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.”
Related Posts
- RIAA initiative not limited to campus network users
- On Location: Implementing Icarus P2P-Blocking Software
- USC to Students: No Sharing Files
- How Napster and DRM arrived at University of Washington
- Police raid college dorm
Loading ...
