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Education The Internet

Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System 157

Posted by michael from the life-in-a-fishbowl dept.
sukottoX writes "Penn State along with MIT and the University of British Columbia are developing a P2P application (called LionShare in the PSU incarnation) to be used only by students, faculty and staff. According to this article at the Penn State Daily Collegian, the file-sharing program, which wouldn't be completed until 2005 at the earliest, would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced. The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. Funding will come in part by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as from the students' information technology fee."
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Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System More

Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System

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  • Do universities actually need this? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Decaffeinated Jedi ( 648571 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @05:42PM (#7213379) Homepage Journal
    If P2P isn't being used for illicit file-swapping, is it really that much more efficient or useful for university students and professors than e-mail attachments and the various online course management software packages that are already out there?
    • I guess lecture notes nowadays are over a gig.
      • Yes, this is true. I make my lectures available to students as Powerpoint files, which get very large, especially with animations and videos. These files are too large to send via email. Right now we do it via a course webpage, but with the amount of data being distributed I can see how this is not the best way to do it. It would also be nice to share large datasets with colleagues more easily....
        • Most of the RFCs you get in ASCII format and I only get them in that format. I never needed more and you do not need much resources for them. Why are you using powerpoint? I do not say that you should use ASCII but at least do NOT use M$ products in an educational environment. Look at what the rest of the world is doing in universities around the globe.
          • The reason I use it is because it organizes the information in the same way it is presented in class. (The idea is that the students can print out the slides and follow along without having to write down everything I say. Then they can focus on listening rather than writing.) There is also a lot of multimedia that can't really be adequately conveyed in text. Diagrams, pictures, animations, etc. It is covenient and all of the UCLA computer labs have it so the students have access to the software. I wis
            • I always preferred to take good notes even with the slides.

              It seems to enhance the long term potentiation.
            • There is also a lot of multimedia that can't really be adequately conveyed in text. Diagrams, pictures, animations, etc.

              What are you doing in powerpoint that you could not do in HTML?
            • As a student and a user of non-Microsoft products, I would really appreciate it if lecturers didn't distribute their notes in such a proprietary format.

              Why not just convert your slides into Adobe Acrobat PDF? Fine, so it's kinda-non-free, but at least the formal specs are public. It's designed for distribution whereas Office files are pretty much for editing only. Then students with pretty much any OS might be able to read them. Oh, and don't do a fancy "4 pages per sheet" printout; if I want more than one

        • no
          a central source for your lecture is needed

          p2p from some random people on campus is not the way. i for one, would modify your powerpoint files...just to piss people off. the source cant be trusted

    • Well, I have seen my university's servers "slashdotted" just before tests and such (when the _humble_ box serving the course management pages get lots of hits)

      This would be a way to ease up on that. Plus, a well-done system would have very good classification of material and no spoofs (no porn instead of lecture notes), so that one can download all of the pertinent materials of a given course, easy.

      Plus, think of the sharing potential. One could share class notes (I have a friend who takes his class not

      • I wonder if they're including things like access permissions. From the university's financial perspective, students shouldn't be able to get the material for classes they're not paying for.
      • Did you read the part where it says that students will not be able to share?

      • No they don't (Score:3, Insightful)

        by segment ( 695309 )
        Well, I have seen my university's servers "slashdotted" just before tests and such (when the _humble_ box serving the course management pages get lots of hits)

        So you think p2p would be the answer? How about load balancing the servers for the admins there. Look I don't want to sound grinchy or anything but p2p is definitely not the answer to the problems you're mentioning.

        This would be a way to ease up on that. Plus, a well-done system would have very good classification of material and no spoofs (no porn


        • So you think p2p would be the answer? How about load balancing the servers for the admins there. Look I don't want to sound grinchy or anything but p2p is definitely not the answer to the problems you're mentioning.

          How about leveraging existing resources avaiable on students 2.4 Ghz word processors instead of buying new hardware, load-balancing switches and expensive IT personel that don't know what they
          are talking about anyway?


          That's a big if. Considering the pranksters running around such schools,
      • Plus, think of the sharing potential. One could share class notes (I have a friend who takes his class notes using a pda, writes straight to latex. The resulting .dvi files were VERY much sought after), material between universities, get data from a course I don't remember and I need to remember *right now*, etc.

        That does sound like a great idea, and the best application for this that I can think of. I'm doing something similar for my math notes, only using LyX instead of a Palm and raw LaTeX. I'm consider

    • Don't know about the rest of you, but I wouldn't trust lecture notes, assignments, data, or other documents related to MY grade to a P2P system where others could change the data. I am in competition with other students for grades on a curve. While I would never do anything sabotage another student, I have college faculty in the family and YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE what some students will do to get a leg up. If a document I needed was available from both a server and the P2P network, my copy is coming from t
    • I agree... most college networks are in a star configuration where all paths eventually lead to the main datacenter where the conencts to the outside world (Internet, I2, any direct links to nearby campuses of other schools) are.

      So, breaking it down.... any P2P config would only create extra hops, and any school that has a class that's big enough to cause a bandwidth clog at a single server really has other problems to deal with.

      Sounds like a solution in search of a problem...
    • The problem with the question "do they need P2P" is that P2P is not one thing but many. There are P2P networks tailored for specfic requirements such as redundancy, anonymity, speed, etc.

      Why then need P2P would depend on what they are trying to do.

  • censor (Score:1, Troll)

    by joeldg ( 518249 )
    if you are going to be at a university, expect to be censored.
    Arn't they supposed to be on "Internet2" at this point anyway? what happened to that?
    • not all universities are connected to i2. even then, that i2 connection is only super-fast to OTHER i2-connected institutions.

      for example, the dorms at my old school (URI) could get 300k/sec on a transfer from an NYU dorm. however, the connection from the dorms to the rest of the world was a single T1. no good for 5000 students all sharing files.

      (fortunately i lived in a house on the 'academic' network that had 10 t3's shared with other RI colleges)
      • I get 170K/s from a measly T1 to a Debian mirror on the other side of the state.

        I take it URI's connection was already under high load at the time?
      • How are the transfer rates to other computers in the same dorm? If I understand the article correctly, this is an internal thing. Still, it's good to know that the students get i2 access in their dorms.
        • it was 10baseT, and on campus transfers were pretty fast iirc (the frequent network troubles aside)

          i think they're trying to deploy wireless throughout the campus instead of constantly rewiring everything. they spent a lot of money wiring up every room on campus only to see 100basetx get real cheap, and then wireless goes and takes off. oops.
    • Internet2 is essentially a high-bandwidth yet limited-admission major backbone provider...

      During its heyday, a good chunk of Napster's traffic flowed over I2 because at the time each school routed all traffic headed to another I2 school (by IP space) over the I2 link rather than the main Internet link. However, once university officials got wise to this they either excluded dorm room connects from accessing or did port-level routing.

      I2's concept is essentially to be what ARPAnet was meant to be before it
    • if you are going to be at a university, expect to be censored.

      No, a place of learning is the last place anyone should tolerate censorship. Without free speech, there is no accademic freedom. Whithout accademic freedom you don't get an education, you get an indoctrination. A free state depends on real education. Without it, we are slaves. Censorship of electronic publishing is tantamount to book burning. Shame on any University that implements this shit.

    • By definition *only* a government can do that.

      Also, when you sign up at a school you willingly give up some of your rights to free expression and privacy. Same as when you accept a job offer..

      They didnt take it, you gave it up.

      Sure it might suck, but they are 100% within their rights to do so. If you dont like it, you dont goto school there. ( or work there, etc )

  • Why not use bittorrent? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just operate their own tracker with controlled access on who can add things. Standard apache logs will tell you who was downloading which torrents, and you'll ease the load on servers.
  • Where's your "no legitimate uses" argument now, RIAA?

    • Re:Legit uses (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Mike Hawk ( 687615 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @05:47PM (#7213428) Journal
      As a casual observer I have to say that this would seem to strengthen the RIAA's point. By developing their own solution when others would seem to already exist, these colleges lend weight to the notion that the existent services are not designed for "legitimate use", but rather for what they are used for now: Illegitimate use, in the eyes of the RIAA.

      Anyway, thats just one possible view of this.
      • As a casual observer I have to say that this would seem to strengthen the RIAA's point. By developing their own solution when others would seem to already exist, these colleges lend weight to the notion that the existent services are not designed for "legitimate use", but rather for what they are used for now: Illegitimate use, in the eyes of the RIAA.

        Anyway, thats just one possible view of this.

        Another possible view is that because third party solutions incorporate Spyware, Adware, Eulas

        ETC, ETC, ETC
      • While that's an interesting point, consider this:

        In an RIAA-less world, where song swapping hasn't brought copyright violations to the forefront, would these organization build their own network or would they use an existing service?

        One of the reason they are building their own network instead of using one already made is so they can track who gets what, when. This requirement has primarily surfaced due to the actions of the RIAA.

        In effect, the RIAA has made a self-fulfilling prophecy:

        1. People use P2P

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @05:43PM (#7213392)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The funding is to controll what is exchanged with "bittorent".
    • Bittorrent, as it is, is poorly suited for serving large numbers of relatively small files, to a population in which only a small percentage of users will want any one file. This solution probably won't cut it.

      However, the underlying protocol would work for this just fine. (In fact, you could probably just get away with changing the client; servers could probably be the same, though I don't know all that much about the internals.) I'd say that a customized Bittorrent client would probably be fairly effe
      • Bittorrent would, however, be good for those vaguely plausible 100 mebibyte powerpoints. I think that Waste [sourceforge.net] would be a good idea for students to use if they get fed up with the whole "know who gets what files while still using the term 'P2P'" thing. After all, the university would have some trouble stopping them.
    • Why do they need funding here?

      The funding is to block out all but the spyware they are building. That way they can track the little nits and crush the ones with double plus ungood thoughts. You don't want people at a University thinking, do you? This makes Carnivore look innocent.

      They are destroying what the internet should be. By placing a central inteligence at the core and forbidding alternate services, they are creating one giant collection of dumb terminals. Nice work Penn! Shame on you MIT for

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • as well as from the students' information technology fee.

    I always loved that about going to a University. I was paying for them to keep up their Windows addiction.

  • Top Heavy (Score:3, Interesting)

    by OECD ( 639690 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @05:46PM (#7213415) Journal
    ... if students can share with professors, they should be able to share with other students as well.

    I should think so. This is oddly top-heavy. How is it going to cut down on traffic if students are using Lionshare for class AND Kazasterwire for their friends?

    • How is it going to cut down on traffic if students are using Lionshare for class AND Kazasterwire for their friends?

      That's easy, you expell the students who run Kaza and what not. It's not right, but it can be done. If your mac address does not give you away, a remote call through IE to get your prcessors UID will. My fear, soon to be realized, is that only "approved" applications will be alowed on campus networks.

      Anonymous speech is integral to free speech. If there is no anonymous electronic publis

    • Perhaps this would be irrelevant if, say, Kazaa were to implement a general category mechanism. Perhaps the protocol does this, but the clients that I know of sure don't. It would be nice to just click the "university" category and search for stuff.
  • How is this Peer to Peer if students can't send data to each other? Because only profs can post data on the network, it is more like a master-to-serf transaction.
  • When it comes to brains, they've got the lion's share.

    But when it comes to brute strength (in number of users) ...

    I'm afraid their network's at the shallow end of the gene pool.

  • Thanks to a $1.1 million grant, a legitimate way for students to share files through a peer-to-peer network could soon become reality.

    ... because we all know how difficult it is [ufl.edu] to write a P2P system. [/sarcasm]

    Methinks it is time to switch careers!

  • The initial version of LionShare used the LimeWire open source codebase [limewire.org]. Good to see open code and open networks being used to build new applications....

  • as for illegit uses.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @05:57PM (#7213491) Homepage Journal
    dozens of university networks(student housing) run local directconnect hubs for anything. helps cut the traffic out of the network too..

    and as for legit uses, there's practically no need for such system. local data transfers are CHEAP, and so is hd, it's no biggie to have fast networks that make the need for it(p2p) practically nil(actually it makes more sense to have most such data few centralised servers).

    oh well, i guess some universities run their storage servers off from dsl or something.
    • Local transfers are cheap, until you realize you need to re-wire the 100 year old dorms for gigabit.
      • Yes, the sooner the better. I want my gigabit ethernet! Ah hell, I'll take what I can get. It looks like lots of others are willing to take what they can get too---and max it out. Anyway, local transfers are cheaper than non-local transfers, and that's what matters.

    • dozens of university networks(student housing) run local directconnect hubs for anything. helps cut the traffic out of the network too..

      Until the direct connect hub is seized [theregister.co.uk] by university police, who will sit [theregister.co.uk] on [theregister.co.uk] the evidence indefinitely.

      • seriously, 4 months is nothing. the sad facts are that a) local police doesn't know jack about computers b) the ones that do are overemployed, if there are any. investigation times that span for YEARS are not unheard of in very simple hacking/harassing/cracking/warez/whatever criminal cases(especially if there's, say, encrypted data on the drives, the drives are already damaged and need to be sent somewhere for data restoring & etc).

        yes even sadder is that the pc's worth goes down the drain every day i
        • Yes, I know four months isn't terribly long, but the police had people analyze the data on the computers in the first couple weeks (there was a ResNet guy with them when they served their warrants--I'm sure he helped them analyze the data). And the police were given the root passwords to the computers they seized when the warrants were served.

          As for "double police systems", consider the fact that at every OSU football game there is a collection of Ohio State Highway Patrolmen, Franklin County Sheriff's De
  • Is it just me, or wouldn't BitTorrent work to ease the load on the servers when professors distribute material? I realize that there are times when BitTorrent isn't the ideal solution, but I don't see why it couldn't be used here.

    The only reason I can think of is that what they are really trying to do is institute the transaction logging, and the file distribution is the official reason given.
    • BitTorrent trackers keep logs of all downloads, just like Web servers do.
      • BitTorrent trackers keep logs of all downloads, just like Web servers do.

        Yes, but this way they can block all _other_ P2P applications, and offer their own in its place. Which just happens to log all transfers. I can't remember now if it was specified or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if those logs are kept somewhere more, well, central than most P2P applications.

  • Controlled? I beg to differ (Score:3, Interesting)

    by segment ( 695309 ) <sil&politrix,org> on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @06:01PM (#7213521) Homepage Journal
    will allow the university to develop a technology called LionShare, a file-sharing system that requires students to log in each time.

    The program is being designed as a way for students, faculty and staff to exchange personal and academic materials on a sanctioned, secure peer-to-peer network. Another advantage is that large files, which would be impossible to send via e-mail or another method, can be shared.

    While it all sounds nice and warm inside, how long will it be before it becomes abused. Now wait before you think it's trolling of me to say this, think about how lax security is at colleges.

    Problems aren't with p2p they're with the users of it, and while some may think sharing a file or two isn't a crime, the fact is, it adds up. So for this to work think about the kind of boolean settings someone is going to have to program to search for illegalities.

    What is staff going to do when snoop|grep -i *.mp* doesn't work because users decided to rename files to madonna.zip or madonna.sda? It's just something to contend with when indeed they do get these p2p programs out. So while it all sounds nice, and the intentions are good, these 'foundations', schools, and business shouldn't advertise or rather expect no shady dealings to go on using p2p on their networks. Sure it'll be closed to the outside world for a minute or two before someone figures out how to use something like datapipe [clara.net] to break that theory.

    Controlled? Sorry never heard of the word

    • Since every transaction is logged, they just need to look for students who are transferring large amounts of data.
      • what if they're a comp science major transferring large executables? You've just offended someone. What if they're in the band and have legitimate reasons to transfer music files, what if one is the band playing we will rock you or something for practice? You've just offended someone.

        Oh logging? You mean as in DHCP logging? Sure but what happens when $USERJOE decides to hang out in $USERJOHN's room and oops uses his connection while there to share files with someone else? Aside from that, what happens when

        • Too much work. Just go grab a more "user-friendly" P2P client.
        • what if one is the band playing we will rock you or something for practice?

          That he's getting practice out of it doesn't make it any more legal.

          Oh logging? You mean as in DHCP logging?

          RTA. The article strongly implies that the logging will take the form of a secured, username/password pair when signing onto the service. Nothing as low-level as DHCP.

          what happens when(if) users start doing stupid little things like hijacking addresses, arp hijacks, yadda yadda to try to circumvent the p2p programs, t
          • RTA. The article strongly implies that the logging will take the form of a secured, username/password pair when signing onto the service. Nothing as low-level as DHCP

            RTA how about you READ MY POST logging as in what IP address is connecting. Forget username/password combos since big football players wont care if their username is bubba password football. So how do you expect to track people when some people are stupid enough to write l/p's and leave them on post it notes right on their machine.

            Oh, and i

            • RTA how about you READ MY POST logging as in what IP address is connecting.

              Directly from the article's second paragraph:
              develop a technology called LionShare, a file-sharing system that requires students to log in each time

              Plainly, they're logging USERNAMES, not just IP addresses. Otherwise the student's wouldn't have to "log in each time".

              So how do you expect to track people when some people are stupid enough to write l/p's and leave them on post it notes right on their machine.

              Yes, there are ce
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Leave it to Academia to spend way too much money to reinvent something with less functionality than so many other *free* products out there.

    Idiots.
  • What's the advantage of this over a course web page and personal web pages? I mean, isn't that what web pages were designed for, file sharing and information sharing among individuals? And we even have URLs we can include in mail messages to point people at things. And while for MP3 sharing web pages may not work and not everybody has web hosting, evey university student should have web hosting and the skill to put up a web page somehow.
    • A course web page places strain on professors or TAs to maintain the thing. It's harder to teach a technophobic teacher HTML than it is to say "put everything in that directory over there." Then again if it's taking until 2005 to make this thing, it raises a few questions.
      • How would this be less strain or easier? There is no need to learn HTML given the amount of easy to use authoring tools available.
      • Publishing files on the web requires nothing more than dragging them into a folder. If people want to add text, they can choose among hundreds of programs to help them, many far easier to use than P2P software.

        Keep in mind that the web was designed for scientists to share information in the first place; even a sufficient knowledge of raw HTML is so trivial that anybody working in education should be able to grasp it with little training.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Bets on how long until someone puts together a "gateway" program to connect this network to an outside p2p network?
  • would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced.

    I'm sure this will be popular. It will easily displace every other P2P system in existance.

    OTOH, it could make grading easy in the future. To wit:

    Got caught trading illegal files -- F
    Didn't get caught trading illegal files -- A

  • mv Britney_Spears.mp3 Professor_Boring's_Presentation.pdf
    • I went to PSU. Almost all of the professor's boring presentations come in Powerpoint format. I know of only one that actually used PDF so your suggestion would probably be noticed :).

      That said I'm sure the universities have some sort of way of auditing what the file contents actually are. Of course then they could read anything in those files. I doubt the university would do that for other reasons though.

      All of that said they're still missing the key tenant of this whole issue: never underestimate
  • Some days you get the Lion.
    Some days the Lion gets you.
    But always dress for the hunt (in your RIAA-proof underwear, no doubt).
  • Logging assumes some central point where logs are kept. And it's detrimental to privacy.

    Why not have clients simply check documents' fingerprints and digital signatures, and only share/download "legit"/"authorized" content? That's the truly distributed way to do this.

    I wonder how overloaded those webservers can get from a handful of students downloading some PDF'ed powerpoint presentations though..
  • Why not a client that like Groove or something that allows more than file sharing? File sharing can only go so far. Since you are in a university setting, you can setup servers to host things. But oh wait, if professors need to share things with the students let's say....they can always use web server. So why P2P again?
  • Apparently I'm missing something really obvious here. I mean you're going to have a P2P system to distribute college material? Maybe these people have never heard of file uploads through http. Are you going to trust the english department to properly share their files? Are the clients going to do md5 checksums on the files to make sure they haven't been tampered with? Are their servers really suffering that bad from "legitimate" academic traffic?

    I mean you're telling me that you couldn't take like 2
  • Sowhat happend to plain email and html pages where you can download files? What wait until 2005 when you can do the same today ;)

  • How can the RIAA snoop? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @07:07PM (#7214043) Homepage
    This is interesting because of the fact that it is an INTERNAL network. I can understand why they have the tracing in place....but if they didn't, how would the RIAA find out what was being traded? This is a private network that is closed to only include the school. So if the RIAA were to gain access, wouldn't this be breaching a private network? *cough*DMCA*cough*PATRIOT Act*cough*.

    Also, how long will it take before the students develop something that encrypts the name of the file as it is transferred, but offers another server somewhere to rehash the names? (I don't know the technical details of this so please forgive any ignorance on the matter).


  • Accept that the first release is going to be the "Spoofed Client" Programming Contest.

    Accept that you have just given students a great kicker to explore embedding seriptious content in the containing school-oriented files . Suddenly, the school is put in the position to declare random bits as being intelligent content or not. My personal container fav: That crazy TIFF

    By forming a closed system, you have effectively removed spyware for the RIAA to inject into. Once in, this system is golden. I like it.
  • Bridget Smith wrote:
    Vaught said the program is easily confused with similar ones like Kazaa and LimeWire, and is a completely different concept.

    LionShare will be a similar technology to those illegal peer-to-peer networks [...]
    Illegal P2P networks? What law is their against Gnutella? Bridget, you got some 'spaining to do...
  • Hell, I could have almost exactly what they want using dchub [freshmeat.net] in a week or two.
  • Run your own student network in the dorms. Tell the administration to go back to their RIAA masters.

    A few access points comprising an isolated network with authentication using a secure file transport client would be undetectable. When I was in university, we ran unofficial and against policy ethernet and cable lines with little difficulty. Wireless should make it a snap.
  • Now university students can download lecture notes that suddenly cutoff after a few pages, and repeat over and over again. Or they will download what they think is course materials, only to find it is just a file that repeatedly says "what the fuck do you think you're doing?" [waxy.org]
  • To a first approximation, it sounds to me like they just got awarded a lot of money to reinvent afs....

    -Carter

  • The idea is that university computers should be used for learning purposes and not for non-education related things. I took some courses at Penn State and have to say that the old computer labs were mainly filled with people typing in chatboxes and such. I think if you just want to fool around online you should just get a dialup account and just use the school computers and network for school things.

    The problem with this implementation is that it is a "sneaky" way to do it which allows people to still get

  • Why not just setup a system like strangesearch [strangesearch.net] and let people use windows/SAMBA sharing?
  • As one of the developers of LionShare and a /. addict, I feel obligated to shed a little light on this story, unfortunatly I don't have time at the momement. I managed to post a quick journal entry [slashdot.org] to dispel some of the myths. In a few weeks, when we have detailed information on the web, I will see if the /. editors would be kind enough to post an accurate followup submission.

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