Re: [TCLUG:14628] RE: Napster

["Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom" <carls@agritech.com>]

>>         that's by *far* the best idea I've heard on the matter. anyone
>> grabbing 100MB+ is pulling pr0n, warez, movies, or mp3s by the bucketload.
>> doubtful that they're actually making use of much of that data.
>...or installing Linux/doing an apt-get upgrade.  For that matter, I'm in
>the middle of downloading a copy of viavoice from IBM - that's a 75M tar file
>right there.  And if you lose your connection halfway through and restart,
>there's 100M again (assuming you didn't cache it and don't have the ability
>to continue the transfer instead of restarting).  And this is all legit
>stuff.
        point taken. 
        I wonder how resource-intensive it would be, to keep track of people
who've contanced the napster coordinating server; and just throttle *their*
bandwidth?
        not sure I like that idea, tho; smacks of arbitraryness. 

        perhaps traffic shaping could be done to throttle individual IPs
down to a certain level of bandwidth.. especially after long connections.
(choke them down to 28.8Kbps after a while) this way; you could still DL
large amounts of data if you really wanted; but it would take a while. if
grabbing mp3s is taking up all one's web-browsing bandwidth; one will stop
grabbing mp3s.
        give everyone a proportionate fraction of the total bandwidth
available; so no one can choke off everyone else. 

        Winona State University actually was encouraging students to buy an
account with an outside ISP; so they wouldn't be taking up University
bandwidth by MUDing. (those were the days...)
         now that DSL and cable is so cheap; it might actually make sense to
encourage students to buy bandwidth from outside, if they *really* need it.
(yes, I know; 'poor starving students'... been there, done that ...
considering what the beer & McDonalds budget for most students is; I think
they can spring $25 a month for (absolute gobs of) bandwidth if they really
want.)

>If Napster uses a standard set of ports for client-client communication, 
        therein lies the problem.. it doesn't. it takes whatever ports are
available. :)

Carl Soderstrom