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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."
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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.
Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.
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.
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.
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)
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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.
Or we could get rid od intellectual property law.