Ashamed to live in Ohio. Glad I'm not an OU alum.

What about World of Warcraft!?!? The updates/patches are distributed via bittorrent

I'm tired of hearing "there are legitimate uses for blah blah blah." You know why you are mad. You are going to have to go buy the CD at the store now. Deal with it.

Good luck recruiting new students

Boooo Ohio, I didn't like you before, now I really don't, who just accepts the evil RIAA rule...If i was a student, I would organize all the downloaders and rebel.

thats funny mr. readerorganic, theres an example of a perfectly legitemate use in the post directly above yours.
i'll provide some more examples: openoffice (and its ports/derivitives), countless flavors of linux, various gaming demo's from sites that instead of bombarding you with ads to pay for bandwith use torrents. etc. etc. etc.

in summary, quit pretending like you're better than everyone else.

Please Steve Jobs save us from the RIAA. if you do i'll have more money to buy your apple stuff. :)

@imchase, i hope people are confident enough to constantly use BT for its legimate purposes and quickly overwhelm the IT staff and disciplanary system with countless perfectly legal "infringements."

Hopefully the kids at OU are smart enough to configure a proxy server at home. ;)

Or Valve's Steam service, which they hired Bittorrent's creator to work on as well. I would encourage everyone to discourage people attending that Luddite school, and don't send your children there if you have them. ReaderOrganic, go troll under some other bridge, please.

OU is already in deep with their students over removing 4 sports from their program (not sure all of them but Lacrosse may have been one) due to "budget concerns". This is yet another reason NOT to go to OU.

@ Geisrud:
By the looks of the letter, it seems like they're not actually disabling any ports or such, they're just tracking activity and disabling lines with suspicious activity. So the WoW updates should still work. A net admin can tell the difference between a connection to blizzard.com and one to l337h4x0rw4r3z.com. In fact, there are routers which detect this automatically and shut down any line that triggers a fault. I used to help with the campus network at my school, thus I was the guy to go around helping all the idiots get rid of the spyware and viruses (byproduct of downloading pr0n) so that we could let them back onto the network.

They're too busy up on Bong Hill, or doing the Court Street Shuffle, to figure out they're being hosed here.

Pretty soon there will be RIAA Liason Officers on every campus...
"There's a man outside
In a long coat, grey hat,
smoking a cigarette"
(Gary Numan "Are 'friends' Electric?")

It is their network. They can do what they want with it. :shrug:

Not too surprising. Liability for the school screams action like this.

Hey - are they monitoring Usenet?

And so it starts...

@ANoel:
Sssshhh! Let it continue to be widely overlooked.

To all OU students.

Just e-mail yourselves one 5 MB song at a time and screw the Network administrator anyway.

Sure, it might be a little more work, but it's doable.

Instead of a P2P bittorrent download you'll just have 10 ~ 12 5MB e-mails... per album.

When there's a will... there's a way!

Well I am a current Junior at Ohio University and an avid reader of this site, and I got this email a couple of days ago and thought this was typical of Ohio University because our administration here is horrible, I feel like our students here are smarter than the administration because of all the various things they have been doing. Don't think this is the ONLY thing that they have done wrong because it isn't and I'm just dissapointed in them because I use P2P alot, luckily I live off campus so I don't have to worry about it. But I'd hate to have to live in the dorms and not be able to P2P, it's just insanely stupid, but hey once again that's the OU ADMIN at work again.............

I with rectangle on this, it's their network, they can do what they want with it. If students don't like it they can sign up with one of the commerical networks and stop complaining about what their FREE high speed internet access won't let them do. As a rule, universities are very liaise fare letting students download as much porn as they want on university networks so quit complaining.

Remote access your computer and home and download P2P on it. Hell, run the web UI in one of your other P2P clients. Then just grab the files directly from your house over the net. It's really slow, but an easy bypass.

don't forget tunneling...

ftp...

newsnet...

online file servers...

oh noes...it's getting harder and harder to distribute files....

That's funny, the first thing I thought about was World of Warcraft too. Guess no WoW for these students. Well...I guess you can pay for a download site and download the patches....I don't use torrents in general, unless required, but I'd honestly have to think twice about going to a school that is limiting the access of it's students to materials, files, etc. I'm sure the RIAA guys are popping champagne corks over this one.

I went to OU for 1 quarter. Just like everything thing else in the world, they will find ways around this. It may not be as easy but you can't stop file sharing. It is just not possible.

Bollocks to "stop complaining about what their FREE high speed internet access". I would say that students have paid for their network access with a part of their fees.

@wjousts
Get real dude - I have two kids in university and nothing there is FREE! My BIG problem is with RIAA infiltrating the entire electronic information system, bullying anyone, coopting universities (in this case) for their own financial gain. F_uck that!

Regardless of whether you want to call it free or not, it's still their network and it's supposed to be for academic use. They can set whatever rules they want.

I'm an IT professional and a student at Ohio University. As an IT professional, I know the claims of that email are dubious at best. As an OU student, I'm upset that the CIO has forgotten that, as a publicly funded university, the network belongs to *us*, not *them*. It's care has merely been entrusted to the current IT team, which I feel has broken that trust via this policy shift.

When I received the email, I replied to let them know, in no uncertain terms, that I would be a former OU student until this policy is changed. If I am going to pursue my degree, I will spend my tuition money elsewhere. Vote with your wallet, folks.

And no, ReaderOrganic, I don't use p2p to violate copyrights. I very rarely even use the university network outside of the classroom. I've got an under-utilized T1 at work and roadrunner at home. I can do my legal p2p downloads at either place (since they're normally work-related). It's the principle of the thing.

I have to admit, I wonder if they're merely using the RIAA as the final straw. If I was a college, I would ban file-sharing as well.

I remember going to college back around 2000, when Napster was all the rage. You could NOT use the internet during the day. Everybody and their freaking cousin was on God-damned Napster. The internet in the dorms, very literally, did not work. You could not do anything.

If anyone has a legitimate reason to bitch about things they cannot do on the network, it's those people who are trying to use it for actually school work.

And the more bandwidth the schools add, the more the file-sharing speeds up. It's an arms race with a parasite.

Now I love BitTorrent. I have nothing morally against file-sharing and I am doing it right now, actually. But when an activity has the massive effect on a schools capability to serve students who actually do work that file sharing does, I think it's right that a school put their foot down.

I applaude the move. Not because of legal issues. But because a University is a place of study. P2P activity hogs up too much bandwith, and people doing research have to deal with the latency issues. Gets very annoying when you have that term paper due. Back when I was living on campus, P2Pers really pissed me off. I had to take my laptop to the coffee shop a couple miles away to do my research since P2P and online gaming was hogging up all the bandwidth. I'm sorry, but people go to the University to 1: Study, 2: pick up on drunk college chicks and have promiscuous sex, 3: play games.. scratch that.. you're a loser if you're playing Video games instead of doing #'s 1 and 2.

I hope WiMax takes off or some other form of ultra long range Wifi. It would be nice if the students can get a 2ndary service provider in their dorms for that sort of stuff.

*Sniff* This Ohio alum actually learned about and started downloading mp3s his first year in a dorm with broadband internet. Memories...

Now OSU, don't you even think about following suit. They bent over for RIAA, most of your students won't like it if you do the same.

@ synaesthetique
Actually, no, they won't be able to tell the difference between traffic going to "l33thaxors.net" and "worldofwarcraft.com" because the whole point of BitTorrent is that it's distributed P2P. You won't actually be receiving packets or files FROM either of those sites, but from intermediary computers who are also running the bittorrent application.

Blizzard actually ONLY distributes its beta patches via BitTorrent, and BitTorrent is also the approved transport for many popular Linux distributions (which are important to many Computer Science students). Banning an entire transport based on some illegal activity is a complete overreaction.

Y'know, I wonder if this is a problem at the University of Florida.

I agree with OU's decission. Students should not be able to donate university resources people outside the university. If you want to give away your bandwidth from your home internet connection that you pay for, then fine. But all students at a university should not have to pay higher tuition because of freeloading software.

As for "legitemate" uses for p2p, there are alternative ways for students on a university campus to download what they want. For instance, linux distrobutions are offered up for free on university servers all over the world.

I find it surprising that this is even news... I just graduated last spring and never during the entire time I was at school was P2P allowed. Screw the RIAA mania... this was before they were even sending out letters. Simply put, the school is liable for what you download. My school happened to be smart enough to do some simple packet filtering and slowed all the P2P down to about 2kb/s... not really fast enough for anyone to put up with it. And I'm fine with it. If you really needed to download download something legitimate you could go to the network people and tell them to give you access and they would. I totally agree with urban_ninjya... get a life and stop playing computer games. You only get to do college stuff once.

Meh. The University of New Mexico has had BitTorrent blocked for years now. And every legit BitTorrent I've found has also had a straight download available, most likely because the majority of campuses are blocking it.

Again.....I will say it again.......FUCK YOU RIAA!!!!!!!!!!!

Eh, better than what I had to deal with in school. At the time, torrents weren't around yet, but the other p2p networks were. Instead of monitoring traffic, they throttled everything except for the administrative buildings.

Kind of sucked for me being a computer science major and I couldn't access the web because the whole 2% of the bandwidth given to the student body was taken up with people downloading mp3s from Napster.

740-593-1222 at 12:02 on April 27... rated MA for Mature Audiences only.

I say we all start calling them. just for kicks :)

How about we all email these two twits directly and tell them what we think?

bibleb@ohio.edu

smithk1@ohio.edu

They're listed publicly on the university's website.

First of all, how is this the RIAA's fault? I may not agree with their methods, but they didn't demand OU to shut out P2P.

Second, why not just encrypt your packet headers? Any decent bittorrent client today has the option to do so, and is an easy way around this.

@InfoMofo:
That's true for each individual connection and for packet transfers, but what I was referring to was the connection to the central tracker that provides connection details for each peer; this is usually done over http. That data can be seen and tracked unless they're using a network built in 1984. I would know, it was (and still is to a lesser extent) my job. With my limited logging capabilities I was able to see all the fun torrent and pr0n sites being accessed, just not what the actual content being transfered was. And yes, banning it is an overreaction, but you clearly didn't read my post thoroughly since I said they probably aren't blocking access, just keeping an eye on it. I don't think WoWers nor Linux users have anything to worry about (aside from being addicts and nerds, respectively).

@Sockpuppet:

I agree, the internet fees are probably included in their tuition.I currently go to Purdue which is up there in the RIAA's targeted schools list and I had to pay ~$50 for internet in the dorms for 2 semesters. Granted that isn't much, but that is just the activation fee, the rest of it is included in the thousands I pay to live here.

@meatwad - Didn't say there weren't legitimate uses. What I'm saying is that you aren't using them for legitimate purposes anyway, so stop complaining.

@wintermule740 - Yes you do. Stop lying.

@ ANoel I hear the black helicopters now!

SecureIX VPN connection might slow down the traffic but probably still keep the torrents flowing.