p2pnet news | RIAA News:- The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) has become another of the American schools to openly enlist as a Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG corporate copyright cop, acting for the Big 4 against its own students.

UCSC has, “just started blocking and throttling network traffic,” posts b14ck, one of the university’s residential network (ResNet) technicians on projectb14ck.

What’s behind the move?

“They think that they can reduce the number of RIAA complaints they get each year (which reflects poorly on the school) by blocking Gnutella network traffic, but their decision is uneducated if anything, and will most likely not result in any less RIAA complaints, but more student complaints and workarounds,” says b14ck, continuing UCSC is a public university, “which means that funding comes from both students AND California residents”.

Himself UCSC student, b14ck says he finds it, “completely insane that the school is spending not only my tuition money, but also funding from everyone who lives in California to pay for new network devices to restrict network traffic”.

“I thought that universities were supposed to be defending free speech and information,” he declares, going on that on Tuesday, John Rocchio, one of his bosses, sent the following email to, “everyone who works for ResNet”.

It reads >>>

There are a couple of changes in the way the network works that you should know about to help you do your job.

Last week we upgraded the version of Clean Access software. As a result of this change Windows users will be required to update their agent software. I have heard of some reports of problems with the update process and Vista machines from other schools, but I haven’t seen any of these here yet. I’d guess that we’ll have about as many problems as Vista users had last quarter. The update will allow more and newer versions of anti-virus software that didn’t work last quarter to work now. Also Windows 64 bit users will be able to use the agent software to log in, but it won’t force them to have anti-virus software or have it be current, all it does is force them to log in. I will be contacting Windows 64 bit users who registered their machines last quarter as soon as I know it is working smoothly. I will remind them that having current anti-virus software is a good idea, even if we can’t require it.

To help speed up the network for legitimate uses and reduce the risk of ‘accidental’ copyright infringement we have purchased and are now using a network device that can control different types of network traffic.

So far it has been configured to block software that uses the Gnutella protocol such as Limewire and eDonkey, and to limit BitTorrent to 1 Mb/s inbound and 128 Kb/s outbound per IP address. Those numbers may change at some point. Last quarter we had 24 people get letters from the RIAA asking for money to not sue them, otherwise known as an Early Settlement Offer. Please remind your friends and people who contact us for help that they need to be careful with file sharing software.

Let me know if you have any questions.

John

But b14ck, isn’t leaving it there.

“Even if you forget about the issue of the school spending public monies to pay for restricting network traffic, there is still the issue of actually restricting this traffic,” he states, going on >>>

The new network hardware will be completely blocking all Gnutella network traffic, which not only restricts illegal traffic, but legal traffic as well. Gnutella networks are not only used for piracy. A lot of the traffic over those networks consist of completely legitimate media. By blocking all traffic over Gnutella networks they are breaking down the very ideals that this university was founded on, which include (among other things): the pursuit of knowledge, information, and freedom. The only thing worse than the school actually blocking the traffic is the reason why.

They think that they can reduce the number of RIAA complaints they get each year (which reflects poorly on the school) by blocking Gnutella network traffic, but their decision is uneducated if anything, and will most likely not result in any less RIAA complaints, but more student complaints and workarounds (which I have already discovered and will disclose later in this article).

The network administrators need to take a stand to political pressure by school officials and fight to keep the university a free environment. As many of you know, most public high schools use WebSense network monitoring software on their school networks to block websites with ‘questionable’ or ‘offensive’ content. Every time networks are subjected to censorship, whether it be blocking certain network traffic, websites, or whatever it may be, the users lose. They gain nothing, and only lose their accessibility to information. I hope that the students here realize that they are slowly losing their freedoms and decide to complain and cause a stir.

The other thing that the new network hardware is doing is throttling bittorrent bandwidth. I found this curious because I was just reading another article about this on slashdot which you can find here called: FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling. This article basically says that the FCC is investigating claims that Comcast was knowingly restricting customers’ bittorrent bandwidth, and may be subject to fines of $195,000 per user. I wonder why it is that a public company cannot throttle bittorrent traffic, but it is perfectly legal (or is it?) for a public university to do the same. I for one, will be complaining to the school and demanding that they remove the intrusive new hardware for obvious reasons.

In the meantime, the students of UCSC are going to need a workaround to get past the nasty new hardware. Being a network technician, I know the internal design and implementation of the network, and have a simple way for users to bypass these restrictions. I’ve detailed it below in a few simple steps. If you follow these steps, not only will you be able to bypass the new network restrictions, but will also be able to bypass the 2GB daily upload limit per MAC address, as well as the required Cisco Clean Access Agent program which requires you to have an antivirus program before you can connect to the school’s network.

1. Go to start->run and type in ‘cmd’ then press enter. This will open up the command prompt. If you are on a UNIX-based machine (like a MAC), open up the terminal program.

2. Windows users should now type in ‘ipconfig /all’ and press enter. UNIX-based users should type in ‘ifconfig’ and press enter. This will display IP information for your computer.

3. Windows users should now look for the line which says ‘Physical Address. . . : somenumber’. UNIX-based users should look for the number that follows ‘HWaddr’.

4. The number that you see (on windows) should look something like: 00-1A-A0-8A-F8-FB, whereas the number that UNIX-based users see should be the same, except have colons (:) separating the numbers instead of dashes (-). Write this number down, you will need it.

5. Once you have the MAC address (that number you just wrote down), go to: http://cuhs-web.ucsc.edu/IT/ResNet/NetworkDevice.cfm and enter your student ID number as asked for.

6. You will now be redirected to another page which asks for some basic information. Enter it all (they won’t use it for anything), and where you see the box asking for your MAC address, simply type in the number you wrote down before. And where it asks ‘What kind of device do you have?’, simply select ‘XBOX’ from the drop-down menu. Then go ahead and click the Submit button.

That’s it! What that does is create a ticket for you in the system, and a technician will see your ticket, and add your computer’s MAC address (a unique identifier) to an exemption list which is typically reserved for gaming consoles so that they can get unrestricted access to the network by bypassing the Clean Access Agent and the new network hardware. Give it about 24 hours to kick in, and BAM, you will be able to use Gnutella neworks again, as well as have un-throttled bittorrent download/uploads.

But, adds b14ck, “working around the problem is not a permanent solution.

“What we really need is to generate enough commotion and let the school administration know that we will NOT tolerate these kinds of actions.”

Slashdot it!

Also see:

projectb14ck - UCSC Network Woes, January 9, 2008

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Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details. Download here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 7:43 am and is filed under RIAA News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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