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
RIAA, My Foot!
It has been said a million times before: Illegal copying isn't theft. Look up the appropriate statutes of your jurisdiction for reference.
Also, ISPs do not share any sort of liability for the wrongdoings of their customers (only their own wrongdoings, as it should be. Should universities be liable for people smacking others over the head with books they borrowed from the library? Ridiculous.
That's a cop out. Universities should be the private police force for the media cartel, they are there to provide education and do research and guess what: One of the hot topics in distributed system research are peer-to-peer systems, so banning them is directly opposed to one of their core purposes.
It really is too bad Bit Torrent is being banned because of early adoption by Pirates. Granted, I became familiar with it years ago when I was Pirating a lot of things, but over the past year and a half or so the only thing I've really used it for was downloading perfectly legal Linux ISO's - with results always outperforming a typical FTP download.
I hope that Bit Torrent can gain mainstream support (browser plugins, etc) before it is written off as strictly a "Piracy" protocol.
P.S.,
This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated.
The problem I have with these kinds of regulations is the confusion between the medium which is used to transport the data, and the message, the specific data being transported. If the Uni is unhappy about copyright violations, that's one thing; or if they have bandwidth problems, that's legit; but restricting specific protocols and programs does not accurately target the problem behavior. They seem to adopt the maxim that "the Medium is the Message"; that is, if something is being transferred by Bittorrent, it is a copyright violation. And granted, that is the case much of the time.
But it is not a perfect correlation. Banning Bittorrent will hamper downloading Linux ISOs and other high traffic, legitimate materials. There is no justification for saying that file sharing as a whole is illegal, any more than you could say that using the Internet is illegal even if it turns out that much traffic violates the law.
While a lot of material downloaded via bittorrent is copyrighted, not all of it is. By banning it entirely they are also preventing the download of Linux distros, Project Gutenberg releases, etc. To use a lame car analogy, just because a student's car has the capability of damaging property or hurting someone doesn't mean the college should ban students from owning vehicles.
CATS/Diebold '08- All your vote are belong to us!
Everyone else is going to be "OMG lamerz teh MAFIAAAAA won because of retard schoolz like u" but seriously, why is this not a good idea? It's the school's network, the RIAA is actually on their tails trying (however illegally or immorally) to punish their students, and they have every right to restrict the use of file sharing services on their network.
Yes, I know that there are great legal uses for BitTorrent, but do you really think 95% of the students are using it to legally download Ubuntu or something? Yeah right. Get real and be honest with yourselves, this is probably a smart thing for the school to be doing. If the students want to download whatever they want, then they need to pay for their own DSL or move out of the dorms and be responsible for their own actions (gee, what a thought), but while they're using the school's network and the school is somewhat responsible for them, I think it's perfectly reasonable to restrict their illegal file sharing.
It's a whole other argument whether the RIAA sucks (they do) and whether file sharing positively impacts the recording industry (it might) but for a school, come on, it's their right, and probably the right thing for them to do. Get over it.
"!"
Justify that "excessive usage of mega-corporate wealth by applying pressure/bribery of elected representatives, putting laws that will benefit precisely and mostly the business type & business size that exactly fits one's own mega corporation, and then hiring lawyer armies to embark on oppressive & barely legal and even at times unconstitutional suppression of ordinary citizens just to be able to continue the unparalleled inequality & injustice between the cuts of oneself (the publisher) and the creator (artist) that is earned through sale & renting of intellectual property" is not a theft.
and then ill line behind you.
Read radical news here
You can tunnel just about any service over any other on a TCP/IP network. Do they plan on blocking http? email? ssh? ping? If so, why offer any network access at all? If not, I'm sure the students are already at work with various stegenographic and tunneling techniques that let your share files over unconventional services. Also, when I share with my college peers, I generally just do so using a usb disk drive that I carry with me. I can move tens of gigs of data in just a few minutes. Does the university plan on doing a full cavity search of all students to make sure that they don't possess any readable/writable media? This is the information age. You can't stop people from sharing information! (fucking Luddites)
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Can you just hear the screams of agony if students can't download their normal patch updates for WoW? They'll be looking at FilePlanet and other places to get their patches.
This could be fun if they didn't exempt Blizzard. I didn't notice any mention of their legal use of P2P torrent.
"Nail in the coffin of internet freedom" is a bit of an overstatement. There's no free lunch. Dealing with DMCA takedown notices is a huge burden on campus IT staff (our campus has a network security officer who has spent most of his tenure chasing movies and music) which cannot be ignored without the risk of losing the campus's protection under the DMCA safe-harbor provisions. Further, campuses don't have a magically free internet connection. Most pay into a state-wide consortium for Internet2 access then pay an additional, metered rate for commercial internet traffic. Why should universities spend limited resources to subsidize torrent traffic?
Now before anyone talks about the legitimate p2p use, even that is a questionable use of university resources. Ideally p2p shares bandwidth costs so that everyone gets something for a minor contribution. This doesn't necessarily work out to the benefit of universities since their fat, low-latency pipes take priority over the narrow, slow-upload-speed DSL and cable-folks. Ultimately, the universities have to allocate resources to support university business and this policy must be seen as a business decision. If it is necessary for an aspect of university business, I suspect an exception will be allowed as soon as a faculty member makes the request. If the students are miffed, they can pay for commercial wireless access (like most cell phone companies offer) for on campus or use xDSL or cable at home.
and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?
its one thing to apply qos to manage bandwidth, its quite another to start making student's choices for them and refusing to provide "internet" service.
especially for isp's.. if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited". Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
linux distro's being the one that springs immediately to mind.
Some of us download Microsoft Windows distros the same way. Of course, the idea is the same.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
1) Bandwidth. College students think Universities have infinite bandwidth. The fact is that they don't. I went to a small college (1000 students + 200 faculty) and they both shared a max bandwidth T3 line. They used a network analysis tool to auto-turn off the connection to any computer (tracked by MAC address) that was using "excessive bandwidth" which was determined by a sliding scale based on time of day and overall network activity. The system could detect bittorrent and people were constantly kicked off for days at a time for using torrents. The point is, they needed the system. Without it, legit users were only getting download rates around 1.5 kb/sec with pings reaching over 1000ms. It was unusable. However, a system like this is rigid and requires constant administration from non-rigid IT. False positives occur (programs that auto-update - including Windows) were known to cause issues. IT needs to be flexible.
2) RIAA subpoenas. My former college sent responses to every request for information from the RIAA they received by telling them that they would handle the matter internally. That numbered hundreds. The school enforced penalties. If things are they way they were then, a large school would need to hire people who would stuff RIAA envelopes all day.
3) Network Worms. If I had a nickel for every college computer without a an up to date copy of Windows XP or virus scanner I'd be right next to Oprah Winfrey on the list of Billionaires.
4) Open P2P is a security risk. It causes havoc for IT. IT costs money.
Good. I'd thought they'd have to take a legal or ethical stand on something. Had me worried there.
A weird reasoning you have, do you mean that when someone shares a file another file is deleted from the university computers somewhere? In case you didn't know, a digital file, differently from more material commodities, can be shared without deleting the original.
Anyway, that old, old FUD you are trying to spread on behalf of the MAFIAA isn't the point here. A university is a site created for one and only one purpose: to spread knowledge. That function is performed by sharing information. If one assumes your thesis that sharing == theft, then one must also come to the inevitable conclusion that when a teacher gives a lesson someone is stealing his knowledge.
A university cannot exist without sharing knowledge, in our age knowledge is contained in digital files. Without file sharing, a university would be just like any corporation. Would you sign a non-disclosure agreement when you enter a university?
Hmmm. How about they go out and get some T1 lines then share that amoungst themselves? I'm sure the "culture of sharing" and "information wants to be free" shouldn't have a problem with that arrangement. Plus guarenteed "unlimited" bandwith and the costs is an accurate reflection of the way the connection is being treated.
Freedom is about being able to do what you want. Responsibility is knowing what to do with your freedom.
Port blocking, while it will restrict copyright violations - is a restriction of freedom.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Yes because those Ubuntu and Debian ISO's I downloaded with Azeureus were just so illegal and evil!
Applications by incoming freshman has dropped by 50%!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The end result of this kind of crackdown is that the next generation of P2P applications will simply tunnel everything over https:
Yet another case of profit over people. Win/win for RIAA/OU and the investors who stand to profit. Lose/lose for artists and students.
When are more people going to wake up and admit that capitalism is the problem, was the problem, and will be the problem until we do something about it.
SHIT / GODDAMN / GET OFF YER ASS AND JAM
You have to keep in mind that a significant chunk of P2P traffic (WoW patches, Linux distros, etc) is completely legal. It might be more reasonable for the school just to block sources that provide illegal content, or allow students to request that legal sources be added to a whitelist.
I'm of the mind that the ones who brought this whole mess about, don't give a damn about society except so far as what society can do for them, or they can get from society even if it's unwilling. You'll make a note that a lot of issues would disappear if there were no society (in other words you all can't get along so go your seperate ways). No piracy. No hogs. But we do have a society and the majority do want to live within it and live within it's rules, and strictures. It's the minority (and growing sad to say) that will make life miserable for the majority until society either collapses, or wises up to the malcontents.
Like a Packateer or the like. Just set P2P to a lower priority than other traffic. Thus it'll never interfere but get as much bandwidth as is available. That's what we've done here, works quite well. Also, then you don't get in to the problem of playing net cops.
Also there are plenty of legit reasons to use P2P. Linux being a major one. I find all the fastest downloads for Linux distros are torrents. Hell, when Knoppix 5 came out I downloaded it and then seeded over the weekend since it was summer and the bandwidth was mostly unused. I transferred about 1.5TB, and would have done more had I not throttled it. Clearly there's more than a bit of legit demand on P2P things.
Then you get things like World of Warcraft, which use Bittorrent to update. Even if you argue that the network should be used for nothing but education, there's still plenty of legit reasons to want to check out WoW. It's a massive social phenomena, and I can think of plenty of good research that could be done on it.
Of course saying that there should be no games runs in to a real problems that being the dorms. What right do you have to tell students that they can't do what they want in their home, which is what the dorm is? For a private university ok, fine, their rules, but in a public institution isn't likely the students could successfully launch an anti-competition suit against the university and force them to open up the dorms to competition, which would be a massive problem given that most universities are on their own wiring plan.
Finally, maybe the students should have a say in what their money is used for. They are the customers, after all. Without the students, there is no university. Maybe they want to be charged a bit extra to get more bandwidth. You'd be amazed at how cheap big lines really are in the scheme of things. Take a large university with a few tens of thousands of students and charge each an extra $5/month, you can buy a lot of bandwidth for that.
Didn't Ohio University already have a policy against students placing servers on the Internet? Hello! When you run P2P, you're running a server!
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
When the University owns the wires or pays for the connection, they do as they see fit as long as their policies foster academic research. But I think nobody can come and state that p2p have a real academic use without being called hypocrits. I hope the IT Service Desk (or the deans) will be open to creative use of p2p. If all else fails, a few quids should convince the BOFH of your needs.
All the bullshit about supporting theft or caving in to corporate terrorism is nothing but demagoguery. I so wish those inflamatory comments would return to the cellpool they came from. And frankly, speaking as a near-addict, being unable to update WoW is a boon to students.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Generally, universities own all rights of way on their campuses. That's certainly the case here. All data, telephone, cable, water, electricity, all provided by the university to all buildings on campus proper, which includes the dorms. Thus you have no option but the provided dorm service. Here that's not a problem for most students, as we aren't dicks about it and provide pretty good service. However if they don't like it, there's nothing they can do. They cannot order other service, it simply is not available.
What may happen, and should happen to universities that restrict it like this, is they should get sued. There are limits to a public university's ability to compete with and to keep out private companies. This would be more than enough to insist that they need to be let in. Massive problem for the university to make that happen though.
Students are not paying five figures a year for bandwidth.
It's perfectly legitimate for a school to stop providing a particular service. However much you want to think students are paying for the costs of their education, the reality is is that public schools are heavily subsidized by tax payers and private schools are heavily subsidized by private donors. Neither one of which has an interest in providing "unlimited" bandwidth for purposes outside the charter of the school.
People need to get off the entitlement train.
http://www.gigatribe.com/tour/accueil.php
wasn't listed as a banned client. If more people start using encrypted clients, university net admins will have to do traffic shaping. If the RIAA and MPAA can't figure out what's being downloaded in an encrypted stream, why would the university care?
"...is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing?"
The obvious answer is neither. First, it will not curtail the freedoms of our universities at all. Quite frankly, this will have a minimal impact on P2P file sharing at the universities. Also, any impact it has would be a benefit to the over all infrastructure of the campuses in that there will be less hogging of the network resources, making more available for research and administration.
Second, this is not a 'needed step to prevent file sharing.' This, as I stated above, will have little to no impact on file sharing. The torrent users will just adapt as they always have. Torrent programs will come out using other protocols and other methods of file sharing will be used. They just could go back to the methods of old, with some new twists. Maybe authenticating in before getting to the download/upload web page? Who knows? But they will figure it out.
The actions of OU would be better supported if they left RIAA out of it and just said they need to protect the bandwidth for more legitimate (scholarly) use. As Rakishi said, "Then put god damn bandwidth limits on students in both gb/month and kb/s with an easy to use system to apply for exceptions." That really settles the issue. It will minimize the impact of P2P greatly, while supporting the need for open bandwidth for research, etc.
No, i really think its about bandwidth.
I doubt the school really cares about what you are pushing across, but they DO care that it kills the lines. Bandwidth does cost money.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Until the school gets sued, and the courts rule that they have to now allow students to purchase third part services. It's real likely they would in a case like this and it'll be expensive as hell for the university to implement. When you are a public university, you have to be careful what restrictions you implement. Dorms are people's residences and there are rights that come with that. For example you could make a rule saying that employees can enter a room at any time for any reason, and you could give them keys to do so. You'd quickly find out, however, that the police disagreed with that view and those responsible would be in trouble, possibly jail.
Remember: Nearly all university students are adults, with all the rights it implies. Universities don't get to take those away just because they feel it is convenient. Dorms in many ways have to be treated like apartments: Just because you own them, doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to them.
It doesn't matter what they do to block it, if this catches on filetraders will just switch to a masquerading system so p2p traffic looks like "legit" traffic. If it's encrypted and over port 443 or 22, whose to say it's not a web server or ssh server?
If I were a college, I'd simply bill for or limit excess usage, tell the students how much cooperation if any we give to the mafiaa, and call it a day.
I wonder how many students would pull the plug on their p2p servers if the top 5% or even top 1% of off-campus-bandwidth dorm users had to pay cash for excess bandwidth.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
While I agree that it is unwise to mix in legitimate, legal file sharing with the rest, the current overwhelming disrespect for intellectual property understandably demands action from the university's perspective. Students in particular don't tend to see copyright infringement (lets be clear: downloading and redistributing apps, games, music, and movies) as wrong, and sometimes don't even believe that it is illegal. Even much of the Slashdot crowd tends to find infringement to be a justifiable activity on the basis of risk vs. reward. Copyright infringement is turning thousands of students and others into white collar criminals because it's becoming ever easier to commit. When they see their schoolmates settle with the RIAA, they don't learn a moral or legal lesson, but instead often learn a technical lesson and simply try harder not to get caught.
This crowd tends not to sympathize with artists, but maybe software piracy will be a clearer example. Universities often provide site licenses for commonly used software, and for anything beyond that, companies have always sold at significant discount to students. Recently, I can think of hearing about students who "needed" Microsoft Visio or Adobe Photoshop, but (without even looking at legitimate solutions) immediately turned to pirated software. Just because students are not willing to pay the price asked doesn't give them the right (much less the legal permission) to obtain it through other means. Unfortunately, since piracy is now so easy and so rarely enforced, they begin to feel that it's OK. That attitude needs to change, and it's likely going to take more frequent and more painful enforcement actions for that to happen.
Turn your DHCP records down to 24 hours. That's plenty of time for trouble shooting, but not enough time that there's useful information when the request arrives. You then respond "I'm sorry, but per our policy we do not keep records that far back in time and are unable to help you." They'll stop asking. Seems to work here at least. The real cops can (and do) get wiretap warrants if they need to check something out. Those people that are just on fishing expeditions, RIAA or otherwise, get told to go away.
UNC Chapel Hill blocked BitTorrent and Gnutella last December (without notifying anyone, I might add), and I'm pretty sure the entire system followed suit as of last month. Why did no one make a fuss then? How many more public universities are blocking internet services without telling us?
I've talked with some people in a couple of colleges in Mexico city. Here in Mexico filesharing isn't prosecuted as much as it is in the US - and yet I've seen bans in filesharing. Reason? Bandwidth. In one particular college, P2P activity covered around 99% of network activity, and webbrowsing became as slow as molasses until filesharing applications (napster at that time) were prohibited.
...there should be some sort of block or restriction on fire sharing..!
Oh wait, that was a typo! But more than once?!
(Read the summary!)
Like someone mentioned earlier, it doesn't stop someone sharing internally in their network. Blocking external access, also blocks the RIAA interrogating the internal sharing ;-)
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
"as for "non-school related activities": people live there. Its their home. I suppose university students are just supposed to be machines who do nothing but eat sleep and work, and of course obey whatever nanny-school tells them?"
Funny. My "home" was off campus. Payed for everything from my education to the apartment I was staying in, right down to the cell phone and broadband connection. Expensive? Yeah! But I was my own boss, but I was also held responsible for my actions like any adult should. Apparently "on campus" people feel different. As far as "eat, sleep, and work [and study]"? Well when you're going for a four-year degree that's pretty much all you have time for, and sometimes not even that.
All the cool kids are sneakernetting the stuff around - ripping CDs, stuffing stuff on thumb drives, and such.
So -- paint it simple, but you're just spouting unrealistically. Why would the university, which runs the phones AND the cable, pay to implement the internet twice? Hell, until 1999 or so they only had one pipe (spring) into all of VT anyway! I warned them this was stupid. They didn't listen until a campus-wide 24-hour outage. But I digress...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Ok, first off I have to say this. The best thing to do is fight back. Drain the blood of the industry either by fighting and taking them to court or by not buying anything and downloading everything. I am tired of this pussy-footing around bs that everyone does. There are two sides of the fight right now and society is on one side and big business is on the other. We have a lot more of us so we should start throwing our power around. Someone make up market campaigns against RIAA. Someone start taking these assholes to court. Someone start doing something. They want a fire fight then so be it. It is all about how to control media because once you control the media you control the masses...control the masses you control the money. I have already started to think of ways of mass marketing out against the RIAA and MPAA but I just need to actually get around doing it. For instance use things like Youtube or myspace for your voice.
Two things wrong that need to be fixed for the college or in general
Bandwidth- If this sucks so much bandwidth....doesn't that tell you, you need an upgrade. This goes back to how we have shitty internet here in America. Our broadband is terrible and needs to be updated. Telecoms don't want to update their backbone because they don't need to. They have the power to do whatever they want. It is just like gas prices. Consumers can complain about it all they want but that still doesn't change the fact that they still need gas. We still need the internet because it is now a part of our culture. My point is that the telecoms have to reduce the prices or set better network backbones to compensate what the public wants/needs.
Legal issues- Just because you p2p doesn't mean it isn't legal filesharing. I probably can guess that most of the files are illegal but now-a-days people decide what is legal and what isn't not the DMCA or what the RIAA is. Either way, this is stupid that the college is doing this because there are legal files to download. What about game updates (WoW) that uses p2p?
I really wonder if people understand that p2p is one of the best sources for knowledge. You can find everything about anything through torrenting. It isn't just about legal and money issues now, it is about the right to enjoy entertainment, art, books, software, and uh everything. 90% of what I have downloaded has been stuff that I wouldn't have known about. Stuff I would not have either paid for to begin with or don't have time to go see or listen to. Not only that but I am not going to start paying for stuff that I already own... I bought a Harry Potter collection at one point a few years ago and I haven't picked it up since, but I downloaded ebooks of it because I like reading off my computer and not reading from the books. I shouldn't have to pay twice because of media change. There are tons of educational tv shows or movies or books that I would not have ever seen. A lot of foreign things I wouldn't have seen also. This isn't just an American thing any more...you have the world to deal with now. It is something that will never stop no matter how many laws are passed or execs giving out notices.
The entertainment industry is really really struggling right now to figure out how to proceed for the future with money in their pockets. Whether it is game industry, movie industry, music industry, tv industry...they are all struggling with this (some more than others) They keep fighting everyone because they want to buy their third or forth houses or $100k+ cars that are useless in LA anyways, other than looks(woohoo). They struggle because everyone in the movie, music and tv industries get paid way way more than they should and some how we as a society put all celebs on a pedestal. Celebs need to start talking out. I want to hear from them. Because you know what, I haven't heard a damn thing from them. Possibly because they know the internet and programs like napster made them big to begin with. I guess as long as they keep getting money they just don't care.
Well, good luck to all the people over at Ohio. Maybe you should look at another school now. You know because it seems like the people high up in making decisions at your school are morons or lazy or stingy assholes to update their network.
I don't see a problem with it, block a pile of ports put in some sane port throttling mechanism. Then call it a day and say they did their part and tell the RIAA people to get stuffed.
When people just change to some random port or sit under the throttle point. I don't think the university is really obligated to go further.
The police don't escort people down the interstate -- they post a sign, they paint some lines, and bust people that violate the signs and the lines. Seems good enough.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Instead of whinning, now that it's perfectly possible to do so, why don't you set up a wireless meshed network that students will use over the gestapoed university network ?
I use bittorrent to legally download movies...
would it be legal for them to prevent me from doing so?
thank god I don't study in ohio...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
While this horribly draconian, stupid, pointless, and a fine example of educational institutions once again bending to the whim of content industry cartels, if they are going to be like that, they should treat dorms like every other apartment building in the world and allow the students to purchase their own internet connection if the ToS for the campus internet isn't acceptable (I would consider the inability to use Bittorrent completely unacceptable and barely worth being called "internet"). Chances are a student at this university will not only not be able to use the internet they pay for properly, it's not likely they'll be able to find an alternative ISP. Which should be illegal.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
First of all, accounting is a pain in the ass. Billing is problematic, and tacking it onto the fee statement tends to get irate parents calling once the bill comes due. "What do you mean Johnny racked up $1000 in bandwidth usage this semester?!"
Also, dealing with copyright complaints is time-consuming. The requirements in dealing with these notices include not only determining the name of the user who allegedly infringed, but also removing the infringing content. In the case of a university network, this means contacting the student regarding the incident, and telling them to stop sharing.
Blocking en masse means that word will spread quickly. You'll get a lot of complaints at first, but they'll trickle off once it becomes the norm. I don't necessarily agree with their decision, but it certainly means less work for the university staff in the long run.
The U owns the bandwidth, and rents it to students. They get to make the TOS. If the students don't like it, go to a different school. It's the school's prerogative. PERIOD. If they don't want their network flooded with crap so that people using it for academic purposes can have better/faster access, that's their decision.
And before you go hollering about the legal uses of P2P, put a sock in it. You and I both know that people downloading Linux ISOs are in the VERY SLIM FUCKING MINORITY.
These lazy, privileged, criminal kids who think its their RIGHT to have ANY MUSIC OR MOVIE they want WHENEVER THEY WANT IT, for FREE, no less, can blow me. Move somewhere else and go to school at a U that values transitory pop culture products over proper education if its that fucking important.
Let's hear about somebody whose rights are actually being trampled; not some well-to-do frat idiots who can't get free DMB songs.
If every university blocked p2p today, by this time next year a p2p program will be indistinguishable from a web server or other common "legitimate" device.
The colleges will have to block all servers, which will really tick people off and start a cottage industry of GoToMyPC-like matchmaker servers, or they will have to do something that actually works.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors
About 100 different FTP sites for Ubuntu. Twenty three in North America alone, and close to twice that in Europe. There you go. Now you don't have to worry about Ubuntu anymore.
PS - any legimate file for download is available via FTP or HTTP.
I completely agree with many of the people who have said that the universities should charge for bandwidth. I go to Cornell University and this is in fact what is done here on campus. In the newer dorms you can buy TV connections and therefore get cable internet, or you can use the on campus internet. For anyone who uses the on campus internet service, ResNet, their usage is monitored. We are given 5 GB/month and each additional GB is $1.50. This is only for off campus traffic however so there is still a lot of on campus P2P sharing. But, I think this is a much better step than completely stopping traffic outright. Students are free to do what they want and the university is reimbursed if someone goes crazy with bandwidth.
software distributed that way, it's fairly obvious that making Hollywood happy is more important than the educational interests of the students, particularly CS and engineering students. What's next, "intelligent design" biology classes to keep fundy wackos happy? There are a great many more of those than there are RIAA attorneys. Don't they have just as much right to tell a publically funded school how to apply its resources?
The best and brightest should vote with their feet to educational institutions where education is considered more important than well-funded political lobbying organizations. This isn't something I expect students to win against the administration on.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Maybe it's not everyone's beloved P2P being "illegal" or whatever.
Maybe it's the fact that torrents take a fucking ton of bandwidth?
I stand by my post. I believe the vast majority of P2P is for stealing music/movies. Not all of it, of course, but most of it.
Downloading a movie to avoid paying for it is stealing.
This does NOT mean that I think the RIAA should be allowed to do their hideous witch-hunt. There's a big difference between someone stealing a song and someone stealing a car. They should not be treated the same way.
As an I.T. Manager it's my job to protect my employer's interests, and one of those interests is not getting attacked legally over file sharing violations. It's the same for the university.
This claim that universities should allow all activities of any kind, at any time in the name of 'freedom' is idiotic. One thing you can learn at university: you cannot do anything you feel like without consequences. Obliging the university to use their own resources to support your need to steal music is not expanding anyone's rights, it's just selfish.
I used to be a big torrenter, using my home connection. I torrented every thing under the sun, just 'cause I could. Since I switched to linux last year I haven't really torrented much of anything. Last thing I remember torrenting was a linux ISO. I suppose I have a question out there for the university torrenters. Torrenting software without a proper license IS illegal, I don't think anyone will argue with me there. Following that train of thought, wouldn't you want to follow the law and not download illegal software? Ok, so maybe its not free(dom), maybe the law is immoral or whatever. When it comes down to it, can't you find the same software legally in the open source world? If its music I bet you have 10 spare bucks to pick up the CD down at walmart. And if its a game? I bet if you rationed your pizza intakes for a few weeks you could get the 50 bucks you need. And don't go whining about convenience, because now-a-days Digital Download is everywhere. So, basically, is the software/music/movies whatever so vital that you NEED it, and you just don't have any money at all to buy it? I bet spring break trips aren't cheap, imagine how many months of WoW you could purchase with those airline tickets.
Actually, yes, I can see legitimate academic uses for P2P. When I was working on my thesis (pre-p2p) many of the things I was working with then (via a complex system of mirrors) are now distributed using p2p, including software distributions and large datasets. I have also recently downloaded a good bit of security software (e.g AutoPatcher) via P2P. A lot of the complex mirror systems and sites have been able to be reduced by P2P technology. For a lot of research projects, Open Source saves quite a bit of money, and Linux sure beats trying to get funding for Sun workstations.
That being said, I would have been able to get permission from the Major Head or whoever, if needed. In fact, we did have to have some discussions over bandwidth usage, some of which was solved by mirroring software needed by several students locally to reduce usage (what P2p does automatically), and part of the problem of legitimate P2P usage can be solved going back to the manual approach.
As an aside, academic access needs are sometimes very different from corporate norms. At one point, for a Women's Studies paper, I needed to view Internet content of a "less than savory nature", which would likely have been banned by default in any corporate network. I won't elaborate on the content except to say that it was not graphical and that I felt like disassembling and scrubbing my computer afterward.
I like the idea that some folks have put forward of simply putting account caps on the students across the board. This eliminates problems with tunneling and cans other download protocols as well. People who use P2P legitimately on an irregular basis won't be affected.
IF stealing a car and copying a song are different, why are you saying they are the same? Why are you contradicting yourself? Logically, legally, they are not and for good reason. One = deprival of somebody's property or whatnot without permission and importantly, removing it from their posession. The other you are looking for, copyright infringement, is making a copy of data that violates the applicable restrictions, "rights," without depriving the owner of anything they had before, or of any property, though a breach of rights has occured alone this is different from theft. You also fail to back up your claim with little reasoning more than "it is, it is, it is, repeat argument, repeat argument". I also like how you lump all music downloading as one, broad big bad act, when many musicians would disagree with your stance quite strongly.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
And suppose my use of my piece of the network available to all users is filesharing. That's how I want to spend my bandwidth share. If that's the case, why don't I get the same access as anyone else for any other application? If this is simply a bandwidth issue, then cap the bandwidth either by total speed, or by usage per day.
And if it's not a bandwidth issue, then quit claiming that it is.
I wonder how good they'll be at catching less common, unlisted, P2P apps
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Sneakernet is back, baby. among my friends and I we've shared a great number of songs and ebooks among ourselves over sneakernet2.0.
Here's how it works. It isn't really a network in its own right, just as an extension of the internets. See, I hop on my friendly "local" bittorent, invite only site and DL say, rosetta stone language learning software, the whole set of them. Now I don't need all of them, but I get them anyway, nothing new here. After that when I talk to a friend who needs to learn Arabic, I burn him a copy of the CD so he doesn't have to waste time Dling the whole damn thing himself.
Alternately, I just burn some DVDs with all the languages on them and hand them out to everyone who wants one of the languages. There could be around 100 of the things in circulation, more than technically needed, but redundancy is a good thing.
This works with just about anything really. I'm the super node of sneakernet and the others are sub-nodes, because they still trade amongst themselves.
A blog about stuff.
I can share music and stuff through AIM/MSN Messenger/Yahoo Messenger/etc. I'd like to see the university try and ban the use of those on campus. They'd lose 95% of the student body.
you know what's stealing? Taking a cultural heritage and then buying off the FCC AND every radio station in the nation until there is only One True Source.
and they're upset? Let Our Music Go!
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Back in college we just shared files over the LAN.
When I went to OU, I lived in dorms for 3 years. Every room is provided with at least one school computer/monitor/printer, and often more, not to mention that IT would lend you a hub for free if you needed more ports, plus free wifi for students nearly campus-wide, and plenty of empty, air conditioned computer labs (rarely used because most people were using their computers in their rooms or their laptops on wifi... Beowulf, anyone?). So even the poorest student has PLENTY of accessibility.
Back then, there was a lot of port throttling going on. Trying to serve anything from inside campus was nearly impossible due to the bandwidth being quickly throttled down, even on port 80. As for getting information from outside the campus network, only port 80 worked with any reasonable speed. Other ports were throttled back to the extreme, so much that watching a streaming video was often impossible. If you think academic information only comes in the form of text on a web page, you're mistaken - as a music major, there were tons of video and audio resources made unavailable by draconian bandwidth throttling. And no, I'm not going to send a special request to IT for each instance; that's impractical.
While it is obvious that many students choose to infringe on copyright law, the true problem I believe is bandwidth usage. College is so expensive that I don't think any student would bat an eye at an extra $100/month in bandwidth expenses, to say the least. That's about the cost of books, though internet access provides enormous academic and social benefits.
The best way to handle the situation is to provide more than enough bandwidth for academic and social needs, and try students who infringe on copyright law in school court. If they're found guilty, they get kicked out of school for a year.
Add on to all this that OU subscribes to CDigix for all students - even if you live off campus. This company provides students with tons of cd quality music, entire albums, etc., of not only popular but also obscure artists, and it's completely legal, and many students are very happy with the content it provides.
Because of the quick pace of technology change, banning p2p seems unwise to me. However, OU is a business, and like any business, it will do whatever the directors feel it needs to in order to make as much money as quickly as possible.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
It's just an incentive for the research students to develop a method to circumvent the block.
Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network ... is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing?
Ain't that a bit racialist? I'm sure it's not just the Asian students who are involved.
Next they will call out the National Guard and start shooting students-
oh, wait, they don't shoot students in Ohio, do they?
The "nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities"?
/sarcasm
If you want your concerns to be taken seriously, stop asking the rest of us to play fools. EVERYONE knows what most students most use P2P for: transferring materials in violation of copyright.
You have some gall to suppose that the TAXPAYERS of the State of Ohio should continue subsidizing your illegal acquisition of movies and software and porn while you whine about "internet freedom".
You can have all the freedom you want (within the bounds of the law) just as soon as you move off campus and foot the bill for it yourself.
You are being deprived of about as much "freedom" as your parents requiring you to be home by midnight when you take THEIR car out.
And what about the legitimate uses that you will no doubt trumpet (because of course, *you* have never used P2P for any purpose inconsistent with the educational mission of the institution)?
It says right in the announcement that exceptions will be made for LEGITIMATE needs for P2P use. Developing a new P2P client and need to test it out on the dorm network? Go ask your technical coordinator; he or she will work with you to meet your needs consistent with the eductational mission of the institution. Need to collect real world data on a new exotic P2P network structure you are researching for your team project? Go ask IT services; they are there to help you. Need to download the latest copy of Linux Distro X available only on BitTorrent? Yup, that's legitimate too. Go ask.
Now, if it turns out that they can not accomodate your legitimate educational needs when you go ask, then you might have something to complain about.
But until then, if you feel that you need unrestricted P2P, you'll have to take it to the taxpayers of your state who are subsidizing your activity. I'm sure they'll be happy to cough up a few more dollars so that you can download porn faster.
"and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?"
NO, students do not pay big bucks. Students pay a small fraction of the highly subsidized costs of their education - tuition, facilities, infrastructure, salaries - at a TAXPAYER funded public institution such as Ohio University.
And I assure you, the taxpayers of Ohio have much better things to do with their money than to foot enormous bandwidth bills so that students can illegally download copyrighted music, movies, and porn faster. I'd like to see them take that argument to the floor of their state legislature.
"Hay guys, I used to download movies and porn really quick, but now it's slowed to a trickle. Please increase the property tax levy to PIMP MY P2P!"
That's why people who aren't 20 year old college students don't give two shits about your "plight".
Who cares. Its not like its not already blocked at every single "smaller school" ie private high schools.. etcetera... in the country (thats a royal every). I can't speak for the public sector, however...
What the students will do next is rent (or maybe buy) some big gigabit switches (with a lot of cat5/6), rent space (with power) for a day at Baker or the Convo center, and setup a "networking party". Will the administration claim that is taking the bandwidth?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This mainly comes from the RIAA letters and them covering their asses, and possibly from our new CIO (we've been through several in the past 5 years). The part about using up bandwidth is complete BS to me and I have never heard one word about limiting my network usage until those letters came. OU is in the process of upgrading all the buildings to gigabit.
It's my theory that we get so many letters here because every dorm with an Ethernet jack has a world viewable IP address (no NAT and as far as I can tell it's static, mine's been the same for about 100 days). That's all great for me, but I guess the RIAA likes it too. There was an open meeting about this today at 7pm, but I had a midterm. I'll look around for a transcript or something
Lastly, a copy of the email sent to students earlier today
my UID occurs in pi starting at the 384,199 digit after the decimal point.
If college kids have to pay a bit for their own connection.
Like Time/Warner or ATT are going to have friendlier offerings? This is not about sharing the latest pop crap, it's about free speech and press. Your rights and privacy are being attacked in ways previously impossible.
What you see here is the final attack on the last segments of free internet. This is particularly egregious at public universities, where the network is truly built and owned by you and me and should remain open and free. Through many bad laws and FCC decisions, "broadband" internet competition in the US is limited to no more than two providers in any given area. Those providers have been coerced into wiretapping provisions for Total Information Awareness, despite the explicit condemnation of that program by Congress. The same providers are guilty of worse abuses for proffit and at the behest of the big publishers. Port blocks, crimped uploads, dynamic addresses, traffic monitoring and reporting, email violations and other abuses are universally practiced and are considered acceptable behavior by these greedy companies. Now the same greedy bastards are pushing their agendas onto the last surviving public networks. The goal is to spy and suppress publishing competition.
All of the above is a complete outrage, possible only where government prevents real competition and neglects it's regulatory duty. The only thing worse than government sponsored monopolies is unregulated government sponsored monopolies.
It's time to turn these greed heads out. A future without free publications is just too awful to contemplate but that's what you will have if we allow the big publishers to do to the internet what they did to broadcast and cable.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This makes no sense. Enforcing a protocol ban will take way more time than it took to fill out extorti^H^H^H^H lawsuit papers. Especially with the protocol obfuscation encryption that the new BitTorrent clients have, it will take a staff of network engineers to administer the network, as opposed to a staff of student-slaves to fill out paperwork. So either they're stupid, or that excuse is bullshit and they're just going through the motions to appease the RIAA.
The solution, as always, is not to outright ban something, but to provide the service with certain consequences (e.g. bandwidth throttling, extra fees, lawsuits teehee). And propaganda, of course...
As a native Ohioan who has friends who went to OU, I always wonder why OU's filesharing activities get picked up by the media. OU is in the middle of BFE and there is absolutely nothing to do out there besides drink yourself stupid, but that is the situation with a lot of universities ( at least in Ohio ).
I remember back in the late 90s there was an NPR piece about filesharing at OU (might have been Berlin, I'm not sure). Is this the genesis of the OU filesharing media meme?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
One thing everybody seems to forget is that by enrolling into a university, you literally sign a contract for enrollment and that these enrollment contracts usually include a termination clause that allows the university to expell a student for violating any laws or Terms of Service.
Simply put, if Ohio-U wanted to be real f**ktards about the entire situation, they could expell damn near every student for violating the contract signed by their enrollment.
So a student gets expelled for violating one of the contract terms and although as an individual, you do have the right to challenge the termination of any contract that's incomplete, just where is the money going to come from and how long will it take to get a decision by the courts?
Responding to properly submitted legal papers is a requirement of such an organization. Even if it turns out that the RIAA ends up unable to make their case, the university still has to bear the cost of responding to subpoenas.
Caving into extortion is disgraceful. An appropriate response is silence. The RIAA has no case and should be made to pay. Caving in and attacking the rights of those your serve is the wrong response.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
if they cant provide the bandwidth they sold to their customers then they should be sued for fraud, not allowed to strip down and hobble what they advertised as "unlimited".
The ISPs contend that unlimited meant always-connected, not always maxed-out. I wish they didn't put that bit in the fine print of an ad, but I've seen it there.
Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
Bandwidth overselling is one way that that ISPs can give you an affordable rate. I've heard of ISP techs saying that they use as much as a 50:1 oversell rate and only very rarely does anyone notice. They aren't providing a guaranteed bandwidth, for that, they want more money, such as providing a more expensive service such as what they sell to businesses.
Students are now paying fairly big bucks and the universities have been bought by corporations to be research arms for much cheaper than the corporations would have to pay for the research if they were paying market rates for all the work done by students.
The average grad student probably defers a couple hundred thousand dollars in income and works basically "for free".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
"Left unchecked, P2P applications can consume all available network bandwidth," The bandwidth is an ok reason.
You have to ask yourself why they have bandwith before you decide it's use is bad. From what I remember, the network was built to share information. P2P does that more efficiently than other services do, so suppressing P2P is not OK. Copyrights exist to spread knowledge and advance the state of the art. This is a clear example of copyright laws being used against both of those goals. The social costs outweigh the gains.
Second guessing the administrators is pointless. They are violating your rights, so you should complain no matter how they justify it. The profits of publishing companies are not worth your freedom and security.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's about controlling bandwidth costs that have soared as a result of the explosive growth of p2p traffic.
P2P is more efficient than traditional internet protocols because most of the traffic is local. Blaming P2P for network costs is like blaming roads for traffic jams.
If deciding who can share and publish is not a free speech issue, I'm not sure what is. You might read the relevent sections of the Bill of Rights again, you seem to have forgotten than government laws against publishing violates the first amendment to the US Constitution.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Second, you have excess bandwidth usage. This is really simple: Charge the students a reasonable fee for bandwidth overages
Students already pay to maintain their network. I don't think it will wear out sooner because people use it. What would you suggest as a "reasonable" fee for a public network other than a flat fee that covers the cost of repair and upgrade?
It's almost always cheaper to fix bandwith problems by building up your network. Money spent limiting traffic is pure waste. The social costs of limiting publications are a bigger waste still.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"It might be more reasonable for the school just to block sources that provide illegal content, or allow students to request that legal sources be added to a whitelist."
Kind of hard to determine what's illegal and what's legal when P2P writers tunnel everything through port 80, and hide the source.
we are implementing pay for service very soon (mainly to cover the cost of re-wiring our older buildings as well as wiring newly purchased properties)
My university has had a flat tech fee for years to pay for stuff like that. Some of that spending has been missused on personal tracking technology, "software deals" from M$, and obnoxious network logins, but there is no bandwith problem. This, despite a typical bot/spam gamer and p2p load. I can't imagine them charging per bandwith consumed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I've read the constitution, thanks.
The first step in regaining control of your culture and rights is to reject non free software.
Evangelizing again?
It is all the more outrageous that this violation of your security and free speech is being done on behalf of companies engaged in a reign of terror, where suspected copyright infringers are threatened with the loss of their life savings and livelyhoods.
I don't know why twitter, but I always think of this when I read these posts of yours.
The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.
It's the margarine of the 'torrent world.
DATABASE WOW WOW
"Most educational establishments already have rules governing how and what is allowed on their network, but banning/restricting a technology altogether is a bit naff."
Well apparently people don't want to "follow the rules"*, and one of two things happen in that case. One everyone loses the privilage, but that doesn't work as well in a university setting but might in a business setting. Two the present situation were a technology is limited in some way. It may not be fair to the innocent, but since the dishonest will never admit to such everyone suffers. Welcome to the world of consequences.
*You may have forgotten that slashdot story last year about how many people felt it's OK to violate copyright.
Now that they've branded all P2P as illegal, what about someone downloading say linux ISO images or open source software?
also, what about internal P2P sharing would that be branded as illegal as well?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I don't know why twitter, but I always think of this when I read these posts of yours."
LOL, nice to know he has that effect on other people too. Good night everyone, and happy arguing!
If you're that worried I would start looking at the taxpayer funded 120 hours spent doing work for the RIAA. Maybe the taxpayers should start looking at how much time the government is also spending on the concerns of RIAA, MPAA, etc.
The RIAA almost always has a very strong case.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.
First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars, but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I don't know why twitter, but I always think of this [cute kitten image] when I read these posts of yours.
Thanks, I like kittens. Here's as many of them as you want. Here are boobs. (very nice!)
For some reason though, whenever I see your name Bungi, I think of this (shit).
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Offer a couple of different options for internet access, so that you (students) pay up front for a certain amount of bandwidth to be available to you. You'd probably have to do some sort of MAC address registration for those who bought anything above the bottom, so that you could throttle bandwidth based on MAC address. Then, people who want to download a lot of stuff could pay for a faster connection, and the extra money the university gets from that could be used to buy a big enough pipe to serve the total bandwidth needs of the campus. Research labs and (perhaps) professors' offices could still have unlimited bandwidth, you don't have to block anything, you don't have surprises for the parents on the billing, and you don't have too much traffic for your pipe, so research isn't hindered.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
You have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Of Ohio State's $3.76 billion 2006/2007 budget, only $510 million (13.5%) came from state appropriations.
Considerably more money ($921 million / 24.5%) came from students. And even more than that came from the hospital that Ohio State operates.
Is this information hard to find? No! It's right on the Ohio State site, right here.
The fact is, at Ohio State, students funding is twice as big a factor as state funding. And student funding isn't a "small fraction" - it's nearly a quarter of the entire budget.
I go to a "state funded" school (University of Colorado at Boulder), but Colorado only contributes 8.1% of the funding for my university. Student fees and tuition contribute 39% of the budget - almost five times as much as state funding.
I am so sick and tired about this "what are my tax dollars doing" bullshit with regards to educational institutions. There are 26,000 people who attend my university. That's larger than most of the cities in Wyoming.
If a city offered municipal internet access (as many Slashdot users would like), would it be OK if the city decided that you shouldn't be allowed to use? What if the city prevented other providers from offering services on their premises?
Here we go again. Because, if someone is using BitTorrent, they must be a dirty criminal. Give me a break. There are so many legitimite uses for P2P that it's not even funny. I downloaded an Ubuntu CD when 7.04 came out using BitTorrent. Public domain and educational materials - including videos - are distributed with BitTorrent. There are even professors on campus who use BitTorrent to distribute video lectures.
Maybe you are too short-sighted to see the many uses of P2P technology. Guess what? The vast majority of email sent today is spam. That doesn't mean that email isn't a valuable tool.
I remember when Bill Owens made an incredibly stupid statement about how CU should dismiss a particular professor. Owens didn't seem to understand that universities have a large degree of autonomy - it's not the Governor who selects the Regents, it's the voters. If you don't like what's happening at Ohio State, elect different representatives. But don't go pretending that the State legislature should make policy decisions. Ohio doesn't like it when the Federal Government decides to interfere. Your City Council doesn't like it when the State interferes.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
You missed the first five words there - "Congress shall make no law". There's no law here being made.
Let people do whatever they want ON THEIR OWN BANDWIDTH.
Even when I was in college (in the Napster heyday) our connections sucked due to the amount of bandwidth wasted on Napster, online gaming (I realize it's fairly low bandwidth, but a lot of it adds up) and on other non-academic, network uses.
The primary function of a university is not to serve as a playground for spoiled kids with tons of tech and too much freetime to screw around all night on the Internet downloading movies and music (often illegally at that) or playing computer games. If universities have so much excess bandwidth that they don't notice or are not impacted by very high amount of P2P traffic, I suggest that they have too much bandwidth and would be wise to pare down their connection and direct any resultant financial savings towards more academic ventures, assuring that their students are better prepared for the real world.
Yes, there are legitimate (as in non-illegal) uses for Bittorrent and other P2P apps, but come on. What percentage of bandwidth used for file sharing is used for legitimate, legal activities? Certainly not a majority and probably not a significant minority.
Now mod me down because I said that downloading copies of movies and music is exactly that: illegal (it probably shouldn't be, but the law as it stands currently is after all the law). Oh, and also because I said that it's ok for one entity to set rules and policies for how a separate entity uses its network resources.
Message contains 1 attachment: spam.gif
Here at UT, we have to pay $20/mo to get 4 GB/wk of data transfer (that's 4,000,000 bytes, not 4*1024^3 bytes) in our dorm. To sweeten the deal, all the rooms get 100 Mbps lines and traffic between on-campus computers do not count against us. Exceed the allocation and you'll have to deal with ISDN speeds until "reset day." My fellow students can complain about this all they want, but freedom is not free and I am content knowing that I can seed Linux distros every now and then.
I remember when universities were the beacon of freedom for the establishment of the internet. Now universities are a bunch of whores that bow to the institution that don't welcome openess or freedom. Every year the salaries raise for the executives that run the university as student tuitions rise and rise and rise. Far as I concerned I hope that the internet genre i grew up with will fight for the freedom that once was at universities and not bow to the fuckin retards that run them now. Its a fuckin retard convention that runs the IT departments of most universities now. If I could post picture of drool I would.
According to Wikipedia the .torrent file can be extract from the blizzard downloader and used with another bittorrent client.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader
If a normal client can exchange data with peers using the Blizzard downloader then how, broken, non-compliant can it be? Also what difference does the port in use have to do with compliance? I use uTorrent and it seems to work fine on whatever port I feel like using.
I don't think schools should start setting up "courts" to "prosecute" their own students for copyright infringement. They wouldn't be qualified, I'd be expensive, and it's not their job. Schools should comply with the law, co-operate with the RIAA et al as little as possible and let real courts take care of the problem. Students who are consuming excess bandwidth (for whatever purpose, no the schools business imho) should have their access restric or revoked (preferably after at least one warning). At my university they had a simple system. You could do whatever you want with your bandwidth however there was a sliding window of 1 week and if your total amount for that week exceeded x (around 500mb I think it was) then your connection was throttled down to the point where web browsing was highly annoying (but not impossible) and would stay so until the window slided enough to reduce your average. If it looked like you were up to no good (or infected with something contagious) your service would be cut (often by an automated process right away for a virus). So anyone who wanted to download a bunch of crap could go right ahead a use up their personal limited resource which no one did (very often) because slow Internet really sucks. I couldn't accept this so I got DSL (already had a phone line included with room and bell had a deal where it was first 6mo for $20/mo and I was only gonna be there for 8) and became the guy in my building that got all the goods and used another box to share it over the local network. However whenever I wanted to play something online (I was into quake 3 at the time) I'd switch to the local network because of it's superior latency thanks to no one hosing the network The network resources provided were more then enough to support learning and in fact met most peoples "social" needs. Everyone else worked around it (like a box at your parents house that you could VNC into and grab your D/L's next time your home). I don't think it's fair to make the average student pay more for (or have more of their money diverted to) the "social needs" (how is d/lding movies and p0rn a social need?... Ok well maybe p0rn but that's it) of a minority of bandwidth pigs (like myself). I think it would be a good idea if schools became more like commercial ISP's providing a basic service for free (included with residence fee's, ect) and sell more bandwidth to those who want to pay. They should also be the kind of ISP's that don't keep logs for more then say 48 hours or so...
A state funded university should not be babysitting students or censoring network traffic as they do. The law is clear that universities are not responsible for content being transfered since they are acting as an ISP. The law only requires that they respond to take down requests for content on servers they control. The university does not have control over students personel possessions or computers, thus they are under no obligation here. They are in fact protected under the DMCA and other federal statutes. Universities are prohibited from releasing student information to the RIAA under privacy statutes regarding students rights. The big problem is not what is being transfered, but how the networks have been configured and are being paid for. The shared resources should be equally divided like ADSL- not like most cable internet services. The other option is to charge based on bandwidth usage. Students should not be firewalled, forced to install non-free software, or censored in any way. Many universities are doing all three. Students should be opting in and paying separate fees for internet services in the dorm room. Most universities make students do this for telephone, cable TV, and other services. Why not internet access? The other thing I can tell you from my experiences with IT is that the problems exist almost solely in the dorms, and not on the academic networks (assuming they are divided this way). I can tell you that free uncensored, unfirewalled, capped internet access can still be provided in academic buildings without significant burdens on IT. I have been very active in my universities information technology issues and found everything I've said to be very true in practice.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
I am confused, is Ohio for arsonists and firefighters. Slashdot seems to be on subject of fire sharing.
And two words of Ohio U: Give up.
In my opinion universities should be places for innovation and experimentation. Though I agree that using university network for downloading movies from a torrent is not very innovative, I am against the university making the thing impossible. University students should be able to experiment with new technologies, even during their free time. P2P is just a technology, which could be a legitimate way of distributing media in the future. It would not be a good thing to prevent the students from understanding the technology properly by banning it because of one problem.
There are also legitimate uses for P2P applications. These include Linux distro distribution, World of Warcraft and other game updates (Valve?), Skype, Groove etc. As I understand even MS Windows has some built in P2P technologies. MS Office 2007 server edition integrates the Groove technology in itself. Should we also ban Windows and Office applications?
If the real problem is with bandwidth consumption, there are easy solutions to this via different Quality of Service network equipment. Bandwidth usage can be limited to certain level and each user can be shared an equal amount of bandwidth without even prioritizing different applications.
If you want your concerns to be taken seriously, stop asking the rest of us to play fools. EVERYONE knows what most students most use P2P for: transferring materials in violation of copyright.
Wow...Someone on Slashdot who is opposed to piracy. I'm honestly at a loss for words, here...I didn't know that people who thought like this actually existed outside of the RIAA. What's your motivation? Are you in the music industry yourself, or are you merely ovine and catastrophically naive?
But until then, if you feel that you need unrestricted P2P, you'll have to take it to the taxpayers of your state who are subsidizing your activity. I'm sure they'll be happy to cough up a few more dollars so that you can download porn faster.
I saw another poster here who pays $20 a month for Internet access to his dorm. If other people at his university are doing that, it wouldn't be the taxpayers who are paying for it at all, would it?
I live in the dorms at the university I attend, and they also block P2P clients of all types. But there are pretty much no limits otherwise. I can dwonload linux distros and creative commons media by the truckload with no problem. Our network uses a Cisco Clean Access system, so I would assume everyone's net usage can be tracked back to the network ID account, which is static for the user. I've never had a reason to do so, but I'll bet I could get an exception for bittorrent (for legal purposes only, of course) applied to my ID. Although the IT policies are lax, it is only because their official policies are unenforcabel without major backlash from students. The IT policiy basically says internet resources on campus are for academic use only to complete assignments and courses. 95% of what most students do on the net does not fit this at all. The reason they don't enforce this is because it would eliminate personal email, all personal web traffic (including slashdot, GASP!), all internet radio (often needed to keep students in good mental health), and basically anything else. It would be cutting off the students from the outside world except for phone. The reason I mention this is because sometimes the wrong IT person will look at your network usage and compare it to this outdated, draconian policy and shut off your net for arbitrary reasons such as using internet radio (which is perfectly legal), or viewing pornography (which, ironically, is not expressly prohibited by the IT policies, and I would assume is legal in the US if you are over the age of 18, which I am.) My dorm neighbors have had to deal with IT on these issues on a couple of occasions, and they turned thier net back on when they pointed out the implications of enforcing their outdated policies and the legality of their activities. So in a way, blocking P2P is basically a small step toward enforcing their own rules, but in a way, it's breaking their rules by cutting off students and preventing free speech, or any kind of speech at all.
Because it's inconvenient, and they shouldn't have to. And how many fscking times are you going to post that same trollish rhetorical question?
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Whilst attending University of Bristol (UK), filesharing was rife, especially internal DC++ hubs. So, the banned it all and by the time I left pretty much all the filesharing ports were blocked. What the students can use superJANET for now don't know!
We have about 1000 hosts. We get maybe 1 notice a month. It's never legitimate use. It's always sharing of copyrighted material. There's an exception process for legitimate use (grabbing Centos 5 for example). But that never happens. It's always illegal. Freedom is not at stake. Just freedom to disobey the law...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
I go to Cardiff Uni in the UK, and I can tell you, US students have it so much better. The majority of UK uni's do the same as cardiff, which is effectivly block UDP traffic. They also block IRC. There are no games, no file sharing, no IRC, and internal traffic is monitored so you cant easily swap files inside the network. There is always tunneling, but thats just a pain.
Ohio State http://www.osu.edu/ and Ohio University http://www.ohio.edu/ are two totally different universities.
No, it means that eventually all peer to peer applications will be using SSL over port 443 so nobody will be able to tell what the traffic is.
Congress shall make no law
Ohio state university is not congress. They are private entity. If I run a school, coffee shop or bar, I can block whatever traffic I want to on my open wireless access point.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
Outsourcing the dorm network is a great idea. Use VPNs or similar to connect to the campus network.
Heck, you might even be able to turn it into a profit center by offering it out to bids. In order to be "fair" to students you'd need to allow 3rd-party DSL and Cable-Internet lines in also.
CALL FOR BIDS:
Manage 10/100/1000Mbps ethernet contract for university dorm and apartment contract with a potential market of 10,000+ students.
You will have the exclusive right to offer students Internet access at speeds above {insert maximum available DSL/Cable speed here} for 1 year.
Qualifications: Bidder must have proven track record managing large installations in a home-consumer environment and managing large installations in a heavy-user environment. Winning bidder must have at least one pricing package that allows {insert reasonable bandwidth + reasonable usage cap} for {insert reasonable price}/semester, must allow students in the same room to share a connection, must not prohibit wireless connections (but can nominally prohibit sharing with other customers - good luck with enforcement), and must understand that students will not be required to subscribe.
Then tell the students that their rent no longer includes free Internet (but it will be dropped by {insert reasonable price}/semester), and that WiFi wireless in the dorm areas will be a "free for all" and will likely have too much interference to be useful.
There's a valid educational reason to do this:
It prepares students for the real world and teaches them the value of budgeting.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
From the OU FAQ:
"P2P file sharing isn't just about stealing music and movies. What if I have a legitimate use for it?"
Why are they perpetuating the myth that copyright infringement is stealing? Being a university, you'd think they'd have a bit of a clue.. at least their law department should make them aware of the facts, not the MAFIAA spin.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
As a Network Admin for Concordia University, we have also taken the same approach of blocking P2P traffic using an appliance called CopySense from Audible Magic Corporation. Our philosophy for the blocking is a bit different than trying to avoid RIAA. We simply cannot afford the bandwidth hog that P2P is on our campus. CopySense allows us to open certain types of downloads based on keywords. So, we allow people to use P2P to download legitimate files like Linux distributions etc, but everything else is blocked. For us it's not about Internet freedom, but the cost of supporting the constant bandwidth strain that P2P causes. Before CopySense, P2P was killing our ability to do legitimate academic work on the Internet.
50:1 (or higher) used to be a doable overbooking ratio for an ISP. That was true because the typical individual demand for service was actually pretty low over any arbitrarily long period of time. Each individual would have a very spiky usage pattern, with short bursts of traffic interspersed with fairly long periods of quiescence. That model doesn't work with P2P because it essentially creates a new traffic model of always on, constant send and receive. That places a burden on the network that it hasn't been engineered for.
:) )
Hey, if someone wants to fire up BT and leave it on for long periods, I say more power to 'em. They just need to be prepared to pay for the bandwidth that you are using above and beyond the standard usage pattern. (Well, that, and you need an ISP willing to offer you such a contract.
Why not setup your own "Private Internet", instead.
That way the University wouldn't suffer from the bandwidth crunch.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
more like ensure everyone learns2encrypt
Ohio University is by no means the first place to do this. Universities everywhere have been blocking all kinds of P2P for years. That doesn't meant that people won't find a way around it or something else instead, but everyone shouldn't be acting like this is a new thing that's ending the world for P2P.
(IANAL...)When are people going to realize there is a difference between "file-sharing" and "illegal file sharing". The burden of proof is on the owner of a copyright to show it has been violated. While I am sure that many many illegal files have been shared at this university, stopping all file sharing goes above and beyond what is allowable.
My understanding in theory is that under the US Constitution, freedom means we should be allowed to do something unless prohibited by law. We seem to be precariously close to making it law but so far, my understanding is that if a file is not copyrighted, anyone should be free to use it, see it or copy it. That said, the university's network is a private network and I suppose they are allowed to make their own rules for its use.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Fire sharing sounds dangerous. Back in my day, they used to call that arson. But, alas, times have changed.
"Because it's inconvenient"
Lazy sounds more like it.
"...and they shouldn't have to."
You get out what you put in.
"And how many fscking times are you going to post that same trollish rhetorical question?"
Until you all realize it's a viable solution to the problem (not that I'm the OP. I just agree with him).
The ironic aspect to the "information wants to be free" argument is how little of the information is actually used. The history of Jefferson is not only widely available, it passed out of copyright a long time ago. Here's the other irony. Those who talk about how indispensable the internet is, but once again we see people not using it. Apparently there's little correlation between accessability and literacy.
I don't know about you guys, but "fire shaing" ought to be blocked or at least restricted
A silly Windoze user tries to apply M$ logic to free software:
Do you think if you downloaded an open source firewall that your head would explode?
No, because I'd own the firewall and would not use it to infringe on the rights of others. Because I don't run Windoze, I don't need to "firewall" much and only have such things because my ISP will only provide a single IP address that I must share with others.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You missed the first five words there - "Congress shall make no law". There's no law here being made.
Nice try, but Ohio can't violate your free speech rights either. This applies to laws, "rules" and any policy that might violate the first amendment. The violation remains, no matter what you call it or who does it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It is not Ohio State. I live near Ohio University and people get confused all the time. It is not Ohio STATE University, it is Ohio University. There is a difference.
Well, now we know what you do with your free time. Thanks for sharing.
Have fun!
(from here)
The students are expected to limit their 10meg line to 128kbit/s. Or they ban you.
AND we PAY for this service out of the dorm fees.
Actually, you are completely wrong. To take your US Post example, any private organisation, be they a school, coffee shop or airline, is free to insist that any person entering their premises turns over all documents they are carrying to be inspected. Of course, customers are just as free to not enter the premises. Your ISP could make it a term of their contract that all customers consent to have a keylogger installed. Not unconstitutional. Unethical, probably illegal if they don't tell you about it, sure. But unconstitutional? No, not really.
I could also install a pay phone in my imaginary coffee shop, and tell my customers I was going to eavesdrop on their conversations. Neither of those are unconstitutional. Were Congress to pass a law saying all phone conversations are to be monitored, now that is probably unconstitutional.
I would imagine that what Ohio state University did here was look at the amount of hassle and risk involved in allowing P2P on their network, and came to the conclusion that that the risks outweighed the benefits. I would probably have done the same if I was in the business of providing residents with Internet access. If you think it's unconstitutional, explain why, with citations. The section you cited earlier limits the ability of congress to pass laws, not the drawing up of private contracts. Ohio University != congress.
"I realise this is not a very popular opinion but it's the truth, and there for needs to be said" -Bill Hicks
ha ha, you're getting screwed.
around here, (northern california) you can get DSL starting at $20/mo for 1.5mbit/384kbit. My line actually gets like 1.5mbit/480kbit, so I'm pretty happy. Of course you can pay more to get faster.
Comcast usually runs specials, probably when my DSL contract runs out, if Comcast is running another one of their specials, i'll sign up for that (usually it's $20-$30, for 6months to a year)
Even said, all of us are living in the dark ages compared to other countries...Sweden for example you can get like 50mbit for the equivilent of $40USD/month. Don't get me started on japan and south korea.
sig? uhh, umm, ok
Link to 4chan. I dare you.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --