Web Censorship on the University Campus? 503
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? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY (Score:5, Funny)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Insightful)
Please explain how political correctness is NOT censorship??
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Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along. (Score:4, Informative)
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++
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Read about the non-filtering proxy filter on internetfilter.com at peacefire's blog:
--jeffk++
Key word (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Bandwidth limits make sense (Score:2, Insightful)
If someone wants to pay $30/month for 6-down/1-up or more for even higher bandwidth, they should have that option, assuming your equipment allows for it.
After all, if they lived off-campus that's what they would have to do.
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This only allows for academic usage of the connection (which can encompass a *wide* variety of things, no doubt), and only allows for de minimus personal usage. All on campus traffic is unlimited, and any academic off-campus use can be unlimited. Everything else can be used, too, but counts against a 5GB/week bandwidth
Shrug (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Shrug (Score:4, Insightful)
So, it's more imcompetence than malice.
Re:Shrug (Score:5, Insightful)
Narrow thinking (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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He said the personnel director basically went white whe
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But isn't everything interesting on the internet considered illegal in Utah?
Seriously, though, if overall bandwidth and equal access are an issue, I suspect duration and content based throttling would solve most of the problems of widespread abuse. By targeting the high-bandwidth content and placing bandwidth caps (I'm thinking 24 hour window rate throttling for the top 5% of users, not max client rates on an intermittent basis), you could limit the total
It strikes me as odd... (Score:2, Insightful)
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But wait, that isn't what strikes you as odd...it strikes you as odd that students need the 'Net in order to learn.
What strikes me is odd is that what strikes you as odd is completely unrelated to anything in TFA.
But wait, this is
Ok, the irrelevance of your comment, and the insightful mod it got, no longer strikes me as odd at all.
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Think of it not as "the internet" and more as extremely easy access to reference materials. Long ago, you only had ac
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why? (Score:2)
I can understand throttling bittorent but this is taking it a bit far.
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout... and some teaching assistant just "checked" a box and initialed it. After all that work? It was sort of an insult. Universities are not the places they used to be...
That happened to me at Stanford (Score:2)
Although I just got my degree the other day and they "Confirmed" it on this shoddy carbon copy of a dot matrix printout...
That's what I got when I graduated from Stanford in 1985. I finished at the end of a quarter, but not at the end of the academic year. So I got a printout on a dot matrix printer. It was a real letdown. Eventually, many months later, the fancy diploma showed up in the mail.
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Err... not to be a pedant or anything.
This is most certainly NOT a trend (Score:5, Informative)
I know what school! (Score:2, Interesting)
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University of the Incarnate Word [uiw.edu]
Our Lady of the Lake University [ollusa.edu]
Trinity University [trinity.edu]
Wayland Baptist University [wbu.edu]
The rest I remember are members of the Alamo Community College District [accd.edu] or University of Texas [utsa.edu].
I'm not sure which institute of higher learning would like to take credit for this, but you never know. I keep having to remember to toss logic out the window at work, why not with these places as well.
You vill take zee notebook and LIKE IT! (Score:2)
Anyone else want to speculate as to whether this is the place?
high costs, hard to pick good uses (Score:2)
Truman State University (Score:2)
If students are so worried (and have admin access to the PC's they use), they could use JAP, or any number of other software(s) that redirect at least http requests through proxies to get around such restrictions.
I don't agree with the message stupidcensorship puts out (aiming it primarially at jr/high schools), but for college settings I see nothing wrong with it, for the stated purposes.
It's when such services are abu
Complain, complain, complain!!! (Score:2)
hm (Score:2)
I don't think that this is "normal" though, because as you rightly mention, there is so much to learn on the internet and I think that you achieve this goal best by allowing the free flow of information. Hell, you're screwed if your studying medicine at that uni. Y
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Public University = any university that has some or most of their funding through tax dollars from the state/federal level. Most 'state' schools (like Ohio State, Florida State, Oregon State, etc) are public universities.
So which is better? No clear answer to that as each type has their advantages and disadvantages. Private schools are often views as 'better' because of
just make this info public, enrollment will drop (Score:2)
censorship makes you liable (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
My last job used to censor Lightspeed University too. I can't possibly imagine why
Not odd (Score:5, Interesting)
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
At University, you jump through hoops. (Score:2, Insightful)
Web Nazi (Score:2)
New York University (Score:2)
I work for a university (Score:2)
1) Rate limit the dorms. Each dorm has a cap, 5-10mbits I think, for the whole dorm. That mean that we can know for certain that the bandwidth used by residents won't exceed a certain amount.
2) Reflexive access lists on all dorms. That's a permit out, deny in kind of thing like you'd get behind a NAT. Means that while P2P apps work, they aren't the demons that they can be (fast computers with no
ssh tunnel (Score:2)
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You can SSH tunnel anywhere, but the server on the other end has to port forward or proxy for you, which means you need control over it.
I see this reply a lot, but if you only have one machine and no friends on the outside of the network, it's not *that* simple.
No censorship at UC campuses (Score:2)
I work on one of the UC campuses, and there is no such censorship here. The tradition of the university, and of the UC system in general, makes me believe that if a CIO dared suggest similar censorship here, the faculty and students would cry that this is against academic freedom, and the CIO would be sent packing in very short order. But this is just what I believe, since to this day, no CIO has attempted such censorship (he would be stopped before implementation).
We do, however, keep track of net
It's only censorship if... (Score:2, Troll)
It's only censorship if 1) the students are prevented from leaving campus to search for information and 2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. Otherwise you and your students are free to do what we've been doing for hundereds of years: bringing in outside knowledge and incorporating it into our education.
I can't speak for every university, but the p
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Safety, weather, amd transportation are ways someone is prevented from leaving campus.
"2) you as a teacher are prevented from bringing in outside material for your classes. "
"I can't speak for every university, but the private university I attended never had a hard copy version of the Village Voice or other such material on campus (my college years were pre-internet). If I wanted such material, I had to go off-campus to get it
At my University (Score:2)
Your university is doing a disservice to its students by blocking.
Limits on Bandwidth, not Content (Score:4, Informative)
Only blocking P2P and bandwidth limits (Score:2, Interesting)
Art Class (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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?
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.
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:
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The best thing students can do is make a lot of noise. Write to your local papers, your l
Ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:4, Insightful)
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If their concern is high bandwidth items, then they can institute bandwidth throttles, instead of blocking data completely. If you really want to wait forever for your large file to transfer, you should be able to get it.
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Anyway, I don't think the bandwidth problem applies to most universities.
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Yes, like Royal Military College in Canada: 137.94.0.0 to 137.94.255.255 -- go nuts
By the way, a military institution, beholden to the vast majority of the most fucked up government rules imaginable, blocks absolutely nothing. Monitor, yes; block, no. I could surf for the naked pictures of Taco's mom to my heart's content and not get blocked once. Though the admins might have something to say about what I was looking at.
To the OP, tell your CIO they're just as much of a joke as the school IS is becoming..
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Me too. I paid $100 a month for parking in the Coffman ramp. However keep in mind the stadium is a drop in the bucket as far as parking problems go, the real problem
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:5, Insightful)
If conserving bandwidth is their concern, why don't they just do that? Throttling connections would _actually_ solve the problem, without imposing censorship.
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Well, from the University's perspective a football stadium is probably a better "investment" then better bandwidth. Having a good football program probably does more t
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would be very surprised if 'foodball stadium' listed high on the reasons for attending among the students who go on to do well in ways that reflect on the university.
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the "good football team" is all about alumni dollars and administration prestige and NOT about students.
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Re:Sounds Like... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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What are you talking about!?! Our football team is undefeated since 1993 [caltech.edu]! :-P
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That's why I went to UTA in Texas, where there was no football team at all. Of course, every year, some "involved" freshman would write editorials in the school paper about why we needed one, launch a campaign for "student government" (why should those people have control over me?), etc., trying to get a football program restarted, but they never found enough support to win, and I suppose eventually they always went on to a sports/party university like they wanted so the rest of us could stay and do what w
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How is blocking the Village Voice (an online newspaper) not about censorship? You are a total tool.
Re:Sounds Like... (Score:4, Insightful)
I often find that useful articles with algorithms or techniques get blocked this way.
One would think that the obnoxious handholding stops after highschool......
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I'm not against the college allocating bandwidth and other legitimate practices - but the handhold (censorship) proves to be annoying to me every day where I'm at.
le porn (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The good old days (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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Re:The good old days (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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:The good old days (Score:4, Insightful)
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Oh sure, electronic media is very handy to work with. However, there are vast amounts of information that aren't on-line or freely accessible. There's a heck of a lot you miss by just doing a google search, and students that approach their work that way haven't learned about research.
Is JAMA freely available online? How about the last 100 years of the New York Times? Articles from the Washington Post more than a month old? A decent college library has those and much more. It wo
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The uni in question is just being cheap about their bandwidth bill.
No admin in his right mind institutes blocking of particular Web sites to reduce bandwidth. Protocols blocking, sure. Traffic throttling and shaping, almost certainly. But blocking particular Web sites, like ones about anatomy or CA news sites? I don't see it. Maybe the sys admin is just really, really incompetent and believes what he is saying or maybe he's a lying scum bag. In either case, something should be done to address this.
Re:has this universityh eard fo "academic freedom" (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh shit, I forgot where I am! I meant to say "Americans are fat dumb sheep!"
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one of the major points of battle is some of the sites that they end up blocking.
part of several of the lab work assignments requires posting the results to a personal website, usually a geocities page or something else free. and for some reason or another, IT keeps blocking those specific sites (not all of geocities, but the student's website on geocities). and the
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I find that funny. It was from an
I do have to admit many schools worry about having to deal with probes from Media Sentry and the following court orders for private information of students. I could easly see where staff may want to block some protocols to protect their students from financial disaster. They woul
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hahahaha... oh man, are you in for a suprise.
256 is fine for any research.
The only change I would make would be the option to have specific student make request to increase bandwidth temerarily(2 hours) if they NEED to download something very large for school work.
Say an ISO for some reason. Alternativly, have computers in the library with a large bandwidth that stu
Re: part of a disturbing trend? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
SSH + Firefox is even better (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can run ssh on a port 443 somewhere, you are as good as outside.
Get corkscrew [agroman.net] and use the following in your .ssh/config
ssh -D 2080 homebox -v -N and you're all set to rock !. And if you're using firefox, turn on network.proxy.socks_remote_dns and use localhost:2080 as your SOCKS4 proxy (so that your office DNS doesn't get a "A on mail.yahoo.com").
Needless to say, I acquired an intimated knowledge of the network protocol layers and how the different mechanisms in each layer works. I would have never acquired such a clear understanding of DNS lookups & tunneling, if I had been given a wide open network. Now, my current office has only a simplified NAT with port 25 outbound blocked (thank you spamware). But I still need to use this when I go to some campus to talk about something & suddenly miss some image or something from my machine (nearly all campuses in India have strict proxies).
And all this information is provided free of cost, with no liabilities on you getting fired/expelled for using this :)
PS: and somebody should hack CGIProxy to send entity encoded content & accept base64 encoded URLs ;)