University Raids Graduate Student Office for Using BitTorrent
Written by Ben Jones on October 25, 2007Students on campuses around the US are having increasing success in dealing with groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, and the frivolous, and often perjurous lawsuits that they send. It is very disturbing then, for a graduate student at the University of Northern Colorado (UNCO) to be targeted by his own university.
Sam Zwenger is a graduate student at UNCO and, like many hundreds of thousands of students throughout the US, makes use of bittorrent. On one particular day, however, he was pulled out of a class, to be admonished by a representative from the university’s IT department. In his hands, a network hub, and power supply, obtained from Mr Zwenger’s office; from his lips, and warnings that such devices were not allowed, to stop downloading illegally, and not to use so much so much bandwidth.
Whilst the latter two are getting to be de facto when it comes to IT departments around the US, what troubled Mr Zwenger most of all was how the IT representative came to be in possession of his networking equipment. It was connected physically to his computer, in his office when he had left for his class, and that office was locked. It wasn’t until he had entered his office afterwards, and found his apple laptop devoid of running programs, that he grew concerned.
“I have no arguments against his complaints. I realize now that having a hub is not permitted. What I do have trouble with is how he physically entered my office, confiscated hardware and got onto my computer without my consent.” Says Mr Zwegner on his site. “Although the hardware was returned, it was not until later that I learned he entered my office without anyone’s permission. I can only suspect he had access to my class schedule and was waiting for me to be absent from my office so he could freely enter and search on my hard drive for whatever he may have been looking for.”
Mr Zwegner then complained to his dean, and to the Assistant VP for IT, Jeanette Van Galder, in the hopes of getting some questions as to why his personal property was treated with such disregard. From these questions came a meeting forum where Ms Van Galder explained that it was an emergency, as he was using 33% of the total university bandwidth. Thus, they had to enter the office, and shut down the computer. This was confirmed by UNCO General Counsel, Ronald Lambden “The office where the computer was located is University property. There is no expectation of privacy. IT knew only the address of the wire in the wall, not who owned what equipment.”
What makes Mr Lambden’s response more troubling, is that he’s also the person that deals with all DMCA requests/notifications that are sent to the university. It would also appear that either he is under a great illusion as to how the university’s network system works. It’s a payment based system, meaning access is controlled by a central system. Furthermore, networking equipment right down to the standard wired and wireless routers sold for home use incorporate a whole range of filtering and Quality of Service (QoS) features, so a large networking infrastructure will obviously have them , every university we have contacted has freely admitted this. So, assuming it was an emergency, one would assume it would be quicker to disable Mr Zwenger’s access, than to go all the way over there, and close down programs and systems. Additionally, most large organizations (like universities) have asset marking , often just a sticker with a number , identifying the property as belonging to the university. Questions to Mr Lambden about these issues were not answered.
Mr Zwenger only wanted two things from the UNCO IT department, to be told that entering locked offices and using private computers is not UNCO policy, and an apology. Instead, he has received lies, and obfuscation. Indeed, the actions of the IT department in this case have broken several of the university’s own “Prohibited Usage” policies. When asked about these, Mr Lambden again declined to comment.
What ends up perhaps most incredulous about this whole affair is that later, Ms. Van Galder responded to a question clarifying the 33% bandwidth usage figure as “The connection was consuming 6.6M (Max inbound)of the 20M pipe” and the pipe was “for Real Audio transmissions and P2P apps, such as Skype and Bittorrent”
In short, using 6Mbit of a pipe whose very purpose is for bittorrent use, means that someone can come into your office, and take your stuff, with the backing of the University’s Legal Counsel. It’s clear that UNCO needs a radical shakeup, to prevent itself being the target of lawsuits. As always, it’s the students that don’t know about what’s going on that get kicked down the most by attitudes such as this, and with the person responsible for dealing with DMCA notices involved, and clearly out of his depth on issues of technology, I wouldn’t be surprised if applications dropped next year. Trust is an integral part, and once squandered cannot be easily regained.
Previously: P2PKids: Because We Care About Sharing
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75 Responses
Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.
It’s only a matter of time before the UK falls in line with the US.
illegal p2p is about to get a bit more nastier for us brits.
Why haven’t you posted about this?!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7059881.stm
Yeah it’s a bit of a whiner, but otoh the BOFH had no right to enter his laptop. (why wasn’t it passprotected?)
blocking the IP/socket would have been a better approach, make the user come to you, leave them the burden of proof. I get the sense of some personal feud between the two also.
(who cares it’s apple btw, stop that fucking advertisement, appleserfs)
[quote comment="195225"]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7059881.stm/quote
@2 Again, not news. The Uk has always had strong ip laws and will continue to do so regardless of some comment on a programme nobody watches or cares about. Thank our IP laws for all your ARM powered devices.
[quote comment="195223"]Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.[/quote]
Utter nonsense. Like the article said, disconnect the said MAC address from the system to shut him down. There’s no need to physically take the personal property of the student.
Wonder if you are a fuckin’ corporate shill. The idiot lawyer of the university also deserves to be publicly admonished. Labs are not public rooms, access to any lab in any university is restricted.
You guys are a shame to humanity and corporate whores to the core
I used to work in an .ac.uk if someone was downloading over the top we would have blocked the users internet access using websense or turned packet shaper up a notch! Why go to them when you can make them come to you ? Also if you are a uni why are you not shaping things like torrenting / online radio?
A.
It is just a control factor with the IT department. I think it MAY have had something to do with the computer being a mac. . but the point is, why go through the trouble of taking his equipment and searching his computer? most likely a scare tactic and too many IT guys at places such as schools are creeps.
I sure are hell would have my computer password protected though!? wtf..
33% of the uni’s bandwidth? What a legend! That’s some speedy downloading.
As I wrote, and apparantly the mouse didn’t read, the pipe he was using was a 20Mbit one that was dedicated for p2p. His poor attempt to counter with ‘those medical images’ doesn’t work.
Please, if you’re going to comment on the article, please ACTUALLY READ THE ARTICLE
[quote comment="195247"][quote comment="195223"]Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.[/quote]
Utter nonsense. Like the article said, disconnect the said MAC address from the system to shut him down. There’s no need to physically take the personal property of the student.
Wonder if you are a fuckin’ corporate shill. The idiot lawyer of the university also deserves to be publicly admonished. Labs are not public rooms, access to any lab in any university is restricted.
You guys are a shame to humanity and corporate whores to the core[/quote]
I am a huge fan of P2P. Everyone benefits. Now comes the factor that this situation has nothing to do with P2P. I work for an Infrastructure shop and we see people use these hubs all the time. That does not make it right. We confiscate them and they can go and get approval for the item. We then return the hub. Now usually we do not search for said hubs but they are a nuisance. If we do not know every part of our network then we fail as administrators. Number one rule of networking is “know thy network.” Performance management depends upon it. For all they knew he might have been attacking the network. Why would he have a hub? So they went and did what pretty much is done when a virus is found on the network. They severed the computer from the network physically and shut the computer off.
Also, Some lowly Grad student should not prevent a fast upgrade of the network. Or even slow communications between Professors. Just so he can use the network for his personal reasons. That is Fraud , Waste and Abuse at it’s most ugliest. This is not news, this is trash. Share on your own time. And stop the name calling it is beneath you. Viva la Bittorent!
Why would any university have a 20mbit pipe dedicated to torrents?
Yes, they could have simply disconnected him from the central location, but QOS and filtering shouldn’t be assumed. I spent my days at university hijacking all mail server space on the network for student use (each student was officially limited to only 2MB at the time), which was made easier by a complete lack of security.
Colleges and schools are generally just as lax.
I appologize, I did not read that las t part before releasing my comment. Delete “Also, Some lowly Grad student should not prevent a fast upgrade of the network. Or even slow communications between Professors.” and replace with Also, Some lowly Grad student should not prevent a fast upgrade of the network with perhaps bittorent (it’s possible). Or even slow communications between Professors via Skype.” I am assuming that he was not torrenting work related torrents.
And the lesson being… don’t live on campus. Avoid it at all costs. They will violate your rights, break and enter, and treat you as a criminal. The universities are not your friends and not there to help you, they are there to take your money.
This guy’s retarded. I go to UF and use bittorrent all the time, except I know to turn on some sort of encryption whenever I do. And I know to set my upload/download limit lower than “No Limit”. With these fast university connections, you can use a shitload of bandwidth without realizing it. And seeing as his office is on campus, I’m pretty sure the IT guy could gain access to it without his permission. I live in a dorm and they can definitely walk in whenever they want and look at our computer. Though, granted, if they catch you here, you’re just kicked off the network with a warning usually.
theres a typo in the text.
to stop downloading illegally, and not to use “so much so much” bandwidth.
[quote comment="195247"][quote comment="195223"]Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.[/quote]
Utter nonsense. Like the article said, disconnect the said MAC address from the system to shut him down. There’s no need to physically take the personal property of the student.
Wonder if you are a fuckin’ corporate shill. The idiot lawyer of the university also deserves to be publicly admonished. Labs are not public rooms, access to any lab in any university is restricted.
You guys are a shame to humanity and corporate whores to the core[/quote]
Yeah I have worked in University IT departments, it’s fucking nonsense that they had to physically turn off his computer. Ban the MAC, and if all else fails, reboot the server, don’t violate his privacy, that opens the university up to all kinds of lawsuits. Unfortunately he’s a student, so probably can’t get a decent lawyer, and all he wanted was an apology. but that would mean the university was wrong, they won’t admit that.
[quote comment="195223"]Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.[/quote]
any decent university with research labs has it’s own research lines and its own student use lines. so if you do actually work in a university IT department, yours must suck pretty bad.
my guess is you are some sort of administrator at a college, and have no clue as to how the network actually works. so stop spreading lies, and making other people who don’t know the first things about university networks think you are telling the truth.
http://in.geocities.com/black_beard_wins/
> What was I transferring?
> Torrent files. These are metafiles, a file that simply describes or specifies another file.
“Metafiles” LOL, yeah. You got caught. If you can’t take it like a man and shut up about it, you’ll take one for the team when you drop your soap in jail.
Am I the only one who noticed what the uni is called? UNCO?
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Unco
Most universities have fine print policies just as ISP’s have their TOS agreements that state they can terminate your connection if using excessive resources.
It’s common sense. I don’t agree with entering his office and would have just null-routed the port :) He will come to you.
Perhaps this employee was having a bad day and decided to take matters into his own hands. Although wrong, he was probably putting the employee in a tight position (complaints of slow internet service). Maybe the university should investigate counter measures of invest in a bigger pipe! If only 6mbit of bandwidth for thousands of users can cause havok, you may have an issue.
lol….i think both sides are wrong here. it appears the kid was knowingly jacking the university for all the bandwidth he could. i wouldnt doubt someone that feeds off the e-credit he was getting for having such great speeds. As well the kid locks the office door, but doesnt lock his PC? The school may not have needed to enter his office, but i really dont see anything wrong with it. Now if they actually went through his pc searching, changing, and closing things…that is wrong. However, do we know that they did all that? or did they just walk in power down his PC and thats why he noticed programs not running because it was rebooted?
Guys and girls its time to face reality. If we the regular nobody users dont collectively stand together, the few ppl that are willing to fight (TPB for example) are going to eventually run out of money and countries to run and lose. Maybe some of the time ppl spend on reverse engineering copy protection should instead go to law school become a judge and start passing laws to better benefit us!!! WE NEED INSIDE HELP TOO!!!
This University has a 20M pipe for p2p? Is this common in colleges? I can’t feel too bad for the guy though. It sounds like he was constantly downloading over the hub, especially to get noticed by the IT department. Suck it up, that’s the risks you take when you download illegal torrents.*
*(I know I’m assuming here but I am also not naive enough to think using a 6.6M pipe is just for work related materials)
http://www.cdfeed.com/oink-death.jpg
Slam!
ONE selfish brat used one third of the bandwith hundreds of people were dependent on, he was stopped. Big deal & he had it coming.
They could of course disable his access. But it might be that the person who did so wasn’t aware of how to do so, or just wanted to do it the easy way. No damage done.
I’m the security admin at my .edu, and I can shutdown any IP at the access-switch level instantly using a perlscript that queries the ARP table and does SNMP to the downstream switch.
Problem folks get entered into a database by MAC and any port they plug into shuts down (whole labs have gone down this way).
Only really problem folks that change MAC addresses or other foolishness (like running Nessus against our webserver) get a visit.
BTW: we have 1gbps to the Internet and Internet2, and we still have to use Packeteer to limit the p2p stuff (we don’t block it entirely, just permit so much for each IP during the day).
First off, if he managed to use a third of the university’s bandwidth, their infrastructure is either serious broken or no one else was really using the network. Most networks balance the load and mutually slow everyone down.
Secondly, I work at a University. We have had serious problems with viruses getting loose on campus and people using BitTorrent during peak hours (at least here, we don’t care during off peak … ie: after 6pm and before 7am). Our switches disable ports for abuses of this system — this is done remotely and at the switch. Trust me, people will get a hold of you when their network stops working. We can also ban mac addresses. The use of unapproved hubs/switches is also forbidden by our network policy (security risk to an already open network … personally I think it is a level of concern). When an unauthorized hub/switch is detect (which is easy since hubs/switches have identifiers in their mac address), the mac address is banned, forcing the end user to stop using the hub/switch. There is no need to enter into the office and a lot more work … why waste the time?
Finally, people downloading illegal material is fairly common these days from University connections. If we can identify the culprit (which is hard if they used a lab), we forward the “cease and desist” notice to the student/employee (mostly to cause fear, not because we care … if they use less bandwidth later, all the better). We also send a canned reply to the complainant which quotes the Canadian privacy act and includes the contact information of our legal counsel and instructions on how to obtain a warrant from the RCMP, should they wish to proceed. To this day, no one has followed up on these replies.
There is also the issue of access copyright (http://www.accesscopyright.ca/), which Universities in Canada pay a semester fee (based on the number of full-time/part-time students) to allow violations of copyrights on campus. While it is intended for movies/tv shows in classrooms and photocopying of parts of library books (for handouts,etc), an argument could also probably be made that it covers any copyright violations on campus. However, I’m not sure if there is an equivalent in the US … but there may be.
i dont understand this damn article. So a student had an office? and they took his usb hub? but why would a student have an office?
tough for the guy his rights were infringed. tougher he has to publicise his case to win sympathy against a spastic college administration. by all accounts his position is untenable, whatever went wrong he is outta there
20MB pipe costs 200 bucks/month
methinks the USA is too scared to sit down and jaw jaw, is all too ready to war war
What a douchebag. He steals music, then whines about his “rights being violated”. Guy needs to punched in the face.
Sweet deal. Just wants respect dats all.. Peace out..
I work for an ITS in an .ac.uk; We consider handling people’s private property/equipment on site without consent is very poor etiquette and big NO NO in working practice. Not to mention making us liable to anything that may happen as a consequence ! Probably a nazi IT dept … aaah it was in the states, land of the free ;]
p2p is considered to be an academic perk/freedom, if you don’t cause networks headaches they don’t give you grief. It is really quite civil.
I still think it’s particularly lol-worthy how the local internet backbones of a country in the so-called western hemisphere still use bandwidth metering. Is this the “efficiency of capitalism”, hm?
I love how you little brats talk about “capitalists” and “corporatism” while you live off your parents money.
[quote comment="195993"]I love how you little brats talk about “capitalists” and “corporatism” while you live off your parents money.[/quote]
And what are you? A music talent scout or industry shill?
Read the article. If you did your repugnant head would be able to comprehend we’re talking an individual’s rights. The fact that you get to say what you say, is because people like us fight in the courts against your corporations. Now go back to suckling your mommy’s tits.
[quote comment="196016"][quote comment="195993"]I love how you little brats talk about “capitalists” and “corporatism” while you live off your parents money.[/quote]
And what are you? A music talent scout or industry shill?
Read the article. If you did your repugnant head would be able to comprehend we’re talking an individual’s rights. The fact that you get to say what you say, is because people like us fight in the courts against your corporations. Now go back to suckling your mommy’s tits.[/quote]
And you still live at home praying you don’t get busted for stealing music or caught by your parents beating off.
[quote comment="196018"][quote comment="196016"][quote comment="195993"]I love how you little brats talk about “capitalists” and “corporatism” while you live off your parents money.[/quote]
And what are you? A music talent scout or industry shill?
Read the article. If you did your repugnant head would be able to comprehend we’re talking an individual’s rights. The fact that you get to say what you say, is because people like us fight in the courts against your corporations. Now go back to suckling your mommy’s tits.[/quote]
And you still live at home praying you don’t get busted for stealing music or caught by your parents beating off.[/quote]
Oh really! Like you know…no wonder the neocon nazis came to power. Thanks a lot. Go serve your masters, minion.
It’s the same as torrenting at work. This guy is a total moron. L2 password protect your laptop. If that was a corporation he’d have his walking papers for crashing their network. Someone hit this guy in the crotch with a foam bat. It’s these people without discretion which make file sharing so hard to do these days.
Also, technically those ‘numbers of wires in the wall’ are Loc’s or Locations. Yes, a lot of times when a Performance Monitoring group sees a heavy user they send someone from local IT to find out what the device is. Usually it’s with the expectation that someone’s work comp is infected with a virus and is spamming the crap out of the world. Just this time they got Bob Dumbass torrenting porn or music. Yes you could perform a shut on the switch port or whatever but that doesn’t really resolve the issue if Joe Clueless’ virus infected laptop is still infected. Joe would just call IT and ask why his internet is out.
I like this blog and it’s posts most of the time. In fact, I like every post I’ve read so far here from Digg… except this one.
Unbelievable!
Oh and I suppose he was downloading totally legitimate files using bittorrent and not copywritten movies or music.
Riiiiggghhttt…..
Aside from the aforementioned mac address banning; you can also throttle them down, on a HW or IP address (or even OS fingerprint) basis. Just route your “trouble” makers thru an old machine with two nics and have their links slowed down. Very easy to do with Freebsd or Linux, assign them 128kbps or something, problem solved. You don’t need special QoS or processor intensive packet inspection (that can be masked anyway). This does show how clueless and inept the IT staff at UNCO are. And yes, its very easy to use a lot of bandwidth transferring “legal” content. Just join some popular linux distro swarm at release time ;)
Well, the uni was within their rights to disconnect him, but were way outside their rights by actually touching anything that belongs to him. Simply disable the damned port on the switch and be done with it.
I would be pressing charges if I were him.
yes, u call us nerds, but we are going to rule the world.
” Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.”
Well said! Agree 100%, and for those of you crying out ‘invasion of privacy”…Get real for a minute, he does NOT own the property he was staying at, and ANY member of staff CAN enter that area with or without reason, whenever they please, especially in situations like this, if I were having difficulty getting important information thanks to someone choking the bandwidth then I’d expect that person’s connection to be shut off, using any means necessary.
The guy is a huge whiner. Normally we would just shut off his port, or physically disconnect him. The locked offices jazz is BS. The office is university property, and as such, the IT staff have keys/keycards to get anywhere they need.
Our policy is NO personal equipment on campus. We provide computers for the faculty and staff. Hubs and routers are strictly not allowed unless we provide and set them up.
Hello all, I WENT to the University of Northern Colorado, and I call bullshit. What this was is illegal entry (and possibly search, if indeed a search did occur). The university has a similar network infrastructure to any other large educational/corporate network, and I know for a fact that they could EASILY have simply blocked his access. I know this because I supposedly contracted a computer virus while there and my access was shut off. Once I turned off IIS, access was restored. (No virus at all.) However, that brings up another issue around how their IT won’t allow computer science students to run a webserver on the network, regardless of the requirements set forth by the CS faculty. Oh, and the admin password for all the computer labs there is a simple word. No numbers or non-standard characters. Is this really the practice of an intelligent IT department?
I have my doubts about there being a large pipe just for p2p use sanctioned by any University. That claim comes off as utterly absurd to me.
1. Labs are secured and typically only those with explicit access can enter them; how did this IT guy get in or who let him in?
2. Who leaves their system sitting there without locking it or enabling the screen saver + password? That is retarded
3. P2P use is a huge problem for universities all over the country. I think this student is a liar.
He had a switch, IT departments hate unknown equipment, the MAC address therefore didn’t show a mac or PC. They had no idea what they would find prior to entering his office and with that much bandwidth he was suspicious. In our shop we frequently pull machines and re-image them if we see odd network behavior but WE own those machines.
I suggest he read his “Acceptable Use Policy” from the school and see how he violated it before he cries too much. I agree they shouldn’t touch privately owned machines but that could have been an oversight if the school owns Macs.
My Uni just flat out blocks every god damn port but 21, 80, and 443. I haven’t tried going directly by wire, but I know damn good and well I can’t do much of anything without using a TCP Tunnel.
its called put a password on your screensaver jeez
sorry, I guess I forgot to mentioned what his mac-based Azureus was torrenting – It was openOffice and Neo office.
Lets just remember that not only did they have the option of terminating remotely, it’s built into their system. The resnet at UNCO is a subscriptio service – if you don’t pay, you don’t have access. Thus they enable via MAC, and so disabling via MAC is not only feasable, its an integral part of the system.
As a real network administrator with my own assets in play, not just another cushy policy-preaching employee, I can tell you that the University’s sysadmin isn’t worthy of his salary.
Any decent admin would have simply throttled the connection down using traffic shaping tools available on just about every commercial router and ALL Linux distros. If he didn’t want people to use up 6mbit for P2P, he could have locked it down to e.g. 250kbit per person, or any other arbitrary number.
If he had been anal yet skilled, he could have blocked the ports used by the P2P, or even disconnected that specific user from the network without ever leaving his office. I run several servers halfway around the world, and I can precisely control who does what and how fast they do it. If I get unwanted visitors, I block their IP or MAC address. If someone’s trying to DDoS, I limit the rate of incoming connections. My stuff is actually more difficult as I’m dealing with the entire Internet full of strangers. The university only deals with a controlled number of clients and they “know” everyone.
This admin was just looking for attention. He made a huge fiasco out of a non-event to drive some ulterior motives, like maybe he wants to be portrayed as a “hero” and get a raise or other perks. Maybe he had a personal grudge against that student and abused his privileges to attack him. Nobody knows, but either way I’d have this guy fired!
so UNCO now become a place that breeding thieves.
Sounds like this student didn’t read the fine print…
Taken from http://www.unco.edu/it/aboutIT/procedures.htm#howcanresourcesbeused
What are the penalties for abuse or violation? Abuse of computing and electronic communication privileges can be a matter of legal action or official campus disciplinary procedures. Depending upon the seriousness of an offense, violation of the procedure can result in penalties ranging from reprimand (e.g. don’t do this any more), to loss of access to referral to university authorities for disciplinary action. In order to sustain reasonable performance and secure services for the rest of the user community, the computing facility may immediately suspend an individual’s access privileges. Access to UNC computing and communication resources may be wholly or partially restricted by the University without prior notice and without consent of the user:
If required by applicable law, policy or procedure
If there is a reasonable suspicion that there has been or may be a violation of law, regulation, procedure, or policy
If required to protect the integrity or operation of the computing and communication resources or when the resources are required for more critical tasks as determined by appropriate management authority.
Steven R – I read it – nowhere there do I see that a reletively small amount of bandwidth usage (6Mbit isn’t actually a lot) can lead to interference and confiscation of personal property.
If you want to quote rules, hows about the prohibited usage
number 14 – Unauthorized modification of or deletion of another person’s files, account or posting; altering or attempting to alter files or systems without authorization – would seem to apply, as would 15 – Use of computer resources or electronic information without authorization or beyond one’s level of authorization
maybe even number 2 – Any person who knowingly uses any computer, computer system, computer network or any part thereof for the purpose of devising or executing any scheme or artifice to defraud; obtain money, property, or service by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises; using the property or services of another without authorization; or committing theft
Oh, and don’t forget number 9 – Interference with or disruption of the computer, telephone or network accounts, services or equipment of others is prohibited.
I’m not a lawyer, but there may even be a violation of number 1 as well
Those are clear prohibited usage, and those actions were committed by the staff member.
Well if I “owned” the network one usage rule would be if you get caught doing this you get expelled! And you must pay for the bandwidth you “stole”. That would stop most of this BS!!
Anyways, yeah pretty bad. That guy should be fired and so should his boss. I would sue too!
My adivice to everyone is over the next few months DOWNLOAD as much as you can for free…backing up everything you can creating massive libraryies of music and film as when they do start messing us around (although there will always be a way around) we will still have all the media we want free and easily burnable to CD to give to friends etc…DO NOT LET the EVIL media corporations win!!!!!!!!!!!
The article didnt tell you much. He could have hooked up a switch before the packeteer thus no limits, maybe hooked up a router before the office building’s switch thus shutting down the mac address would have shut down the building. I’m sure the IT guy had a good reason for doing this, the article just doesnt give details.
Both the IT BOFH and the grad student are dumbasses. All the BOFH had to do was disable the switchport. All the grad student had to do was, I dunno, stop leeching on university network. 6.6mbps of a 20mbps pipe? And he feels like a victim? If I were the network engineer I would have shut him off or spanned his port and examined his traffic, because 6.6mbps (sustained obviously) is suspicious. He was probably pulling 6.6mbps for afew hours… btw- fuck your college. drop out and get a real fucking job, or switch schools. Don’t be a whiny student. Oh and cut out the Apple advertisement too. It makes you look nothing more than a dumbass that uses an Apple.
most of the uni are only alowing http/ssh/ftp/msn trafic btw.
I appreciate the constructive responses on this matter.
In a meeting with myself and multiple staff members on this issue, I was asked to “collaborate” on “education in downloading” and university policies. I have declined to participate and instead teach students in biology labs (77 of them) how to use torrent files. I will continue to teach this in all of my classes until students don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars towards ms office, etc. Open-source, by way of torrents, is the way to go.
Please be aware, when the university threatened me with suing for illegal downloading, I was confused, but unworried. My only crime here is bandwidth consumption, not copyright infringment. The administrators were under the impressoin I was downloading illegal files. This is simply untrue, I am all for open-source software and don’t use windows, etc.
This all boils down to one thing; a mistake on UNC’s IT department. Hopefully everyone who is a graduate student, or an undergraduate, is aware that some uinversity administrations follow U.S. government tactics and do what they want to whom they want. The IT department at UNC is unique in how they handled-and continues to handle-downloading of anykind.
Keep up the file sharing.
Sam
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[quote comment="195223"]Fast university-type connections (eg ja.net) are expensive and not provided so that our students can hose our bandwidth, be it via bittorrent or otherwise.
What am I meant to tell the researcher whose medical images hadn’t finished transferring when he arrived in the morning? You wouldn’t hoax call an ambulance now would you?
Breach terms of service and you get disconnected. This happens every day in universities across the world. Get over it.[/quote]
Lol, you totally missed the point of this article. Being disconnected and having private property illegally accessed are, well, as different from each other as the shores on different continents. Get over yourself and your misplaced confidence. Lrn2read.
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