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Censorship

A Ban On Napster Becomes A Ban On Education? 21

Posted by Cliff from the the-ever-classic-censorship-result dept.
Ecliptik asks: "I am currently a buisness student at the University of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio. Many of my classmates and I are writing a large paper for a law class we have on Napster's legal battle. Due to the current ban which our university has put on Napster, many resources on Napster's site are blocked. So what do you think? Is this not only a ban on music, or is it also a ban on educational resources as well?" I can see why you'd want to ban the Napster client, which uses resources other than the standard HTTP port, but why do some colleges block access to Napster's Web site as well?
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A Ban on Napster Becomes a Ban on Education? More

A Ban on Napster Becomes a Ban on Education?

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  • I work for the networking department at the University of Dayton. My statements are not meant to be construed as official in ANY way or form, but I thought it necessary to respond to this article anyway. That said....

    As already stated and guessed, the University of Dayton has blocked a NUMBER of file-sharing services due to ABUSE by people sharing files indiscriminately. We have a partial T3 running at 24MBps... last year we had 15MBps. And we were maxed out the FIRST WEEK the students came back.

    The strain on our T3 was so bad, people from off-campus trying to get to our official web server or to check e-mail couldn't. I am the *NIX admin here. When _I_ can't even get 0.5KByte/sec to try and download software to improve the network, it is extremely frustrating... and frustrating for the other 15,000 people here on campus who have a LEGITIMATE need for internet access.

    I was just told that the reason all of napster was blocked was that the web server and the service log in server are one in the same. We only have a layer 3 router (i.e. normal router), and not a layer 4 firewall, so separating the services was out of the question. It was all or nothing. Sorry folks: triage.

    The University of Dayton is in no way for censorship. This issue is only about bandwidth abuse. A 24Mbps pipe is NOT cheap. I'm sure that students don't want yet ANOTHER tuition hike just to pay for the 20-40 or so students who use about 90% of our bandwidth, robbing the other 15,000 people on campus (students, faculty AND staff) of their right to use the Internet.

    If students would learn to be responsible about bandwidth usage, the University of Dayton wouldn't NEED to limit ANY web site or internet service.

    =plink=plink=plink=

    (Just my $0.03)
    -Richard Balint
    University of Dayton

  • I was inferring that the abusers were in the number of approximately 20-40. These are the people who share their whole 10GB drive of files to the whole internet.

    LAN games only last so long. AOL/ICQ transfers start and stop quickly. Yes, it uses bandwidth, but it is not SUSTAINED for HOURS like file sharing is. There is a major difference between normal use and abuse of the network. Our network can handle normal use. Yes we will get spikes that fill our 24Mbps, but traffic can still get in and out. When the usage is PEGGED at 24Mbps over 18 hours a day, THAT is excessive.

    And like always, these are my own interpretations of the situation here, and NOT an official statement by the University of Dayton. I'm just a concerned employee, like you are a concerned student. :)

    -Richard Balint

  • We can't ban EVERY site. Banning sites and servers is only a stop-gap measure until a firewall can be implemented. It's a horrible way to do it, but the only thing we can do to save our bandwidth _right now_. We currently sanction students when we notice disappropriate bandwidth udage; but when one student is taken off the network, two more replace him (or her, but I don't think we've revoked access for a female student yet... anyone wanna comment or theorize about this? ;)

    When the firewall goes up, I think napster and other services will be opened up again... just limited so that they don't take up the whole pipe.

    Again, all statements are my own, and not necessarily those of the University of Dayton.

    -Richard Balint

  • Simply go to google's cache [google.com] of the napster page.

    or have they banned search engines too?

    Baz

  • ..that the people implementing the ban (the "sysadmins" at your school) don't know what they're doing. I've noticed a *lot* of media coverage referring to Napster as "a website that allows people to [blah blah blah]". I think it's perfectly possible that the facts are just not being checked.
  • Unfortunately I doubt the majority of the users would keep very good track of how much the mp3s they've downloaded takes out of thier allocations, much less keep track of each web page and each image on that page that they view.
    of course, you could give them a website they could go to to check on the amount of bandwidth they have used that day, or maybe write a quick little app that shows it in thier taskbar.
  • I'm also a student. It's UD, I can get there from my co-workers box.
    -- Bucket

  • My computer connects to the internet, wich has illegal things on it. Should I disconnect my computer from the internet...Signed, Perplexed

    Dear Perplexed: No, you should destroy your computer, lest you might later succumb to the urge to reconnect it to the internet, where as all upright persons are appalled to know, licentious talk of illegalities freely and shamelessly circulates. While you're at it, you also, just in case, should pluck your eyeballs out, as per Matthew 5:29.

    Yours Dr. Laura - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • what this means to educational institutions in general, but you ought to be able to get to napsters pages through anonymizer.com or rewebber.com, both of which launder your packets.

    -mark
  • It's not just about legal issues. My campus is heavily debating a ban - our sysadmins for the most part hate censoring anything, but our single T1 line simply cannot handle it (we're talking about transfer speeds sustaining 50 - 90 KB/s prior to Napster's release, and not even being able to sustain 1 KB/s after people started using it en masse).

    In the past, there was a loosely enforced policy in effect where students could only run Napster in the off-peak hours of 1 - 5 AM so as not to interfere with legitimate academic usage. Now the school has budgeted for a second T1 line, which has been completely dedicated to academic machines (faculty, labs), leaving the other for students to fight over themselves. Needless to say, accessing anything from your dorm room here still runs at about 50 - 500 bytes/sec - aka 0.5 KB/s max. I couldn't care less about people downloading songs and what not, but when it takes minutes on end of waiting to load simple web-pages something needs to be done. It's not denying people of an education to block the Napster website, it's ignorant Napster users who spout "Why do my songs take so long to download on Napster?" while 150 people are simultaneously downloading from their machine that deny us of an education...

    I agree that censorship is not in any way an American ideal, and it's anyone's choice to break the law and pirate copyrighted music, but I fail to see what other choice is available when Napster users are robbing others (like myself) of their tuition money that goes towards school-provided Internet access.

    I'm open to any suggestions anyone might have as a step to resolve such issues, or any advice on alerting the campus of the obviously rampant problem and steps that can be taken to resolve it... Feel free to drop me a line at cmgroteATthethirdDOTnet [mailto]. Hopefully there will be enough bandwidth for your message to go through =)

  • This seems like a mutated version of the question about the legality of napster itself (and many other things).

    Should something which provides the means to do something illegal itself be illegal?

    I haven't been following the napster case very closely, but I gather that the decision in napster's case has been something like, "yes, pending further review".

    So, napster's website provides access to napster, which could potentially be used to do something illegal. Therefore, napster's website should be banned.

    While we're at it, we should ban networking.
  • Dictating acceptable content is not a good solution. I don't know about the feasibility of this, but... Your school could try limiting a user's bandwidth by day. That is, each user is allotted a certain number of kb/day which he may use at his discretion. Beyond that limit, one may continue to use the network, but priority goes to those with "download points".
  • on the contrary, my friend. UD SysAdmins, whom which I know many personally, DO know what they are doing. UD is a private school, offering a service to students ( Net access ). It is _NOT_ a right to have Net access from the college. If students do not like the way UD handles their net access, use another ISP. I know ERInet offers some very nice 56K dialup accounts. :-) What I'm saying is, they can do whatever they want, and if you really don't like it, transfer or find another ISP. it's not a quistion of why they did it. it doesn't matter why they did it. if UD decided to ban Yahoo right now, for no reason. What can legaly stop them. nothing.
  • It could very well be that they're trying to avoid being sued for providing direct access to the napster program. They're probably looking at the DECSS case, where it's apparently illegal to post a link to the code. It's just a knee-jerk overreaction attempting to keep them out of legal hot water.

  • What kind of router do you have? Even lower-end Cisco boxes support traffic shaping and prioritization. It's not exactly easy to configure unless you really know what you're doing, but they can be set up to either limit the bandwidth on certain types of traffic (i.e. Napster can't use more than 50% of our total bandwidth), or prioritize traffic into queues (for example, incoming web/mail traffic gets top priority, then outbound web traffic, followed by FTP, and Napster gets whatever is left over).

    As far as the bandwidth question goes, I really think traffic shaping and smart queuing is the answer rather than blocking the service entirely. Most hardware out there can already handle it, your important services can get at the bandwidth first, and you're not censoring anything so you can avoid sticky legal issues.

    `dont forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away.' -- mingo on linux-kernel
  • Usage expands to overwhelm available bandwidth, plus 62%.

    This reason for a ban already exists at some small colleges.

    I did database training for Librarians and IT folk of nearby colleges (not universities) and to a person they despise censorship with the true passion of good librarians. To a person, they had either relegated Napster to the no-hit list, or to the wee hours. The wee hours ban was made total for the two weeks prior to mid-terms and finals.

    Not because they wanted to protect the minds of the little students from Napster's corrupting influence, but because other students were unable to do assigned research, thanks to the bandwidth hogging of Napster. Needless to say, the students weren't happy.

    I finally suggested that they speak to the students about infrastructure costs. I also suggested that they ask the students to do an economic analysis of napster usage the same way they would do an economic analysis of a polluting industry: in both cases, the entity using or creating the service is not always the one paying the hidden price.

    Napster is free only if you do not take into account the infrastructure costs necessary to support Napster. The people benefitting from the service are not the people who made the judgements about placing the infrastructure, nor are they the ones who have to make a *%$(&#$ new budget to add bandwidth to support the service.

    I sound like a broken record, but I urge you to look at hidden costs before you tout something as free. TANSTAAFL!

  • to let it get to that point in the first place shows how pathetic your sysadmins are to begin with. block that damn service! there is NOT one thing educational about NAPSTER! NOT ONE! But if they stood up and had some back bone... then all the little crybabies who get everything they want, when they want it! would cry abuse! we're VICTIMS! boo hoo! i'm getting really sick and tired of this competitive victim hood. sense your sysadmins are losers and you can't depend on them. it's time for you to step up and provide for yourself my man! time to get your own ISP! then with a dial up you can get(if you're lucky!)5.xKB/s!! and then you only have to DEPEND on YOUR connection! and trust me when you pay for it yourself you get to call the shots and the ISP will listen to your concerns. if not then you get a new ISP!

    leave the flock!
    Individual freedom and personal responsibility!

  • I go to Georgia Tech (who sent the attorneys a nice b!tchslap of a letter, refusing to filter out napster). Our information technology center is understaffed, and doesn't properly configure much of its software until enough users complain. I don't blame them, I just think that they need more people. I think that your website ban could either be from a few things: 1.There being a miscomunication between your adminstration and your IT department 2.Your IT department is like ours and just didn't configure the filter right 3.The software they use is really simple and just blocks eveything from napster.com. Ask your IT department if it is intentional that they are blocking the web site, and if it is, start bellowing that the schools federal funding should be revoked due to blockage of the free press(the napster site). I suggest the school newspaper as a good place to start, and your local congressman/ state representative too (you'd be surprised how well people like that respond to individual requests that can get them lots of press, like this one). Alumni that work in the technology field or Media are also good people to ask to talk to the school. Your Alumni association will probbably help you find this type of person (if you don't tell them why you want them).
  • Banning websites (-websites-, not napster's service ports) is totally and utterly stupid. I can't think of any reason for it, OTHER than attempting to hide information and prevent students from becoming aware and educated about the program.

    It's one thing to have a policy banning the -use- of napster, it's a whole other thing to (effectively) ban dissemination of information about it. In fact, i'd even go so far as to say that your school is probably breaking some of its own laws, if not actual U.S. laws; take a look at their by-rules and such, see what you can find.
  • It may be ignorance on my part, but if you can only ban site-by-site, then how do you ban all the other services out there, such as gnutella, openNap, etc, that come from an infinite number of sites?
  • hit the cache or use a prox - lists available at http://www.astalavista.com/en/proxies.asp All a school can do is make it harder for people to access the stuff. Keep the pricked out liberal arts majors off the internet anyway. I mean figure any "admin" at a school has to be about the bottom of the barel as far as technical people go. Most Admins are going to do things like map out the DNS for napster to go to their internal page that sayes "no no no, you bad student" in witch case you type in 64.124.41.35 into your little browser instead...or better yet edit your own hosts file so you never do a DNS look for it. They probably don't know how to implement a packet analysed detour. Figure the conversation between the "Admin" and the president of the school as something like this...damn, I'z aint gots no bandwith. Themz sudentz be suck'n it all...logz show that napster is generating all the traffic" (Prez speekz) well, I heard on CNN that napster is a bad bandwidth sucking illeagal thingy...is there a way we can stop the students from doing this...(Lazy "Admin") yes I'll stop it. It's more about the fact that the "admin" has better things to do than spend 2 hours implementing a solution when a 10 second solution gets him his result. E-Mail the dude and ask him why. There was an erlier comment on links to the DECSS software being illegal. NO son LINKS to the software are NOT illegal. It was debated in the case however the judge somehow upheld the word of the constitution and links ARE alowable. Now for people saying is it illegal for an organization to aid in an illegal activity. The federal RECO act says that yes if an organisation is involved in the act of aiding "malicious activities" it can be held liable for the activities at a rate of three times the actual damages. Presidence of this is a web site that showed the pictures of Dr that performed abortions. One of these Dr was killed. The web site (operated by a churchy organization) was sued big time for wrongfull death. Needless to say the record companies would present lost sales historical data that would crush the pocket book of napster...but that's what backruptcy is for. It will start again in a different contry so what's the real point except for a bunch of lawers stroking it up.

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