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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?
The Blizzard downloader uses Bittorrent to download patches.
My college, which is private, doesn't allow even iTunes sharing amongst the students
I went to a state college in the 90's and they kept the dorm networks completely separate from the school networks. I don't know if it was foresight or not, but they appeared to keep the college system up and running all the time, but the dorm network often slowed to a crawl (and this was before Napster) and you had to foot it out to a lab if you needed something off the network.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
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/
They don't always get that option. Back when I was at Berkeley in 2000, bandwidth was getting hammered hard. Some people even thought of getting their own service, but phone and cable co.s don't have the necessary access to the dorm network that they would need to put that in place, and rescomp wouldn't give it to them anyway.
Course, it has been 6 years, things may have changed, but I doubt it...
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.
I went through those problems living in a dorm, then they blocked p2p using the completely bogus "to stop viruses" excuse.
for the next 2 years the network was crawling even slower than it was before.
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?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That is the basis of both "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement is not theft [in the literal sense]".
Jefferson's works make me wish Amnesty International hadn't already appropriated the candle-and-barbed-wire logo for themselves.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.
Seems silly to do it on an 802.11 but people do it; my school is basically all wireless since the campus is spread out, and P2P can really bog down a wireless network. So bandwidth is now limited in general... I don't think we have torrents actually banned, though.
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.
That changes nothing. Especially if you want to try to make the argument that if a given percentage of something is used for illegal activity, the whole thing should be outlawed. You'd be surprised at the things you'd be talking about banning in that case. The original argument still stands: Simply get an application layer filter. They are not expensive in relation to other high end networking gear, and it will solve the problem without resorting to a ban. I speak as someone who works at a university with just such systems in place.
When new technology develops and taxes the available systems, the answer is to work out a better system, not to start banning new technology.
At the university I attended, P2P file sharing was blocked using Packeteer. Which essentially scanned every packet to/from the Internet and cross referenced them with a list known P2P protocol packets. It was highly effective. That was until some enterprising students set up SSL tunnels to remote machines. The reason that the university cited for blocking P2P was of course bandwidth utilization, but as I remember there was an issue where the University holds some liability for students who violate copyright laws by downloading pirated content. However I am not familiar with the laws regarding this. Overall, P2P file sharing was tolerated on the internal network as long as it wasn't obvious. Meaning that anonymous FTP servers with 100GB of movies would attract attention. However setting up and FTP server with a password that was given out to friends went by unnoticed.
"Flee at once, all is discovered."
Good thing it's still legal in Europe and that... they've just passed the vote that said that there should be protection for copyright material _except_ for private users with no lucrative intentions and for personal use.
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.
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.
There's no free lunch, but there are certainly legitimate uses. I've had students use peer to peer applications in my course. I've also had to deal with DMCA notices that students receive in the course of my work in IT at a university. Universities might very well need to make business decisions, but the business of universities is not necessarily the same thing as a commercial endeavor, nor should it be treated as such.
Policing content, though, is another road to losing DMCA safe harbor protections, which are partly based on the OSP not being responsible for user actions- you certainly have to respond to DMCA notices, but beyond that it gets dicey. If you find obvious infringement in the course of your work you are obligated to deal with it, but other than that I'd find that particular business decision questionable for various reasons, ethical and legal.
I'd have less a problem with the situation if students who lived in dorms had the option of paying for comparable service. Although I'd personally still have concerns.
Bandwidth isn't unlimited, there's only so much of it. Buying more capacity costs money.
Faced with more bandwidth demand than supply and no income from bandwidth charges, a University IT department (or an ISP selling "Unlimited Internet") will tend to look at their bandwidth usage and make calls like "60% of our bandwidth usage is coming from these 8 guys running servers. If we just ban servers we won't need to upgrade". So they implement that policy by blocking incoming TCP connections with a firewall and it buys them a couple months - at the horrific hidden cost of turning what was previously a general internet connection into a "consume only" connection. The first google servers were in Larry Paige's dorm room - who knows how college students might take advantage of having a general purpose internet connection...
Eventually, bandwidth usage will rise again and the IT department will be faced with the same situation: "60% of our bandwidth usage is coming from users doing P2P file sharing". But they can't fix this with a single firewall rule - so they're faced with the decision of buying active traffic shaping hardware or upgrading their bandwidth. Traffic shaping is cheaper than adding capacity, so they do that. They think they're only hurting "a couple students claiming to download Linux distros", but they're really killing ideas like blogtorrent. Basically, this is the same as the server block - it just costs more money in hardware.
If, instead, the school just charged for bandwidth - perhaps $0.25 for each gig after the first 5 gigs/month - this would play out completely differently. There would be an incentive for users to not outright waste bandwidth, and when it came time to chose between upgrading and degrading the school internet connection it would always be better to upgrade.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.