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Bittorrent banned from Antarctica, and boy, are the penguins pissed
The U.S. Antarctic Program has banned their use. From the official communique from the USAP's director of IT and communications:
There are many different Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications: BitTorrent, LimeWire, Gnutella, and KaZaa to name a few more popular ones. Some are used to download legitimate software and media, some illegitimate. None of them are permitted on the USAP enterprise network for both bandwidth and security concerns. P2P applications have the potential to overwhelm the internet connections on the Ice and inadvertently bring malicious software and traffic into the network.An unhappy USAP employee wrote FreakBits "The gist I got from it was 'because you are all too dumb to use a computer correctly.' At least the plans for my secret uranium mine won't leak out while I'm down here freezing my ass off."
We went poking around the icy continent to see what other Antarcticans thought about the policy.
One penguin speaking on the condition of anonymity told us, "Hey, there are plenty of legitimate uses for bittorrent. It's going to take forever for our Linux group to download new distros now." He added, "We're not all trying to download episodes of The Real Housewives of Orange County like Professor Opposable Thumbs over there."
And he's right. He stinks like greasy fish, but he's right. Bittorrent and peer-to-peer apps aren't the problem. It's inappropriate use and carelessness that's the problem.
The penguins plan on staging a protest later this month, though they refused to announce any details at this point. "We don't want to jeopardize the operation," said our source.
[via FreakBits]
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsDrew GreenAug 18th 2009 9:41PM
Thanks for the story, Lee. That graphic (and the title) made my night!
turuAug 18th 2009 9:42PM
What is the IP address for Antarctica ? or do they use addresses for their original countries in each base ?
Mobile Phone DivaAug 19th 2009 3:44AM
I agree Drew, really funny caption, LOL!
Too bad about the ban though.
GeirAug 19th 2009 4:48AM
Norway hasn't made any such decision in their territory on Antarctica, so the penguins are gathering at Queen Maud's Land...
EvoAug 19th 2009 9:28AM
Being a former IT worker from down on the icy continent, I can tell you that the bandwidth is less than that of most dial-up connections and anyone that thinks they need bittorrent clients for legitimate purposes are full of it. We just used an SFTP connection to get updates for our servers and they took for-friggin-ever but it was a legit connection.
Money MikeAug 19th 2009 12:53PM
Evo, thank you for letting us know the situation there, but I don't understand the comment that "anyone that thinks they need bittorrent clients for legitimate purposes are full of it." Are you referring to "anyone" in Antarctica because of the bandwidth limitation or are you talking about anyone in general. If you're talking about everyone, then I don't understand why you completely ignore the legitimate purpose of Linux distros that was clearly pointed out in this article.
You sound like one of those people that swear there simply can't be any legitimate users and everyone is lying so they can be a pirate. You're exactly the type of person who should never be given any power because you obviously don't think things through completely and jump to conclusions too quickly.
If you were only talking about people in Antarctica, that's better, but I don't see why they are "full of it." I'm sure they can use other methods to download those large files, but I'm pretty sure bittorrent is preferred.
MarttyAug 19th 2009 6:18PM
This is not new news at all.
P2P has long been banned by the USAP enterprise rules of behaviour as has any nefarious use of bandwidth. This is about bandwidth and the huge cost of getting it in and out of Antarctica...
There are NO wires to Antarctica guys.. It's all satellite which costs a bomb. The USAP is not an ISP and we provide bandwidth exclusively for science.
A mac address is collected and retained as part of the security screen that EVERY laptop must undergo prior to connection on the USAP network. This list is maintained by net-ops guys as is the ability to completely disconnect ANY offending equipment from the network. New technology IS in place to block whatever traffic we feel necessary to block in order to avoid contention.
The point is also that P2P software is prone to abuse and generally bandwidth intensive. Its not just P2P stuff, also "frowned upon" is any activity that involves file sharing, streaming media, downloading music, podcasts etc.
The us government own this network and provide it at huge cost to support the ENTIRE research community in Antarctica.
It is NOT a pipe to provide entertainment services of ANY kind. read iTunes, streaming video etc.. Take your own DVD's and music with you, dont use our network for that garbage.
There are up to 2000 people in antarctica over summer and they have to share approx 13Mb of bandwidth....
This requires serious bandwidth management when you consider that most science projects involve sending gob loads of data back to universities and research organisations. This traffic must always take priority.
If you dont like the rules that are in place to ensure everyone gets a fair crack at bandwidth, then perhaps you should arrange your own internet feed to the ice. Im sure you will very quickly find that the costs are quite prohibitive....
AIVASAug 20th 2009 1:03AM
Kowalski was the unnamed anonymous penguin!