Sharing programs hinder computing network

The enormous popularity among students of multimedia sharing programs has noticeably slowed the Internet in residence halls this year. Programs such as Kazaa, AudioGalaxy and Gnutella have had such an impact on the speed of Internet usage that University Information Technology Services has been forced to implement several changes including a temporary "dynamic rate limit" program.\nThe multimedia sharing programs clog up the Internet because they turn students' computers into individual servers that are accessed by others with the same program, said Sue Workman, director of the Teaching and Learning Internet Technology division.\n"Eighty-eight percent of the Residence Halls network is being used by those coming into the University to obtain these multi-media files from student systems," Workman said.\nTo combat the high traffic, UITS has instituted a one-week-only temporary "dynamic rate limit" program. This trial program will cap the amount of outside users accessing IU's servers. The program has already proven to be effective in reducing the outgoing bandwidth used by multimedia sharing programs to 46 percent.\nIn addition to "dynamic rate limits," the Residence Halls Association is organizing a campaign to discourage students from using the serving (uploading) portions of multimedia programs. If students police themselves and limit multimedia uploading from their individual computers, then RHA won't have to limit multimedia downloading.\n"The problem isn't people downloading at extreme rates," said RHA president Ken Minami, a senior. "The problem is that the outgoing traffic is significantly slowing down the incoming traffic. The dynamic rate limit minimizes outgoing traffic because it doesn't benefit IU students."\nFreshman Nathan Scheeler, a resident of Teter Quad, uses both Kazaa and AudioGalaxy to share music. The slow Internet speeds have been annoying, he said.\n"I've noticed that during certain times of the day, my computer runs really slow," he said. "If it would make it run faster, I'd stop people from sharing my files."\nDownloading multimedia through these programs is a digital quid pro quo. If a student wants to download a song, he or she must download it directly from another person's hard drive, through programs that act as gateways such as Kazaa and Gnutella. Because of IU's T3 connections, outside users often look to students here to download music from. When too many people access a student's hard drives, the system becomes congested and slows down.\nFreshman Ted Derheimer, who uses WinMX to share multimedia, has already stopped letting people have access to his files because of the burden it puts on his computer.\n"It makes my computer very slow, so I only download from other people."\nThe RHS IT committee plans to meet this Friday to evaluate the results of the weeklong trial.