Journal jedijoe9's Journal: Ohio University blocks P2P File sharing 425
After receiving the highest number of notices from the RIAA about P2P file sharing, Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all file sharing on the campus network. Some file-sharing programs that could trigger action are Ares, Azureus, BitTorrent, BitLord, KaZaA, LimeWire, Shareaza and uTorrent. Claiming that this effort is "to ensure that every student, faculty member and researcher has access to the computer resources they need," is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal file sharing?
I wonder what level they are blocking? (Score:4, Insightful)
If its at the wall, won't internal sharing continue?
Just because you can stop the data coming in via p2p means doesn't mean the data won't be there (waste/DC can exist in a private garden without ever touching the real net).
Or is this an active process which does a portscans your machine continuously?
Failing everything else, there is always sneakernet. Expect a rise in blanks in the area.
WOW players will be pissed (Score:5, Interesting)
Blizzard Downloader (Score:4, Informative)
The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.
It's the margarine of the 'torrent world.
Re:WOW players will be pissed (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from all that, this effort is somewhat futile since many clients support encrypted/tunneled transfers and/or using Tor. From my experience, Tor traffic is nearly impossible to reliably classify (and therefore block).
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The Linux ISO excuse has been used so much now that it's used as code for Warez/Porn, as in 'I went over my bandwidth cap downloading Linux ISOs'.
Bittorrent has legitimate uses in the same way an Uzi does. Sure, I coul
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Sneakernet [wikipedia.org] is dead... remember? Don't you dare copying that floppy! [youtube.com]
Re:I wonder what level they are blocking? (Score:4, Informative)
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 500 GB USB drive. Even a burned DVD can hold around 4 GB of music/video/software. Another possibility is an ad-hoc wireless network or a wireless router not hooked to the internet. Never underestimate the ability of college students to solve a problem like this.
Re:I wonder what level they are blocking? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article, I guess they are blocking at the port level. That is, if Network Security discovers you have P2P traffic coming from your network jack, they turn off the port that serves that jack (possibly for 24hrs, or until you talk to them.) That means you can't even do P2P inside the local network.
We do this at the University I work for, unless you have a research need to use P2P (or some other legitimate need that has been reviewed.) I imagine they will by default disable P2P through their wireless network - but doing P2P over an 802.11 network would seem silly anyway.
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Well some places you block port 80, or better still entirely remove internet access. there are typically other ways of getting those materials anyway, going to libraries, out to do field research, traveling to foreign countries, making long distance phone calls..so no major harm.
Same premise, where do you draw the line though?
Re:I wonder what level they are blocking? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if you were joking or half-joking, but sentiments and statements like this only serve to reinforce the sense of elitism and exclusivity of the linux community in the minds of joe public. This what is holding back the growth of the linux community and the general acceptance of linux and OSS among the general computing public, as well as aiding the perpetuation of companies like MS and Apple.
How does one determine who should and shouldn't be allowed to use a particular protocol or software? Less peers on bittorrent means shorter TTLs and less bandwidth on torrents, how is that a good thing?
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Also, dealing with copyright complaints is time-consuming. The requirements in dealing with these notices include not only determining the name of the user who allegedly infringed, but also removing the infringing content. In the case of a university network, thi
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Since the problem is typically providing the copyrighted material (rather than simply downloading it), this would solve a lot of those problems. People would bitch, and the university would point to the p2p problem and explain that it was their fellow students who caused the lockdown.
The whole thing irritates me, b
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Nail in the coffin? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nail in the coffin? (Score:4, Interesting)
Course, it has been 6 years, things may have changed, but I doubt it...
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Re:Nail in the coffin? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't that kinda depend on being able to use the bandwidth for something useful, though?
If the university is offering high-speed Internet access for free to students, then restricting it to ensure it's properly available for academic use is one thing. If they're actually charging for it at a market rate, then restricting it is completely out of line. If the students start doing illegal stuff with it, sure, kick 'em off if it's causing problems, but don't block stuff by default even for those who are using those technologies for constructive purposes when those people are paying for the privilege.
You can't (Score:4, Interesting)
What may happen, and should happen to universities that restrict it like this, is they should get sued. There are limits to a public university's ability to compete with and to keep out private companies. This would be more than enough to insist that they need to be let in. Massive problem for the university to make that happen though.
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Bandwidth? (Score:2, Insightful)
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I went to a state college in the 90's and they kept the dorm networks completely separate from the school networks. I don't know if it was foresight or not, but they appeared to keep the college system up and running all the time, but the dorm network often slowed to a crawl (and this was before Napster) and you had to foot it out to a lab if you needed something off the network.
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Illegal Fire Sharing? (Score:2, Funny)
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Re:Illegal Fire Sharing? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is the basis of both "information wants to be free" and "copyright infringement is not theft [in the literal sense]".
Jefferson's works make me wish Amnesty International hadn't already appropriated the candle-and-barbed-wire logo for themselves.
Not because of RIAA alone ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not because of RIAA alone ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Judical Extortion and Free Speech. (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA almost always has a very strong case.
No they don't. They have an IP address and an accusation, many of which have been proved false. What they have is the strength of bad laws that allow them to take everything you own or waste it all with court motions, both of which are better called "judicial extortion" than justice.
1) Sending someone else's creative work to ten thousand of your best friends is not speech.
Keeping me from publishing my own work on the network I pay for is a violation of free speech.
If you want to publish your own content via p2p, go ahead and do so on a network that isn't subsidized by the rest of your community.
First, because the networks are highly regulated all of them are publically subsidized. The network operators may not be living up to their obligations and might have wasted two hundred billion of your dollars [muniwireless.com], but they are ultimately yours and can be ordered to perform.
Second, how can I share by P2P when idiot operators block my traffic? I can buy all the hardware and service I want, but I won't be able to use it if it's censored at the receiving end.
Make no mistake, the big publishers want to make the internet look like cable TV and they are almost there. Unless you fight for your rights, you will play no further part than as a "consumer" and others will continue to own your culture.
It's not about speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not about speech (Score:5, Insightful)
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That's about 2400mbps of bandwidth. (4&~600 mbps payload)
Lets say you have 24,000 students, and 10% of them are doing p2p => 2,400 sharers
That's 1mbps per sharer to saturate your connection which is not really a large amount.
In this scenario, unless you bring your cap below that, you won't affect existing sharing.
And if you drop it below that, you really start to impact real work/research.
Doing an across the board limit just doesn't wo
Re:It's not about speech (Score:5, Insightful)
No no no! This will actually solve the problem while maintaining the neutrality of the network!
By telling students what they can and can't do, the University maintains its mommy/daddy role to the students, and further leaves themselves open to more legal actions, allowing them to parent the students more in the future.
The goal is to have as much administration involved as possible (administrators only exist to create more administration) and to control the students as overtly as possible!
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So charge the students for their bandwidth usage at slightly above what it's costing. Use the extra money for upgrades.
Bandwidth is a resource that costs money - giving people "Unlimited" bandwidth and then degrading the internet connection to prevent "excess use" is absurd. Hell, if you give every student the first gig/month free most of them won't even notice the policy change.
isp's crying about having to provide what they say (Score:3, Insightful)
and both isp subscribers and students pay big bucks, or is 5 figures a year not enough for them?
its one thing to apply qos to manage bandwidth, its quite another to start making student's choices for them and refusing to provide "internet" service.
espec
Re:isp's crying about having to provide what they (Score:2)
Students are not paying five figures a year for bandwidth.
It's perfectly legitimate for a school to stop providing a particular service. However much you want to think students are paying for the costs of their education, the reality is is that public schools are
Re:isp's crying about having to provide what they (Score:3, Insightful)
The ISPs contend that unlimited meant always-connected, not always maxed-out. I wish they didn't put that bit in the fine print of an ad, but I've seen it there.
Lesson to learn: don't oversell your bandwidth.
Bandwidth overselling is one way that that ISPs can give you an affordable rate. I've heard of ISP techs saying that they use as
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You have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Of Ohio State's $3.76 billion 2006/2007 budget, only $510 million (13.5%) came from state appropriations.
Considerably more money ($921 million / 24.5%) came from students. And even more than that came from the hospital that Ohio State operates.
Is this information h
So drop a Layer-7 filter on it (Score:2)
Also there are plenty of legit reasons to use P2P. Linux being a major one. I find all the fastest downloads for Linux distros are torrents. Hell, when Knoppix 5 came out I downloaded it and then seeded over the weekend since it was summer and the b
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Higher learning (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh No! (Score:3, Funny)
Oh No! How will pyromaniacs share now? But seriously, it's kind of sad that a major error like that can slip through... twice.
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Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
At the place i worked at, for a while we did try to block kazaa and the like, the problem was that there would always be a new protocol that would pop up to take it's place. We eventually gave up on blocking it because of this.
This story is really not a new thing in the university world, most have a policy of limiting the student's ability to fileshare (some through innocent means like NAT routing, others through throttling the bandwidth for those services).
So before we all get up in arms that people are limiting access, you'd think again when you have to call 20 people in a day, tell them why their access has been shut off, and have every one of them claim that they've never file shared in their lives. Only to get the call the next day where they complain that their their myspace is too slow.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
You have two problems, they can be handled separately.
First, you get RIAA letters. The appropriate response is a form letter saying that "Our school privacy policy prohibits us from releasing user information without a subpoena or court order" (obviously you'll want to verify that with a lawyer, but you shouldn't be sending out user information based on random letters). If you do get a legit subpoena or court order, send them the info if it's still available.
Second, you have excess bandwidth usage. This is really simple: Charge the students a reasonable fee for bandwidth overages - this will encourage users to conserve without unduly constraining people who actually are willing to pay for their bandwidth. It also has the advantage that as demand increases you automatically have the money to pay for upgrades.
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Second point: Actually we are implementing pay for service very soon (mainly to cover the cost of re-wiring our older buildings as well as wiring newly purchased properties).. sooo... you're right about this one
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Bandwidth isn't unlimited, there's only so much of it. Buying more capacity costs money.
Faced with more bandwidth demand than supply and no income from bandwidth charges, a University IT department (or an ISP selling "Unlimited Internet") will tend to look at their bandwidth usage and make calls like "60% of our bandwidth usage is coming from these 8 guys running servers. If we just ban servers we won't need to upgrade". So they implement that policy by blocking incoming TCP connections with a firewall and
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uhh, I'm not an expert on myspace but I didn't know it was a p2p app.
Re:Much easier, better solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Knee jerk (Score:3, Interesting)
Applause (Score:5, Interesting)
Most university IPs are real on a really high speed connected LAN. As a result they get elected to supernode status by most modern P2P applications. As a result the university network becomes a jump point for NAT traversal for all leaches within 30-60ms rtt around it. As a result the resource usage is clearly disproportional to the actual on-campus usage. Essentially all small and medium corporates and home users sitting behind firewalls in the immediate vicinity live off that resource and steal a significant portion of the Ohio University network capacity.
Personally, if I was the admin, I would have tried to QoS P2P down (and net neutrality be damned) to the point where the campus is made equivalent to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately even if the protocols were easier to isolate, that may be quite difficult for a network the size of Ohio State. Most network equipment used at the bandwidths in question cannot do selective delays and probability drops very well. The P2P applications nowdays make the "if the protocols are easier to isolate" statement false anyway. All the developers know that they are committing a resource theft and they go way beyond what is considered spyware tactics to achieve their aims (current Skype is a fine example of this).
So on the balance of things, just banning them to hell is probably the most cost effective options. Congrats and applause. Can we have more of that please. A few more and the net economics will go back to where they belong so people actually start looking at things like multicast and frontline in-local-loop delivery instead emulating it through resource theft.
Sure, cost effective (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember: Nearly all university students are adults, with all the rights it implies. Universities don't get to take those away just because they feel it is convenient. Dorms in many ways have to be treated like apartments: Just because you own them, doesn't mean you have unlimited rights to them.
Re:Applause (Score:5, Insightful)
Applying QoS across the board on all known P2P applications would not be a violation of net neutrality. Arguably, neither would applying QoS for a single standard (de facto or de jure) protocol, like BitTorrent.
What would be a violation of net neutrality would be if they applied QoS to BitTorrent, except to certain sites that paid the university a fee.
Medium vs Message (Score:5, Insightful)
But it is not a perfect correlation. Banning Bittorrent will hamper downloading Linux ISOs and other high traffic, legitimate materials. There is no justification for saying that file sharing as a whole is illegal, any more than you could say that using the Internet is illegal even if it turns out that much traffic violates the law.
Against the grain (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know that there are great legal uses for BitTorrent, but do you really think 95% of the students are using it to legally download Ubuntu or something? Yeah right. Get real and be honest with yourselves, this is probably a smart thing for the school to be doing. If the students want to download whatever they want, then they need to pay for their own DSL or move out of the dorms and be responsible for their own actions (gee, what a thought), but while they're using the school's network and the school is somewhat responsible for them, I think it's perfectly reasonable to restrict their illegal file sharing.
It's a whole other argument whether the RIAA sucks (they do) and whether file sharing positively impacts the recording industry (it might) but for a school, come on, it's their right, and probably the right thing for them to do. Get over it.
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How can you block file sharing? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Add to that the fact that most people don't even know how to update their compu
I'll laugh if it catches Blizzard's WoW patch (Score:2)
This could be fun if they didn't exempt Blizzard. I didn't notice any mention of their legal use of P2P torrent.
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So, worry not. You can still sell your souls at $15/month (as I do mine).
Unsurprising (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nail in the coffin of internet freedom" is a bit of an overstatement. There's no free lunch. Dealing with DMCA takedown notices is a huge burden on campus IT staff (our campus has a network security officer who has spent most of his tenure chasing movies and music) which cannot be ignored without the risk of losing the campus's protection under the DMCA safe-harbor provisions. Further, campuses don't have a magically free internet connection. Most pay into a state-wide consortium for Internet2 access then pay an additional, metered rate for commercial internet traffic. Why should universities spend limited resources to subsidize torrent traffic?
Now before anyone talks about the legitimate p2p use, even that is a questionable use of university resources. Ideally p2p shares bandwidth costs so that everyone gets something for a minor contribution. This doesn't necessarily work out to the benefit of universities since their fat, low-latency pipes take priority over the narrow, slow-upload-speed DSL and cable-folks. Ultimately, the universities have to allocate resources to support university business and this policy must be seen as a business decision. If it is necessary for an aspect of university business, I suspect an exception will be allowed as soon as a faculty member makes the request. If the students are miffed, they can pay for commercial wireless access (like most cell phone companies offer) for on campus or use xDSL or cable at home.
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Policing content, though, is another road to losing DMCA safe harbor protections, which
But they can still pay all their athletes, right? (Score:2)
In related news.... (Score:4, Funny)
No Servers! (Score:3, Insightful)
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And it is not just a pedantic point. While it might seem like a computer that is only sending e-Mails is clearly a client, and not a server,
Re:No Servers! (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, it really is. And your email example is bogus too: if I return those emails, I do it by connecting back to an email server. The email server doesn't connect to me.
I don't think there is any good technical or legal definition of what a "client" and "server" computer are.
Try this one: If I can remotely connect to your computer and induce it to perform a non-trivial function at my convenience, its a server.
We firewall jockeys even have a precise technical definition: If your machine accepts a SYN packet and responds with a SYN/ACK, or if your machine expects to receive the first in a series of UDP packets on a particular port, its a server.
Who owns the wires? (Score:2)
All the bullshit about supporting theft or caving in to corporate terrorism is nothing but demagoguery. I so wish those
Mexican universities... (Score:3, Informative)
Monopolizing student's internet (Score:4, Insightful)
My Experience at OU (Score:3, Interesting)
Back then, there was a lot of port throttling going on. Trying to serve anything from inside campus was nearly impossible due to the bandwidth being quickly throttled down, even on port 80. As for getting information from outside the campus network, only port 80 worked with any reasonable speed. Other ports were throttled back to the extreme, so much that watching a streaming video was often impossible. If you think academic information only comes in the form of text on a web page, you're mistaken - as a music major, there were tons of video and audio resources made unavailable by draconian bandwidth throttling. And no, I'm not going to send a special request to IT for each instance; that's impractical.
While it is obvious that many students choose to infringe on copyright law, the true problem I believe is bandwidth usage. College is so expensive that I don't think any student would bat an eye at an extra $100/month in bandwidth expenses, to say the least. That's about the cost of books, though internet access provides enormous academic and social benefits.
The best way to handle the situation is to provide more than enough bandwidth for academic and social needs, and try students who infringe on copyright law in school court. If they're found guilty, they get kicked out of school for a year.
Add on to all this that OU subscribes to CDigix [cdigix.com] for all students - even if you live off campus. This company provides students with tons of cd quality music, entire albums, etc., of not only popular but also obscure artists, and it's completely legal, and many students are very happy with the content it provides.
Because of the quick pace of technology change, banning p2p seems unwise to me. However, OU is a business, and like any business, it will do whatever the directors feel it needs to in order to make as much money as quickly as possible.
Re:Freedom is not about theft (Score:5, Informative)
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Completely untrue! (Score:2)
when you do it on someone else's infrastructure all they have to do is hand over user information, and they are completely in the clear thanks to DMCA safe harbor provisions.
let's apply this to any other controversial morally loaded topic:
"a university expelling students for getting abortions is not curtailing freedom, they are protecting their medical resources"
"a university blocki
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Now, if you were to magically modify your database records so you had more money without depriving anyone else of any, that would not be theft, but it would still be fraud, and illegal, and wrong.
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In your example, after you make your illegal transfer, the other person no longer has access to thier money.
With copyright infringment, you deprive the other person of nothing. They still have thier copyright. They can still do everything that they could before you infringed.
There's
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This analogy doesn't really fly, since money is a finite and ultimately physical resource. But I'll play along...
Of course that would be. If you transfer the money out of my account that means I can no longer use the little plastic card in my pocket. And that I can't go to the bank and get the physical cash
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As an aside, there is no reason why money is either finite or physical. Value is finite, but money can be infinite given appropriate inflation.
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Face it-- downloading music is probably wrong, regardless of what you personally believe, unless you go out and buy an equal number of CDs for every album you download. Yes, it is a free non-rival good, but you should still be paying for it in some sense if you're getting something out of it. Anything less is just lying to yourself about the morality of the issue. There's no guaranteed "right to free music" for you or anyon
Re:Completely untrue! (Score:4, Insightful)
ahh the classic black and white approach.
people have been recording radio and copying tapes for decades, and that "violation of exclusivity" didn't do anything to the bottom line.
if you want to start defining that as theft, then i say turn about's fair play:
what did the RIAA companies steal?
1 - the public domain: they've extended copyright from 17 years to life+70, assuring only quaint anachronisms will be in the public domain from now on.
2 - competition in the tech sector: their government granted priviledge(not right) of exclusivity did not cover carte blanch regulatory control over all electronics through sneaky leverage of DMCA section 1201. it's been stated over and over again this was unintended, but it only takes one corrupt politician to prevent a law being repealed.
3 - fair use and individual property/privacy rights: once you've purchased a copy you have the right to do anything with it short of distribution. They have used DRM and the DMCA to stop that.
so they "stole" 3 times, and we're "stealing" it back.
theyre reaping what they sow, and i have no sympathy for them as they receive their recompence full circle.
Justify this : (Score:2)
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theft is taking something away (Score:2)
A weird reasoning you have, do you mean that when someone shares a file another file is deleted from the university computers somewhere? In case you didn't know, a digital file, differently from more material commodities, can be shared without deleting the original.
Anyway, that old, old FUD you are trying to spread on behalf of the MAFIAA isn't the point here. A university is a site created for one a
Yes it is (Score:3, Informative)
Freedom is about being able to do what you want. Responsibility is knowing what to do with your freedom.
Port blocking, while it will restrict copyright violations - is a restriction of freedom.
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Some of us download Microsoft Windows distros the same way. Of course, the idea is the same.
But saving money is about saving upstream (Score:3, Informative)
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If it's anything like the Linux mirror at my school, you won't find anything released within the last two years on the IT department's servers. It's a decent idea in theory, but in practice I think that between the frequent releases and various distributions it probably doesn't save much bandwidth over individual downloads. Sure, you save a bit when multiple people want the same file; on the other hand, you have to maintai
Re:give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)
If that was the reason, they'd just throttle it to a reasonable level. Also, if you would RTFA, that's not the reason that they give for blocking it; they just give it a mention after talking about all of the RIAA threats.
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The University itself is implying that the RIAA letters are the reason for this; the article was written by one of their employees and
HTTP tunnel (Score:3, Informative)
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I hope not, considering how slow it is already. Proxies shared across thousands of people really don't support peer-to-peer sharing of large files well.
What I DO suspect will happen is that students who live near, but not in, the University will start hosting FTP servers off-campus.
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Out of the frying pan, in to the fire [slashdot.org].
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for the next 2 years the network was crawling even slower than it was before.
as for "non-school related activities": people live there. Its their home. I suppose university students are just supposed to be machines who do nothing but eat sleep and work, and of course obey whatever nanny-school tells them?
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whatever that was supposed to mean. theyre protected under DMCA safeharbor. theyre not at all liable.. except for the time it takes to look up and copy IP logs. Woowoo.. they have to do their jobs in the school it department.
it's time for these schools to start earning these tuiti
Re:BitTorrent (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirates use something because it's the BEST way to do something.
Why? because they have total freedom to choose the best, because, due to their nature, they don't pay for anything.
Thus, outlawing something because pirates use it is shooting yourself (or at least technical progress itself) in the foot.
Sony's views on the xvid codec originally brought this thought to my mind when they prevented sony vegas 5 or 6 from working with it, under that same logic I'd say ban sony vegas itself, I hear it's still incredibly popular with pirates.
While your at it you'd better do something to shut down Maya, 3dstudio and Photoshop.
Adoption by Pirates (Score:2)
I doubt the school really cares about what you are pushing across, but they DO care that it kills the lines. Bandwidth does cost money.