Cardiff University BitTorrent Banlist Update
OK, ‘Fess up
Who submitted the email in this blog entry to TorrentFreak? C’mon, I won’t be angry…
I posted the thing just because I thought it was an unusual (and probably doomed, but that’s just my opinion) way to approach a problem. I certainly didn’t expect more than a couple of people to read it. So I was surprised earlier when a member of the server team from the Uni’s Information Services dept (INSRV). pointed this article out to me a couple of hours ago…
Embarassed by my own blog
The guy comes over to solve an issue with one of my servers, and mentions all this bru-ha-ha they’re having today over there because someone’s released an email that was sent out only to LCRs (that’s local computing representatives to you and me). He shows me the article and I think “that can’t be me, can it?”
Yes, it can. The number of characters in that X’ed out name at the bottom there is a match to the one I used - and not to the original email. So I think I’m the culprit. ho hum.
So that upset a few members of the network team - not a thing you want to do if you rely on them to work your network for you - and they do look after us. Luckily as it got passed up the chain of command the general sentiment changed from outrage to approval - the high-ups like the idea that cardiff are ‘leading the way’ with this approach (what?) and getting a form of recognition from it.
Missing the point?
Meanwhile, the INSRV team has also found a silver lining: not only are a couple of the comments quite funny (”Finally a good list of torrent sites”), some of them mention the odd site missed by the boys in INSRV - who can fill in those gaps.
One more thing, in the interests of pedantry: the email says that they will be prohibited - these sites are not blocked just yet. But soon, and for the rest of your life (maybe).
Apology
Ok, I lied. One last thing, for real this time.
Any organisation like ours with many satellite, semi-autonomous departments and a single organisation to provide general information services/network/computer support will entail a number of challenges. Sometimes there’s no good way to do something. Sometimes you need to compromise. Because of legacy reasons, the network in Cardiff has outgrown its design, and there are problems; bitTorrent complicates these hugely. It really does impact on our work.
INSRV might not always do things the way I like, but they’re always trying really hard to do the best thing by the university and their users. I posted the original entry because I wanted to talk about the technical limitations, and social education versus technical limitations. Any criticism was supposed to be positive. Sorry if I’ve caused you hassle, boys.
March 9th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
Looks like they got it from Technorati: there you go, folks, that’s how something goes from an obscure blog read by about four people can get to an international news site
I hadn’t realised that wordpress did that, but evidently it happens automagically. This post is already top of the list for a search on ‘bittorrent cardiff’
March 9th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
That’s what you get for using WordPress instead of your own custom blog software
(and not examining the code). Oh, and I think you already know this, but it wasn’t me that did it 
(this is why I have private entries on my site that only my friends can read).
There are a few obvious and notable omissions, which I alluded to earlier, but I didn’t want to list them just in case
(not that I’d know anything about illegal torrent sites 
having never used any… ever… at all… in my entire life)
March 9th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
lol
I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I really don’t want to undermine INSRV’s efforts, but on the other, I really wanted to give working with a blog a proper go, and you can’t do that without being honest, so…
I don’t mind the technorati thing nearly as much as the idea of someone passing the story around without mentioning it to me at all…
I’ve noticed since posting this that all the articles say that this email was posted to thousands of students. As I mention above, that’s not quite true - just to a few hundred staff.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:51 am
Is that your first spam comment post? I used to allow anonymous comments on my website until I got fed up of the spam. I might implement it again after writing some sort of anti-spam feature.
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:21 am
I think it’s the second - there are some spam-catching filtery things going on, but as I’ve been away this week I’ve not been able to keep an eye on them…
April 4th, 2007 at 9:08 am
Nice to see you caught that last one, although it did appear on my RSS feed. I wonder how many spam comments would be stopped if they had to be a certain length/number of characters. The longer the comment is the easier it would be to detect spam, as there’s more to work with. On the downside, people would have to write more in their comments, but I think you know I already write waaaaay too much so I’d be okay.