UNC Requiring Any Student Who Wants To Use File Sharing Software To Apply For A 'Hall Pass'
from the say-what-now? dept
Apparently UNC's method of dealing with constant complaints from the entertainment industry about students file-sharing is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's blocking network access to any computer which they discover has file sharing software on it. It's unclear from the article just how UNC is detecting file sharing software, though that would seem to raise some serious privacy questions. Also not explained in the article is what qualifies as "file sharing software." After all, an FTP app, email, instant messaging and a browser could all be considered "file sharing" apps. Either way, if UNC discovers you have file sharing software that's on its "evil" list, you get a message that pops up in your browser saying:“UNC-CHAPEL HILL IS BLOCKING FILE-SHARING THROUGHOUT STUDENT HOUSING.”Students then are told to remove such offending software or they won't be able to access the internet.
Of course, since there do remain legitimate reasons for using file sharing software, students can apply for a "Hall Pass," that will let them use the software after they "learn what does and does not violate copyright law." One hopes that the lesson plan required is reasonable, though such programs rarely are all that accurate.
I understand why UNC is doing this, but I still find it worrisome. These are technologies that rapidly evolve. What may seem "evil" today may not be in the near future. Blocking your students from using them, except after they jump through a bunch of hoops -- each with a giant warning on them -- chills the willingness of students to actually look at certain new and important innovations that can be built on top of the older things. Requiring people to go ask permission to go use one of the fundamental features of the internet is likely to be quite frustrating for students who have perfectly legitimate reasons to use such networks.
Separately, I will note with a bit of pride that the same article quotes someone from my alma mater saying that Cornell would never implement such a system:
Ms. Mitrano said. Engineering and science-heavy institutions would have a hard time, for instance, because those fields often require a lot of file-sharing. Cornell, she says, wouldn’t do it because it would violate a student code that emphasizes “freedom with responsibility.”Nice to see them going against this kind of snooping/cutoff setup.
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Filed Under: file sharing, hall pass, unc
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Really, Really stupid
Since we don't claim to do anything to stop infringement, we don't have to bend over backwards trying, and then we aren't on the hook when something that is clearly impossible, fails.
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you can tell that its installed on their computer because they plug into a managed switch, that gives you the MAC, and then you see P2P traffic from that
IP. Its not hard, the only hard part is proving that you removed it as opposed to just stopped using it.
Even more, it's possible to run file sharing software on a computer without leaving a fingerprint in the operating system.
Under Windows you could run a portable instance of utorrent from a thumb drive having all outbound trafick going through a SSH tunnel.
Even if the institution has a policy of blocking all but web trafic, file sharing will always be possible as long as you can tunnel over port 80 or port 443.
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Re: NO! It is called management software
Why does a company or university use it? To make sure nothing is installed on the computer that will compromise the very network your computer is using. That isn't the only use, but one of the many uses of this type of software. Why does a university or company want to limit the use of file sharing programs? It can be an attack vector and many consider it a security issue running on a network. Students seems to forget that the network they share with the rest of the community is used for many important things beside downloading software. It is important to make sure the network bandwidth isn't clogged with hundreds of PC's downloading movies or TV shows.
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Re: Re: NO! It is called management software
That's a particularly ironic statement, given the preceding:
"Microsoft makes such a product".
Even if we generously -- VERY generously -- overlook the fact that Microsoft Windows CANNOT be secured in production environments even by its maker -- then I am certain that the users of such software are making fundamental errors. For example: do they permit IE? That's most certainly a highly dangerous piece of software that has a long and sordid history involving network compromise. How about Outlook, another exceedingly-dangerous, extremely-buggy program that nobody should ever use? And what about Acrobat, which is another hideously awful piece of software?
My point being: the incompetent fools using this kind of "management software" haven't got the slightest idea what is and isn't a threat to their network environment. They lack fundamental clues about the basics of contemporary security practice. (Heck, they probably still use anti-virus software and expect it to work.) So let's not pretend that this has anything to do with sound network operations practice...because sound network operations practice in the kind of environments we're discussing here would presume that all end-user-controlled systems are already compromised and defend accordingly.
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Re: Re: NO! It is called management software
YOU may not call it spyware, but isn't it mimicking the behavior of actual spyware just a bit? How is it any different if a student clicks through a bogus "anti-virus" EULA than if they do the same thing to install this "legitimate" software because they're told they need it in order to access the world? Internet access (especially in college) is no longer a luxury and the administrators for this campus have crossed the line with this.
Whether you want to admit it or not, management software can also be a vector for remote intrusion. With the right password and/or private key it essentially throws open a user's entire system to the bad guys.
I will admit that file sharing can lead to virus and malware infestation. However, so do Flash banner ads and insufficiently secured ad networks. The last two virus outbreaks we had here were caused simply by navigating to msn.com.
Finally...bandwidth. If a major university cannot afford the equipment and training for traffic shaping during peak hours of use, they have no business offering the service. Without question the best internet service I've had has been at the major universities that I've attended. Most have the infrastructure to handle every student streaming / torrenting at the same time (at least in my experience).
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cornell
2Ms. Mitrano said. Engineering and science-heavy institutions would have a hard time, for instance, because those fields often require a lot of file-sharing. Cornell, she says, wouldn’t do it because it would violate a student code that emphasizes “freedom with responsibility.”
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Introductions
fellas, meet UNC ... play nicely now you hear
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Re: Introductions
Is that another fork of the defunct waste?
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I haven't ever heard of btguard before I typed this post, but they are a bittorrent proxy that also encrypts your traffic for you so that you can't be throttled or caught (costs money though)
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I haven't ever heard of btguard before I typed this post, but they are a bittorrent proxy that also encrypts your traffic for you so that you can't be
throttled or caught (costs money though)
BTguard is not very reliable and is expensive.
Rather try superchargemytorrent.com and vpntunnel.se.
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Re: Introductions
http://www.i2p2.de/
http://freenetproject.org/
http://anonymous-p2p.org/programs.html
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HEOA
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How ironic...
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It's also not a bad thing to get people to learn about copyright, what is or isn't infringement. Isn't that part of what you guys try to do here. Make people aware?
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This is often one of the ongoing problems. Define something too narrowly (e.g. just specify torrents) and it's easy to bypass (e.g. people just switch to binary usenet or encrypted P2P, which aren't covered by the rules). Specify too vaguely - as has happened here - and a lot of otherwise legitimate avenues can be blocked.
"It's also not a bad thing to get people to learn about copyright, what is or isn't infringement."
File sharing is not infringement. Forcing people to apply for a licence to use legitimate software for legitimate uses is not "education". In fact, if any education takes place when getting the "hall pass", I'd bet it would be the same misleading, inaccurate and easily disprove misinformation the **AAs trot out on a regular basis, not the truth.
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RE: learning?
don't trust the "feds"
or
"Do as you are told"......
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Solution?
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University of Alabama in Huntsville
This software scans the computer for AV products to determine if they should be allowed on the internet. Sadly, the only AV software it consistently recognizes is McAfee. So not only does it fail at its intended purpose, but removes whatever protection you might have had.
Whats worse is that allows the university full access to our computers, even though no one there is smart enough to use it for such a task.
Now, back to the topic at hand.
Back when Kazaa and LimeWire where big they would ban your computer from the network if they detected you using them. The only way to get back on was to turn your computer over to them so they could rifle through your hard drive and delete the software.
It is draconian, but I guess they have no choice when they spent all this money on monitoring equipment and not on bandwidth. The fastest download speed I ever saw for a student, either via wireless or from the dorms, was around 256KB.
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As far as training goes, I was talking about how incompetent our IT department is.
I meant 256Kbps. My bad.
It's so bad that Knology makes good money selling cable internet to people who live in the dorms.
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Applications share files, that's how computers work.
I suppose some people who would like to define "file sharing" as something other than sharing files, but that is rather silly.
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A hall pass for WoW?
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Call me crazy, but isnt Cornell completely wrong on this? Instead of blocking the software, they allow students to run it after they agreed to use it appropriately. Last I checked, that means they have freedom (to run the software) and were responsible for it being run properly.
If they were like a lot of other institutions, students wouldnt be allowed to run it at all.
Is it wrong to make someone get a license to drive? Is it wrong to require a student to know the consequences of their file sharing before they can share?
Cornell is the one looking foolish on this one.
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