Florida Dorms Lock Out P2P Users
By Katie Dean
02:00 AM Oct. 03, 2003 PT
The University of Florida has developed a tool to help extricate the
school from the morass of peer-to-peer file trading, and early results
show that it's succeeding.
Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services,
commonly called Icarus, debuted over the summer on the network that
links all the residence halls on the UF campus.
The open-source program was developed by campus programmers to cut off
the file sharing going on among students. Housing officials say the
application educates students as it restricts them from peer-to-peer
services.
Last spring, the university received about 40 notices of copyright
violations per month. At peak file-trading periods, 90 percent of the
traffic on the housing network was peer-to-peer. In an average 24-hour
period, 3,500 of the 7,500 students in the residence halls would use P2P services like Kazaa.
"We needed something to stem the flow. We were spending too much time tracking people down," said Robert Bird, supervisor of network services for the UF department of housing. "There were too many of them and too few of us."
Enter Icarus.
"Icarus has detected about 300 people using P2P this fall," Bird said.
"That's an over 90 percent drop in people using P2P. That's a dramatic
reduction in user behavior."
[Full story in Wired -
here
By Katie Dean
02:00 AM Oct. 03, 2003 PT
The University of Florida has developed a tool to help extricate the
school from the morass of peer-to-peer file trading, and early results
show that it's succeeding.
Integrated Computer Application for Recognizing User Services,
commonly called Icarus, debuted over the summer on the network that
links all the residence halls on the UF campus.
The open-source program was developed by campus programmers to cut off
the file sharing going on among students. Housing officials say the
application educates students as it restricts them from peer-to-peer
services.
Last spring, the university received about 40 notices of copyright
violations per month. At peak file-trading periods, 90 percent of the
traffic on the housing network was peer-to-peer. In an average 24-hour
period, 3,500 of the 7,500 students in the residence halls would use P2P services like Kazaa.
"We needed something to stem the flow. We were spending too much time tracking people down," said Robert Bird, supervisor of network services for the UF department of housing. "There were too many of them and too few of us."
Enter Icarus.
"Icarus has detected about 300 people using P2P this fall," Bird said.
"That's an over 90 percent drop in people using P2P. That's a dramatic
reduction in user behavior."
[Full story in Wired -
here
Facebook
Twitter