Moneydick

It’s really nice to be off campus with my own internet and my own network rules. What if I wanna do usenet? Sure! What if I want to use bit torrent? Go for it! What if I want to download at 800 KB/sec and not wait 15 minutes for a flash video to load?

Vassar Internet

My Off Campus House’s Internet

I wish that I could make a gateway between my network here and the one on campus. It would allow me to print, access subscribed databases… Perhaps an ssh tunnel and a dedicated host on campus? It could work, that is if ssh isn’t disabled.
I remember my freshman year (2003) when the DC++ hubs were sprouting up everywhere. Those were wild times. We had a clever Freshman who set one up for the school. He started it with a login system and an aol username ‘Vassarhub’, but then got overwhelmed and just opened it up to anyone who could log in. Terabytes of data crossed the fiber lines of Vassar over the next couple weeks, enough to freak out our CIS (computing and internet services) folks. He was shut down. Articles were written.
At times there were 30 people in the DCC hub. Needless to say, the LAN speeds had a lot of people drooling.
I was withdrawn for a couple minutes when it was shut down, but I set up an FTP server of some DVDs I had burned from the library (fairuse, anyone?). (We have an impressive collection) It worked for the rest of the year, but CIS did some light reading over the summer, and found some ingenious ways to COMPLETELY CLOSE PORTS internally and externally making it impossible to do VPN, SSH, SFTP, USENET or anything remotely non-academic. The one port they believed they did not have to deny us was the Itunes music sharing port (ahh… ourtunes…).

3689

When I discovered this, I was a happy boyo. I had tried TOR, port scanners, and even encrypted bit torrent.
Whenever I miss living on campus, I just look at this graph and imagine how sad everyone is, even with 64 megabits of download speed.