Reading between the lines (banks?) of the Cherwell, it seems that OUCS have placed a block on the music-sharing application, which was already banned under Oxford University network rules.
The reason is simple: OUCS houses a connection to JANET, which happens to be one of the faster Internet backbones of the country. Peer-to-peer applications are designed to use the bandwidth of their peers to spread the load away from the single server of the standard client/server model.... and that means that P2P software tends to saturate JANET as much as it can.
That's a bad thing. So it's sensible to prevent its use.
So, Oxford have not recently banned Spotify; rather, they've imposed technical restrictions preventing its use, to replace the logical ones that apparently people weren't following. It was banned all along, people! As was the original BBC iPlayer Downloader and Channel 4's equivalent, until they moved away from the peer-to-peer model. And in fact Skype was included in that list for a while, before a special relaxation was granted with certain configuration options.
But I guess they had to save a story for Fifth Week...
5 comments:
This is exactly what I keep trying to explain to people...
I don't think OUCS have blocked access though, because I think (I don't know - I've never used it and until two days ago had no idea what it even was) people at SJC are still able to use it. I think that some colleges have blocked it while SJC, it seems, won't bother unless it becomes a real problem.
@Simon - That makes a lot of sense, especially since OUCS usually keep to a policy of blocking the absolute minimum of ports. Colleges and departments have their own control for the most part - New College, for example, block all but port 80 outbound, or at least they did in my day.
That's exactly it, OUCS block a very limited number of things, mostly ports used by known exploits etc. Cherwell is wrong saying the ban isn't consistant, Spotify is banned across the University - in some places if you choose to ignore the ban then the service will still work, but that doesn't mean it's not banned. It's like speeding - not everywhere has speed cameras to enforce the speed limits, but that doesn't mean the speed limits don't apply.
Amusingly, the Director of Computing Systems and Support at OUCS, who according to Cherwell's article "did not wish to comment", has... um... commented underneath it.
I think that it's worth explaining that the idea of a p2p app like spotify should be that the University bandwidth only ever has to download each track once from spotify, then users share it internally at essentially no cost. In exchange, the university may well upload it a few times, but still use far less external bandwidth than if all the internal users had to download it once each. It should be a win-win.
In practice, because everyone outside the Uni has asymetric connections that can only upload about 1/4 of what they can download at best, simplistic P2P algorithms end up using places like Universities as hubs to feed the entire bandwidth usage of their services.
What should happen is that P2P traffic bound for outside the network gets a low priority, and doesn't affect other services, but does make use of spare bandwidth in off-peak periods. I'm not up to date on developments in this kind of area, though.
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