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?"

Does your university censor /. too?

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY

What... you don't see the humor in downmodding the comment such that it in great probability is reduced below the viewing threshold for the majority of Slashdot readers, in some essence censoring a post which is making a (debatably) humorous reference to an error message which has implications that can be viewed as being related to censorship, all of this being posted to a discussion on censorship in an organization supposedly modeled on free sharing of information, the discussion being held in a community of people who are supposedly great supporters of freedom of information?

To double the humor, the mod of offtopic was in itself an offtopic mod, as the post was in an of itself on topic. Redundant would have been a far more appropriate mod, as we see a "nothing to see here, move along" post on just about every Slashdot story that is related to censorship, but then again that mod would have brought up complaints of being unfair as many Slashdotters can't seem to realize that a post can be redundant even if it is the first post on that particular discussion if the post shows up on every single discussion of similar nature.

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Even if your University is in the minority, it is part of a disturbing trend.

Most of those filters are designed for corporate or under-18 environments.

Universities have wildly different needs.

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

If anything, Universities (and libraries) should at least be the ONE place on earth where the Internet should never be censored under any, any any any circumstances!!

Although your suggestion that there is a 19-24 age group that is super-responsible is kind of funny :-)

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

What is funny is that people still think universities are the last bastions of free-expression or critical thought. Universities are one of the most censorship prone, controlling, paternalistic, politically correct restrictive institutions around. Usually, censorship or other forms of social control are pioneered in universities, before they move out into the public at large.

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

Political correctness is another matter, and not really relevant to this discussion.

Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??

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

Perhaps University should be the place where any intelligent net user should learn how to circumvent this sort of thing (an increasingly important academic skill!). Actually, it's pretty simple. All you need to do is [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]

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

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++

Key word

"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.

Shrug

It's a private university. They can do what they want. Try surfing Fark at Bob Jones University and see how well that goes over...

Re:Shrug

Well, what's different about this is it's not even accomplishing any particular goal. Is it keeping out "naughty" sites? Er, some yes, and some no. Is it keeping out newspaper sites? Er, some yes, some no. Is it keeping out bandwidth hogs? Er, kinda in the sense that it makes internet use a nightmare. But it prohibits an itty bitty mp3 clip of of the wumpasaurus's mating call for my zoology class (hypothetical, people!) just as much as a 14 Mb mp3 at PIRATEYOURMP3SHERE.COM. Plus, it seems to clip out vital parts of websites that *are* acceptable. Kinda like what happens when you do javascript block + ad-related url-block, except that you can't turn it off by changing settings on your software!

So, it's more imcompetence than malice.

Re:Shrug

It's a private university. They can do what they want.

True and completely besides the point. The first question is "Should an institution dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No"; the second question is "Do many institutions dedicated to higher learning engage in censorship?" and the answer is "No."

Narrow thinking

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?

Re:Narrow thinking

I should note that I agree with the sentiments in your post. At the University of Wisconsin, we also do not censor or block any traffic, and only use traffic shaping and bandwidth limits in the residence halls, because it was deemed a necessity in terms of the way the housing division here manages bandwidth and usage; still, nothing is blocked.

I would like to say that QuickTime, while proprietary, is often a reasonable tool to use to generate and view content that utilizes open international standards (such as MPEG-4 and H.264). Part of that thinking went into this IP video delivery project [wisc.edu] for us (more reasoning in a recent presentation here [wisc.edu]), and ultimately, QuickTime allowed us to do things with open standards and protocols that Windows Media, Real, and VideoFurnace simply couldn't, and at a cost that was (and still is) much, much less than dedicated industrial video encoders and other equipment.

Re:Narrow thinking

Regarding Quicktime. I fully agree with you and that is why I noted it as a media tool. I just felt it was appropriate to note that it was proprietary for full disclosure.

As an aside, some of the new imaging code coming out in 10.5 is also really going to enhance the ability to extend Quicktime in some new and exciting ways, not just for video or sound either. :-)

This is most certainly NOT a trend

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.

censorship makes you liable

I was in charge of writing a policy for web usage and censorship at a small private university. The policy that was decided on was to charge each student a $20 annual internet usage fee, in exchange for which we provided uncensored internet access to them while on campus. We chose to be their "ISP" so we could wash our hands of responsibility for whatever they would choose to do with it.

It was our opinion that by choosing to actually censor internet access, a college could become responsible for the actions of its students on the net, because it shows that they are monitoring the students' behavior and choosing to intervene. Failure to "correctly" intervene could make a school liable. Establishing a policy that the school is an ISP and provides uncensored access to students who are responsible for their own actions could prevent liability for the school.

Blocking porn?

> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.

My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why

Not odd

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn,

Not at all, that's the way it's been for thousands of years.

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." -- Mark Twain

Limits on Bandwidth, not Content

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.

Art Class

As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights [ibiblio.org], you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.

Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus [artchive.com], which... what the hell?"

I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.

I'm an admin at a private university

university students are unable to see content that the rest of the (free) world sees

That's what filters do. That means they're working. The important piece that molds the context of this comment is how "content" is defined.

and more importantly are often blocked from very legitimate information crucial to their area of study

In almost every case I've been involved in, it broke down to exactly how crucial the information was. In my realm, if I think there's any educational value there whatsoever, I'll unblock it. I'm more concerned about proper student education then sensless content blocking. You place may be different.

Papers like Village Voice are blocked. Anatomy sites are blocked. Electronic Art sites are blocked. Anything with ".mp3" is blocked.

Village Voice and anatomy sites may be being blocked because of overzealous regex filters. I can't imagine why electronic art (how ambigious is that?!) sites are blocked unless you're refering to Electronic Arts [ea.com], in which case I might not see your case. As far as MP3s, I, too, block any MP3 downloads at my campuses, unless requested on an individual basis for a good reason. I have yet to find a good reason why unfettered MP3 downloading aides education. Do you have one?

It strikes me as odd that students must leave campus to learn, and smacks of censorship in horrible ways.

Now it's obvious you're biased, trolling, or just whining. Not to mention you just labeled yourself and your fellow faculty incapable of teaching without unfiltered internet access.

Are we alone, or part of a disturbing trend?

I don't know. Do you enjoy beating your wife?

Look, at my campuses I use a web proxy (Squid) for several reasons, and one of them is to block certain types of content. Most of the campuses have two multilinked T1s, which means right around 3Mb/s. I don't have enough bandwidth to support the world. First, the obvious stuff, like porn, goes into the blocklists. Then I do a little advert filtering. Anonymous web proxies are a no-no, as well as sites dedicated to any sort of large, streaming content. YouTube, Google Video, di.fm, and video portions of ESPN, CNN, and other are blocked, to name a few.

Oh, and Myspace, Friendster, and most of the other social sites are blocked. I challenge you to show me what educational value they have and then show me them being used that way .

And, yes, through a combo of mime-types and regex I block mp3, avi, wmv, mov, and just about every other audio and video type out there. You know what happens when I don't? People spend their time on apple.com waitching movie trailers or something equally unproductive. We got tired of wondering why our VPN or online applications were slow, only to discover people abusing the network. It is not my students right to download the latest game trailer for Whatever's Coming Out Next Month XII (omg!).

I'm betting you haven't:

• Thought, at length, about how the internet can both help and hurt your students, both during and away from class.
• Recorded specific examples of sites or resources you can't reach and why they would make a justifiable, positive impact on your class.
• Met with your local IT staff to discuss your specific examples and discover what can be done about providing access to them.

Ridiculous

I've had computer access at five universities in the past two years, and none do anything like this. Each in a different state, three private, two public, all in the top 50 (USN&WR), all but one in the top 20. Maybe it's common, but not at good schools. Which schools does your CIO really want to emulate?

Re:Sounds Like...

RTFS! How is the Village Voice and anatomy sites high bandwidth?