Penn State bans servers, provides info on Napster Program

I'm at the EDUCAUSE Policy Conference this week in D.C to talk about EFF's VCL. I'm currently in a session on DMCA Enforcement where Russell S. Vaught, Associate Vice Provost, Information Technology, The Pennsylvania State University (the chief architect of Penn State's Neo-Napster program) is speaking. (Carrie Russell, Copyright Specialist, Office for Information Technology Policy, American Library Association (ALA) also gave an excellent presentation on the dangers of the DMCA to universities and libraries.)

Vaught had many interesting things to say. Among them were:

(1) Penn State now has an absolute ban on any student running a server in a residential dorm. Period. The only possible exception is if you swear to only use it for "educational" purposes and get written permission from a faculty member and get approval from the Vice Provost.

So this is part of Penn State's solution to copyright infringement: Take away computing tools from students. As Ed Felten pointed out in our later panel discussion, this is a very dangerous approach for educational institutions to take. Computer science students often learn best through hands-on experimentation and tinkering with technology, and as Jamie Boyle noted in his plenary talk, unplanned experimentation often bears the biggest educational fruit. To paraphrase: "How many times do we learn more from the book next to the book we originally went to find on the shelf, or from the article after the article we looked up in the journal?" Hence, restricting access to content and technology out of fear for infringment can have a very real and direct impact on the ability of students to learn. [Note: Both Yahoo! and Google began as "unauthorized" Stanford student experiments with servers -- should those had been banned as well?]

Felten also pointed out (again, paraphrase) that servers are perhaps the single most revolutionary advance in self-publishing technology since the printing press. Students running their own servers are publishing and expressing themselves like never before. To take away this means of digital speech does academic freedom quite a disservice.

(2) Vaught also provided some numbers re: Penn State's "Lionshare" project that uses Neo-Napster to compete with P2P. Here's some of what he showed us:

- Contract signed since Nov. 5, 2003
- Spring semester -- Residence Halls Only
- Summer -- all students
- Fall - all students at all locations; faculty and staff for a fee
- Centrally funded -- no direct costs except to purchase tracks.

- Status
- 16,5000 residence students
- 75% have machines that can use the program (no Macs)
- 85% of those have signed up
- 100,000+ tracks per day in first few weeks
- Around 80,000 tracks per day toward end of semester.

Contract -- has study provisions
- Frequency of use
- 40% use it few times a week
- 35% every day
- 20% few times a month
- 15% never

Are you able to find the content you want?
-only 40 percent say yes.

How would you rate the purchase prices to burn tracks?
- excellent 2.5%
- good 10% (songs)/15% (album)
- average 20-25%
- fair 20-25%
- poor - 37%

Main Complaints:

- valued and new tracks not available
- macs not supported
- off campus students can't get it

Conclusions:
- Teaching kids the right behavior
- Piracy may have decreased*

* On this last point, I asked Vaught what evidence he had that piracy had actually decreased. He admitted that he didn't have much empirical evidence and that, in fact, the number of DMCA infringement notices that they receive now is essentially the same as before the program. He did note, though, that he had anecdotal evidence that students were file-sharing less and that the DMCA notices were more regarding dial-up than broadband these days.

Comments

[Eric Aitala]

Wow, you mean PSU students aren't allowed to run web servers stuffed with porn, open email relays spreading spam, rogue DHCP servers creating havoc over the network, game servers sucking up all the bandwidth, and IRC servers pirating software and movies? What next? Homework?

[Todd JJ. Troxell]

It really is a disgrace. Luckilly I am off-campus @psu on a broadband connection.

I think I've been holding a subconscious grudge due to past and present tactics like this, but I've no plans to ever sign up for their "Napster"

.. Then again I doubt they've got a Linux client anyway.

And by the way, it's not just against policy, it's at the tcp level in most buildings. :(

Make that "firewalled at the tcp level".

[Todd J. Troxell]

Make that "firewalled at the tcp level".

[Tony]

How the bright minds of the future must suffer, not being able to run servers on a university network!

Are they too stupid to rent co-lo and SSH to a box there?

As a university admin we don't let random members of staff run servers on the network as they are invariably badly managed. Quite why students should be allowed to is beyond me.

A university network is primarily an essential part of the institution as a whole; not a playground for the compsci geeks.

[Tony]

How the bright minds of the future must suffer, not being able to run servers on a university network!

Are they too stupid to rent co-lo and SSH to a box there?

As a university admin we don't let random members of staff run servers on the network as they are invariably badly managed. Quite why students should be allowed to is beyond me.

A university network is primarily an essential part of the institution as a whole; not a playground for the compsci geeks.

[Pat Berry]

Dude...I'm just south of you right now down in Fairfax. Jeez...we need to coordinate in the future ;-)

[jeremy hunsinger]

just one more exampe of educational institutions pursuing normalization instead of education.

In regards to the playground comment above, i suggest reading the manifesto for creative computing which speaks toward the necessity of technological use for creating technologically literate students and workers http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit/archives/cat_manifesto.html

[Richard Jones]

I can see why the university would want to do this, but I cant see it being very easy to police.
An enterprising compsci geek could still get away with running a server anway.

You could make the port appear closed to any IP not within a given list/range (your mates, or known student IPs), making it hard for them to scan the network for servers.

A really devious candidate might setup a port-knock so only those in the know could access the server.

Ban students from using the network if they're caught?
They'll hook up wifi/cables and share their next door neighbours connection.

It seems to me it'd be near impossible to enforce, which makes you wonder if such a rule is worthwhile at all.

[Andrew Walls]

Disclaimer: A few years ago I worked at PSU and dealt with a variety of security issues.

Although the posting above is based on a conversation focused on copyright enforcement, it must be noted that the move to ban servers in dorms was probably based on more issues than this. Servers in dorms are a perenial source of headaches for security staff in many institutions. For that matter, servers maintained by poorly paid Grad students in faculty offices are a regular source of security problems!
Before we get too concerned about the perceived loss of educational opportunity, we need to consider the position of the university in this. The university is not a common carrier and cannot totally shield itself from liabilities arising from the behavior of people using university resources such as networks. As the university supplies the networks and Internet gateway for the dorms, students that run servers in dorms are using university resources. As the university is convened to support education, it is not unreasonable for hte university to insist that activities involving university resources should be related to education.
The university has not prevented students from setting up private LANs with servers in the dorms. Students are still at liberty to run WIFI and other protocols to enable communication with their services. They cannot connect these servers to the university's network.
As has been pointed out by other posters, if you really want to run a server on the Internet, move out of the dorm, get broadband and go to it.
PSU has some of the best computer labs around and some of the most computer literate faculty you will find. They are well supported by a variety of vendors and it is not difficult to get faculty support for private research projects involving servers. If a student has a legitimate interest in working with a server (and is not simply trying to run games and distribute illicit content) any number of faculty members will support the project and help acquire a server or provide space and a network connection. If the student simply wnats to publish content, PSU provides numerous web hosting opportunities for students, faculty and staff.
This expansion of AD-20 does not have a negative impact on the educational environment of PSU.

[Tony]

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~knetlit/archives/cat_manifesto.html

Um, I'm having difficulty seeing how that's relevant or indeed vaguely useful.

You can be just as creative without a wide open network account. Or if you want to really experiment, do it on your own systems or test networks. Sheesh.

At university my halls account started off restricted lightly, and then turned to access only via proxy. Was it a problem? No. I developed a search engine akin to google as my dissertation quite happily within the restrictions.

Proof: http://www.i-r-genius.com/project.htm

I'm technologically literate, and a frikkin firewall never stopped me learning. Stop whining just because you can't flood the network with P2P.

If the restrictions genuinely do stop you learning I have found that tutors will help you get the tools you need.

Anyway, in my experience a decent student will learn more getting ROUND the restrictions :)

[Firewallsabitch]

I had first ran into the evil firewall through my unablilty to connect to my ftp server from the lab computers in order to transfer and burn files. My computer is old, I have no cd burner. The U Drive etc. are all too small and slow compared to ftp. For the U drive or webspace I'd have to physically go back and forth between lab and dorm to get any significant data transfer, fudge that. Now the cd burners in all the computer labs are worthless. Nobody used them except me. I wasted an hour agonizing over what was wrong, when I found out that Penn State was the problem. Fudge Napster.

[TheGuyAbove]

I'd like to add, I'd rather have a slow network of the pure anarchy and net havoc of video game servers, file sharing networks, telnets, ftp, mail, and http servers, then a useless firewalled network.