Re: : Semi OT: Academic Firewall Rules

In cases of piracy, your actual duty is the same as an ISP's or any
other third party providing services without assuming responsibility for
them, which is to pass on notices to the persons that the complainant
identifies. 

You do need to ensure you describe yourself to the users of the services
as a third party, and specifically say you are not selecting or
publishing material that is sent over your wires, but instead are
operating consciously as a transport service only.  There is lots of
advice to ISPs on the net, have a look.

US companies have claimed secondary and vicarious liability applies, and
have lost. Canadian courts have cited the U.S. decisions in their holdings.

Bandwidth consumption is actually a technical problem, because many
medium-priced devices do NOT implement congestion control and fair-share
scheduling properly. People used to have to solve this technical problem
with rules and legal agreements (;-))

You need to look for equipment that supports fq_codel (fair queuing with
controlled delay, by Kathie Nichols and Van Jacobson, see
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336)

Properly set up, networking should give everyone equal shares of the
bandwidth, which you should statically limit to exactly the speed of
your uplink on the device that connects the fast internal lan with the
slower external link.

If you have a specific problem, you can bias mass-file-transfer services
like ftp and bittorrent so they give way to interactive services like
ssh and REST.


--dave

On 05/23/2014 12:25 PM, Ansar Mohammed wrote:
> Thanks all for the candid feedback and the trip down memory lane. The
> combined experience/mindshare on this community is always impressing
> and humbling.
>
> I do appreciate the danger of stifling freedom of expression and
> allowing academics the freedom required to conduct research.
>
> I have two concerns with a relaxed and open internet access policy
> * exposure to litigation in the event of piracy
> * bandwidth consumption.
>
> BTW, is your internet access audited/logged?
>
>
> On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Mel Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2014-05-22 at 21:23 -0400, [email protected] wrote:
>>
>>> Then one day, the then president had lunch with someone from IBM and
>>> suddenly, without any consultation with the committee, we had a new
>>> computer system, which apparently was a Steal of a Deal. Ultimately, it
>>> turned out (I heard) that the computer needed additional memory and ended
>>> up costing much more, but we did get a new computer system.
>> That was the IBM way.  They sold straight to the people who signed the
>> cheques.  I remember a whole benchmark team being recalled from Phoenix
>> after the news hit that IBM had already closed the deal.
>>
>>         Mel.
>>
>>
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-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
[email protected]           |                      -- Mark Twain

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