What's Banned On Your Campus?
Posted by
emmett
on Wed Mar 01, 2000 10:00 AM
from the taking-a-nap dept.
from the taking-a-nap dept.
Going through the Slashdot submission bin, one story has been popping up over and over again over the past few months. Every few days, someone writes in to tell us about yet another university that has banned Napster, the popular mp3 distribution tool. From Indiana University to Seton Hall, there are over a hundred colleges and universities that have banned its use. It's not just Napster, either. DeCSS and internet telephony are being targeted, as well. Some people say it's censorship, others say it's just a matter of reclaiming the university's bandwidth.
We wanted to give the Slashdot readership a chance to talk about this issue. The 'Students Against University Censorship' have set up a site chronicling the day-to-day Napster battle, listing every school they know of that has banned the program. What's going on at your school? What are their policies regarding Internet usage? Have you had a run-in with the collegiate authorities over something you were trying to do? Let us know!
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As a student AND administrator... (Score:3)
Censorship is restricting certain types of content only within a medium for some sort of political or moral goal. I don't believe that the university has any objection to students receiving any certain type of content (the AUP simply specifies that usage should be for educational purposes - I'll get to what this means in a bit). But regardless of the content, as the head admin says, "network bandwidth is a very limited resource." And I wholeheartedly agree to any measures he takes to help relieve the congestion, especially if it impacts only services, like Napster, that cannot possibly be considered to have legitimate educational purposes.
Yes, that's right, educational purposes. That's what university networks are supposed to be for. And I believe in a broad definition of "educational" that includes things like hosting Free Software projects, receiving and playing (non-stolen) music files, and even reading Slashdot. Most organizations, especially for-profit ones, do not even allow these activities because they do not contribute to that organization's mission. You should be thankful that most universities liberally interpret the boundaries of their missions and do not require you to pay for your own bandwidth to use these and other services.
Another issue to consider is that, in a badly oversubscribed environment like ours (100% usage from 8am to 6pm), every byte you get is a byte someone else won't. In a lot of cases, that someone else is trying to do real research, or as in my case, get security fixes and other data crucial to my job as a systems administrator. The conscientious individual recognizes this and self-imposes limits to his network use during congested times. After-hours, in fact, most limits are removed and students and faculty are allowed even freer use of the network. As I've been saying, these restrictions and limits are placed so that everyone has a fair shot at using the network. It would be nice if people would further limit their usage to truly educational material during the day; if they did then restrictions would not even be necessary. Until that happens (ha!) we'll continue to restrict and/or rate-limit certain services.
Unfortunately, decisions must be made as to exactly which services must be limited or cut off, and in general I feel that Napster is an example of a service with no real educational value and high bandwidth usage. Thus it is a good candidate for restriction. Perhaps you disagree, but then it would be your responsibility to decide what else must be limited or cut. Obviously items like DeCSS are not cut for these reasons, and I vehemently disagree with that practice. Ditto for cutting internet long-distance just to prevent competition. There are lots of bad reasons to restrict network usage, but I've yet to see anyone around here bringing them up and I suspect that in most places, decisions are being made for valid reasons, not censorship or to stifle competition. Here we are talking about bandwidth usage, and something has to go. I'm glad it's Napster and not FTP or HTTP. Certainly these protocols can be abused as well, but they are also frequently used for purposes directly related to the stated goals of the university. Think about it. If not Napster, then what?
--TM
Within their rights (Score:3)
When MP3s flying around the network start to affect people's ability to get real work done -- both by students and researchers -- I think it's entirely within the rights of the admins to restrict the use of things like Napster. Buy your own T1.
--
I'm a campus network admin ... (Score:3)
Personally, I feel that this _is_ a matter of censorship. Furthermore, banning sites and blocking ports is a futile attempt. Students are resourceful. They will find some way around it (proxies, say), or someone else who knows. Once one student knows a way around it, the whole campus knows.
Recently our uplink set a packet filter blocking all packats to napster.com. I lobbied against this, and stressed that this wasn't a solution to the problem. Blocking content _is_ censorship. While I am sympathetic to the problem, censoring people is simply wrong. The filter was dropped a few days later; I hope my arguments had a hand in persuading them.
I currently impose bandwidth throttling on the interface that connects to our campus residence. This seems to work reasonably well and I would recommend this to any network admin over packet filtering.
Jason,
tack@linux.com
Net demographics 1994-2000 (Score:3)
In 1994, it was rare for students to take computers to campus. For most schools, this was the dawning of the connected era, when they were thinking about the procurement process for full scale fiber ethernet networks. Some schools wrote grant applications, begged alums, asked the state govt, raised tuition to pay for their "pipe dreams".
So, for a few years, in most cases, the bandwidth that was planned in the mid 90's has held out. But in the past two years, hardware prices have fallen through the floor, and evry kid wants to bring his or her computer to school.
At my school last spring, when I sat down to look, less than 5% of seniors had computers on the campus network (all computers have to be listed as students' usernames for easy ID). More than 70% of freshmen did. The explosive growth of end-user computing sent the computer from the realm of luxury item to the realm of more-important-than-a-tv.
So the procurement process has to start again, admin staff trying to get money to upgrade the network, keep faculty in working machines, provide multimedia teaching facilities in classrooms, provide public use computers for students who don't bring computers, spend money selling the school through its website, and making sure CS students have access to labs that will allow them to actually learn something. Add to that the personnel cost of manning the network, admining accounts, going to meetings to get more money, and researching new tech for upgrades, and you've got a pretty hefty bill, even in cases where a lot of the grunt work is done by students. Not to mention that hefty chunks of 1999's budget probably went to Y2K upgrades.
In short, bandwidth is a very expensive commodity for departments with short budgets, and students abusing it before the school can get what it needs deserve to be shut down. The angst-ridden middle class kid syndrome will whine to no end, though, thinking they were really paying what the resources are worth. Yeah, right.
Of course, the faculty were more concerned with "what do you do with students who spend all their time on the net and no time working? They already recentered the SAT for them. Now what?" But that's for another day...
--mandi
Re:QoS has been suggested (Score:3)
You can use QoS.
Even if you cannot use it selectively (with Napster this requires sniffing the proto and configuring QoS filters realtime) use per net/per IP limits (aka per dorm). Or even better schedule the dorms to use ONLY leftovers from the rest of the campus. Over. Done. Whoever says it is impossible eat a gun. Been there. Done that
Problem is elsewhere:
Re:Whats wrong with banning Napster? (Score:3)
Bad Mojo
Re:But we Pay (Score:3)
Just because you pay a fee for your connection does not mean they waive the right to determine how it may be used. If you don't like the fee, the conditions, or whatever else, you can always find an alternate method of connecting.
Personally, I don't see what people are bitching about. $80/semester is a fantastic deal for high-speed acccess. My cablemodem costs me $240 per semester.
cjs
Re:As a former university sysadmin (Score:3)
One place that I do have a problem is when public schools make sweetheart deals with long-distance carriers in return for kickbacks. They force their students to use one carrier from their dorm rooms under the auspices of cheaper rates, when in fact they are taking some of the savings themselves. Now, don't get me wrong -- I think that public schools should try to save money (or generate it) wherever possible to save both the taxpayers and the students money.
However, banning IP long distance phone calls is an active conflict of interest. It puts the school into a position of protecting their preferred long distance carrier's market by controlling their network.
What I suggest is not that schools should give up controlling their networks, but that they should be more careful in choosing who they make exclusive agreements with, or if they should at all. These agreements with LD carriers put them in an exposed position and tie their hands when they want to later control network bandwidth, and they are just plain no good.
In the last few years, it's almost been a free-for-all with schools making exclusive agreements with everyone from Microsoft to all the long distance carriers to Subway and even credit card companies. But these agreements come at a price that administrators don't yet realize: the integrity of their school's goal to provide education, not business relationships.
Re:As a former university sysadmin (Score:3)
And remember that universities are not usually strictly private profit-seeking entities. They are payed for by tuition and student fees, by charitable endowments, and by govenment money collected with taxes (even private schools receive federal funds for student programs and research).
You claim it's not censorship when someone else owns the wire, but what happens when everybody who owns the wires won't let you talk? What's your recourse, build your own Internet?
Give each user their own allocation - IProute2 (Score:3)
It's a tough problem (obviously). The best solution we came up with was to use DummyNet under BSD or iproute2 under Linux to give each user their own allocation of bandwidth. When they run out, they can still use our proxy servers (which don't incur charges) or can buy more bandwidth for their allocation.
IProute2 is actually excellent for this. It can do just as much as your average Cisco, much more easily: source-based routing, processing of packets based on arbitrary hexadecimal strings in them, and so-on. With a powerful enough CPU and two 3Com cards, we got a decent throughput too.
We came up with a whole complex system with perl, Oracle, DBI, SNMP, shaper.o (no iproute2 in those days) and lots of other things - then ran out of time and money just as it was starting to work (though shaper.o wasn't very suited to the task). There just isn't enough money, at least in UK universities, to do this sort of thing.
Instead each ethernet segment of 100+ users squeezes through a 20Kbps throttle. This is of course totally unfair, because 2% use more than the rest put together, but on the bright side traffic through our proxies is excluded from the throttling. It's a terrible solution but there isn't money for anything better. We don't have Cisco CPU capacity for selective QoS by protocol. Any suggestions welcome :-)
Re:Whats wrong with banning Napster? (Score:3)
I understand the problem. I mean, several weeks ago one res-hall (250 students) was cranking out 35 MBit (all Napster/MP3). We have a 45MBit link to the Internet. We put a filter on the router just to count # of packets going to the Napster server - several hundred per second. That just to the server, NOT mp3 files going across the wire.
I can understand turning it off. Although we started with the biggest offenders at first - that doesn't work. It's the large number of people using it - not several major offenders.
So how to nail it? filter out anything to that class C - fine. That'll work temporarily. Proxy's are abundant. DNS it - they'll use external DNS servers. The only viable way I know of to really shut it down is possibly to shut off ICMP inbound. Although I'm going to try to write a filter that would nail the Napster protocol. Blocking ICMP would suck, but it would work. If anyone knows a better idea, please please let me know.
Brent Deterding
Univsity of Missouri - Columbia
Data Network Planning & Support - Core Group
Research Computing Group
Grader - CECS 253 (UNIX)
From savenapster.com ..... (Score:3)
SSU - Salisbury State University, Salisbury, MD (Score:3)
Napster and other bandwidth hogging programs can cause slow Internet connections for everyone
The Chronicle of Higher Education published the following article in the issue dated February 25, 2000. Salisbury State University is facing similar bandwidth issues with the proliferation of Napster and similar programs, plus other bandwidth stealing applications such as Spinner, Real Player, WinAmp (when used to receive Shoutcast Stations) and Instant Messenger programs such as AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, and ICQ. As a consideration, please be aware that using these programs during peak hours (usually 9 AM to 9 PM) causes the network to slow significantly, so please try to limit your use of these programs (especially the Napster-like programs and the streaming audio programs like Spinner, etc) to non-peak hours. In this way, we can ensure that the Internet is available at an acceptable level of speed to everyone that needs it.
"Napster, a tool for finding MP3 audio files online, is causing headaches among network administrators -- not because of its potential for copyright infringement, but because when students use it en masse they can clog even high-bandwidth campus Internet connections.
A growing number of universities have responded to the resulting congestion by cutting off the software's access to the Internet.
The program runs on personal computers and allows a user to share his or her collection of MP3 files. MP3's on users' hard drives are made available for both searches and downloads over the Internet by anyone else who runs the program. At peak times, this network of Napster users can offer access to several hundred gigabytes of data, or hundreds of thousands of individual files.
At any given time, each user can be sending and receiving dozens of files. Multiply that by hundreds of students on one campus, and the consequence can be a serious traffic jam.
"We found that, on average, that particular program was using 10 to 40 percent of our campus Internet bandwidth," says Marjorie F. Proell, communications director for Saint Cloud State University, in Minnesota. "There were times it peaked even at 60 percent."
Such high traffic can slow down everyone else's use of the Internet, whether for surfing, for transferring scholarly journal articles, or even just for sending mail. "It was reducing the speed and reliability of our Internet services, which is something that's felt by everyone on campus --students, staff, and faculty," says Ms. Proell. In October, network engineers at Oregon State University noticed increased Internet traffic, which they traced to Napster. "It was using 5 percent of O.S.U.'s total bandwidth going out of the university," says Christopher White, the administrator for the university's residential network. That percentage "doesn't sound like a lot, but it is -- a real, real lot," he says. By November, Napster was using up 10 percent of the bandwidth.
At first, administrators responded by calling students who were using the program and telling them that such bandwidth-hogging programs violated the university's policies on acceptable use of the network. But when it became clear that hundreds of students were using the program, officials decided to block the network channel that carries Napster traffic.
"If we had let it go much longer, I think we definitely would have had serious problems," says Mr. White.
Other institutions have reported similar traffic problems. Institutions that have reportedly banned the program include Boston, North Carolina State, and Northwestern Universities, and the Universities of New Hampshire, Pittsburgh, and Texas. Institutions don't just face slow Web connections as a result of Napster -- they can face significant Internet access costs as well. According to Curtis R. Pederson, Oregon State's vice provost for information services, Napster was costing the university about $1,500 per month at the time it was shut off.
The university normally spends $12,000 to $15,000 a month for Internet access. Mr. Pederson says the university is planning to hold a forum with students to talk about "Internet use and ethics, and the reality of the budget." Other institutions have had similar meetings.
Administrators who have blocked access to Napster say that bandwidth is their main concern, rather than the continuing controversy over MP3 files, which are often used to illegally transmit copyrighted music. The Recording Industry Association of America is pursuing a lawsuit against the makers of Napster because of the ease with which the program lets users share pirated music.
The association also regularly requests that colleges shut down online archives of illegal MP3's on campus networks and has created an educational campaign intended to teach students about copyright law.
Oregon State's Mr. White says the decision to block the program was definitely made easier by Napster's illicit uses. "If it was a program that had real educational value to it, it probably would have been a lot harder," he says. But, he adds, "we wouldn't have even noticed it if it wasn't for the bandwidth issue."
BTW, I received this mail from my school account - one "powered" by Groupwise [ssu.edu] - but that's all I use that account for, because it's literally down as much as it is up. But I guess that's another story...
Colleges Can do what they want (Score:3)
Three years ago when I lived on campus, I ran an mp3 FTP site. It was pretty popular for the few months it was public and I was able to serve about 100 gigs worth of stuff. I decided to cut back because the University did monitor that stuff and basically it's their bandwidth.
There is the arguement that you have to pay Computer Access fees. At Texas A&M where I went to school, that was all of $50 a semester. I pay that in one month for cable service. I don't really see how I can then justify saying that I pay $50 a semester I should be able to use all the bandwidth I want. My cable company asked me to stop running an FTP after 3 days and 1 gig served.
The thing is if your actions are negatively impacting other people, (and high bandwidth usage does!) then you have no right to complain if someone asks you to stop. Yeah it's fun to complain, but grow up people. Don't take it all so seriously.
Mordred
Thats worse (Score:3)
Metered bandwidth? (Score:3)
Can't load limits be implemented?
I only wish my campus was as enlightened as yours (Score:4)
Take a look at http://www.uri.edu/mrtg/jvnc.html [uri.edu]
You can see right when the pulled the plug on napster. At least the network is blazingly fast now.
As a former university sysadmin (Score:4)
WRT napster: I am well aware that it could be used for the transfer of non-copyrighted MP3's. But the fact of the matter is that it is not. I will challenge anyone to show me that even 1% of the MP3's available on Napster are not copyrighted. And this thing is using 20% of the bandwidth on a lot of campuses! If students in fact own the CD's, why can't they just rip their own copies?
So don't talk to me about Napster. As for DialPad: that is also a purely economic decision in most cases. Yeah, it only eats about 20K/sec. But remember that's 20K/sec for hours on end. It adds up.
To call these censorship is to abuse the term censorship. Nobody is preventing you from saying ANYTHING! They are just choosing not to pay for you to say it! There's nothing stopping you from going out and getting your own ISP.
I'm sure many of you will claim that "this is just the start of censorhip" and "a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant". Here's the thing you've got to remember: when you cry "censorship" over petty stuff like this, you will not be able to get my attention when there really is censorship. For example, the DeCSS stuff is quite disturbing from a free speech point of view. But by hassling with dialpad.com, you are losing credibility for that battle.
Never cry wolf.
--
Re:Whats wrong with banning Napster? (Score:4)
OTOH Napster is a worse bandwidth hog than W2K's Active Directory. Both should be banned.
From a network management side..... (Score:4)
Now on the censorship side, that is just not acceptable and should not be tolerated. Bandwidth mangement is one thing. Censoring is never the right reason.
Educate me on something.... (Score:4)
Will this just be a never-ending war?
Plankeye
But we Pay (Score:4)
Re:As a former university sysadmin (Score:4)
I don't think I'm nitpicking if I point out that many universities make it nearly impossible to do this. If they don't forbid outside ISPs directly, many universities have residency requirements, and follow those with (in addition to the highest rent possible) the most stringent rules about the housing that you'll find, effectively preventing anything but dial-up access. One university I was associated with had a PBX set up in their dorms that was strange enough that it wouldn't talk to a normal phone, much less a modem.
They have reasons for these rules, and there are reasons for service restrictions, but the two together are fairly procrustean. Not that they're out of their rights to do so. But I think students always have the right to be outraged at the restrictions placed on them by administration. Part of the Student Experience tm.
no bandwidth (Score:4)
If it was up to me, I'd throw in another connection or something and limit Napster to a few machines or something. I dunno, I just feel frustrated that our 'state-of-the-art' network doesn't work for jack when 200 people are using Napster simultaneously.
Eh, I'll shut up now
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
QoS has been suggested (Score:5)
1. everything not mentioned below
2. web
3. internet telephony
4. Napster
If there's leftover bandwidth, Napster gets it (hopefully preventing people from getting deperate enough to go to lengths to circumvent the measures). And if somebody else needs bandwidth, they get it. E-Z.
Ban excessive use, not content. (Score:5)
The three or four warez d00dz who think they have to have a dozen MP3s or VCDs downloading at all times don't help. A few months ago we had one or two twits using up well in excess of 50% of our bandwidth, moving traffic we all knew perfectly well was bootlegged media. But we really see this as an excessive-use problem, not a bootlegging problem -- so we put a 200MB/day cap on usage. As soon as any user machine on our network has moved 200MB over the Internet link in one day, it is unceremoniously blocked off until 3AM the next morning. There is a "free period" from 3AM to 6AM during which people may download all they want without limit; also, we grant exceptions for academic use, such as when someone wants to download a new distro CD image. (The funny thing is that the really heavy users don't use the 3AM-6AM window, even though there's plenty of scheduled-download software out there. They just hit 200MB and get blocked -- just about every day.)
We do, actually, have a policy against bootlegging software, music, movies, and the like -- but I'll be the first to admit that's a CYA move, so if RIAA or the like come attack us, we can say we don't tolerate bootlegging. We don't go looking for MP3 servers unless someone raises a fuss. We do block NetBIOS-over-TCP at the firewall, but that's all. (We're planning to block inbound SMTP directed to systems other than our mail server in the near future, but that's to stop spammers, not to limit our users.)
Blocking services by port number is not a solution to excessive use, nor is it a solution to bootlegging or other "contrabandwidth". In a port-blocking situation, the serious abusers tunnel or otherwise route around the censorship; the regular users get stuck with bogus limits on their use; and we sysadmins have to play catch-up maintaining a list of blocked services. If congestion is the problem, ban excessive use, not controversial use.
Lots of things are wrong with it. (Score:5)
Think about guns - guns are made to kill people. They are used in crimes every day all over the nation. But still, they are legal, because we recognize that they have legitimate uses. You can restrict the use of guns, and you might even reduce crime, (I don't actually believe that, but that's an entirely different story) but you'd be giving up a portion of your freedom to do that. Similarly, you can ban mp3s, and you may reduce the amount of IP theft, or lower your bandwidth utilization, but you're giving something up. Namely, the positive aspects of downloading mp3s, and also, the students freedom to be in an environment that allows them to expand themselves as they see fit, not as the university sees fit.
I can kinda sympathize with the bandwidth argument, but I really hate it when people change things midstream. If you come onto the university network, and sign an agreement saying "by signing this you agree not to do x, y, or z" then you have a choice, and you can go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you invest in a NIC for your student network, and then have regulations piled on you never agreed to, that's different, because you weren't given a choice.
It's their bandwidth, right? So they're completely justified in monitoring and restricting all traffic, including all your outgoing email and communication and logging them. That's just not fair, and it's somewhat absurd. They're fighting a losing battle anyway. If they ban napster, somebody will figure out how to run it on a differnent port, or will just move to another service.
Quality of Service (Score:5)
For instance, you can say the following:
- First, let all traffic not defined below go first (SMTP, NTP, etc) -- basically all non-classified traffic
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all web traffic,
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all IP telephony traffic,
- Then if theres bandwidth left over, all Napster traffic.
(Insert other bandwidth hogging apps or reprioritize as necessary)Basically this is probably the best for all worlds, since then the Napster users can try to hammer the network all they want. They just will have their packets dropped first. This will allow them to actually use *ALL* of their network.
Whats wrong with banning Napster? (Score:5)
What's wrong with universities banning it? Clearly, they cannot condone the flagrant ripping of MP3's on campus. I'm sure they'd do the same if they found 10000 warez sites running on their students' boxes.
I'm not saying that censorship is a good thing, just that in this case I fail to see how this is construed as censorship, given that using the application for anything other than illegal activities is fairly hard. 5% of university bandwidth is a hell of a lot as well.
Just 5%?! (Score:5)
I wish Napster was only taking up 5% of our total bandwidth!
Here at the college where I am a technician we've already had the first part of our firewall system installed to secure the campus and restrict the use of Napster. Our reason to kill Napster is the same one repeated many times in this forum--bandwidth. Currently, Napster is taking up about 25-30% of the sum total of our T1 line.
It used to be a 3-to-1 ratio of incoming to outgoing traffic. 75% of the traffic came into the campus LAN and 25% (or less) went out. This year, that has all changed. As I write this our MRTG graph shows 150K+ going out and less than 100K comming in. At night its even worse (typical night: 50K+ out vs. ~10K in). On average we are split equally between traffic comming in and traffic going out.
I probed and port scanned the network a couple weeks ago and found 30-40 people who were running a Napster server. Lets say each server allows 10-20 users. At peak that would mean 300-800 people are downloading large MP3 files. We have a student body of 1000. The math becomes a little frightening at this point.
This is a college LAN, not a server farm.