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College Opportunity and Affordability Act passes...Napster anyone?

Summary: The College Opportunity and Affordability Act is a largely benign bill passed by the US House of Representatives Thursday that funds student financial aid, among many other pieces of higher education in the States.

Christopher Dawson

By for ZDNet Education |

The College Opportunity and Affordability Act is a largely benign bill passed by the US House of Representatives Thursday that funds student financial aid, among many other pieces of higher education in the States. As Ars Technica points out, though,

COAA makes a host of changes to the higher education landscape in the US, but for our purposes, the most interesting was the requirement that schools make plans to offer some form of legal alternative to P2P file-swapping and that they also make plans to implement network filtering.

It is clear that penalties won't be imposed yet for failure to comply with these provisions; however it certainly paves the way for future federal involvement in piracy policing on university campuses. Again, the author sums up the problem well:

the requirement that schools plan for filters and for legal music options is one that universities largely oppose. EDUCAUSE, which represents IT managers at more than 2,000 US universities, has consistently opposed to the provisions on the grounds that schools aren't in the business of pushing commercial music services to students. When it comes to filtering, schools don't like to block services with legal uses.

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  • The Late 80's on Campus

    I was a recording producer/engineer for the MIA label at a school in VA in the 80's.
    We released a very popular album on cassette, and sold it in Campus Book Stores
    and local businesses. To reinforce the label's copyrights, we simply referred to the
    School's Honor System Code. In other words, we felt that if the School was able to
    build a high-quality body of students, teachers and its polished academic offering,
    then that was our best faith model to rely on. A mutual trust and respect of peers
    within the college family. Not saying there weren't a few bad apples who copied it
    in their dorm rooms (i.e. didn't buy it at the stores), but, again, the Honor Code
    was the big thinking at that time!
    dascha1
    Reply Vote

  • Simple solution

    Cut on-campus housing out of the campus network. Treat them like any other apartment housing and let the students make separate arrangements for internet service.

    Suddenly, not the University's problem.
    Yagotta B. Kidding
    Reply Vote

    • That would work, but ...

      I don't believe the communications infrastructure was upgraded with single service accounts in mind when Universities decided to network on campus housing.

      Now of course with WiMax just around the corner you can completely skip the process of upgrading any on campus housing wiring since the equipment are service are maintained by telcos off site.
      MisterMiester
      Reply Vote

    • IT Security

      Sereral universities have done this, completly seperating off dorm/residential networks and handing control over to ISPs who bid on the project. Of course this does nthing for various computer labs on campus.

      Filters for higher ed is an idea thats been a long time in coming. Like it or hate it, people need to get used to the idea. Reporting from the web filtering servers we maintain here is one of the best IT security tools we have. Please note when I say that, its for identifing spyware/malware/p2p traffic, not from a block people from going to ebay/facebook/control non-IT actions. Too many hacks utilize the fact many of use need to leave web traffic open for our own legitimate apps.
      dog15bert
      Reply Vote

      • 3 minute workaround

        Are they blocking SSH inside/outside access? Fine, redirect the ports to port 80 between client/server (SSH does this natively). They can't block port 80, no reason why Songname.mp3 can't be called LabImages.zip, transferred over port 80, then renamed. They going to parse ZIP files to see if the contents are actually MP3, or AAC, or WMV or any number of other formats of varying bitrates.

        It's a fools errand, it can't be done. The only way to stop sharing is to take down the university intranet/internet access. That is the only "magic" filter that will work.

        TripleII
        TripleII-21189418044173169409978279405827
        Reply Vote

        • 3 minutes for you and me maybe ;)

          nt
          D T Schmitz
          Reply Vote

        • 443

          [i]Are they blocking SSH inside/outside access? Fine, redirect the ports to port 80 between client/server (SSH does this natively). They can't block port 80, no reason why Songname.mp3 can't be called LabImages.zip, transferred over port 80, then renamed. They going to parse ZIP files to see if the contents are actually MP3, or AAC, or WMV or any number of other formats of varying bitrates.[/i]

          Port 443 works better, and it's [b]supposed[/b] to carry SSL traffic. That's how I access the home server from $WORK

          As for examining the files, pointless -- it's all encrypted anyway. Still, you can't run a P2P client over a tunneled connection unless you're going to a proxy, which then becomes the target ...
          Yagotta B. Kidding
          Reply Vote

          • Examine the data stream patterns ...

            Even if you had a proxy account and used an SSH tunnel certain blocking software, such as Sandvine, look for long lived TCP connections as a sign of torrent activity. Now even though your data is encrypted the TCP control messages are not so Sandvine will start to inject forged TCP packets into the stream in order to drop the connection.

            You would have to use OpenVPN since it tunnels over UDP and the control messages are unreadable by intermediates since they are encrypted. Sandvine of course becomes useless at this point so your torrent traffic would go through unnoticed other then the increased bandwidth. :)
            MisterMiester
            Reply Vote

  • Right to Privacy: It's your right. Protect it.

    School IT Departments should maintain their traditional roles and protect students' right to privacy.

    Students who feel their privacy rights are being infringed should consider their legal remedies.

    Students who wish to maintain their right to privacy can opt to create [url=http://silenceisdefeat.org/]inexpensive or free ssh shell accounts[/url] or rent unmanaged [url=http://www.linode.com/index.cfm]Virtual Private Server[/url] accounts to which they can tunnel port forward their internet activities.

    Right to Privacy: It's your right. Protect it.

    Thanks Chris
    D T Schmitz
    Reply Vote
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