arstechnica.com — The application is daunting to those caught in its snares, for it can boot users off the network in real-time if it suspects that they are engaging in P2P file sharing, or even if they are using so-called darknets. As you might expect, the entertainment industry loves it.
Mar 12, 2007 View in Crawl 4
quadcoreMar 12, 2007
@tacroy/me feels stupid now, thanks for clarifaying it up :)
rouslanMar 12, 2007
Every college student should use Tor, because after all these anti-piracy articles about p2p, the university is most likely spying on students and reporting to the RIAA, etc. To share files, IM, or do stuff Tor doesn't allow, use an encrypted VPN tunnel to some old computer set up as a server at your parent's house or some other place that has a normal broadband connection. Problem solved.
alexmaxMar 13, 2007
And you're nuts if you think that an already cash-strapped university is going to flush a 1 million dollar investement (Today, think about how cheap these things will be in five years), down the tubes because a few percentage points of their userbase is downloading huge files. Honestly, a vast majority of people who go to college do nothing with their internet but check their email and maybe play games. And you're not even guarenteed that, I had an online friend whose four-year university (I beleive in Mississippi) blocked everything except web traffic because concerned parents were worried that Quake 3 was causing little Johnny to fail out of school. But getting back to the origional point, I can just imagine the phone calls now..."Sir, this is the third time this year you've called us complaining about your game patches and Linux ISO's. Most of our users have no complaints about the system, and it's probably something YOU'RE doing that is making it go off."And then you're up s**ts creek. You complain, it gets filed away and ignored. Your parents don't want you to raise a stink about it because you're at college to get an education, not be a target for an **AA lawsuit, and the quality of the internet connection was probably not a factor when choosing where to go. And good luck trying to convince your local cable company to give you your own internet in a dormitory, and even if you somehow do, you have to pay for it, and I doubt the housing department would refund you for the unused connection in your room. The only out I can see is living off-campus and getting your own internet, but depending on where you go, off-campus apartments might not be within a reasonable price range.(By the way, this is not speaking from personal experience. I live in an apartment and pay for my own connection. A few years ago, I lived in an older dormitory that wasn't wired for eithernet, and had a roadrunner business class connection in every room. Unfortuniatly, the new dorms around here are being built with ties to the universities network, so I feel sorry for incoming freshmen.)
ferrofluidMar 13, 2007
"$1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs."Can you say RICO (or dial the DOJ number) , its out and out extortion, or at the very least a form of tax.Plus would you trust malware from *AA running on your servers, who knows what else it might be doing.If its deep inside the server with admin exec privileges, It could install rootkits, keyloggers across the network, all sorts of nasities.Any University, College or body with any gov connections would hate this, and prob not be allowed to use it.
dmseanMar 13, 2007
re: BLKMGKthats pure genius man. an alien race is coming to take us over via digital means. The RIAA and MPAA are not really interested in *money* they are interested in our best intentions. They know we will steal crappy music and movies that we wouldn't pay $0.01 for. So they create this plot to keep us actively finding ways to hide in the digital realm. pure genius, pure genius. thank you RIAA and MPAA.
b3tamikeMar 13, 2007
@mrcoldheart (just wanted to clarify that I don't actually agree with the policy at all)I know what you mean man; cGRID does not (nor is there really any way to) distinguish between legal and illegal content. It was a pain in the butt to download any linux isos, podcasts, or any of the other legitimate uses that I have for BitTorrent. I just hope that BitTorrent Inc. will make enough waves that they'll have to change the policy due to the flood of legal content available via BitTorrent.
mwhitlock84Mar 13, 2007
As an employee of Red Lambda, I can tell you all with certainty that Ars Technica severely misquoted the price of the cGRID software. So all the comments about $1M and $250K/yr. being a waste of money are effectively moot. That's not the price of the software.
mwhitlock84Mar 13, 2007
But see, if you set up a VPN tunnel to somewhere outside of the university's network, it's no longer the university's problem. The university won't be getting any notices from the RIAA/MPAA in that case; it'll be whoever you're VPN'd to that gets fishslapped. So at that point, the university doesn't care, other than for your bandwidth usage, which they can limit in general.