p2pnet.net News:- You already know it’s faster than a speeding bullet. But it could also be the worst nightmare of the RIAA and MPAA come true in the cold, hard light of CyberSpace!

Or maybe not.

“We are all from universities, so it’s obvious that this service is for educational purposes only.”

*this service* is i2hub.com, a file-sharing network of 206 universities from A (Arizona State) to Y (Yale), university-to-university direct.

“Meet people from other Internet2 colleges!” – says the site promo. “There is no limit as to how much you download! Terabytes (Thousands of Gigabytes) of information!”

Can it be true?

Yep. And it’s all down to http://www.internet2.edu/, a “high-performance network that uses an entirely different infrastructure than the public Internet we know and love/hate today,” as WebMonkey puts it here. As well as all those universitie, scientific institutions and more than 60 comcorps (notice the .edu top-level domain), in the Internet 2 network.”

But back to fastability, Internet2 has set a land speed record with a clocked speed averaging 6.25 gigabits per second. That’s nearly 10,000 times faster than your typical home broadband connection.

How do you get into it?

“1. Download the i2Hub software for Windows. (Attention Mac and Linux users: Mac OSX here, Linux here: Just enter mac.i2hub.com as your hub) 2. Set your nickname and add folders to share. 3. Start browsing and enjoy!”

Want to chat?

“Use our i2hub webchat just for chatting with all the users! (ActiveX required) (no sharing though – gotta download the real thing for that) Check out our super duper cool chat stats page

There’s an I2HUB Council and, “The future and direction of the hub is determined by the representatives of each college or university,” says the site. “Each college gets one vote on an issue. Majority rules.”

Say no more …

… unless you’re Penn State, a launching pad for guided missives from the entertainment industry.

Napster II on Internet2
“Penn State is collaborating with Internet2 on several projects that promise to revolutionize the way university faculty, students, researchers and staff collaborate and support each other’s academic endeavors,” it says in what amounts to a huge post taking up about a quarter of the Internet2 site.

And Lo! Guess what’s on Penn State’s metaphorical mind? You have it – no less than Napster II, the entertainment industry’s entry vehicle for direct-to-students music sales, with movies not far behind.

In blurb that reads more like it was churned out by RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) hacks than a senior US university, Penn State is shamelessly promoting ‘product’. And Big Music product, at that.

“A ground-breaking agreement with the online music service Napster has made Penn State the first university in the nation to offer its student body a legal and quality alternative to illegal downloading. The service, which uses Internet2’s Shibboleth middleware technology to provide secure, private authentication and registration, currently provides on-campus students with access to over half a million downloadable songs.”

Since when were US universities top-level sales points? And since when did they actively market for commercial intererests? Since Hollywood’s Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities.

The Penn State puff fails to mention that the ‘legal and quality alternative’ only became necessary after the RIAA started suing students, and that yesterday, it filed against another 477 people including students from Mansfield University in Pennsylvania; Brown University in Providence, RI; Emory University in Atlanta; Georgia Institute of Technology; Gonzaga University of Spokane, Wash; Michigan State University; Princeton University, New Jersey; Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Conn; Trinity College of Hartford, Conn; the University of Kansas; the University of Minnesota; and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

In the meanwhile, Marc Ray, a senior computer support specialist at Florida State University, is quoted in a CNET story here as saying he’s still evaluating the program and, “The fact is, (the network) cost a lot of money, and downloading games and music should be the last priority on any campus network. I think it’s borderline taking advantage of the system.”

The University of Florida was the first to start acting as an unpaid RIAA police agency with ICARUS, short for the Integrated Control Application for Restricting User Services, an appit designed and built so school authorities can shut down network access every time ICARUS comes across anything resembling p2p activity.

The University of California at Los Angeles has just become the second major US educational institution to start using software that disconnects students accused of trading copyrighted songs or movies.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2004 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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