The idea of blogging has been rattling around in my brain for some time now. I explain social networking to people often, lecture about the benefits of Web 2.0 to my students but I have yet to "eat my own dog food". So, here goes ...
University of Alaska just announced that within a week they will throttle student Internet bandwidth to control the practice of illegal downloading. You may not be aware that, since July 1, 2010, colleges and universities in the US are required by law (Higher Education Opportunity Act - 2008 or HEOA) to use "technology-based deterrents" to combat unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material.
Maybe the cold arctic air is slowing the synapses of those folks up in Alaska. First off, 2Mbps is plenty of speed to download videos and music, legal or not. This reminds me of when the teacher punished everyone in the class when nobody owned up to who threw that eraser! If only someone could invent a way to throttle just the bandwidth made available for certain kinds of undesirable traffic! Or maybe detect the traffic when it happens and give the student a warning. Oh what? There's an app for that? Check out UNC's approach to this problem.
To comply with HEOA, we decided to employ deep packet inspection to identify types of Internet traffic entering and leaving our campus network then make bandwidth available to that traffic flow according to traffic policy rules. Our rules also consider the network addresses of the two computers involved, one on the Internet and one on campus. This allows us to provide high bandwidth for legal sites like hulu, netflix, youtube and itunes but restrict bandwidth for P2P downloads.
Things are heating up over this U. of Alaska's decision. I don't think that's the kind of heat they want.
Learn More: Copyright Criminals, Copying Right and Copying Wrong ..., Cisco NBAR, EDUCAUSE
P.S. (to really smart network engineers out there - you know who you are)
Two technologies we don't have and could really use:
- a "copyright" filter that examines network traffic and determines if it is copyrighted
- an "illegal" filter that determines endpoint intent with regard to breaking the law ... LOL
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