University Bans BitTorrent To Stop Flood of Infringement Notices (torrentfreak.com) 123
A university in Canada has taken sweeping action in an effort to stem the tide of piracy notices. Following changes to Canada's copyright law in early 2015, ISPs are now required to forward copyright infringement notices to their customers. Over the past years, copyright owners have aggressively targeted users and ISPs with volumes of notices to generate more revenue. TorrentFreak adds:The phenomenon has also been felt at the University of Calgary, which acts as a service provider to thousands of students. Inevitably, some of those students have been using their connections to obtain music and movies for free, which has led to the university receiving large numbers of notices. So, in an effort to reduce the instances of alleged infringement, the university has recently banned BitTorrent usage on several Wi-Fi networks. Speaking to student newspaper The Gauntlet, vice-president finance and services Linda Dalgetty said that the effect was felt immediately. During the first eight days of the ban, the university received 90% fewer notices than usual. "I think what we're finding is it has definitely made a difference. But we have to monitor that, because statistically, we have to go through a longer time frame than eight days," Dalgetty said.According to Dalgetty, reducing the number of infringement notices wasn't the only consideration. The volume of traffic and other threats were also on the agenda. "The more streaming we have on the campus, the more it impacts network performance and that takes away the user experience for other pursuits," she said. "The third [reason] is security. The more streaming we have, the [higher chance] of inadvertently downloading something that would create issues."
Re:Good and bad... (Score:5, Funny)
what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
You seem to be attributing wisdom and empathy to college students. Do you see the problem here?
Re: Good and bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
There are certainly valid uses, and this may be a case of throwing out the baby with the bath water, but now the challenge is how to whitelist approved sources, given the nature of BitTorrent?
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You're assuming that they give a crap about valid uses, and I don't see why they would. Even if someone decided to challenge it, they'd likely have to show that they couldn't obtain legitimate material via other means, or would at least be significantly inconvenienced in doing so. And of course nobody's going to challenge it based on illegitimate material for obvious reasons.
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What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
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what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!
What sort of network admin isn't familiar with QoS and rate limiting?
The Network Unit where i currently work, a UK University, used to have a rather nifty network appliance which sat on the network segments that student halls of residence occupied and listened for Bittorrent connections. When it detected one, it sent a hang-up to each end neatly closing the connection. We never publicly announced what was going on here, but instead let the students run into the blockage by themselves. It worked better that way, fewer complaints.
These days network security appliances do the s
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Other than downloading Linux Distributions...
Most other Legitimate turrents don't have enough members to be as effecient as just downloading it directly.
"what sort of monster uses Bittorrent on shared Wifi?!"
People who do not know or care about bandwidth limitations and sharing with others.
Aka. Late teens who are more interesting in getting their stuff faster without little regards to others.
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Actually, a lot games use Bitorrent networks for file distribution. (i.e. WoW, WoT, etc). I don't know if they we affected by the ban or they operate differently enough but there are legitimate uses.
(I know at one point you could even a regular bitorrent client to get WoW updates, I don't know if that's still true)
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Akamai is one company that sells a service for this. It's transparent to the user.
Windows 10 (maybe Windows 8?) also use peer-to-peer.
Re:What kind of monster (Score:1)
Re: Stupid (Score:2)
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I am sure colleges don't have full administrative control over the students on what they do.
You can say you are a Dry campus, but there will still be a lot of drinking.
You can tell students to use their internet responsibility... But they will not.
So lets be honest with ourselves.
for every Legitimate use of turrents they are 100 illegitimate uses and for that Legitimate use there are a numerous workarounds.
So you block the feature. you don't have to punish kids, you don't have to deal with take down notices
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Wouldn't connecting via VPN bypass the no torrenting restriction, anyways?
University (Score:3)
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Or, you can blame the people pirating the movies and music. If they weren't dicks, everyone could use BitTorrent to download all them Linux ISOs.
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Re: University (Score:1)
How many Linux isos do you need to download? You download one, run the installer, then it's smallish updates from that point on. If you're maintaining a Linux box by downloading a new ISO for each update and trashing the whole filesystem with a new install, you're thinking like a Windows user, not a linux admin.
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Or, you can blame the people pirating the movies and music. If they weren't dicks, everyone could use BitTorrent to download all them Linux ISOs.
If they were smart they would use KODI + Exodus Add-on, and get their pirated movie / tv fix without overloading the network with Torrent traffic (I assume linear streaming is better), and eliminate the chances of copyright notices.
Music can just be downloaded off Youtube.
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The network admins should watch closely what's going to happen to their budget: Without that traffic, the network is probably underutilized. Whether that means it has to be downgraded or otherwise necessary upgrades can be postponed, the budget for operating the network isn't going to be what they expected. Yes, it's their network and they can do what they want with it, but if they think passing on copyright notifications to students is a burden, they'll be surprised how burdensome a lower budget can be.
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and you dont think the excess bandwidth wont get eaten up by Netflix or youtube?
Reaaarry?
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That's not really how it works. Those notices are sent not just to the edge network owner. They are also sent to that network's internet provider.
If the university chooses to ignore the letters, eventually their upstream provider will be left with no choice but to cut the university off.
Fair enough (Score:4, Interesting)
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College students should have this little nugget of truth down by the time they get there.
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Actually, education is under provincial jurisdiction, not federal. So, it would be more accurate to say it technically belongs to all the citizens of the province of Alberta, Canada.
That being said, your post is still nonsense. For example, the trans-canada highway technically belongs to all the people of Canada, but that doesn't mean that the local unicycle club can block all the lanes of the highway by setting up some sweet jumps to do unicycle tricks with.
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This (also terrible) analogy is more analogous:
They are banning the transport of all unicycles on the trans-Canada highway because someone is repeatedly claiming that people who use it keep stealing his unicycles.
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...but they aren't stealing the content. They are infringing on copyright.
Yeah. I'm that guy.
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The citizens of Canada also implemented the copyright law at the heart of this matter, either directly or indirectly via their elected representatives. The school is only doing what the public has asked of them in this regard.
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Actually we got blackmailed by the citizens of the USA. "If you want access to our market, you thieving arseholes, who are worse then all 3rd world countries, you better pass these laws" Americans are obviously in favour of those draconian copyright laws.
Now we're likely to get hauled into court and forced to pay, sometimes as much as 3 times the cost of a DVD but usually only the cost of a DVD. Then we get the American companies threatening to haul us into court if we don't pay. As most of us are exposed t
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Wait.. I thought Canada couldn't have copyright infringment because you guys have a piracy tax on all the media. If that's not paying for a license for everything, where is the money going?
We only have the copying (it covers legal time shifting as well as copyright infringement) levy on cassette tapes and blank CDROMs. After the courts ruled that the levy made it legal to copy music for personal use, the copyright cartel lost interest in adding the levy to DVDs etc.
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Except in this case, it's a public university
You're right, it's a public university, in which case they can block ALL uses of the systems that don't have a particular academic necessity.
In other words, it's not your private connection, so it is not for personal use in a way that impacts other students' ability to use the network. Those are the rules that my US-public university operated under, and they didn't get into any trouble with that.
It technically belongs to all of the citizens of Canada,
I don't know if it's the same in Canada, but this is a pretty common misconception for public universities, in th
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Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.
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Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Honeypots are not entrapment. They have not forced or coerced you into doing something you weren't setting out to do anyway. I believe the concept of entrapment can only be applied to law enforcement entities, as well.
Mostly true. To oversimplify it, entrapment is the idea that everyone has their price, so if you make something attractive enough even an honest person becomes tempted and may succumb. Joining a bittorrent swarm and seeing who else (by who I mean what IP addresses) is also in the swarm isn't in any way an enticement, let alone an unreasonable enticement, so isn't entrapment.
However, entrapment is an affirmative defense, meaning the accused admits doing it but claims a mitigating factor that excuses it. This
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There is no such thing as entrapment by non-law-enforcement individuals or organizations. Only cops. Definition of entrapment [dictionary.com]
1. the luring by a law-enforcement agent of a person into committing a crime.
2. an act or process of entrapping.
3. a state of being entrapped.
It's perfectly legal for me to do something that, if the police were to do it, would be entrapment. So no, your claim that it also applies to private entities is a fantasy, same as the democrats thinking that Clinton could win.
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I doubt dictionary.com is a good source for international legal advice. If I was worried about whether I (as a private person) was committing entrapment I'd rather consult a lawyer familiar with my state's laws.
I don't think it would be wise for me to offer to pay someone to perform an illegal act, anyway. Law enforcement can often do that, provided they are conducting a bona fide investigation.
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You're free to look up other sources. I did. They all agree - entrapment only applies to law enforcement. Mind you, I already knew this, and I'm surprised that it's not common knowledge. When was the last time you saw a show where someone who wasn't a cop was accused of entrapment?
And no, the law is the same in all states. Try again.
It's entrapment when law enforcement acting without the target knowing they are law enforcement induces the target to do an illegal act that they would not otherwise have done
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I was hesitant about accepting an on-line dictionary for legal advice, but if you've checked other sources I'll accept that.
Around here, presenting an opportunity to commit a crime is not considered entrapment. It's okay for an undercover police officer to hang around a suspected drug dealer in the hope of being offered a deal, because someone who is not a drug dealer will not offer the deal. It's entrapment if the officer asks to buy drugs, because that's an inducement to commit a crime.
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Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Citation please?
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Either companies are honeypotting Bittorrent emissions themselves, which would be entrapment
Citation please?
They can't provide one. The legal definition of entrapment is a member of law enforcement inciting someone to commit an illegal act. If I make it known that I leave my door unlocked, knowing that someone is going to go in and steal something, and I have a hidden camera there, I haven't entrapped them, even though my actions have certainly encouraged them to commit a crime.
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In your example, you haven't incited an illegal act, and if the police did it it wouldn't be entrapment.
What you would have done is more parallel to a police sting operation, in which they don't incite crime but make it attractive for a criminal to commit a crime they would already have done somewhere they can be arrested.
If I were a police officer and walked up to someone and offered them money for drugs, that's entrapment. If I say I want drugs and the guy offers to sell them, that's a sting, becaus
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That's not how the courts see it around here. The police have parked cars here and there intended to be attractive to car thieves, on the principle that only a car thief would care about such things. The idea is that only a criminal would take advantage of a good opportunity to commit a crime. They can't push anyone towards taking advantage of one of these opportunities, or that would be entrapment.
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Magnet links protect the directory, e.g. The Pirate Bay.
Identifying the sender and receiver is trivially easy.
How else could a BitTorrent client connect to the sender?
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We need a Slashdot Bot which just responds to the word "entrapment" in a post and corrects the author.
You can honey pot legally The police can even sell you drugs and arrest you. It's not entrapment unless you can prove that they convinced you to do something that you wouldn't have done except because of their coercion. You could setup a pot stand on the street titled "weed sold here" and arrest you when you came up and tried to buy weed. The test is whether a normal law abiding citizen have been persua
"In other news..." (Score:2)
"...the volume of VPN and Tor traffic on campus has mysteriously increased."
It's a virtual whack-a-mole game, when will the MAFIAA finally realize this?
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More examples of stupid admins in U of C (Score:5, Informative)
So this is the same place that paid $20,000 to decrypt a malware attack that locked down its email and AD infrastructure... http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/university-calgary-ransomware-cyberattack-1.3620979 [www.cbc.ca]
I doubt they've learned much about how to operate a network at this rate.
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In some respects, U Calgary isn't even really much of a university. Its incestuous relationship with the local oil barons makes the quality and reliability of anything that comes out of there, including research and graduates, suspect.
Re:More examples of stupid admins in U of C (Score:5, Informative)
I work for the uni and you don't know how correct you are.
In response to the malware ransom, they mandated that all employees are now banned from using gmail, yahoo, etc. for work-related stuff because 'they don't control those servers.' Then, in spectacular irony, they then migrated their email system to Office 365, which has proven to be an abysmal user experience, and emails appear to be sent through microsoft's servers anyways - which the uni doesn't control and are SO slow. (It could just be that Office 365 works fine, but that our servers are misconfigured in some way)
This recent bit about bittorrent is idiotic as well, as anyone who wants to use the wifi has to login using their IT credentials, so they could easily find out who is downloading what and take action against the infringing individuals instead... but that would require a reasonably competent monkey in the IT dept.
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My mom works for U of C too and I wanted to slap those people for their ham fisted communications and messaging about the whole ordeal. I've seen good implementations of O365 and the company I work for now is beginning their implementation too which is likely larger than the U of C by a small margin. I would have thought that other email addresses would be banned for work related purposes as a matter of principle from the get go. The saddest thing overall to me is that the malware ransom didn't come out of
Encrypted traffic (Score:2)
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My favorite trick for getting torrented content on hostile networks is to simply let my seedbox, on a very good network, handle the torrent download and then transfer the file to my local computer via SSH. It requires more lead time but it works great and is completely undetectable. I don't even need to use a VPN this way!
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No, the encryption is ineffective. It's not really encrypted that heavily and traffic shaping devices have been able to identify what these streams are for years and years already.
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I'd expect a VPN to use apparently unbreakable encryption. It's not that hard. If I found that a VPN services was using something lame like DES, I'd find another.
What a traffic analysis would find is that GameboyRMH sent some sort of message to a computer outside the system, and then downloaded a file from it at some later time, and that's in the best case scenario where there's no other traffic.That's not going to tell anyone anything.
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It's not really the data, it's the way the data is transmitted. Multiple, single sockets connected to dozens of IP addresses scattered all over the world is a good indicator.
This is a university you see... (Score:3)
a place where the next generation wishes to learn, gain knowledge expertise.
What a brilliant idea, to ban BitTorrent! -Why didn't anyone else think of that?!
Re: This is a university you see... (Score:2, Funny)
They could also ban Token Ring.
It wouldn't affect the quality of the education any differently.
Except maybe for a few Fine Arts students studying anime.
Thank you (Score:1)
Do it right. (Score:2)
Someone get a dump server up and running. Twenty-odd terabytes of storage should do it, for anyone in the know to upload and download as they see fit, all safely on the university network.
Streaming vs. P2P (Score:2)
No comment about net neutrality? (Score:1)
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