torrentfreak.com — While some universities restrict the use of BitTorrent clients, others embrace the popular flilesharing protocol and use it to spread knowledge. Stanford University?s School is one of the few to realize that BitTorrent does not equal piracy.
Oct 18, 2008 View in Crawl 4
swramanOct 20, 2008
Go Bears!
swramanOct 20, 2008
@Cal: You gt caught. Your problem. They dont send out messages unless the (RI/MP)AA gave them one.as far as hosting lectures through bittorrent....Big universities have more than enough server capability to give everyone around theworld who wants to see the lecures acess to them. And if you are on the campus network, web lectures are hosted on your LAN so it doesnt use bandwidth.Go Bears
swramanOct 20, 2008
I dont know what school you go to...but mine definatley has planty of bandwidth...It is its own ISP and owns mannnny many IP adresses, ive seen incomplete lists on the order of 10^6 IP's, not including servers, which we have many of too. Bandwidth not the issue with throttling P2P. My school doesnt stop any P2P activity btw, and The internet is stil limited by the 100Mbit ethernet cods that wire the buildings.
Closed AccountOct 20, 2008
what they're really trying to say is... bittorrent technology is great for filesharing and fast downloading, but they don't condone illegal activities. only problem is most people download copyrighted material. but then again, its not really a problem for stanford because they can cash out on "misuse" of it. its a trap. =)))
onefixOct 20, 2008
I don't know what school you go to, but it's obviously a large school. Large schools (most of which run state networks) are the exception rather than the rule. Most people go to schools with less than ~20,000 students. These are the schools that can't afford the bandwidth. Their bandwidth is designed into the funding of IT and if they need a significant amount of bandwidth, then they have to cut back somewhere else (usually in services). It's a very simple math problem. If the cost of meeting the bandwidth needs of a given service exceed the cost of shaping/blocking it then you should first attempt to shape the protocol, if it refuses to cooperate, then you should block it.
onefixOct 20, 2008
I don't think schools are going to purchase a separate synchronous connection and do all of the necessary network routing just to support P2P, but then again, P2P eats both incoming and outgoing bandwidth, so the synchronous idea doesn't work anyhow. My previous point still remains. This is not a question of censorship or even piracy (although some may claim that they are reducing piracy). It has everything to do with the cost of providing the extra bandwidth which is due to the uncooperative nature of P2P software. As soon as a legitimate company comes out with a P2P protocol that can be shaped so that it doesn't decrease the quality of service for more important services like HTML, SMTP, or IMAP then schools will begin allowing the use of it. The fact remains that current P2P software just doesn't play nicely in a LAN environment and until this issue is addressed, anyone that cares about quality of service for end users on their network will block it.
tehdoctorOct 20, 2008
Yeah, unfortunately, where I go to school, there are some off-campus users and people who go over wireless, so it can suck a little