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?

[mcmonkey (96054)]

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY

[shawb (16347)]

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.

[TubeSteak (669689)]

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.

[abscissa (136568)]

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.

[RDW (41497)]

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.

[Flounder (42112)]

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

Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??

Key word

[daveschroeder (516195)]

"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

[by Anonymous Coward]

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

[AxelBoldt (1490)]

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

[BWJones (18351)]

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

[daveschroeder (516195)]

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.

This is most certainly NOT a trend

[frequnkn (632597)]

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

[TheMCP (121589)]

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?

[Skevin (16048)]

> subjected to Lightspeed and/or Websense blocking.

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

Not odd

[AnotherBlackHat (265897)]

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

Art Class

[Dekortage (697532)]

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.

Re:Sounds Like...

[rundgren (550942)]

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

Re:Sounds Like...

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

``If your school's primary interest is to serve HTML & e-mail to the students, then can you really blame them for blocking high bandwidth items?''

If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.

Re:Sounds Like...

[walt-sjc (145127)]

Having a good football program probably does more to attract good students to your campus then good parking, bandwith, and competent instuctors combined.

Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.

Re:Sounds Like...

[cyber-dragon.net (899244)]

When I was looking at schools I actually took this into consideration. A schools focus on sports VS academics was a major deciding factor actually. The more interest in and money spent on sports the less interested I was in that campus. It showed a distinct flaw in the thinking of the administration that I knew, even at 16, would perpetuate into the rest of the campus. Are MIT and CalTech known for football? Nope. Do they even have teams? Who knows and who cares. That is not why one goes to college. Either of those schools on your resume and no one will care if you went to a football game or not. Sports programs should be required to live and die on their own, with NO school funding coming out of my tuition I was working two jobs to pay.

Before you think this perspective is born out of being a "geek" who never played sports etc, I was on the varsity swim team starting freshman year and JV football team for two.

Re:Sounds Like...

[maetenloch (181291)]

Back when I was an undergraduate, I worked in the university's admissions office helping with paperwork and gathering statistics. One of the things they did was to survey incoming students (and students who chose not to attend) and find out what influenced their decision to apply and attend/not attend. Surprisingly the top factors were mostly non-academic. As I recall campus appearance and the social scene were the top two factors. Most had decided to apply based on the recommendations of friends and guidance counselors followed by the performance of the school's sports teams. This was at an upper middle-tier university and the applicants were all well qualified academically. For the two years I helped with this, the results were consistent. For me it was an eye opener to find that most people made a major life decision based on 'shallow' considerations rather than the 'socially correct' reasons that everyone states publicly. Later I realized this is actually more the norm - the real reasons we choose other people for dating/mating or hiring are often far different than what we tell others or even ourselves.

le porn

[Jett (135113)]

I once ran a small computer lab at a university. One night a girl came in and told me she needed to look at porn for a research project - I had her sit in a corner so other customers wouldn't be uncomfortable and she spent about an hour taking notes and printing stuff out. So scratch porn from the list of sites a university would legitimately want to block. I'm sure students and professors need to do research on piracy, viruses, and all the other badness on teh intarweb as well.

Re:The good old days

[DragonWriter (970822)]

There was a time when information was distributed with books. Students would read them and learn... Too much to ask?

Yeah, and I supposed if you lived before computers and heard of a university prohibiting students access to books that most people had access to and that would be educationally useful, you'd dismiss it with comment about how people used to get their knowledge transmitted orally from the elders, and would it be too much to ask if students just went back to doing that...

Re:The good old days

[King_TJ (85913)]

Ugh... I just had a bit of a debate on this subject with a female friend who works in a university library in my city.

She maintained that schools teaching kids to "do research on the Internet" does them little good, and it's a farce that it's even called "research". She had an obvious bias towards printed books as superior media.

I maintain that the content is what's important ... not so much the form of distribution. Books used to be the least expensive way to distribute the content. Now, that's just not the case. It's far more space-efficient to convert most of it to digital media, and doing so gives huge advantages in search capabilities too.

With digital content, you can always duplicate onto printed media at will. With your original being a book, you have to do labor-intensive photocopying or scanning and printing to produce a duplicate. I'm not against the idea of paper or books, but especially for research purposes - digital is a vastly more flexible format.

Re: part of a disturbing trend?

[mamer-retrogamer (556651)]

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. ;)