Re: blocking new version of kazaa

[Chuck Yerkes <chuck+obsd@2003.snew.com>]

Quoting Dylan Smith (dylan@iompost.co.im):
> On Sunday 31 August 2003 1:42 am, Brian W. wrote:
> > So many applications revert to trying port 80 in the event their primary
> > port fails, it really is tough. 
> 
> If you merely shape it rather than block it, they tend not to do that.
> When I had problems with Kazaa users, I shaped their traffic so they had the 
> equivalent of a 28.8k modem for anything other than http (over the proxy). It 
> was enjoyable watching them wonder why Kazaa was so slow :-) It seems that if 
> the traffic is merely shaped rather than blocked, applications like this 
> won't try port 80.

And frankly, the best place for this is policy.
Technology is a lousy place to implement policy without
a paper backup.  Being able to call them in and say:

"hey, our logs show that you're using most of your dorm's bandwidth
 for music downloads and that's against our AUP.  We don't want to
 have to cut off your access, so please stop abusing it."

And yes, shaping the traffic is a great compromise to remove the
problem of them affected a shared resource.  Frankly, there's no
way for them to control that usage if they wanted.  A slider that
says "slower" isn't available.


I leave out the whole legal baliwick and presume they are sharing
recordings of lectures with other universities rather than stealing
art from the corporations who steal it from artists.

(A friend uploaded me a copy of her album, so I mailed her a buck.
She noted that that was about a billion times more than she'd made
if I'd bought it.  I didn't ask for US$0.95 back (she's author AND
artist).  Her stuff is available for free as lower sample rate MP3s
anyway - she's figured she's sold more albums if 2% of the people
around the world/country who hear it buy than if only 500 people
ever hear her music. Novel concept).