Ohio University Blocks P2P File Sharing

After receiving the highest number of notices from the RIAA about P2P file sharing, Ohio University has announced a policy that restricts all fire sharing on the campus network. Some file-sharing programs that could trigger action are Ares, Azureus, BitTorrent, BitLord, KaZaA, LimeWire, Shareaza and uTorrent. Claiming that this effort is 'to ensure that every student, faculty member and researcher has access to the computer resources they need,' is this another nail in the coffin of internet freedom in American universities or a needed step to prevent illegal fire sharing?

Re:Freedom is not about theft

[miskatonic alumnus]

file sharing != copyright infringement != stealing

Re:Freedom is not about theft

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright infringement is not theft.

Re:I wonder what level they are blocking?

[Jim Hall]

I wonder what level are they blocking?
If its at the wall, won't internal sharing continue?

From the article, I guess they are blocking at the port level. That is, if Network Security discovers you have P2P traffic coming from your network jack, they turn off the port that serves that jack (possibly for 24hrs, or until you talk to them.) That means you can't even do P2P inside the local network.

We do this at the University I work for, unless you have a research need to use P2P (or some other legitimate need that has been reviewed.) I imagine they will by default disable P2P through their wireless network - but doing P2P over an 802.11 network would seem silly anyway.

Yes it is

[Weaselmancer]

Freedom is about being able to do what you want. Responsibility is knowing what to do with your freedom.

Port blocking, while it will restrict copyright violations - is a restriction of freedom.

Re:Makes sense

[Chandon Seldon]

You have two problems, they can be handled separately.

First, you get RIAA letters. The appropriate response is a form letter saying that "Our school privacy policy prohibits us from releasing user information without a subpoena or court order" (obviously you'll want to verify that with a lawyer, but you shouldn't be sending out user information based on random letters). If you do get a legit subpoena or court order, send them the info if it's still available.

Second, you have excess bandwidth usage. This is really simple: Charge the students a reasonable fee for bandwidth overages - this will encourage users to conserve without unduly constraining people who actually are willing to pay for their bandwidth. It also has the advantage that as demand increases you automatically have the money to pay for upgrades.

Re:No Servers!

[Glowing Fish]

The problem with a "no servers" policy is that "server" doesn't really mean anything. A server is a computer that somehow serves information to another computer. Which includes every computer on the internet. There is no actual difference between a "client" and a "server". Even if a client computer is just sending a request to an e-Mail server, it is still serving data.

And it is not just a pedantic point. While it might seem like a computer that is only sending e-Mails is clearly a client, and not a server, what if you set up your e-Mail client so that it could automatically return e-Mails when it got them? And what if those e-Mails had attachments of files? You've just set yourself up as a "server".

I don't think there is any good technical or legal definition of what a "client" and "server" computer are.

Re:It's not about speech

[TheSkyIsPurple]

Lets say you have an 4 OC-12s (no idea what they'd actually have)
That's about 2400mbps of bandwidth. (4&~600 mbps payload)

Lets say you have 24,000 students, and 10% of them are doing p2p => 2,400 sharers
That's 1mbps per sharer to saturate your connection which is not really a large amount.

In this scenario, unless you bring your cap below that, you won't affect existing sharing.
And if you drop it below that, you really start to impact real work/research.

Doing an across the board limit just doesn't work well, and even if you factor in exceptions.. you're still going to have a large chunk that use their excepted connection for p2p.

Fine... so restrict p2p only on the "excepted" connections? But now you're playing the same game just on a smaller field, and that field will keep growing as well. You've just put the problem off a bit.

I dont' know how to solve the problem, but bandwidth limits don't strike me as a good approach. /twiddle those numbers all you want... I bet there's only a small cosm in which limiting bandwidth will make sense, and I doubt that will map to many major universities.

Re:Against the grain

[bark]

Yes, it is *their* network whether or not you pay for a portion of it.

If you pay a doctor for the use of their CAT scanner, do you suddenly get to "own" a piece of it and can come in afterhours to use the equipment to do cat scans of your dog?

You pay for stuff that you don't use freely all the time. Why should this be any different?

Mexican universities...

[Spy der Mann]

I've talked with some people in a couple of colleges in Mexico city. Here in Mexico filesharing isn't prosecuted as much as it is in the US - and yet I've seen bans in filesharing. Reason? Bandwidth. In one particular college, P2P activity covered around 99% of network activity, and webbrowsing became as slow as molasses until filesharing applications (napster at that time) were prohibited.

HTTP tunnel

[tepples]

Why not implement quality of service on the network and give priority to web, email and FTP traffic?

Because other protocols can impersonate HTTP [nocrew.org].

Paying for bandwidth

[JavaCodeGuy]

I completely agree with many of the people who have said that the universities should charge for bandwidth. I go to Cornell University and this is in fact what is done here on campus. In the newer dorms you can buy TV connections and therefore get cable internet, or you can use the on campus internet. For anyone who uses the on campus internet service, ResNet, their usage is monitored. We are given 5 GB/month and each additional GB is $1.50. This is only for off campus traffic however so there is still a lot of on campus P2P sharing. But, I think this is a much better step than completely stopping traffic outright. Students are free to do what they want and the university is reimbursed if someone goes crazy with bandwidth.

Re:How can you block file sharing?

[element-o.p.]

Yeah, but there's got to be something on the other side of that tunnel. IOW, you aren't just tunneling from the students' PCs to the Bit Torrent/KaZaA/gnutella/whatever host -- you have to have an intermediate endpoint outside the university network to be the other side of your tunnel, which then connects to your torrent. At that point, the RIAA complaints are no longer the University's problem (although bandwidth still is).

Add to that the fact that most people don't even know how to update their computers, and the fact remains that while all the CS majors might still be able to download their mp3s^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs, they make up a relatively small portion of the population, and therefore both the bandwidth usage and RIAA complaints are reduced.

But saving money is about saving upstream

[tepples]

Yes because those Ubuntu and Debian ISO's I downloaded with Azeureus were just so illegal and evil!

Why didn't you download them via HTTP from your university IT department's mirror? Unlike multiple students downloading ISOs from the Internet, multiple students downloading from a mirror on the LAN do not make upstream bandwidth unavailable for use by other students.

Re:No Servers!

[Spazmania]

And it is not just a pedantic point.

Yeah, it really is. And your email example is bogus too: if I return those emails, I do it by connecting back to an email server. The email server doesn't connect to me.

I don't think there is any good technical or legal definition of what a "client" and "server" computer are.

Try this one: If I can remotely connect to your computer and induce it to perform a non-trivial function at my convenience, its a server.

We firewall jockeys even have a precise technical definition: If your machine accepts a SYN packet and responds with a SYN/ACK, or if your machine expects to receive the first in a series of UDP packets on a particular port, its a server.

Re:I wonder what level they are blocking?

[Gonarat]

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 500 GB USB drive. Even a burned DVD can hold around 4 GB of music/video/software. Another possibility is an ad-hoc wireless network or a wireless router not hooked to the internet. Never underestimate the ability of college students to solve a problem like this.

Blizzard Downloader

[Z34107]

The Blizzard downloader uses a form of the Bittorrent protocol - a broken, noncompliant, single purpose form of the protocol - to download patches. It doesn't actually use a Bittorrent client, or any of the same ports.

It's the margarine of the 'torrent world.

Re:isp's crying about having to provide what they

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Students pay a small fraction of the highly subsidized costs of their education - tuition, facilities, infrastructure, salaries - at a TAXPAYER funded public institution such as Ohio University.

You have no idea what the hell you're talking about. Of Ohio State's $3.76 billion 2006/2007 budget, only $510 million (13.5%) came from state appropriations.

Considerably more money ($921 million / 24.5%) came from students. And even more than that came from the hospital that Ohio State operates.

Is this information hard to find? No! It's right on the Ohio State site, right here [osu.edu].

The fact is, at Ohio State, students funding is twice as big a factor as state funding. And student funding isn't a "small fraction" - it's nearly a quarter of the entire budget.

I go to a "state funded" school (University of Colorado at Boulder), but Colorado only contributes 8.1% of the funding for my university. Student fees and tuition contribute 39% of the budget - almost five times as much as state funding.

I am so sick and tired about this "what are my tax dollars doing" bullshit with regards to educational institutions. There are 26,000 people who attend my university. That's larger than most of the cities in Wyoming.

If a city offered municipal internet access (as many Slashdot users would like), would it be OK if the city decided that you shouldn't be allowed to use? What if the city prevented other providers from offering services on their premises?

And I assure you, the taxpayers of Ohio have much better things to do with their money than to foot enormous bandwidth bills so that students can illegally download copyrighted music, movies, and porn faster.

Here we go again. Because, if someone is using BitTorrent, they must be a dirty criminal. Give me a break. There are so many legitimite uses for P2P that it's not even funny. I downloaded an Ubuntu CD when 7.04 came out using BitTorrent. Public domain and educational materials - including videos - are distributed with BitTorrent. There are even professors on campus who use BitTorrent to distribute video lectures.

Maybe you are too short-sighted to see the many uses of P2P technology. Guess what? The vast majority of email sent today is spam. That doesn't mean that email isn't a valuable tool.

I remember when Bill Owens made an incredibly stupid statement about how CU should dismiss a particular professor. Owens didn't seem to understand that universities have a large degree of autonomy - it's not the Governor who selects the Regents, it's the voters. If you don't like what's happening at Ohio State, elect different representatives. But don't go pretending that the State legislature should make policy decisions. Ohio doesn't like it when the Federal Government decides to interfere. Your City Council doesn't like it when the State interferes.

Re:Blizzard Downloader

[FiniteElementalist]

Yes and no. The Blizzard downloader has an http seed to download from in addition to the swarm, in large part due to the fact that not everyone can use P2P with their connection. However, it still has the P2P section which is bittorrent. I'm not sure if this holds true for current version, but I believe that the .torrent file was extracted from older versions of the downloader (through "unofficial" means) and people used other clients to download the patches.

And what do you mean about ports, are you talking about the tracker's ports? uTorrent has the option to randomize which port it uses for incoming connections, and the Blizzard downloader seems to use port 3724.

I don't think that's true

[EkimAW]

According to Wikipedia the .torrent file can be extract from the blizzard downloader and used with another bittorrent client. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader [wikipedia.org] If a normal client can exchange data with peers using the Blizzard downloader then how, broken, non-compliant can it be? Also what difference does the port in use have to do with compliance? I use uTorrent and it seems to work fine on whatever port I feel like using.