Web Censorship on the University Campus?

Censored Prof asks: "I teach at a private university in San Antonio, TX. Besides some horrendous bandwidth issues, we have lately been subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking. This means that suddenly, university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees; and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study. Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked. Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus. It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways. So my question: Is this unique to our university? Who else at what other universities are subject to similar web-content blocking? Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?"

Key word

[daveschroeder]

"Private" university. And I'm guessing a smaller school.

But no, this isn't common at all, at least at public universities (and most larger private/research institutions). In residential housing, sometimes traffic shaping and bandwidth limits [wisc.edu] are used to try to curb/dissuade inappropriate usage (and even then, nothing is blocked, and services like iTunes Music Store are added to unlimited use categories)[1], but most universities, especially public research universities, see non-censorship of network traffic and protocols as a matter of academic freedom, and a critical one at that.

Even during the heyday of Napster [wisc.edu], the University of Wisconsin - Madison, for example, made a critical decision, and decided not to censor or limit network traffic based on protocol, port, application, or tool. We viewed the increase in traffic as part of the "cost of doing business" as an academic institution, and viewed censorship of protocols or ports as a slippery slope that was an affront to academic interests.

[1] Some people still might say that's a form of "censorship". I can assure you it's not. When no limits are in place, people use services that can use port 80 and/or tunnel traffic in SSH, and a very small number of users can saturate the network for everyone else. Packet/traffic shaping equipment cannot keep up with the number of flows, so a common practice at large schools with several thousand residents in university-owned housing is bandwidth limits. Anyone can get an exception for acceptable purposes. Remember, this applies ONLY to housing; residents are still expected to follow acceptable use policies for the network that make it accessible and usable by all. Further, these are separate judgments made by the housing divisions at most schools.

Narrow thinking

[BWJones]

Our CIO has assured us that this is not uncommon and that there are good reasons to do this on a university campus.

I don't know if your CIO is full of it or not, but I suspect he is being less than forthcoming about things. Has he/she elaborated on just what "good reasons" there are to perform this degree of censorship in an institution supposedly devoted to learning? Who gets to be the arbiter of acceptable content? In many countries and even communities here in the US, people go to colleges and universities to be challenged intellectually and get away from censorship or limited thinking.

I cannot give you a statistical breakdown of multiple universities, but having been to a couple and being a professor here at the University of Utah, I can give you some idea for how open and flexible our campus computer networks are. We do not, to my knowledge block any sites, there is no censorship, we are able to host websites from university servers or our own servers (including blogs [utah.edu]) using university bandwidth so long as we are not hosting illegal content or using the sites for commercial benefit.

It is a very open policy here that fosters student and faculty growth and communication with the rest of the world. Granted, there will always be some problems and some abusers of the system, but I would say the benefits outweigh the costs/risks associated with Internet access.

Finally, it should be noted that as content is developed and encoded for digital distribution, common (open) formats are going to become more common. College/university courses on mp3, mp4 and Quicktime (proprietary) are becoming more common. Documents, dissertations and journals are in pdf formats, so what's their solution to this?

This is most certainly NOT a trend

[frequnkn]

I serve in the IT management team at a small private university, and we don NOT filter or censor ANY traffic based on content. This is commonly discussed at various meetings regarding technology and higher ed (just google around on the http://educause.edu/ [educause.edu] website). Packet shaping based on protocol our IP address are one thing, but blacklisting and content blocking is blatant censorship. Our faculty would have us hanged if we implemented such a policy.

Re:Shrug

[Kemanorel]

Degrees are accredited by independent organizations that set standards each program has to meet. Google "accreditation" and see what pops up. It is the accreditation that signifies a degree as valid.

Limits on Bandwidth, not Content

[paladinwannabe2]

My school did not block any websites that I was aware of. What it did do is throttle bandwidth to students who used to much of it (if you downloaded too many gigs of stuff in a single day, you would get your bandwidth throttled down to Dial-up speeds for a day or two, and then it would reset). The bandwidth levels were high enough that you could play video games online all day without reaching your limit- unless you were downloading several movies a day, you weren't going to be affected.

Re:Does your university censor /. too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cambridge University, UK Censors/Blocks a number of essay writing sites.

Re: part of a disturbing trend?

[mamer-retrogamer]

I have to deal with WebSense on a daily basis. Yes, "proxy avoidance" sites are blocked, but only ones that they know about. The solution is simple: create your own proxy server outside of the filtered network--and keep it secret.

The way I did it was download CGIProxy [jmarshall.com] from my home computer and dropped into the cgi-bin directory of an unfiltered remote webserver that I control. Now whenever some seemingly arbitrary site is blocked (usually under the category of "Personal Sites"), I just go to my own personal (and secret) proxy server and enter the blocked URL. Note: you may have to change all text instances of the word "proxy" within the CGIProxy file to something else for it to work.

MP3 blocking is a little harder to get around, but is possible as WebSense only looks at the extension after the last dot of the filename. The solution is to have your proxy respond to a "fake" URL like "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3.prx" and have it pipe the real file located at "http://somesite.com/somemp3.mp3" through the fake URL. I've modified my copy of CGIProxy to do just that, and it works like a champ.

Of course, all this information is for educational purposes only. ;)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[Mard]

Replace "[Your organization's Internet use policy restricts access to the rest of this comment at this time. Reason: The Websense category "Proxy Avoidance" is filtered]" with "Torpark" and you have the solution I've started using on my college campus. Runs from a USB drive and runs circles around the filters they use on our computers, at least. [torrify.com]

Philosophies of Colleges:

[OUMorse]

As the CIO of a university, I can tell you that there are two trends in this area going on at colleges these days... depending on the type of college that you are. Every college currently faces bandwidth challenges. Mainly, these come from P2P technologies like Bittorrent, Ares and others. But, more and more problems are coming from sites that offer Flash video and the like. There are a lot of tools that automatically detect these uses and can "prioritize" the traffic on the network. In general, it is best not to attempt to block these tools entirely as this causes some clients to port search... and that can do more harm than good. Plus, these tools in and of themselves, are not bad. The other trend for more conservative colleges is to content manage. Generally, it is religious institutions who place in these restrictions. Further, these tools do not, in and of themselves, manage bandwidth use at all. That is not their main intended purpose, after all. Their purpose is to limit access to what the college deems as "inappropriate" content. I can say that in public institutions and private universities, like mine, that are not strongly tied to particular religious beliefs, there is no trend to install content management systems. That would generally be viewed by those institutions as an affront to academic freedom. For general reports on trends in colleges and universities, I would check out Educause at www.educause.edu. They produce excellent reports on current trends in IT at universities. I hope this helps! William M. Oglethorpe University

My Ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Universities "making money" for the general fund through sports programs is a myth. Check these guys [aaup.org] (second review) for the dirt. Of those, Duderstadt's book is probly the best, since he's tactful, respectful, and the former president of the Big House. It boils down to: the beneficial football team is a myth. College football and men's basketball may make more money than they spend, but what little "profit" is then passed to the (more worthy) other collegiate programs. I say (more worthy) because collegiate sports' influence on academics is really twofold in Division I programs. There's football and basketball, where BS majors (and by that, I do not mean Bachelor of Science) are invented, and men who have no interest or business in university of study are exploited for the Greater Good of Fandom. Then there are the other sports, where the athletes actually perform higher than the average for the student body.

Having done my time as a grad student TA at a Big Ten school, I must say there's some overlap. Non-"semipro" sports athletes ranked right up there with the folks starred "GI Bill" on the attendance roster as people I wanted in the classroom, in general (there were exceptions). Among the "semipro" players there were some genuinely engaged students -- and when an athlete gets engaged, the competitive spirit comes alive, and it's my lardass opinion that even if those guys earn C+s (which happens), they kicked a hell of a lot of ass to get there --, but there were a lot of slobs who had no business being there. I once sent "upstream" an F for the coach's son. Never did find out if he failed. Somehow I doubt it. Force Majeure

Re:The good old days

[porcupine8]

Too much to ask me to limit my research to the physical holdings of my school's library? To have to wait weeks for an inter-library loan for any other material that might be important for a big paper? Hells yes. Nearly all decent academic journals are online now, and there's no possible reason for me to waste time physically tracking down articles in the library if I don't have to.

Re:Does your university censor /. too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cam.ac.uk [cam.ac.uk] has also proposed blocking "high numbered ports" details: http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/netdiv/portblocking.html [cam.ac.uk] - from the document: 'It is likely that the blocking will affect activities such as P2P communications', my experience suggests it affects features such as video calling and file transfer in instant messanger applications. Where the University is a domestic ISP with a monopoly for many students and some staff, many of whom prefer to communicate with friends and family online rather than using expensive phones this is a particular problem.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[statusbar]

BTW You can use the anti-internet filtering proxy provided free by my "Internet Filter" [www.internetfilter.com] at:

https://proxy.internetfilter.com/access.cgi [internetfilter.com]

--jeffk++

NCSU: Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

For NCSU, the answer is, it depends, but mostly no. In residence halls, the only thing censored is kazaa/limewire/etc. In public labs, it depends on the administrator. The administrator of that lab may choose for it to be an "academic only, no personal use" lab, or they may choose for it to be "free for any use". Meaning if they want to ban porn, they have to ban all personal use on those computers, but if they want to allow personal use, they have to also allow porn. Most of the labs on campus are open for personal use.

Overall, no censorship.

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[statusbar]

The irony if that happens is that they would be blocking their competitors websites!

Read about the non-filtering proxy filter on internetfilter.com at peacefire's blog:

• http://www.peacefire.org/blog/?p=4 [peacefire.org]

--jeffk++