The Enforcers

摘要

Today's college students live well. Although they still have to put up with messy roommates and community showers, their dorm rooms are equipped with air conditioning, state-of-the-art digital telephones, 100 channels of cable TV and super-high-speed data connections. They don't even have to attend class anymore because lecture videos can be streamed to desktops on demand. As long as Domino's keeps delivering Philly cheese steak pizza, they never really have to leave their rooms. But one modern convenience has been removed from the dorm rooms at the University of Florida. Campus residents can no longer use Kazaa, Morpheus or any other P2P (peer-to-peer) file-sharing software to download music, movies or software applications. The free lunch ended abruptly at the beginning of the 2003-04 school year, when network administrators working in the campus housing unit turned on software they developed that not only detects illicit network activity but also dynamically enforces acceptable-use policies without IT intervention.