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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'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.
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/
I've said it before and I'll say it again.
Pirates use something because it's the BEST way to do something.
Why? because they have total freedom to choose the best, because, due to their nature, they don't pay for anything.
Thus, outlawing something because pirates use it is shooting yourself (or at least technical progress itself) in the foot.
Sony's views on the xvid codec originally brought this thought to my mind when they prevented sony vegas 5 or 6 from working with it, under that same logic I'd say ban sony vegas itself, I hear it's still incredibly popular with pirates.
While your at it you'd better do something to shut down Maya, 3dstudio and Photoshop.
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.