Academic Network Censorship? 94
Mark asks: "I'm the President of the Brock University Students' Union, and recently our IT geeks completely cut off access to the Kazaa network for the entire school. It concerns me, while I understand the need to save bandwidth.. what's next? File sharing bandwidth has been throttled for quite some time here, this is the first all out "restriction" we have seen. As a Students' Union we advocate on behalf of the 13,000+ students here, and we need to develop policy around network 'censorship.' I'd love to hear your experiences and suggestions. Our website is here"
Kiss it all goodbye (Score:1)
This isn't "censorship" (Score:4, Insightful)
We ended up telling everyone they weren't allowed to trade MP3s, and shutting off accounts that did anyway. Didn't take that long before people stopped trying.
The school network is just that, the schools network. It's being used for academic purposes. Lack of access to a file trading network that eats enormous amounts of bandwith is in no way censorship. If you really want to trade files, then move off campus and get a broadband connection. It's their network, not yours.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
Here's a challenge: Name one legitimate academic use for Kazaa.
The people in charge of the network probably couldn't come up with one. Kazaa was causing problems so they shut it off. Why should they put any effort into some type of priority system if it doesn't have academic value?
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
Granted it's not legal, but it's academic. And it's hardly unethical; those students would have just walked to the library instead, rather than running out to the bookstore and buying a copy.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
It works out so that it costs almost exactly $1/GB
Suppose a college has 20,000 students.
50,220GB/month/20,000students = 2.5GB/month/student
The cost of an OC3 is also only $50,000/month/20,000stu = $2.50/month/stu
therefore, it makes no sense to put such harsh restrictions on bandwidth when they could just charge each student a nominal fee of $10/month and get an extra 4 OC3s or an OC12 (which is probably cheaper).
IMO, they should just record how much bandwidth students use and charge them a nominal fee of $2 for each GB in excess of 10GB/month. They would even make a profit from the internet access then.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:2)
The lump sum tuition that goes for all sorts of things that belong more at club med than at an educational instituition is one of the things that makes what should be a rather cheap service (education) unaffordable for many.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:5, Interesting)
By the same token, universities are able to compete with one another for students by advertising less restrictive policies on net usage, if they want to. Thing is, the legal risk from the MPAA and RIAA make them not want to.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
What my uni does (nicer, but takes more effort) (Score:3, Interesting)
If anyone uses significant amounts of bandwidth (there's no formal limit, but it seems to be measured in gigabytes a day), they're told to reduce that for the benefit of other users (on a "please stop before we have to force you to" basis).
This is great, because when you want to download something big (a CD image for instance), you get a huge data rate and don't have to wait long, but the network admins can still prevent people from downloading stuff constantly and overloading the network.
I suppose a more automated equivalent would be to give everyone the full 10/100 bandwidth to start with, then automagically reduce priority for people who've used too much in the last week/month/whatever.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but the students' tuition is in part financing at least some of the network. Can't it be argued that network access is something the students are paying for?. It's not exectly like a corporate internet connection.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:3, Interesting)
Students who lived on campus payed $5 a semester for a high speed connection. That's NOTHING compared to the cost of the multiple T3s.
Anyway, the express purpose of the network is for academic use. And that's never been questioned, and no academic use has been stopped. But when a P2P generates Terrabytes of data a day, there's not a whole lot of other options but to ban it.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:3, Informative)
Now tell me you pay for your bandwidth, which probably costs the university more than ten-thousand dollars per month.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately this argument can be abused. "Since tuition can't possibly pay for X, students can't complain about how X is run."
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:3, Interesting)
An example I'm thinking of is Humbodlt State in CA. They built a new library and, as is usually the case, there were cost and time overruns. The students sued the school since they were paying for access to this new library, which wasn't available to them, and won.
The difference here, of course, is the non-academic use.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:3, Informative)
You are paying for access to the network, but you have agreed to the terms of using said network. If the net admins (who probably also run most of the IT services for the campus) are spending too much time trying to limit non-academic bandwidth, then other services required for an academic network will not be nearly as well off. To be honest, I have no sympathy for a campus where people demand Kazaa, when better solutions exist that do not require using up bandwidth. A well-publicized (among the students) internal Gnutella network did wonders for the bandwidth problems at my school, which is an option you might consider, since it doesn't require administrative overhead/oversight.
As a student body representative, it is your responsiblity to work with administrative officials, not against them. If you find the terms of using the network too constrictive, campaign to have them changed. We didn't get them changed at my school - the excess bandwidth, before throttling was in place for http and ftp, was in excess of $100k, and it's hard to argue an idealistic case in favor of that number to a budget-minded administrator. Just remember to keep your options open, and work for what you believe in. When that doesn't work, re-evaluate your beliefs, and start again.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's an analogy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose there's a lecture hall in some building on campus, and it has a nice multimedia projection screen setup. Now suppose that some local club (lets say, oh, the Anime Club) had arranged to show movies in this room during the evenings or weekends when it wasn't being used for academic purposes. Now imagine that this club became fairly popular, and started holding movie marathons every Friday night -- and that this use of the facility resulted in people spilling drinks in the seats, leaving trash all over the floor, causing extra wear on the seats from having their feet up, trashing the bathrooms in between movies out of boredom, having to replace the (expensive) bulb in the projector much more often, and perhaps having to leave the lights and building AC/heat on during weekends where before they were not needed.
The result is that somebody has to clean up their mess (janitors, building maintenance folks), legitimate users of the room begin to be affected (trash left in seats, projector breaking during lecture, etc), and in general an academic resource becomes overwhelmed with a non-academic use.
The fact is, if the above scenario ever happened at a university, the club would eventually be denied access. I don't think any resonable person would see this as somehow taking away a right or privilege of those students. Their use of the resource became too great. In the case of internet access, if you must download off Kazaa, live off campus and get a cable modem -- just like this hypothetical Anime club is free to use somebody's private home or rent some other facility for thier showings. No one is saying that you can't use Kazaa, they're saying you can't overwhelm an academic resource with a bunch of unrelated spooge.
Jesus christ. (Score:1, Redundant)
- A.P.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:2)
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
No one is forced to live on campus. If you don't like it, move off. If you really want to trade MP3s, then get a dial-up account and dial off campus.
The school's network isn't needed at 1am,
I beg to differ. Our network was constantly in use. Constantly. But on a side note, our original restrictions were "No P2P between 8am and 8pm" But people didn't listen, so we shut them down entirely.
The fact you would resort to completely blocking all p2p and shutting off accounts of students makes me sick.
It wasn't my policy. Like I said, I was a student at the time. But given how much trouble P2P was causing for our network what other options were there?
You are the embodyment of censorship, and as far as I am concerned, a bonified puppet of the music industry.
You are a troll, and as far as I am concerned, a bad one at that.
Now, please explain to me how not allowing P2P networks on a private academic network is the same as censorship.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:1)
This isn't the same as "banning protests." It's the same as saying "you can't have parades around the paved streets 24 hours a day since people who actually ahve to get from point A to point B can't since its clogged all the time."
This isn't the same as "removing controversial books" from the library. It's the same as saying "you can't checkout 2,000 books at the same time to build a fort and prevent anyone else from checking out books for academic reasons."
In no way as anyone's expression been hampared. There is no censorship. Explain to me, without using terrible anologies, why not allowing students to clog bandwidth with mp3s is a form of censorship.
It's not JUST an academic network. (Score:2)
Re:It's not JUST an academic network. (Score:1)
but shouldn't be the university's problem in dorms any more than it's comcast's problem if I do it from home
Which is slightly different. Comcast is an ISP, their business is on internet acess. A university can be considered a business too, but who's product is academics. But like I said above, if it interferes with the primary purpose of the network, it's got to go.
I do like the idea of providing seperate networks. Provide students with their own network, including a route to the main campus network, but a seperate pipe for the internet. That would solve most of these problems. There's only one problem, it would be SO much more expensive
Students were paying $3 a semester, only those living on campus, for a high speed connection. If they had their own seperate connection, I'd expect those costs to be about 100x higher at least. Or perhaps a charge per meg or gig transferred on a P2P network? Lots of interesting options there.
BTW, I'm glad to have a level headed response. One that doesn't involve calling me "the embodyment of censorship" hehe.
Re:This isn't "censorship" (Score:2)
It sounds like the RIAA got in their ear and convinced someone that all downloading was illegal, which of course it is not. You say it is the schools network, yet students pay many thousands to attend. Keeping the throttling seems like a reasonable middle ground. A similar line was just discussed here. [slashdot.org] Schools educate, not eliminate, and schools that dont take this opportunity to teach students about their fair use and the ethics behind it are missing out.
Gnutella's model (Score:3, Informative)
Gnutella also has problems in that it is TOO centralized. Jumpstarting a connection onto the network, when one's host cache is empty, is problematic. Some software writers attempted to solve the problem by providing host caches, nodes that simply share live connection points, but these caches became targets for lawsuits. There are a few alternate methods for looking up live nodes, but any such method is also susceptible to being shut down.
The conclusion? If someone has control over your network connection, it's really difficult keeping them from exerting that control. Anything that succeeds will have to be enormously fluid.
IAAITGAIBP2P (Score:4, Informative)
I have taken and am taking mesures to snuff most P2P applications around here, especially Kazaa and other types of sharing for ONLY one reason, BANDWIDTH.
I know you know this but it is a real problem, the students spend all day downloading pr0n and mp3s hogging every available bit per second. Academic usage would grind to a halt when some new CD came out, it was terrible.
Don't worry about censorship, it was just a decision based on some fuggin' tards that can't stop beating off to mp3s and listening to pr0n grinding the network to a halt.
Re:IAAITGAIBP2P (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:IAAITGAIBP2P (Score:2, Funny)
Re:IAAITGAIBP2P (Score:1)
Until my wife's university blocked file-stealing, their external connection was only fractionally as responsive as my 56k modem.
Use more intelligent file sharing systems (Score:2)
One of the coolest things about P2P is the ability to have closer servers with the same file.
Freenet doesn't have the pretty GUI, but it does a better job.
Some of you people must be on crack... (Score:3, Insightful)
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal shit really easy.
If your not bright enough to figure out how to steal anouther way, well you just don't deserve to steal.
Grow up move on.
It is you who should put down the pipe (Score:2)
Make content scalable to any arbitrary level of demand, on the fly. That is what FreeNet can do, by replicating data on demand to more and more nodes the more it is requested. P2P is the first and to my knowledge only architecture on the net that has this capability, a capability that could well revolutionize the usefulness of the net. And I'm not talking about serving up pr0n or mp3s, I'm talking about making popular webcasts and websites more available and more accessible, rather than less. I'm talking about an approach that solves many of the scalability issues inherent in the net today.
The reverse of the slashdot effect: popular data becomes more available rather than less, with the cost shared by those requesting the data, thereby lowering the bar for those who wish to provide said data (a much nicer alternative to being forced to upgrade your web service when your site gets linked to by slashdot).
this is not about censorship, this is about the uni taking away your access to steal[sic] shit really easy.
First, what you just described is a form of censorship, it just happens to be a form you agree with.
Second, if they were serious about preventing copyright violations they would have to remove all means by which students can share files, which must include scp, ftp, http, irc, IM, and email, to name just a few.
Interesting Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Waaaahhhhhh! (Score:3, Insightful)
The school network exists to enhance your educational experience not for your personal enjoyment.
Also check the Acceptable Use Agreement that you signed (in that big pile of forms they gave you during registration), unless swapping mp3s and trafficing pr0n is acceptable, I don't think you have a case. You could always contact the Chair, Senate Committee on Computing and Communications Policy, in care of the University Secretary, and tell them that not being able to steal music is bumming you out.
Re:Waaaahhhhhh! (Score:1, Insightful)
you never went to college did you?
the school network doesnt only exist for educational experience. that may be in the "mission statement" or whatever, but in REALITY. its a different story.
i am sure you would study without any time to relax if you were in school.
Re:This is the Canadian standard (Score:1)
Speak for yourself:
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How about this: (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, what's that? You don't want to pay for everybody to use Kazaa? Well I'm sure other students don't want to pay for you to use kazaa, nor do the alumni, nor do the taxpayers (if you or your school receive any financial aid, which is almost a certainty).
If you want to saturate a network connection downloading movies and mp3 files, how about you move off campus and get DSL/Cable rather than ruining the network for people trying to get real stuff done?
Re:How about this: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Why don't you take that same $500 or $1000 and purchase the CDs???
- A.P.
Re:How about this: (Score:1)
Sorry, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
My suggestion, build an FTP or Web site and let people download what they want from that...
Or get really intelligent and build a gateway server of some sort, that uses a web interface to submit requests to a machine on the otherside of the University firewall...that machine can do the search and download, and then offer the files up through web or ftp to download...
but na that to much work, you want your stealing to be easy...
Re:Heh, president of the Student's Union... (Score:2, Insightful)
SU's in Canada are actually quite powerful.
University of Western Ontario's SU has a budget of about $25 million dollars. Queens $8 million, Waterloo is probably around $15 mil.
Money isn't everything though. We are also very politically active and influential. Student's here gave $5 million to help the university with expansion. That kind of cash doesn't come without some benefits.
Don't get me wrong, they abuse us a lot.. and we bend over every once 'n a while -- but we aren't little and insignificant as you may think.
RIAA/MPAA Warnings (Score:1)
Choose your battles (Score:1)
RIAA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:RIAA (Score:1, Interesting)
No, the only people this would intimidate is the smaller universities that exist only because of the accrediting. And I don't think it's possible to force something only on small universities and not on large ones.
Ideas... (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, have them explore options to totally cutting it off. I agree that nuking Kazaa, et al, on an academic network probably isn't a bad thing, but I also agree that it's a bit of a slippery slope, what with things like freenet actually getting a bit of actual content. Bandwidth throttles can be inexpensive if you're lucky. They could also offer "full access" accounts for a premium, and slave those to one part of their bandwidth... then it would be the p2p users fighting over their limited space, and not taking up all the real users bw. My last sysadmin job, we set it up so p2p and anything not p80 was blocked during the day, but after work we'd open it up... perhaps your geeks could open the network on off-peak hours.
And, if all that fails, take a couple older PCs, put them in a room by themselves, share a cable modem or dsl between them, and toss in burners. Students who want stuff not available on the academic network can use those to dl and burn whatever they want. (and yes, there are issues with that... it's a last resort, ok?)
When it boils down to it, the most important thing is "Is this network for academic, or general, use?". If the U is giving you access to do your work with, then it's academic and they're right, but if it's general use, then it should be open. IMHO.
academic vs. general (Score:1)
Meanwhile I'm leeching pr0n off of port 80, which has no restrictions, but it's about the most non-academic thing I do...
the moral of the story is, everything is all screwed up, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it, because the network admins believe that >1024=criminal.
"censorship" my ass! (Score:2, Insightful)
No. They're blocking ports to reduce bandwidth consumption by people downloading w@r3z and mp3s. blocking frees up bandwidth for real acedemic pursuits, and is, in fact, anti-censorship, as the available bandwidth can be used for emailing your complaints to the student newspaper, putting up a "these teachers suck" homepage, etc.
what you want (vs. what you said...) (Score:2)
Realistically, there will always be some restrictions on what is considered "proper" network usage, since network bandwidth is a limited commodity. By having an open NAUP process, everyone has the chance to fully understand the limitations required, and contribute to the policy.
My suggestion it to propose an NAUP "board" with a representative from the above groups responsible for writing and approving such a policy. They should have the power to create and enforce such a policy, and the power to deal with any reprocussions thereof (e.g. if more bandwidth is needed to support the desired features, levy a fee on the appropriate user base).
-Erik
How about... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:1)
Re:How about... (Score:1)
What!? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Jesus Christ, how the hell do you get off dreaming this is about god damn censorship?
It is scumsucking bastards like you which give the internet a bad name. Maybe if you beg, plead and cajole, you might be able to explain to the powers that be why bottom feeding trash like you need to abuse the intellectual properties of others.
It never ceases to amaze me why universities even remotely allowed this in the first place.
1. YOU ARE NOT PAYING FOR THE BANDWIDTH. Get that out of your freeloading thick dumbass skull. A portion of your fees go to supporting the infrastructure of the university, but they certianly don't foot the bill. If you want to pay for the whole thing, go buy your own broadband connection and PORN THE FUCK AWAY!
2. DON"T YOU DARE TRY TO DISGUISE THIS AS SOME SORT of "Censorship" issue. No one is stopping you from hearing or publishing anything. It's just stopping you from jacking off to the latest girl-on-girl pic while watching a bootleg copy of spiderman. You want to discuss the political ramifications of the Bush administraton? USE Websites. You want to hear the music from the best of larwence welk? Do it on your own nickel, fuckwad.
3. As long as taxpayers are subsidizing the cost of your education, you could at least appear to give a fuck about blowing the money down the local shithole. When you are actually paying for the whole thing, you can set the rules. Prick.
4. Apparently it's whine about how my daddy abuses us week on slashdot. Christ all fucking mighty.
5. It's people like you that are wearing a SAVE WINONA t-shirt. Fuck the virgin mary with a candy cane. She STOLE, you wanna steal. Fucking lock the god damn bunch of you cocksuckers up with kevin "loose nutz" mitnick and throw the fucking key to the hounds.
--------------------
Well, there went all my karma!
Re:What!? (Score:2)
Re:What!? (Score:1)
You really should check your user agreements.... (Score:1)
That clause?
They hold the right to shut down any service that isn't used for educational purposes.
It might not be the same everywhere, but I wouldn't be suprised if there is that clause in any agreement you have to make to use the campus internet access.
Before you go complaining about this "censorship", remember, you agreed to their terms about it being for academic use.
Carleton (Score:2)
Traffic Shaping (Score:1)
The product we use is the Packeteer Packetshaper [packeteer.com]. AFAIK (I'm not in the telecom area), this allows us to shape our traffic and place higher priority on "legitimate" traffic during the day. I have no idea what the pricing is on this beast (expensive, I think), but it has allowed us to continue to allow all traffic without resorting to more draconian methods.
Here's my experience (Score:1)
I work a company as their IT person. They own a apartment complex that they exclusively rent to college kids for the local community college.
They've got a 3mbit cable connection, cisco router, bay switches, 10/100 drop in every bedroom. I got a call day wondering why the internet was getting slower, slower, and slower. Well, I go out there, turns out they're just saturating the network with Kazzaa, Morpheus, whatever napster-alike they use nowadays. Kids can't register for classes, etc etc
To make a long story short, they didn't have the hardware available to implement a real solution, so I basically called our cable company up, explained the situation, and had them close all the connections other than email, web, streaming audio...
The cable connection was faster than ever! I've had them open up a few more ports since then, for various things like instant messanging, but that's about it.
Sure, the kids complain. They must not understand that the kind of file sharing they are doing is ILLEGAL. That's all there is to it. Sure, you can deal drugs to your college buddies, drink when your 18, steal music... oh well...
Two words (Score:2)
Find an open HTTP proxy out there on the net, and Kazaa away...
(+10, redundant)
Where I work.... (Score:2)
Over 70% of our traffic is from Kazaa an other P2P clients. The university has had to triple it's available bandwith on the campus uplink costing mucho dinero. They have tried very hard to allow all traffic without restricting certain protocols or ports, but this year it was just too much. If I'm not mistaken, they are now rate limiting access to the dorms.
Why not use taffic shaping? Becuase we are currently handling over a gigabit traffic for most of the day...buying hardware to support that much traffic would be quite expensive. Second, P2P applications are a moving target, so new applications or savy users will be able to bypass the filters quite easily.
So now, the students will have to deal with slow access in the dorms if they are going to keep using P2P applications. At least the rest of us, with legitimate internet uses, have bandwidth available.
Re:Where I work.... (Score:1)
The acceptable-use policy states that the network is there only for educational purposes. Yes P2P *might* have some educational purposes, but probably not. Also, the university has receive over 150 notices of copyright violations this year. I'm highly suprised the legal department has stepped in to start shutting things down.
Quit your whining - you've lost already. (Score:1, Insightful)
First off, a round of applause for those smart enough to realize that this could be illegal. You will save yourself some trouble by avoiding the file trading networks.
Second, I've sat on the panel and voted to suspend or expell students after numerous warnings. Most of the hamsters are too stupid/shortsighted to get
it. We are protecting them - when I show the offending hamster the registered letter from Big Media that we just got, most of them seem happy enough to take the local restrictions and know that we'll fend of the lawyers. You probably suspect it, but there are admins out there who do get a kick out of banning you. Repeat after me: BOFH.
Third: I'm as much for academic freedom as the next university IT geek, but I don't believe that this freedom extends to illegal acts. What's next: I should let you surf for bestiality because it's part of a biology paper? Get real. You are expendable: if you expose your university to too much liability, they will drop you like the proverbial hot potato. I'm more than happy to make CDs full of evidence and hand them out to the cops and lawyers like AOL hands out free trials.
Four: It costs money. Lots of money. While we try to peer with as many places as we can, we're still looking at paying over half a million dollars this year for bandwidth as an operating expense. *Operating Expense*. Just like heat and water and power. Your tuition doesn't go anywhere near that bill. Neither do your residence fees. If I were to actually start charging the residence for what they use, their bill would probably double. Traffic analysis shows that over 85% of the packets bound for rez are not academic in nature.
Last year, by shooting down file trading, I reduced our bill over a hundred thousand dollars. Tell me again why the board/ president/ provost/ chancellor/ dean/ whoever cares about you being able to commit mass copyright infringement?
Five: speaking of traffic analysis, go right ahead and change the port. I know what the client looks like in operation. I do content inspection, so I'll still see what you're up to. I know if it's mp3s or divxs, and I know when you're over the limit.
Six: "What about libraries?" you cry. "We can copy stuff there!" hm. Well, you do copy things there for two reasons. Either because the library has paid a license fee or because you're too stupid to realize that you're breaking the law.
So. If you don't want me telling you what to do with my network (It's mine because the university hired me to maintain and secure it, and has given me authority over it) then go buy your own network. I bet it won't be long before your ISP gets DMCA letters and suspends you there too...
Ways around this? (Score:1)
I'm thinking of proposing that we get some flavour of DSL line in and route any non-academic traffic through that (i.e. anything not web, mail, IM and a few others).
One question before I start wading through man pages. I this possible? A simple yes/no will suffice. It would be nice to know that I'm not barking up the wrong tree.
Network Monitoring (Score:1)
The only problem we've found is that network services picks one IP a day , and actually listens to the datastream for copyrighted material. They seem to only really care about movies and large things, not mp3s, but still. If you get caught you lose your net connection for the year. Just two doors down from me, campus security paid him a visit about downloading 3 episodes of family guy. So it seems to be true, but im wondering is this legal? We've yet to find anything that says they cant. So if anyone knows anything about this kind of stuff up here in canada (eh?) it could be helpful!
I feel your pain, but not really... (Score:1)
I cannot describe how frustrating it is to watch your downloads max out at 1.2K as your deadlines approach because the children in the next building want to listen to the latest drek cranked out by the likes of GLAY. I literally had to drive an hour back to my home so I could download and burn the CDs I needed.
I hate the RIAA too, and I mourn for Napster, but I would have blocked all those ports in a second at the college I worked for.