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NEED TO KNOW INFO!
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| First,
please note that while ResCom supports both software and hardware
for students, neither ResCom nor Penn State support the use of
file-sharing programs such as KaZaA for copyright violation or any
other form of illegal activity.
Despite the legal issues surrounding
the use (or misuse) of KaZaA, it continues to be the most popular
file-sharing program in the residence halls at Penn State and around
the world. As
far as the law is concerned, students should know the
following:
Sending or receiving any copyrighted material
(software, music, movies, documents, etc) is illegal. Students can
be
fined, sued and/or criminally charged for this illegal activity.
Read More on Copyrights
Beyond the possible legal issues, which really should deter everyone
from using KaZaA, you should also know how KaZaA affects our
Residence Hall network. Most people fail to realize that with
default settings, Kazaa will use your bandwidth at will and can and
will cause you to get a bandwidth violation. How is this possible?
The Kazaa network has a feature for users called the Supernode. It is
this feature that will commonly use up your weekly bandwidth without
your knowledge and cause you to get a violation. Keep reading to learn
more about this Supernode thing or if you want to be sure that you
have Kazaa configured correctly, we provide a setup page for Kazaa
that will instruct you on which settings to change and how to change
them:
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Why
will the 'supernode' feature of KaZaA get me a bandwidth
violation?
Essentially, two types of computers use KaZaA, standard users and
supernode-enabled machines. When installing KaZaA, the
program is automatically labeled as a 'supernode.' This
means that if you haven't manually 'checked' the checkbox that
sets "Do not act as a supernode," your computer is
acting as a supernode.
This is a feature of distributed networks that can and will have a
devastating effect on your bandwidth. Why? Because
when a computer is labeled as a supernode, other
non-supernode computers ask your computer to do the searching
for them. A computer labeled a supernode holds a
constantly-changing registry of files and their
locations. When a standard-user computer performs a
search, it locates a supernode (and in most cases, several)
and requests the information. The computer acting as a
supernode promptly returns a list of files, their locations
and other information. This wouldn't be a problem,
except all of this transferring of information uses bandwidth
just as anything else. While these bits of information
sent to one computer are relatively small, sending
this information from your computer to 10,000 other computers
uses huge amounts of bandwidth.
And when acting as a supernode, your computer can service
requests from an infinite amount of standard-user computers
for an indefinite amount of time. |
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