arstechnica.com — In a move that has sparked protest from both students and professors, San Jose State University has become the latest California school to ban Skype from most of its campus. Citing concerns regarding security and consumption of bandwidth,
Sep 24, 2006 View in Crawl 4
slapshot24Sep 25, 2006
Ummm, San Jose State doesn't make any money. In fact, it's subsidized by the government to keep tuition down. It's not for-profit. The vast majority of US schools are not for-profit. None of the 95%+ not-for-profit schools make any money. On the other had, providing education is really frickin' expensive.Check your facts.
verbal85Sep 25, 2006
If they were so concerned about losing money because of their telephone system being under-utilized, wouldn't they have also banned the use of Skype in the dormitories and residences as well (which they did not)? Also, to those who cry foul about the bandwidth issue, my guess is that most of the people (students) playing WoW and accessing YouTube are likely doing that in their dorm rooms or off-campus. I can understand why they wouldn't want always-on, bandwidth hogging applications like Skype or BT on all of the computers on campus. However, I don't understand why they didn't try to figure out a way to disable supernoding before implementing the ban (the security issues seem silly, if that's their excuse).
Closed AccountSep 25, 2006
@HMMasterIf they've still got those VAX systems down there, banning the Internet is the least of their worries. I remember the days of learning PDP-11 and you'd sit at a terminal, hit a key, pause, collect your thoughts, and all of a sudden, it would show on the screen. Sad days.
rfunchesSep 25, 2006
"exactly, the reason why they're banning skype is because universities make a s**tload of money from telephone lines. Of course, most people have cell phones, so they're already losing s**tloads of money with their old telephone networks."They're not losing money. If you live in on-campus housing they force some sort of "telecommunications" or "phone/internet/cable" fee. The school and the phone company get their money whether or not you need the landline, as long as you live on campus (the exception being housing where you must bring contracted services).
mookiexlSep 25, 2006
Whoever buried that post is an idiot. The purpose of skype supernodes is to relay traffic between users behind NAT unable to communicate directly. So if it's firewalled itself it CAN'T become supernode.Someone who knows s**t about skype or p2p shouldn't be allowed to control it. Not even in San Jose.
frebisSep 25, 2006
Mybe they are banning it so you dorks will go outside, and get some sun.
gerkinSep 25, 2006
Exactly! That or as I said limit each user's bandwidth alottment. If particular IPs/users are abusing the bandwidth then _they_ should have their traffic shaped/capped/filtered. The ones that are not shouldn't pay the price of general abuse (if you can call running Skye abuse, for me it's a required business tool).I have a really hard time believing that Skype is using more bandwidth in dorms than torrents are :/
hsbsitezSep 25, 2006
oh well. Not going to affect me much, since I have not really used skype on the campus. Mainly since I live in the city. It may be of importance to those are who are out of state students.Still, weird to see name of SJSU on digg.
avatarpalinSep 26, 2006
I love it when announcements are made "Due to security reasons we have decided to ban [INSERT SOFTWARE HERE]" Yet ask them.. So are you making Firefox standard? Hell even banning Windows and opting for Linux or OS X? Nooo Let's face it, security is just a convenient shield that can be used to justify any decision..
strifecaecusOct 6, 2006
Yup! After learning that my state university seemingly blocks Skype today, I used a little combo of Bitvise Tunnelier (PuTTY works too), an off-campus SSH server, Skype set to use Tunnelier's localhost proxy and viola! Skype on SOCKS5 through SSH tunneling!
itakedrugsAug 3, 2008
No company providing legit service would ever provide some sort of algorithm to change a socket port in the application or the way it renders its packets. You're looking at big lawsuits that'll put you out of business in no time. You can laugh all you want, but everything's hackable and breakable if you're willing to spend the time to research it.