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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?
If you can't figure out a way around this, then i think i speak for most of the linux/bsd community when i say that we don't want you in our club anyway.
This is really only going to serve to block people that shouldn't be using bittorrent. If you have a legit purpose for it, then this really shouldn't effect you.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Yeah, plus, then when people start doing really bad things like child porn or e-threats, we'll be protecting them, too!
Besides, it won't matter once ISPs get a legal requirement to maintain records. It's coming, don't doubt it.
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".
"A university expelling students for constantly checking hundreds of books out and ripping out all but 1 or 2 pages of them is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their university resources."
P2P is a privilege, not a right. Internet access is a privilege, not a right. Heck, NETWORK ACCESS is a privilege, not a right.
If the school wanted to be REAL jerks about it, they could just cut the entire dorms off from the network entirely, and make everyone who wants to use the school network connection do so in the computer labs, on school provided computers (which would be locked down).
Simply put, the school IT resources are there for educational use, not so some yuppyspawn twit can download the latest Eminem album. We wouldn't be crying 1st amendment rights if some twit got punted from the library for looking at porn or playing Quake 4, why in the world is abusing the school's Network resources any different?
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.
Thomas Jefferson was born into the Virginia planter elite.
It is easy enough to say that "information wants to be free" when your unpaid slave labor is doing the actual work. Building and maintaining Monticello, Poplar Forest, The University of Virginia.
On April 13, the 264th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth, the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors unanimously passed an historic resolution...expressing the University's regret for its use of enslaved persons from 1819 to 1865. U.Va. is believed to be the first university whose governing board has made such a statement.University of Virginia's Board of Visitors Passes Resolution Expressing Regret for Use of Slaves April 13, 2007
Enlightenment, it seems, was not for everyone.
It would be 1950 before Gregory Swanson a black graduate of Harvard would be admitted to the UVa School of Law. Seventeen years more before the first women were admitted as undergraduates.
The landed aristocrat lives on borrowed time and borrowed money. Jefferson can be as expansive as he wishes because he will never get around to paying his bills. That is a luxury the creative minds and talents of the lower and middle classes do not have.
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.