Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses?
From: Tracy Mitrano <tbm3 () CORNELL EDU>
Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 18:11:58 -0500
Our first time offenders with no previous Judicial Administrative record are directed to a Copyright Education Course, the demo of which is linked from this page: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/ It is less a wagging finger than it is an attempt at an understanding of the tensions among social norms, Internet technologies (file sharing functionalities in particular), the law and traditional distribution models of entertainment companies. The core curriculum of the program may be found here: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/policy/ copyright/primer.html This discussion raises some very interesting questions about which we could all benefit from hearing and discussing more. For example: how do the content owners generate DMCA notices technologically? What is the relationship between security and other policy related functions in an IT shop? What other areas of our institutions that might do well to assist in addressing this issue of copyright education, student affairs for example? Finally, how do we align optimal network operations with our institutions' missions? Good discussion! On Jan 29, 2008, at 5:56 PM, Curt Wilson wrote:
I concur with most of Randy's points, however our attempts at blocking potentially copyrighted contents and letting "safe" contents pass through was met with failure and many takedown notices. We could potentially try again, but many other priorities exist. Our campus was experiencing bandwidth issues, and a deluge of RIAA/ MPAA takedown notices (especially wrt areswarez) and have a small staff handling many other issues. Technical solutions to block P2P were instituted with significant success. We've had to utilize several techniques to provide for decent coverage, and it's still not completely foolproof. The opportunity for exceptions is less than ideal, however that option does exist. In every case so far the user has been able to obtain the contents through other means (such as http). Bandwidth is a lot cleaner, and we are less clogged up with notices and takedown bureaucracy. How do other .edus handle their takedown processes? I believe that the IT Security role in such a process should be minimal - collect the relevant logs for another campus area and let them handle the bureaucracy components of the situation. But that's not how things are currently executed here. Randy Marchany wrote:Having lurked on this and other related threads over the past couple of months, I'd like to ask a few questions and make a few observations about how EDUs appear to be dealing with P2P. 1. With all of the "monitoring" and "rate limiting" strategies, how does your institution deal with legit uses of P2P? We're a land grant and our extension division may use P2P to distribute videos/sound recordings of their products to extension agents around the state. Obviously, blocking all P2P would prevent them from doing their business. Music students working on projects and putting their "product" on the net for download (legit because permission was given to distribute) is another example. 2. How many BitTorrent servers or other P2P servers are on your campus nets? What type of scanning or metrics do you collect about p2p traffic? The usual suspects like excessive traffic to/from IP address is nice but what do you do to keep tabs on "normal" P2P traffic? 3. An observation: I'm a security type and a musician. I've always thought that banning P2P traffic because of the potential "copyright" problems was like banning the US Postal Service (Fedex, UPS) because someone xeroxed a book and use them to mail the book. I don't buy the volume issue (it's much faster using P2P than USPS....duh!) because that's a smoke screen. The real issue is making sure users understand copyright issues and know what the potential penalties are. There are legit uses of P2P in our world and I don't see forcing users to jump through hoops to do real work as being an effective practice. If it's too cumbersome, they'll circumvent it. Having IPS rulesets blocks the casual user but not the determined user. I can remember not being able to download tunes from our band www site because of an arbitrary block while visiting an EDU. Never mind that it was legal (we, the copyright owners, give permission to distribute freely). The block prevented a legit use of P2P. 4. Another observation: are we taking the easy way by arbitrarily blocking P2P because a) we're short staffed b) we're lazy c) we don't have resources for user education d) we don't have upper mgt support d) we're afraid of the RIAA/MPAA e) all of the above? Shouldn't we be investing more in the short term (policy enforcement, user education, categorizing P2P traffic to id the illegal stuff)? This short term effort would eliminate a good chunk of the longer term problem. Just my .01 worth. -Randy Marchany VA Tech IT Security Office
Tracy Mitrano Director of IT Policy 110F East Hill Office Bldg Ithaca NY 14853 (607)254-3584
Current thread:
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Randy Marchany (Jan 29)
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Joel Rosenblatt (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Lutzen, Karl F. (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Scholz, Greg (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Michael Hornung (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Joel Rosenblatt (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? David Gillett (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Harris, Michael C. (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Cal Frye (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Curt Wilson (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Tracy Mitrano (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Joel Rosenblatt (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Barbara Torney (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Barbara Torney (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Cal Frye (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Joel Rosenblatt (Jan 29)
- Re: classifying P2P traffic - what about legit uses? Vanderbilt, Teresa (Jan 30)