Comments on: A Very Special AskBwog: Can Juicycampus Really Be Blocked?

By: Yeah...

Yeah... — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:44:12 +0000

It might be asinine to throw your political muscle behind an effort to censor a site that’s making fun of you.

Michelle Diamond is not the person I want controlling what I can see on the Internet. Haven’t all the parables and dystopian novels about banned books and censorship taught a lesson by now?

Get your shit together, CCSC.

By: this one

this one — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:44:51 +0000

[From the Feb 27th CCSC weekly email]

[...]

And it may or may not be my place to say this, but if youâ€™re posting
on the website that advertises â€œjuicyâ€ campus gossip, please keep in
mind that this can be incredibly hurtful to people. While I hope
everyone recognizes that these posts are nothing more than spiteful
and unwarranted, they are still really bothering to people and they
really need to stop. At our Council meeting this Sunday, we will
be discussing what action we can take to have this site banned from
the Columbia server. (I am not including the url or title because I
do not want to help spread this trash anymore than itâ€™s already
spread).

So to avoid ending this email on such a sour note, check out all the
awesome events taking place on campus this week! As always, feel
free to email or call me if there is anything the Council can do to
make your lives better!

Yours,
Michelle

[List of events/etc...]

By: huh?

huh? — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 22:16:50 +0000

what infamous e-mail?

By: does the site

does the site — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:49:55 +0000

in any way control who has access? Some of the posts for Columbia are so utterly degenerate they could not have possibly come from here. I mean, I used to read b@b once in a while, but these things look like they were written by failing HS kids.

By: hey

hey — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:12:19 +0000

post the “infamous email” plz.

By: that

that — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:11:18 +0000

is kinda fucked up. she ‘brought it on herself’? since when does foolishly advocating censorship mean that you deserve to be targeted with a flood of sexism? blaming the victim has an ugly history in this context…

By: yes it does

yes it does — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 20:07:15 +0000

it hides the metadata precisely because that has been used to filter it. most of the commont bittorrent clients will do this.

By: Juicy

Juicy — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:18:09 +0000

Comments about Michelle have gotten nastier and more common since her infamous e-mail followed by the ever important CCSC meeting. I hate to say this, but she brought this on herself.

By: ZvS

ZvS — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:26:46 +0000

Really, the encryption hides the protocol metadata? That’s cool. I need to learn more about BT, obviously.

By: Ron Gejman

Ron Gejman — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:10:13 +0000

*shrug*
Just for clarity’s sake, garden-variety bittorrent clients can be filtered with some non-firewall softeare, but encrypted bittorrent messages cannot be filtered. Encryption is available on many (at least all the best) bittorrent clients.

By: Ron Gejman

Ron Gejman — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:04:10 +0000

Of course CUIT would probably not modify its routing protocols to censor a website. But the point was that if they wanted to it would be cheap.

By: Oh Zach!

Oh Zach! — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:00:39 +0000

You can throttle my BitTorrent traffic anytime. And it will be hard.

By: ZvS

ZvS — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:46:16 +0000

Yeah, #8-11 are all correct. (#7 — I’ve never seen the site myself, and didn’t realize there was a robots file; so, yeah, Cache won’t work.) However, I’d be *really* shocked if Columbia modified its standing routing configuration on the border routers; I can’t imagine that anyone at CUIT would feel that was appropriate.

Although I disagree with #10 on one thing — throttling BitTorrent traffic isn’t all that hard, because the packets can be identified and discarded on their headers alone. I know of a few universities that do just that, since port-blocking isn’t very functional.

By: well

well — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:55:15 +0000

Someone could still create a range of proxies I think?

By: ron

ron — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 16:47:38 +0000

is correct. if columbia wanted to, say, throttle bittorrent traffic, that would be hard. if it wanted to look for keywords and ban them like China does, that would be hard. blocking one ip is easy – it’s just doesnt actually make a site inaccessible, as the rest of the post points out.