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America Online

Is AIM Really a Bandwidth Hog? 151

Posted by Cliff from the a-danger-to-those-with-small-pipes dept.
Crispen asks: "A mess of schools, especially K-12 schools in the US, have banned instant messaging, claiming that it is a huge bandwidth hog. Is it? If you block ports 4443 (images) and 5190 (file transfers), how much bandwidth does AIM really take?"
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Is AIM Really a Bandwidth Hog? More

Is AIM Really a Bandwidth Hog?

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  • maybe (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Bastian ( 66383 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:27AM (#5237918)
    Depends on how much bandwidth the schools have. A lot of K-12 schools are running on a single DSL line that may or may not be throttled to something less than 1.5mbit. If the line pipe is always full, it makes sense to close the ports for all services that are generally used for recreational rather than academic purposes.

    Then again, given the amount of time most my teachers spent just trying to figure out how to work a computer during my classes' time in the computer labs because they were never trained, I'd say having computers in the classrom is more of a bandwidth hog.

  • Not Bandwidth - Tracking and Filtering (Score:5, Informative)

    by JLester ( 9518 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:30AM (#5237935)
    As Manager of Technology for a school system, we made the decision to shut down all AIM ports because there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it. Local, state, and even federal programs require that we monitor and filter all Internet access by minors. After having some incidents with AIM (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI), we shut down all Internet-based instant messaging programs.

    The bandwidth use is negligible .. especially in these days of cheap bandwidth for education (we have a full DS3 45Mbps for a 7500 student district). The liability of having Internet traffic that is basically untraceable without a sniffer is something we can't have.

    Jason
    • amazing, just amazing... of course if it was the RIAA or MPAA asking for who sent xyz avi or mp3 aol would bend over backwards to provide data, no doubt.

    • Re:Not Bandwidth - Tracking and Filtering (Score:5, Funny)

      by skaffen42 ( 579313 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:44AM (#5238032)
      The bandwidth use is negligible .. especially in these days of cheap bandwidth for education (we have a full DS3 45Mbps for a 7500 student district).

      Holy crap! So what you are actually saying here is that starting a school is the solution to all my broadband problems?

      :)

      • Holy crap! So what you are actually saying here is that starting a school is the solution to all my broadband problems?



        Starting a school, going to school/college, sneaking into a school you aren't going to, claming to be a tech guy and that you know what you're doing, going to the library, going to your local radio shack, going over to your in laws' house...

    • Nice to hear there is some real reason for banning these ports at your place. That shows responsibility and not at all exceedance of your job's limitations.

      We read all kinds of crap "as an IT department we believe these and these ports are bad..", get over it, you are not preachers, neither social advisors.

      Nice to hear some real cases of enforcement coming out.

    • Re:Not Bandwidth - Tracking and Filtering (Score:4, Insightful)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @01:20AM (#5238242) Homepage Journal
      If you want my advice, set up an IRC server and teach people how to use it. It should be exceedingly easy for you to track all of it's usage. True it might not exactly facilitate people communicating to/from off-campus but it would solve your accountability problem. You could even use Trillian as the client, thus giving people that "IM feel".

    • Versions of instant messaging progrmms have beend developed to fulfill the requirements of investment brokers, who need to have all contact with their clients reliably logged. I read an article about this, about a year ago. IIRC it was a legal requirement, not a "nice to have".
    • Who ever said there wasn't an aim sniffer? 10 seconds on freshmeat was all it took
      http://www.aimsniff.com/ [aimsniff.com]
      • Who said thier limitation was technological?

        If they don't have the staff to monitor instant messages then it is impossable for them.
      • Sniffing and filtering are two different things.

        Granted that you could probably build a user-space filter with a linux box pretty easily that would look for certain patterns and raise alarms / install blocks for certain packets.

        Probably take me about a day or two to do it right, but it's a very realistic project considering how easy Netfilter is to use and program for. Performance impact is another question, but again, netfilter comes to the rescue. You can add a filter to your main firewall that routes all AIM traffic through another dedicated box.

      • Quoth the poster:
        Who ever said there wasn't an aim sniffer? 10 seconds on freshmeat was all it took

        The problem is NOT the ability to monitor and filter AIM message content. Hell, you can do that with a combination of the packetsocket module and a perl script.

        The problem is that MOST commonly used IM systems (AIM, Yahoo and MSN Messenger) are server-centric making it impossible to track the actual origin of messages to an IP address without the server owner's cooperation. It appears, in this instance, that AOL rather oddly decided to defy a federal subpoena rather than reveal the identity of an AIM user who had clearly violated federal law.

        What good does it do the authorities to know that the school received a bomb threat if they can't find out who it came from? I think that the school district did the right thing in this instance.
        • Or maybe AOL didn't defy the subpoena and just didn't have the information the feds were looking for. Sometimes the information is not available to anyone because it's not saved anywhere. If AOL saved even the most basic logs on their users, they'd keep the hard drive business rocking for years.
    • (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI)

      Since when can the FBI issue search warrants?

    • do you lock the kids inside too so the sunshine doesnt hurt them?
      i hate over-protective parents/schools/authorities in general.
      i was always taught if you made a mistake yourself you would never make it again...if you get everything given to you...you gain nothing
      but ya...at least there is still a land of the free north of the american border...
      • What does this have to do with bomb threats? By law (at least I was always told, but I imagine in varies from state to state), if there is a bomb threat, school operations must cease while the threat is checked out. If AIM use was leading to bomb threats that couldn't be tracked, then it could cause some serious disruptions. At least if someone phones in a bomb threat, you can get the phone company to tell you were the call came from.
    • Local, state, and even federal programs require that we monitor and filter all Internet access by minors.

      I hope you *tell* the students that you're doing this. Otherwise, you're committing a federal crime in monitoring what they're doing -- falls under the wiretapping laws.
      • Uhm...no. I am a high school student. I have no rights. There is no statute of limitations for violations of school rules. That means the keyboard I inverted the number pad on freshman year is grounds for suspension my senior year. I know they monitor student's habits. I have gotten booted after a look at Snopes of all things. Why? It isn't a crime, we are students, we are using computers other then our own, but I do wonder about students who are 18 though.

        I wish I did have rights though...
      • Students and parents both sign a release. This isn't a local thing guys, it's federal law now. If school's don't filter/monitor, they lose federal and state funding.

        Jason
    • there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it.

      Just out of curiosity, do you *approve* of these policies? I'd have to say that I feel that the ability to privately say what you want to is fundamentally a fairly reasonable thing.

      AIM is an extremely inexpensive, versatile tool that many people use in the workplace and in college. Why deny it to high-schoolers?

      After having some incidents with AIM (including a bomb threat that AOL would not trace for us, even with a search warrant from the FBI), we shut down all Internet-based instant messaging programs.

      This, also, I don't understand. It seems to me like AIM's getting scapegoated here. There are many, many ways to make untraceable bomb threats. Hell, take a computer, type it out, print it, and leave it somewhere, handling the paper with plastic gloves and leaving it in a plastic envelope. Bomb threats are sort of part of high school life -- I remember a couple in high school. AIM's not at fault here.

      The liability of having Internet traffic that is basically untraceable without a sniffer is something we can't have.

      Frankly, *I* found the constant monitoring of everything we did in high school abhorrent and Orwellian, and with a number of friends, constantly went around the school disabling monitoring systems (which happened to use a client-side system).
    • How can you block *all* AIM ports, you can configure AIM to use any port. I have used AIM in organizations that only allowed Web traffic on port 80 through a proxy. AIM worked just fine. Do you mean you blocked all access to the AOL AIM servers because that is what I believe you would have to do to actually *block* AIM.
    • It is possible to monitor the traffic, make everybody go though a proxy set up for just AIM traffic, log traffic to a file.... and there you go.
    • " As Manager of Technology for a school system, we made the decision to shut down all AIM ports because there is currently no way to monitor, filter, or track instant messages that go across it."

      You might want to check this out: http://www.instant-message-spy.com/ [instant-message-spy.com]

    • This is incorrect: I am a technical analyst for a corporation that supports approx 6000+ users on our local corp. campus here in Columbus, Ohio and we host 1 of the most bandwidth intensive net events online every year. I have recently completed a study of IM client server technologies with a specific focus on management of this traffic. (Logging: users, sessions, bandwidth usage etc, Rules based content / connectivity management and more) In the course of this study and report I found several solutions to your problem and that of many corporations. Take a look at www.akonix.com they provide a cost effective solution to your problem. There are many more but this one seems to be the most full featured.
    • Format c: will not touch master boot record
      virii, like stealth-c , just FYI .

      Peace ...

      Out ...

    • actually this is incorrect (or soon will be) AOL is offering an AIM proxy that provides logging capabilities. While this product is geared towards corporations worried about auditing requirements or theft of secrets (unintended or intentional) they would fulfill your purposes. Of course with the number of sickos out there looking for kids on AIM and other IM services I'm not so sure just blocking them isn't a bad idea. I for one would feel much safer if my sons school would dump net nanny and block AIM, no more being blocked access ing holocoust sites etc and no chance of sickos cyber stalking em.
    • Snort can, and has, be setup to monitor IM traffic. We used to watch IM traffic with a rule in snort, and the messages were in clear text. Unless theyve started encrypting their messages, Im sure you still can..

  • Port 5190 (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you meant outoing to port 5190, well, that would be a quasi-effective way to block AIM.
    Now, granted I haven't tried this, but I believe you can always reconfigure AIM (and gaim, of course!) to use a different port, so that doesn't really block AIM. Now, I don't know much OSCAR (the AIM protocol), but it's possible that it uses incoming port 5190 to recieve file transfers...but what are people going to be transferring from school, anyway?
    • 5190 outgoing needs to be open for OSCAR to authenticate to the AOL servers .. shut it down and AIM users can't login at all.

      Jason

      • Re:Port 5190 (Score:5, Informative)

        by jeaton ( 44965 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:44AM (#5238030)
        Nonsense. You can change the port to almost whatever port you want. login.oscar.aol.com listens on 1600 different ports, all with the same service. Try one, like say, port 80. Watch your network with tcpdump. You won't see anything on port 5190, and AIM will work just fine.

        • Maybe so, I haven't tried that. It would depend upon the user changing it though which eliminates most regular users. We do have the IP addresses for the OSCAR servers blocked as well.

          Jason
        • yes this is why on the school network that I admin I take a bit more zealous approach to blocking aim.... blocking all trafic to login.oscar.aol.com, toc.oscar.aol.com, in addition to blocking all non-port 80 (both tcp/udp) traffic to 205.188.0.0/16...... yes I know a determined user can still ssh/telnet to an external box, or setup some type of proxy, but those numbers should be negligible...
          • do you also block traffic to login.icq.com? if you authenticate to that w/ the aim client, you can still get on aim.... and if you did that on port 80, then your firewall would be circumvented

    • pr0n (Score:2, Funny)

      by Bastian ( 66383 )
      duh.
  • Ah, that's nothing,

    I've seen system administrators on european universities that have absolutely no idea how to set up a firewall.

    An example is when they block anything except port 80. Then, they open anything, so anyone can use kazaa, do some cracking and generally abuse the academic bandwidth.

    Then, they block it back again! so, they prove, port 80 is the only thing they know, so thats the only thing they can allow if they start blocking.

    If you've lived on such a great administration environment - surprise surprise, it's so strange they use windows for name serving as well - that's really nothing.

    Trust me, blocking prv messaging is nth compared to a blocked 22.
    • you obviously are one of these useless admins if you open some ports people can use kazaa (oh no! the devil!) and "do some cracking".
      hah. watch out for those crazy crackers
      and what is blocking 22 going to do?
      blocking a default port for anything is only going to keep the stupid people out, who most likely arent abusing but casually using it

  • Enormous consumer of mental bandwidth (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Syncdata ( 596941 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:35AM (#5237967) Journal
    I briefly worked IT for a local high school district, and while AIM doesn't consume much resource wise, it's an enormous productivity-sink for the student/employee.
    Instant Messaging can allow excellent, speedy communication in teams, but it can also utterly destroy productivity during lectures. AIM et all should be banned from installation on institution owned student computers, or at the very least, used in a very selective manner.
    • Excuse me, but how can _you_ decide what is productive to me? And when I say "you" it's not at all personal, it's about all these people that _exceed their job's limitations_.

      You are a system administrator, you are here to block kazaa, movie downloading, perhaps illegal porn etc, but please, you are not a preacher neither a social advisor or a teacher.
      • The burden is on you, the student, not on the netadmin, to demonstrate how AIM makes you more productive in the middle of class.

        Otherwise, AIM is a distraction like passing around a porn mag in the back of class.

        • Let the porn mag pass if that's what they want. If they don't wanna learn, they won't learn whatever you do. Enforcing people on certain behaviours only creates stress and fear. So you get apart from inability and unwillingless to learn, fear, stress and hate on top
          • If they don't wanna learn, they won't learn whatever you do. Enforcing people on certain behaviours only creates stress and fear

            +5 Insighful. Thank you.

            But in my cynical capacity, I wonder if we should figure that many schools aren't there to teach, but to indoctrinate workers/consumers, in which case fear, stress, and hate may be just the motivators that America Inc. wants in its peons. Fear of being fired or ostracized and so not keeping up with the Jones's throwaway consumer McCulture, stress to make sure they work hard and just follow orders, and hate and class envy to make sure they stay on the treadmill.

            (And no, I'm not a loony lefty, or really a lefty at all.)
          • Passing around notes disrupts the people who do want to learn or at least are willing to learn. If you don't want to learn then take yourself out of the school system and go get a job at Arby's. If you want to learn but not in the manner that a school provides then take yourself out and learn in whatever manner is suitable for you. I could not care less if a person who is being disruptive is stressed or not.


            I'm about as liberal as they come, but when people tell me they have to be allowed to disrupt, or speak in ebonics or allowed to use instant-messaging short hand in class I get queasy.

            • You are right on that. When it goes to you that want to learn it's better to enforce them out since it'll be more fun for them, more helpfull to you.

              When someone keeps the porn mag or inet personal or to his/her friends, then it's their fault and their problem or just their choice.
    • "but it can also utterly destroy productivity during lectures"

      How productive can one be during a lecture?

      • Learning is a productive procedure, in a sense, it produces thoughts and memories in your mind. On the other hand, people _must_ undestand:

        If I'm not going to be concentrated because of prv messaging, I won't be due to that hot female student next to me too.

        So, all this crap about productivity is utterly nonsense. Nice to hear some real reasons as "we got untraceable threats through AOL by allowing that prv msg systems", but productivity control? Poliiiise. If you don't wanna learn, a firewall won't help you.
    • When I was attending ITT Tech Institute back in '98 in Nashville, TN, AIM was disallowed because AOL started charging the school for us using their instant messenger program!

    • Re:Enormous consumer of mental bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)

      by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @01:26AM (#5238280) Homepage Journal
      Sure lets block email too! Email costs productivity!

      I used IM and EMail regularly throughout the day to communicate with my teachers and fellow students. My productivity would take a big dump without either technology. If I lost both, well fuck I might have to use a telephone! Hey everybody lets ban all forms of communication other than written mail! Wake up.

      Using AIM during a lecture is a totally different problem and shouldn't require BANNING it from the lab. IMNSHO it's no different from using a CELL PHONE during a lecture and the teacher should deal with the problem accordingly. And if it's a lab where people are typing anyway and the teacher can't tell that the student is IMing then who cares? Students aren't robots and you can't FORCE them to learn no matter how hard you try. If they can IM in lab and still pass then more power to 'em. If they fail then too damn bad, it's their own damn fault.

    • Who is at fault? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 )
      And cars can be used to ram people. Should we ban them from the American public? You can drop chairs on people, use paint from art class to vandalize the school, stuff people in lockers, etc.

      AIM et all should be banned from installation on institution owned student computers, or at the very least, used in a very selective manner.

      At some point, you have to place some responsibility on the students. You can't simply control them throughout school (and then expect them to suddenly mature on graduation day).

      If people are going to screw up, they're going to do it. I've never understood why IT personnel (more than general managers in the workplace or teachers in school) feel a deep-seated need to try to control behavior like this.

  • Schools I've had to deal with... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Fink ( 300855 ) <slashdot@diffidence.org> on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:41AM (#5238014) Homepage
    ... have generally had a single- or dual-channel ISDN to share between up to 100 computers. (This is in rural areas of Queensland, Australia - yes, they really do have less available bandwidth than your average cable user, and they pay upward of 40c per megabyte for it...).

    There's two main reasons we've taken to blocking any form of IM, or in fact anything that isn't HTTP/FTP, to student desktops. First, of course, is the somewhat limited bandwidth, although this was the least of our reasons. Secondly, and far more importantly, is the element of control: with a transparent proxy through which all HTTP and FTP traffic is routed, we can (a) cut down the amount of input bandwidth needed, and (b) implement a certain amount of filtering (well known porn sites, ads, etc).

    Not having IM installed on each desktop also means that there's not configuration problems. Realistically schools have to support one environment, and IM systems, with the number that there are, complicate this no end (imagine the arguments if AIM is the only one supported by a school, but a large percentage of kids use MSN...).

    Realistically, if kids want to use IM, they're welcome to do so at home on their own (usually dialup) time. Likewise with any other non-HTTP access. I personally don't see it at that disabling; if kids want to IM each other, they can go back to "pass-it-on" notes. :-)

    • (imagine the arguments if AIM is the only one supported by a school, but a large percentage of kids use MSN...)

      That's why we have wonderful clients like Gaim [sf.net] that understand all major (and some minor) IM systems in one client. The Windows port is in good shape, aside from some minor GTK weirdness. Although I realize it's not the major issue for your setup, "supporting one environment" and letting everyone eat their cake aren't mutually exclusive these days ...

  • To answer the question: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tmtresh ( 615002 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:44AM (#5238022)
    Without file transfers IM doesn't take much bandwidth. Think about it, messages of of a few dozen bytes only take 1 packet to send! No, you'd have to have hundreds of IMs to add up to a few piddly Kbps. Problem is allowing IM and diallowing file transfers. Or, as one poster stated, monitoring IM traffic. In that case, they could run their own jabberd [jabber.org] server, and with firewall rules force users to use it. Since it's GPL/OS they should be able to modify the code to allow "snooping", if jabberd doesn't already.
    • Problem is allowing IM and diallowing file transfers.

      This is not a problem. Most firewalls (particularly NAT-based firewalls) will not allow file transfers via AIM since it requires a new, direct, P2P connection be established. I know from experience that a Cisco PIX firewall (at least with the default ruleset) will not allow file transfers, nor will a Linux IPTables with a NAT or stateful ruleset.

      --Turkey
      • thats not entirely true. If one side is able to recieve incoming connections, in general, aim will be able to negotiate a link.

        • Ideally, it should work that way. But in my experience, both sides need to be open. Maybe they've changed their clients since the last time I tried. I'll have to try it again.

          --Turkey
          • for quite a while (at least 3 years), their client has been able to do this. One of the problems is that it picks a way it wants the connection to go, and if the 'server' of that layout is behind a firewall that drops packets (rather than reject them), it will take quite a while for the connection attempt to time out and reverse directions.

            in that situation, its best to establish a 'direct im ' connection first, in the way that works quickly, and then send files

  • I Have A Net Admin Friend At A School (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vandel405 ( 609163 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @12:47AM (#5238048) Homepage Journal
    I have a net admin friend at a school who helps manage the dorm network. Amazingly, he claims that it is really those tiny ads (150x40pix). I guess AIM is very lazy and is constantly refreshing them (If you're using the computer or not) and doesn't do much caching.

    To fix it, they rerouted ads.aol.com (i just made up that DNS) to their own servers and sent their own images back localally.

  • This is too bad. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Deanasc ( 201050 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @01:12AM (#5238193) Homepage Journal
    I don't think I could have graduated without AIM to shuttle files back and forth from home to school. Mind you this was from college to my apartment but still I think it's a valid point. AIM was on almost all the computers in the labs and study areas. It was easy to move large files back and forth. AIM also has the ability to limit who gets acces to my home machine. I could easily ensure no one but me could get or give files.

    Now before you go on about emailing my files, my college had the myopic foresight to limit email to 5 megs per attachment. My senior thesis was over 19 megs and my thesis advisor couldn't figure out how to open it after I split the files into email sized pieces. Turns out he didn't have winzip but that's another story. Make a long story short, his computer didn't have AIM and I had to turn a hard copy in late.

    Once AIM caught on we had files going in and out of the department all the time. Students began collaborating on AIM. This was a commuter college and students HATE collaborating. AIM takes some of the sting out of having to drive in at the one awkward time when everyone can meet.

    I can understand schools wanting to control net access but there are better ways to go about doing it. How many naughty files slip through the filters anyway. Blocking AIM isn't going to stop a determined kid but it will chill an effective means of communication between students and the school.

    At the rate some schools are going all those computers will turn into nothing more then a complicated Cable TV system attached to a word processor.

    • Re:This is too bad. (Score:4, Informative)

      by LordLucless ( 582312 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @02:14AM (#5238509)
      Um, if your looking for a protocol to transfer large files back and forth, theres one been around for quite a while. It's called "FTP".

      It ain't hard to setup an FTP server at home, and most Universities (Colleges for the yanks) allow FTP access to their students.

      Why not just use that?
      • For the simple reason that AIM was available to me. Allowed communication as well as file transfer. Was already installed on every computer.

        Quite frankly FTP is a pain in the ass to deal with if you're only moving a few files back and forth. Why run two programs that do the same thing. Memory is a scarce commodity for a poor student. AIM was already running for chat. As I've said, my professor didn't have a copy of winzip on his computer. I can't imagine him running an FTP client much less a server.

        And we have Universities too. We don't need you to define the word for us.

      • Or use floppy disks, like I did! A couple of floppies was space enough for anything, seeing as I only had 2Mb of storage space on the mainframe. Yes, sir, we used to line up on a monday morning to use the terminal with a floppy drive, running kermit to transfer the files to the mainframe, and we were happy.

        Jeez.. nine years go past, and it sounds like bloomin' stone age already...

      • Why IM is better for this than FTP (Score:5, Interesting)

        by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @02:30PM (#5242741) Journal
        It ain't hard to setup an FTP server at home, and most Universities (Colleges for the yanks) allow FTP access to their students.

        Why not just use that?

        Because FTP isn't designed for this. FTP is great if you have an always-on machine at the same IP (or at least hostname). It was originally designed to let a user work with files in *his* account's disk space.

        AIM and other IM programs with file-transfer capabilites are far better suited to most home users. The IP of the user may change. The user may only come online at some time. The remote user is made aware of this ("Oh, John's on. I can send him that presentation file."), since an IM program handles registering and retransmitting this information.

        Furthermore, FTP exposes a whole collection of directories, and generally (unless you hack things up) grants write and list access to *other* things in an upload directory. The user wants to make available a *single file*, and wants to know when the transfer is done, so that they can get offline. IM clients do a better job of providing this functionality than do FTP server/clients.

        Often, file transfer is done at the same time people are talking to each other. This combines two frequently-used-together services, since an IM client would likely be necessary anyway.

        Finally, even setting up an FTP system to approximate the model desired is *much* more work. You'd need a dynamic hostname, need to run a daemon to keep it up to date, the remote person would need to have a program that keeps trying to log in to tell when you're online, you'd need to set up permissions so that your server didn't let people see files that other people uploaded, you'd need some monitor for people logging in...

        FTP was designed in an era where people didn't have goddamn filewalls or NAT all over. Frankly, they do now, and pose a major irritation if someone's trying to send a file. AIM is quite good at dealing with firewalls.

        Also, FTP security sucks. Kerberized FTP is *very* rarely used, as is SSL-tunneled FTP. Plaintext passwords...not even MD5 support. Ick. Granted, most popular messaging protocols aren't much better, but they are improving.

        So while FTP is better for the task that it was designed for, for the kind of thing this guy is doing, he's better off with IM.
    • I had no idea that the education system had degraded to such a point that one must rely on AIM in order to graduate. Truely very sad for today's students.
    • Turns out he didn't have winzip but that's another story.

      Sounds like an exciting story!! Please, do tell!

    • At the rate some schools are going all those computers will turn into nothing more then a complicated Cable TV system attached to a word processor.

      This is exactly what some of the K12 schools are looking for. They want something that can be used to facilitate the writing of papers, the display of educational multimedia bits, and then with complete monitoring/supervision, maybe teach a bit about the general computing and the internet.

      Plus I'm sure there's a whole different set of rules when there are minors in the school vs. a college or university.
    • My senior thesis was over 19 megs

      Let me guess, your senior thesis was written in word and only 22 pages long? Wow, I gotta get back into an american university. I can crank out 19 meg word docs every week :-)

      the AC
      First you take .bmp full screen captures of the text in various windows, and paste them into powerpoint, then embed the powerpoint objects into cells in an excel spreadsheet with bits of text around to explain each image, then export views from excel into word, and htmlize the result and email it out to the european-wide mailing list. They'll never find the body of the last luser who did that on my network!

  • Not IMO (Score:5, Funny)

    by n1ywb ( 555767 ) on Thursday February 06, 2003 @01:17AM (#5238222) Homepage Journal
    Before our campus moved to a fully switched LAN, I used to use Ethereal to sniff my whole dorm's AIM traffic in real time. 80 people, not that much traffic. Even in the evening at peak utilization it was easy to keep up with, no worse than a busy IRC channel. So IMO AIM is not a bandwidth hog.

    The protocol itself is not as efficient as it COULD be. I did notice occasional repeated messages, and signon/signoff messages are repeated frequently. But we're still talking about piffiling small bandwidth.

    PS I'm just kidding and I didn't actually do anything that I've described in this post. By reading this post you agree that I didn't run a sniffer, or reverse engineer AIM's protocol just by watching it's traffic in a sniffer.

    • Whoops (Score:3, Funny)

      by MacAndrew ( 463832 )
      PS I'm just kidding and I didn't actually do anything that I've described in this post. By reading this post you agree that I didn't run a sniffer, or reverse engineer AIM's protocol just by watching it's traffic in a sniffer.

      Ah, you put your condition at the end. I can't agree to something by reading a post without knowing the condition first. Plus there's the questionable enforceability of ERLA's (end-reader user agreements).

      But don't worry. You've already done far more to publish your self-incrimination than I could possibly expand upon. Besides, "gossip wants to be free." :)

      Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?

      • Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?

        here [trillian.cc] or there. [sf.net]

        • Trilian home page: "One Messenger. A Trillian Possibilities" [groan]

          Thx.

          Now, if only encrypted email were the default. And automatic spam "feedback."
      • Now, where do I pick up encrypted AIM?

        If you can stand using another protocol, I'm probably most impressed with the security in Jabber (I've played with gabber), which encrypts everything under the sun and uses GPG for authentication...
      • Use Trillian for windows or Gaim on linux w/ the Gaim-e plugin. It uses RC5 encryption and GPG keys to authenticate between hosts. The only thing is, both parties have to be running the same client.

        gaim-e
        http://gaim-e.sf.net [sf.net]

    • Before our campus moved to a fully switched LAN, I used to use Ethereal to sniff my whole dorm's AIM traffic in real time.

      So you spent college wanking off to other people's cyber-sex?

      What's that called, um, meta-cyber-sex? Anonymous three-way? Text voyeurism? Textual harrasment? Even more pathetic than most geeks' college sexual misadventures?
      • > So you spent college wanking off to other people's cyber-sex?
        >
        > What's that called, um, meta-cyber-sex? Anonymous three-way? Text voyeurism? Textual harrasment? Even more pathetic than most geeks' college sexual misadventures?

        No, it's alled "Total Information Awareness" *G*

      • Re:Not IMO (Score:3, Funny)

        by n1ywb ( 555767 )
        Belive it or don't, I did not once observe cybersex. I think it's a myth.
    • I used to use Ethereal to sniff my whole dorm's AIM traffic in real time.

      When I was in a dorm back in '97, I had a great little "tool" called boink. It would administer, with surgical precision, the "ping of death" to any Wintel machine of my choosing. When someone really pissed me off, I would wait until about 2am when they were almost finished writing that 20 page paper before I sent it down the wire!

      For those of you who don't remember, or are too young to remember, the "ping of death" was basically a malformed ping that would cause any Wintel (including Server!) to instantly BSOD and completely lock up. Everyone's PC had a Windows Share name that was their own name - very easy to identify who's pc was who's on the lan. Plus Samba gives me the IP of any windows share computer... you get the idea.

      It took M$ a very long time to release a fix and I enjoyed every boinkin' minute. Didn't make many friends tho ;-)
  • You could just access AIM through a box set up to connect w/ AIM and send it to you via telnet. An example is a box w/ Bonim [freshmeat.net]. It is self explainitory. I honestly don't believe that blocking ports and firewalls do too much, if you are determined, smart and want to break out.
  • AIM uses a significant amount of bandwidth, even idling. Run Ethereal on any machine with AIM up and running, doing nothing - on my W2k box, about 2/3 of the idle traffic was domain/workgroup/etc broadcasts, and 1/3 was AIM acknowledgements, signons, signoffs, etc.

    levine
  • Why doesn't someone just write an AIM client (and ICQ/MSN/IRC) where the administrator can set a specific port for each, then log that port, and be able to enable/disable file transfers and such? If I had the time or expertise, I would do something like this.. but currently I would go to AOL (for just AIM/ICQ) or Cerulean Studios (the makers of Trillian, for access to AIM/ICQ/MSN/YIM/IRC) and ask about the possiblity of a special school edition such as this. Also, state law shouldn't be a problem anyways, as a good router can log all incoming/outgoing traffic anyway.
  • But only if you're on broadband. If you're on 56K (God help those poor people), you're pretty much screwed any way you turn, especially if you've got pages with Java/Javascript running.

  • My recent experience (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lewp ( 95638 ) on Sunday February 09, 2003 @08:15PM (#5267400) Journal
    In general AIM doesn't use hardly any bandwidth. Myself and my two roommates each have clients running 24/7 and traffic to and from AIM servers barely shows up in the statistics on our router.

    However, one of my roommates has a sister that has recently discovered AIM's DirectIM feature. She seems to like it because she can see if the remote party is typing or not. That's nice, but these connections seem to use quite a large amount of bandwidth even when completely idle. I didn't get exact numbers, but I thought a file transfer of some kind was going on until I went and checked with my roommate. Needless to say, it was causing a measurable difference in latency on our cable modem (which is kind of shaky anyway) or I probably wouldn't have noticed in the first place.

    Anyway, I added a pf rule blocking direct connections on the ports AIM uses from the network she's on at Auburn and haven't seen any problems since then. I don't know if this has anything to do with the claims this story is referring to, but I guess it could.
  • I'm in a situation at my place of employment (a community college). There's a lot of content we'd like to block, such as porn, instant messaging, file sharing etc. It's a waste of bandwidth, but more importantly it's a waste of resources.

    Now, most schools have an 'acceptable use' policy, us included. Try telling resident adults that they can't use community funded resources to do whatever they want. It doesn't happen. Tell someone they can't look at porn in a public lab, and they'll throw the first amendment at you. So we use the all inclusive "waste of bandwidth." Kinda hard for them to argue on that point.

    I suspect you're in the same situation. rather than having students using computer for chit chat and wasting time, they administration wants to see them used for work. Rather than re-inventing the wheel when it comes to their usage policy, which can take ages, they're calling AIM for what it is in your environment, a waste of bandwidth.

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