Magical butterfies, get it right!

Actually, no. MADD just successfully lobbied for allowing 4 time convicted DUI offenders in florida to be able to get back on the road with a valid license again (HB 971). They are no longer the organization they pretend to be. And do you honestly believe you should be drinking before you drive? Regardless of amount, if you drink, call a cab. That simple. By the way anonymous coward, our penal system is based on PUNISHMENT FOR CRIMES COMMITED. Yes I think if you commit a crime by driving intoxicated you should be punished. And 5 years might be long enough to deter people from doing it again.

Its always a bad thing when you pilot a 3000 lb missile down the road intoxicated, whether you blow a .02 or a .20. What kind of asshole can justify driving just a little drunk. I've lost too many friends to jerkoffs coming home from happy hour just a bit drunk not paying enough attention to where they are going. I'm up for mandatory 5 year license suspensions for DUI convictions, if you care so little about the people around you to pilot a 3000 lb death machine while drunk you deserve to have your license taken away.

Bullshit. It can not be revoked because its not a privilege it is a right. It is infrastructure that we, the taxpayers of Miami own. It is left under the stewardship of third party security firms to enforce regulations that the higher authority (Metro Dade Transit) pass. The only person that can revoke your access to the train is a judge after finding you guilty of a crime involving the train or station. You can temporarily be removed from the train for engaging in illegal activities, but as a citizen of Miami, it is your RIGHT not privelige to take any form of PUBLICLY OWNED transit.If you look at the history of Miami's Metro rail, you'd see that not too long ago we had to kill our contract with another security firm, Wackenhut for gross violations of their contract, abuses of power, and theft.

This may be quite old but I used it as a template for a project at my job. http://www.research.ibm.com/WearableComputing/SoulPad/soulpad.html the idea is to boot a small install of linux with necessary drivers and load a vm player. Once the player is loaded you start the xp vm. Gives you a desktop that is extremely hardware agnostic (we built it from Knoppix) and secure (if you include the encryption layer IBM specifies). Once up and running we saw a 5-7% performance hit depending on hardware. Once we started using cpu's with virtualization enabled that went down to 2-5%.

No fee at all. we provide it to them on good faith that they wont do anything illegal on our network. they can do pretty much anything they like but if they get caught, they're temporarily kicked off. We only completely disable them if they continue the same behavior. Even then, there's recourse to get back access to the network, but they must justify it to the Dean. Keep in mind that although they pay tuition, ultimately theyre guests of the school, only there because they applied and were accepted. We must keep the network safe for the people the school seeks out and asks to join, ie staff

Do you? A peer to peer connection is just that. And if one of those peers happens to be on our network they are opening us to attack. That simple. Try to set up a network covering over 200,000 users over multiple vlans, covering 5 campuses and try to keep it secure. While I agree with other posters that there are uses for torrents, they can always use them at home, not school where their priority should be learning, not filling their ipods.

As I stated earlier, no we do not. While I agree that p2p networks and protocols themselves are benign, so are pistols. It all comes down to what you do with them. Most students around that age are not /. readers, and have issues with stuff like "opening the internets on their computer" or "getting the internet cd"... Not exactly educated users, and not likely to know how to access usenet, or what gopher even is. Most of these users are more concerned with aim, facebook, and not much else. We also have to look out for our staff and guests of the school. Students arent the only ones relying on our network. We host many events here, where we gather almost as much funds as we do from tuition, and hold numerous grants, which total more than 150% of our tuition monies.

If we were to follow your suggestions and open the pipe, we would have to hire someone to deal with the RIAA letters coming in, tie them to a particular student, and forward the soon to be arriving lawsuit to them. As Orwellian as it sounds, we do this part for their own good. The last thing we want is a bunch of stuck up students with rich and powerful parents to be sued while on campus. As for the "smarter" students, if they're smart enough to get around our security, we pretty much turn a blind eye to them. If they are that able then we can be pretty sure they aren't going to do something to draw attention to themselves like downloading Brittney Spears newest abomination. Also, by allowing this access on our network, we're implicitly condoning that behavior. It's usually the law students who come in and take issue with us not allowing them to steal as they see fit, ignoring the irony of it. Bottom line, while we aren't responsible directly for security of the students system, we are directly responsible for the environment it resides in. I'm proud to say that less than 2% of the systems on our campus are exhibiting virus like network traffic, and we've quashed all zombie systems within minutes of appearing on our network.

We do provide for that, by hosting our own repository for downloading most of the free distros, also provide access to volume license windows os's and apps, and providing free access to services like napster and Ruckus for music downloads. I promise you that downloading the newest release of Ubuntu from one of our servers on the same network as your system is much quicker and more secure than torrenting it. That being said, I use torrents all the time to download content of questionable license, but I'm doing that from my house, on a connection that I pay for, on a network where my teachers dont host assignments or grades. All we're concerned with is keeping our network safe and stable.

There is reasoning behind this.When the user initiates a p2p connection they're opening up their machines to remote access. Theres also a huge increase in network traffic and port scans all over the place. From a security standpoint, p2p is horrendous. Again, we dont care about the DMCA aspect, in fact we purchase licenses to services like napster and Ruckus (rip) and provide it to students fee of cost as well as hosting a repository for linux distros. If they need WOW updates they can always download them over http so we're not limiting them in any real way, we're just covering our own a**es. We also have a code of conduct the students must sign before they are granted access to our network. In that document we stipulate that they are guaranteed access to basically the standard protocols, like http, ftp, pop, exchange.... And by the way, any network admin who does not disable unused ports or blocks certain non essential protocols from accessing their network is just plain dumb.

I work on a campus as well, and we do pretty much the same thing. It's not our job to police the students systems, if they want to steal crap virus infected music that's okay with me. But when they do it over our network there's hell to pay. We currently use a 3 strikes policy, we look for specific protocols, not data itself, and if we detect torrent or generic p2p traffic we disable their internet access. Once that happens they need to go to the student IT office to have their systems checked out and any offending apps removed. We always give them the choice not to remove the apps, but we wont allow them on our network until removal is verified. On the 3rd offense they need to set up a meeting with the dean of students to have their access restored. Very rarely does it get this far. On another front, if we detect that type of activity on a staff system they're reprimanded and educated about the risks associated, then fired on the spot if it happens again. We don't do this because of any extortion attempts by the RIAA, for us its purely a security and bandwidth based decision.

As the sole symantec admin for a network with 500 plus systems, anything but symantec. Its been nothing but a headache. The only real plus is that it will deploy to and manage win and linux, with mac management in the next major release of the management console for windows.