Slashdot Mirror
University Bans BitTorrent To Stop Flood of Infringement Notices (torrentfreak.com)
A university in Canada has taken sweeping action in an effort to stem the tide of piracy notices. Following changes to Canada's copyright law in early 2015, ISPs are now required to forward copyright infringement notices to their customers. Over the past years, copyright owners have aggressively targeted users and ISPs with volumes of notices to generate more revenue. TorrentFreak adds:The phenomenon has also been felt at the University of Calgary, which acts as a service provider to thousands of students. Inevitably, some of those students have been using their connections to obtain music and movies for free, which has led to the university receiving large numbers of notices. So, in an effort to reduce the instances of alleged infringement, the university has recently banned BitTorrent usage on several Wi-Fi networks. Speaking to student newspaper The Gauntlet, vice-president finance and services Linda Dalgetty said that the effect was felt immediately. During the first eight days of the ban, the university received 90% fewer notices than usual. "I think what we're finding is it has definitely made a difference. But we have to monitor that, because statistically, we have to go through a longer time frame than eight days," Dalgetty said.According to Dalgetty, reducing the number of infringement notices wasn't the only consideration. The volume of traffic and other threats were also on the agenda. "The more streaming we have on the campus, the more it impacts network performance and that takes away the user experience for other pursuits," she said. "The third [reason] is security. The more streaming we have, the [higher chance] of inadvertently downloading something that would create issues."
The university was being put in a bad position and took the easiest steps to resolve it. Their network, they can do whatever they want with it. If you're looking for someone to blame, look to the people who allowed these stupid notice emails to go through in the first place.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"My network. My rules."
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Magnet links should make tracing down this kind of activity pretty difficult. Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment, or theyre just observing over-the-wire for bittorrent traffic and assuming some nefarious activity.
Good people go to bed earlier.
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
You seem to be attributing wisdom and empathy to college students. Do you see the problem here?
There are certainly valid uses, and this may be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water, but now the challenge is how to whitelist approved sources, given the nature of BitTorrent?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
"...the volume of VPN and Tor traffic on campus has mysteriously increased."
It's a virtual whack-a-mole game, when will the MAFIAA finally realize this?
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
So this is the same place that paid $20,000 to decrypt a malware attack that locked down its email and AD infrastructure... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/university-calgary-ransomware-cyberattack-1.3620979
I doubt they've learned much about how to operate a network at this rate.
Other than downloading Linux Distributions...
Most other Legitimate turrents don't have enough members to be as effecient as just downloading it directly.
"what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!"
People who do not know or care about bandwidth limitations and sharing with others.
Aka. Late teens who are more interesting in getting their stuff faster without little regards to others.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Good luck banning encrypted traffic assholes.
The same ones that equate streaming with downloading. If your just streaming, your not actually downloading anything "whole" unless your purposely using some software to capture it all. Services like Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Youtube etc are streaming. Programs / plugins like www.youtube-mp3.org allow you to capture said streams to a file. Bit torrent is a protocol. DASH (Dynamic Streaming over HTTP) is the streaming protocol of Netflix. Linda Dalgetty isn't an IT person, she's the "vice-president of finance and services" so doesn't really know what she's talking about here. However, I'm sure she's right about the "immediate impact" since I bet most people bittorrenting just left their torrent up after getting it and chewed up huge amounts of bandwidth. Yet even if there was zero impact on network health this has nothing to do with that; they are blocking this due to legal and fiscal responsibility.
I am sure colleges don't have full administrative control over the students on what they do.
You can say you are a Dry campus, but there will still be a lot of drinking.
You can tell students to use their internet responsibility... But they will not.
So lets be honest with ourselves.
for every Legitimate use of turrents they are 100 illegitimate uses and for that Legitimate use there are a numerous workarounds.
So you block the feature. you don't have to punish kids, you don't have to deal with take down notices at all.
Gone are the days like when I was in college where every student had a wide open static IP address to the internet.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Actually, a lot games use Bitorrent networks for file distribution. (i.e. WoW, WoT, etc). I don't know if they we affected by the ban or they operate differently enough but there are legitimate uses.
(I know at one point you could even a regular bitorrent client to get WoW updates, I don't know if that's still true)
a place where the next generation wishes to learn, gain knowledge expertise.
What a brilliant idea, to ban BitTorrent! -Why didn't anyone else think of that?!
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Thank you UoC for taking back your network, and getting rid of pointless torrent traffic. Poor fucking kids. Poor, POOR fucking kids. Go outside and learn to live.
Someone get a dump server up and running. Twenty-odd terabytes of storage should do it, for anyone in the know to upload and download as they see fit, all safely on the university network.
Usually they have a 'fall back' (and often slower) download that isn't peer-to-peer.
I had this problem with a previous landlord, who's wifi we were dependent on for a while, and it was really annoying on many levels, and surprisingly hard to work-around when most ports are shut down. It affects a LOT more than torrent clients, and with Blizzard games, it's not just updates, it's playing many of the games. I had to play Diablo 3 (it was in Beta then) through my mobile phone connection, for example.
Akamai is one company that sells a service for this. It's transparent to the user.
Windows 10 (maybe Windows 8?) also use peer-to-peer.
Kriston
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
The Network Unit where i currently work, a UK University, used to have a rather nifty network appliance which sat on the network segments that student halls of residence occupied and listened for Bittorrent connections. When it detected one, it sent a hang-up to each end neatly closing the connection. We never publicly announced what was going on here, but instead let the students run into the blockage by themselves. It worked better that way, fewer complaints.
These days network security appliances do the same job, more or less. It saves time and money and hassle receiving copyright take-down notices and then tracking down the culprits, and giving them an appropriate telling off. This is especially irritating with students because IT Services isn't technically part of the academic structure, and bollocking naughty students is an academic job, so the relevant academics have to be in the communications loop. Network-level blocks are such very much easier all round...
The freedom and liberty loving kind. In other words, the best kind!
Or we could get rid od intellectual property law.
Wouldn't connecting via VPN bypass the no torrenting restriction, anyways?
When I was an undergrad, the university was more worried about wasting the capacity of overseas links than what you used it for. It makes more sense to share stuff within the academic network than for each user to stream their own copy of the same thing. A lot of students realized this a long time ago, but today we care more about being legit than conserving resources.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
You're assuming that they give a crap about valid uses, and I don't see why they would. Even if someone decided to challenge it, they'd likely have to show that they couldn't obtain legitimate material via other means, or would at least be significantly inconvenienced in doing so. And of course nobody's going to challenge it based on illegitimate material for obvious reasons.
Strange...
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
They come down on those who are stupid. These students never heard of VPNs, eh?