University Networks Block Student Project

An anonymous reader writes "A computer science student at University College London put together FitFinder as a bit of a joke — it's been described as a cross between Twitter and personal ads, and it rapidly became very popular. The university took exception to this and started by blocking the site from being accessed on campus. Not content with this, a few weeks later it fined the student £300 and had him take the site down completely. Currently, the site is still offline, although there is a petition with several thousand signatures requesting its return. In the meantime, a site called PhitFinder has appeared, claiming to have no link to the original."

Comments

Re:Sorry PhitFinder

[ae1294]

I was playing around with PhitFinder and I totally accidentally made it forward to slashdot.

I sew what u did ther... Now Bobby, what did we teach you about that sort of thinking? http://xkcd.com/327/

Note: Anyone wanting to do any phishing or click fraud should probably hurry up before someone perm redirects the site to goatse...

Don't expect Univ. to set up everything for you.

[jbn-o]

That would mean students are old enough to know that they should buy an account at an ISP for their site. This means the students can enjoy freedom from University policy/control, own the domain name and site code, and keep the site up after the student is no longer affiliated with the University. In the US one can get this level of service for under $10/month; it's hard for some university organizations to economically justify competing with that low price.

I don't know UCL's complete logic here, and I don't represent them. But in the US many public universities are facing hard financial times right now. Given fiscal realities tough choices have to be made about how to prioritize dwindling resources including staff time. It's not reasonable to expect that some for-fun project is going to get the attention and resources of staff and faculty work (which is rapidly being homogenized into whatever services can be delivered campus-wide, not custom setups for a particular person/group).