Many Universities Spending $100K/Year Enforcing P2P Rules 323
Scott Jaschik writes "A new study documents just how much money colleges are spending on enforcing P2P rules through software license fees, hardware, and other costs. Many private universities are spending more than $100,000 a year — a major allocation of funds. An article in Inside Higher Ed explains the study and its findings."
Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I don't believe this. I do the exact same thing for large networks and it doesn't cost anywhere near that much, what I think they did was *any* software or hardware which was used in the process was added to the total cost.
Ordinary IDS/IPS which just happens to also be used to detect/stop P2P? Add full cost of the solution.
These stats are shady.
Who the hell needs P2P... (Score:2, Interesting)
Went into the campus computer lab to find that the entire room was sitting on live IPs. No NAT, and when I shut off the XP firewall, I was able to ping the machine from the Internet. Naturally, I was logged in with local admin rights.
Fire up Apache and plug in your external HD chock full o' goodies and away you go...
Speed tests showed 80Mb down and 90Mb up. Yes, life must be nice sitting on a phat backbone with a class-B to waste. And we have to wonder why we're running out of IPv4 space?
Re:Or... (Score:2, Interesting)
Or... students could use an academic network for academic purposes only, and get their own bloody network connection if they want to download music? Y'know, just a thought.
Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:5, Interesting)
I know that a lot of people aren't taking this issue to heart, and a lot of people agree that relative to the university budget, this isn't a lot of money to be spent. However, people need to stop seeing this as a fraction of a large budget, and start seeing it for what it truly is. It isn't until the economy start to depreciate that people see the value of small numbers, and if they would have seen it earlier, it would be helping them out more in desperate times. Just last year, my university paid for Carlos Mencia to do some stand up. Apart from the fact that he's a terrible comedian that did the exact act that anyone can see on comedy central, I'm sure they spent somewhere in the area of the amount that it would cost to keep our multimillion dollar gymnasium a bit cooler for the rest of the year. When you waste that kind of money on something useless, you're not doing your job of keeping university priorities strait. What my university essentially said, is that it's important for some hack to tell everyone that Mexicans eat burritos, so we have to sacrifice comfort when working out. Hell, the robotics club could have used a fraction of that for a better processor on our land vehicle.
professors costs $500K (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory quote, I suppose (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do universities spend so much on P2P? Is it just to avoid the legal fees of the RIAA possibly going after them? Couldn't they just allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each student (maybe like 512k or so) and let them do whatever they want with it?
Re:Or... (Score:2, Interesting)
What if someone wants to buy a video off of iTunes?
Are you saying they shouldn't be able to because they are in college?
What if someone just built a new computer and wants to get the most recent Ubuntu DVD iso?
Are you saying they should wait 3 days to do it?
What if one of their professors has PDFs online for their problem sets or as papers for them to read?
They can easily reach 10MB, and while it isn't horrible waiting 10 minutes so you can do your school work, why bother?
Yes, students can sit around and wait, or download things while they're asleep, but what the hell is the point in that?
The university has the bandwidth, why should they inconvenience students paying $40k a year just so that... what? It's more annoying to download files, so maybe they will download less illegal files?
Sorry buddy, that's just bullshit.
I think the school should allow students to get their own bandwidth using FiOS or something. The overall cost could be less for kids that don't need it, and a bit more for those that want to torrent, and the University doesn't have to bother paying to police it. (I know this has it's own problems, but I'm just saying.)
Re:Or... (Score:2, Interesting)
Dude, you don't have a fucking clue!!
There is one hell of a lot of legal content on the internet that require a connection greater than 128 kbps. Saying youtube is watchable at that rate is just lunacy, you may enjoy waiting for it to buffer the whole time but I don't particularly, and the fact of the matter is that it is now unnecessary. What about computer gaming? And don't give me that bullshit of "you're at university to study" because whilst that's true, I'm also here to live my life and enjoy my time!
Saying that the university provides you with free internet is also a bunch of crap! I pay for my university accommodation and included in that price is the internet connection along with a few other bills. Just because it's all rolled into one big number doesn't mean I'm not paying for it! And yes, my rent is a fair amount larger than that of a private flat because of this.
You are right in saying that the college internet is not for stealing movies etc. but it sure as hell is not for the sole purpose of learning! If all I used my connection for was learning I would go insane, I have the right to use it for whatever the hell I want to within the law, and not to be capped because some dick like you thinks I don't need it.
You claim to use a 50k line, good for you. Last time I used a 50k line I was close to pulling my hair out just trying to look at the holiday photo's my parents sent me. I do a lot of hard work at university and often I need a five minute break just browsing something to calm me down, cheer me up and using such a slow line turns taking a five minute break into looking at 2 pages! That's really gonna relax me.
Next, what about research?? You claim to never have done any work from your dorm. Y'know what, I believe you, but I also want to ask you what your grades were when you came out.. Just because you didn't do any work when you come back home doesn't mean others don't. I often have to upload a few gigs of training data, benchmarks, legal software, anything else that I've been working on for the last 3 years and doing that over a slow line would take hours/days. Hours/days that could be spent running said benchmarks and then using the data they create. I have no plan s of being in the labs till 10pm every night just because you think I shouldn't be working on these things from home.
And then the updates. You've gotta be fuckin kidding me! Just leave it on overnight ey? Yeah I really sleep well with a nice whirring fan in the background. Way to save power there too by the way, sod the environment, every time ubuntu releases and update I'll just leave it on. Hell, it'll end up being online 24/7!! Genius!
Long and ranting and probably flamebait I know, but jesus man, get a fucking clue!! If people didn't need fast connections they would not exist. Just because someone is a student who is paying for everything they use doesn't make them second class to you.
Re:Or... (Score:3, Interesting)
My college actually does this - MAC addresses of personal devices are registered to your Novell account. (Unregistered devices get no access!) Each user gets 113KB/s (I think they were going for 1000 Kbps) capped across all of their devices.
We have a massive packet shaper. Faculty and lab machines get higher priority, and the "server" subclass operates outside of the shaper. So, your massive astrophysics lab would probably be on a lab machine or a specially purposed machine, or you could ask nicely and they could register your personal machine on a separate throttling class.
Our bandwidth is horrible - a lot of the buildings are using sub-cat5 cables, for example - but they did buy an additional 10Mbps on their WAN line. Given the inability to get the powers-that-be on campus to get more bandwidth, the caps and shaping help keep YouTube from drowning out EBSCO and JSTOR.