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118 Comments
- rageguy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8My University doesnt allow any net traffic, we can view webpages by the use of a http(s) proxy server only. The usage of the server is monitored as well.
Fortunately I have ways of working around it, we have an open1x wifi network we can use and I have a Debian server which I am part owner of, and on port 443 I run:
http://www.nocrew.org/software/httptunnel.html | apt-get install httptunnel
This program encapsulates one single TCP stream in HTTP requests and decodes them at the other end. From there I can tunnel in SSH, and using SSH I can tunnel in any port(s) I want. I've set up a number of scripts that tunnel in my email, IM, more SSH and my own proxy server (unmonitored and secure). I'm in the process of setting up a VPN tunnel to simplify the whole process, it started off as a dodgey hack to quickly give me SSH when I need it, now I use it for everything. :-)
The best part is, I am far more productive now than I was before I had this set up. I wish the University would just see that and allow a few more useful ports, particularly email and not their webmail service.
If this University has only blocked a handful of Peer to Peer applications then count yourself lucky, there are far worst situations out there. - cptshamrock, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5my university hasnt banned them just used packet monitoring to slow them down to make them unusable
- neuros, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5So? Screw this, SUNY (State University of New York) @ Stony Brook has had NO outside P2P access for years, all we have is a DC++ hub, and we're the only SUNY to have it this way. This happens to UConn and it's news?
- gmikej, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Funny story: Years ago I was hosting an ftp site on my computer with the campus connection. They probably only had 1 or 2 T1s at the time. I had hosted some free games, apps, etc. and I had (of course) an uploads folder. Well I was really busy playing UO all the time so I was not monitoring my ftp site as much as I should have been. After about 2 weeks of not paying any attention to it I lost my connection. I called the help desk and explained that my connection was down. I then was transferred to the help desk director. Turns out my machine was using well over 50% of the total bandwidth... of the entire campus (thousands of users at the time). I also noticed in my uploads folder I had about 3 GIGs of "not exactly demo" type software. I immediately deleted it and met with the director of the help desk, and the CIO of the school. I explained what happened, as well as letting them know it was not intentional.
I also mentioned I was looking for a job.
So I worked at the help desk for the next 3 and a half years, and it was one of the highest paying jobs on campus.
Good times... - CharlesDarwin, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7"University BANS all P2P Traffic"
This is news? - SmeRndmGy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I also go to uconn, and YOUR information is wrong. First of all, shut up about DC++. You want them to shut it down again? Secondly, p2p speed is currently limited to 3k. The problem is that next semester it will drop to 0k. We have already gone over ways to get around this. Third, the 5 gigs per week was recently raised to 7 gigs per week. The "screw uconn" part is 100% correct though.
- thecapitalizt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm one step ahead of you. Flipping on header encryption gives you full-on, 24/7 high speed transfers.
Here's how things currently go at UConn: they recently upped our bandwidth allowance from 4 gigs to 7 gigs a week, but throttled p2p extremely (it used to be unlimited at night). Next year, it will be completely banned. here's the thing: IT IS NOT BECAUSE OF ILLEGAL ACTIVITY. They know that, and apparently you will be able to get a temporary waiver online if you want to torrent, say, a linux distro. They are doing this because it is chewing up their bandwidth. My problem with this, is that my tuition is going up next year AGAIN, and everybody already knows how bloated everyone's budgets are up there. - samuelcotterall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'm all for this, to be honest.
I live at home, but I attent a university that apparently shares it's connection with the student accomodation and it's a real drag when I have something to do and the bandwidth is monopolised by someone pulling a few Gig's worth of movie off some P2P network.
I'm pretty much against piracy too, and I know that's the main use for P2P networks. If you have something legitimate to send/recieve then there are other ways: Set up a temp FTP server, Upload it to YouSendIt/CacheFly, buy some hosting, burn it onto a CD and post it... - PayneX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It would be bigger news if it was a university that DOESN'T block p2p!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This isn't new. A lot of Universities have been doing this for a while (mine included)
- pberry, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Forcing P2P apps to adopt SSL is network suicide...
- kodek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You honestly don't understand why BitTorrent is more valuable than FTP in some cases, do you? The point of peer-to-peer applications is that one can obtain a file quicker by having people sharing parts of the file.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Route their traffic through an SSL VPN tunnel then. The proxy will see it as normal secure traffic and pass it through like normal.
- headzoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think if the students aren't allowed to have *complete* and *total* unfettered access to the net, then the university should make sure those students have a way to get their own ISP, if they choose to, and try to work out a deal with the local ISPs to provide the service at a discount.
- Outrager, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yup. But the weird thing is that you can get the fastest speeds on the DC network. Usualy 800K/s. It's even faster than if I just tried to send something to my friend who lives across campus using AIM.
What I hate is the fact that the school forces us to search websites thru their local intranet which means some legit sites (like my WoW guild site) is blocked. Why? I have no idea. I e-mailed someone once (their website to horrible and hard as hell to find any information) asking why the site was blocked and all they said was that it didn't work for them either. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"It sounds like you mean, its not because of FEAR OF LEGAL REPRISAL (like being sued or something)... is the banning due to "illegal ACTIVITY"...?"
Seriously. Shut up. If you've stepped into a University or even a business IT department lately, you'd realize that roughly 80% of the traffic that goes through is all P2P systems. Both the college and the University I went to virtually doubled the amount of overall network bandwidth, and deployed traffic shaping, and they still couldn't stay ahead of the curve.
Remember, that bandwidth is only provided by the college because it's supposed to foster learning and sharing. When you're trying to grab P-Diddy's newest album, you probably don't even think about the researchers downstairs using video conferencing trying to talk to someone in England about a new 4 wheel drive stablization system, or the Med students on the other side of campus trying to listen to a telelecture done by someone on the other side of the country in an Operating Room. - Drgn547, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Most schools (especially in the SUNY system [State University of New York]) do have a "ban" on P2P Applications. The simply block the common ports used by these program. I'm the supervisor of the Residential Network for my SUNY campus, and the ports here for P2P are not blocked, but throttled. This limits the bandwith consumed, especially during the night hours when most of the residents turn on their torrent downloads and go to bed. This issue that most of these schools have is not the bandwidth, but the viruses and malware acquired from such P2P as Kazaa, Bear Share, Morpheus and Limewire. This is not due to the bandwidth, however. MOST college students are "computer stupid" and don't know how to properly protect their systems, so in the event of acquiring a virus, it has the potential to spread throughout the residential network. On a daily basis, I get calls about computers having viruses, and people responding to my questions with: "I didn't know you could update windows!" or "What's Norton/McAfee/AVG?" or "My computer should be fine, I have Ad-Aware installed" - "Have you ever run Ad-Aware?" - "You have to run it??" --- This is the overall problem with P2P in a college environment, and I don't blame any college for banning it.
- hagrin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You couldn't possibly be more wrong.
Major ISPs here in the northeast are already adopting hardware solutions such as Sandvine units to perform packet shaping and other QoS related functions on such a large scale (over 3 million customers - Optimum Online comes to mind) which decreased their Peer to Peer upload traffic by over 80%. That's hardly "just slowing it down" some.
And even if users have been able to defeat the system, simple bandwith monitoring tools that measure your uploads will eventually throttle you to make any P2P workaround you have found unusable. You'll be asked eventually to justify your uploads to get yourself unthrottled and without full encryption, do you really want to subject yourself to packet monitoring on a school campus where not only can they terminate your service, but you may face expulsion? - z0l0pht, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Banned here too, with the exception of DC++. That's fine, though, there are ways around everything.
- maram500, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is not news to me, especially given that my university (Nicholls State Unversity, Thibodaux, LA) has done so already. The ban has been in effect for some time now and will continue to be in effect.
- ThePDW, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Anyone ever heard of a little program called HTTP Tunnel? http://www.http-tunnel.com/html/solutions/overview.asp If I were living on campus, I would probably be using this. Should make that pesky p2p blocking go away :-)
- soogy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Go, go gadget Tor!
http://tor.eff.org/ - Guspaz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is super easy to circumvent. Most systems can be circumvented by a simple two-step process:
1) Route tracker queries through an external HTTP proxy, bypassing tracker port blocks
2) Enable and force encryption in uTorrent, circumventing any protocol-based blocks
Unless they block all ports above 1024 or something. In that case, you'll need to use something like a SOCKS proxy to tunnel all your traffic.
BTW, httptunnel is neat, but doesn't help any more than SSH tunneling helps. You can't create a tunnel for every individual connection out of the hundreds a client will open.
Personally, I just run uTorrent under WINE on a server and download things from the server via HTTP. - truebullfan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Im going to NIU(northern illinois) and Limewire doesnt connect but torrents work fine. I e-mailed IT and they said P2P is prohibited but there not blocking torrents. Is this the same at other Universites?
- Bonobo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1loL not only do we live in CT. but my brother is going to Uconn next year for college....he cant get enough of torrents of his favorite shows and games...his desktop is LITTERED with azures torrent files....cant wait till i tell him this!
- Duncan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Yes, downloading one piece of software could put me over my limit... after which I have to pay for it out of my own pocket
Bandwidth isnt limited, I can pull several mB/s from the right servers; however data is controlled by a proxy server.. without it you cant get data outside the campus network - floguy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Time to learn how to use Packet Header Encryption!
- stylecramp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1They are not going to be very effective at this. Simply blocking ports doesn't work very well anymore, other than keeping the majority of people down for a while until word gets around from the slightly more skilled how to defeat the blockade; and on college campuses this can happen very quickly. Additionally, most IPS systems I have worked with, even the top in the industry, have not been the greatest at writing signatures for P2P programs that dont involve reference to ports for fear of false positives. I suppose a good admin could use snort and try to make his own sigs while generating traffic from various P2P programs, but this is assuming a college technology department has the money to spend on a pretty skilled security engineer.
The point is: they most likely will be able to slow the usage of P2P programs, but the claim that they will "disable ALL peer-to-peer programs" is pretty laughable. - daboo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As far as the University is concerned, DC doesn't exist. Since its all in the campus network, the likely hood of students getting caught goes down dramatically. And yes, DC users on campus use it almost exclusively for copyrighted files.
I use both DC and Bitorrent, the latter for legal uses (music: bt.etree.org). So this is just another annoyance, in addition to the 7GB per 7 day limit.
*sigh* - samuelcotterall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Dude, that's 100Mb of traffic for, what, 4 months?
So you could theoreticly use it up downloading a some software update? - wonderboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2More people recognize Uconn
- kramit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1loads of unis already do this, no digg, just vpn to and outside box and use that as a proxy if you really need bt
- scrapstyle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm glad I live off campus.
- cfazzini, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hahah I go to SUNY Potsdam. We have freaking RoadRunner cable modems in our dorms. It's not the fastest (3mbit/256k), but I don't have to worry about any form of blocking.
- wedge98, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm a UCONN seinor and this information is wrong!!
UCONN is not bannig all P2P traffic. They are changing the already existing restrictions on P2P from instead of being just at night, to being all the time. DC++ gets over 10MB/sec transfers on campus and you can find just about anything on there so this really does not effect students unless they are after rare stuff.
I believe the limitation is 3KB/sec which is basically nothing. The other thing you don't know about is all on-campus students are limited to 5GB per week of data movement from outside the UCONN network. I've maxxed my g/f's bandwidth by using AIM a few times. And if you do go over 5GB they restrict your bandwidth for a week as a penalty.
All I can say is screw UCONN and I'm glad I'm done in a few weeks. - TheGuruStud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ours slows down/kills the most popular P2P programs (but who's using that crap anyway), but usenet works wonderfully at 40 Mbit/s. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it :P
- cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I am so glad I didn't live in dorms when I was at Purdue. They instituted daily download limits after I was ther but the labs still don't count toward it only the activity in your dorm room.
^^^^ Also, my entire education cost around $8000 not including books. With books it was probably around $10K. Gotta love it.
Edit: There was no captcha for me, hasn't been for several weeks. - drbroccoli, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I hate it when idiots abuse great things like p2p. It has plenty of legitimate uses, for one, I use it strictly to download linux discs.
Just because some idiots steal stuff shouldn't mean that honest people should have to suffer. - zarlwilliam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1go DC++ !!
DC++/usenet/ftp/bittorent = everything humanly possibly - zarlwilliam, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1haha i said possibly and not possible. silly me. ^ ^
ill just talk more about DC++...
nothing like joining 50 hubs of like 500TB each... then searching for britany spears. if that wont freeze up your comp.. i dunno what will ;) - Toniee, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1BTW, Stony Brook is not the only SUNY to have this. As far as I know, Buffalo has DC++ too, and possibly others as well.
- athlonmj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Just enable protocol encryption.
I go to Yale, also in connecticut, and I download upload at around 600 kbps with uTorrent =) - JubbaG, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What about Peer Impact? (http://www.peerimpact.com) It's a legal closed peer to peer application.
- thetron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"except DC++"
Only reason to do that would be to keep the sharing internally. So somebody will setup a DC hub on the internal LAN/WAN network
To save on internet bandwidth - jambarama, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The question, and what makes this interesting, is why DC++? Bittorrent has far more ligitimate uses than DC. It is more resource intensive than DC but at least there is a question of legality. I don't know anyone who uses DC for legal reasons, but I know tons of people who use bittorrent for legal uses - ISOs, large free movies, et cetera.
- richardiscool, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1b or B? There's a rather large difference.
- cleverboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1geminitojanus, I guess you got your waiver then. If you caught my drift, those same people trying to get the lectures or conference with other nations are going to run into traffic issues with the inordinately larger amount of people downloading the latest Star Wars movie, or 20 of their latest favorite songs from LimeWire. You comment about the challenges universities are facing, but your comment seems stuck in the middle of a mixed message if you think by default that all p2p uses, systems, and networks are created *equal* when it comes to "fostering learning and sharing".
"Shut up"? [snark]Thanks. I guess you'll happily figure out the problem of disproportionately excessive non-educational usage. Good to see you have it under control.[/snark] - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Thank god for Usenet, last refuge of the scoundrel....
- Vision77, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I would recommed the Iphantom, JAP, or I2P. Even though this isn't new, this will speed up the development of Darknets. The current ones are not fast at all.
- mutz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0sssst don't mention DC++ please it's still quite under riaa's radar....
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