Terbidium

Morpheus Blocked
 Published by daedalus on 2001-11-06 @ 16:06:56

If you currently use Morpheus or Kazaa to download files, you may have recently noticed that the programs no longer work. No, the internet isn't broken, but rather the ports and IP's for those file-share servers have been blocked. IT has taken the drastic step of blocking access because of Phase I registration for Spring 2002. Like earlier this fall, it is neccessary to make sure all students can register for classes, and the only way to do this is to block access to the biggest bandwidth pigs: Mopheus and Kazaa. IT does plan to re-open the access once all early registration is over.

Here's the message directly from Ron Skopitz as sent to Ed Klein:

"Remember Napster? Well, the heir-apparent to the Napster file-sharing network is a system called "kazaa.com", and its client software, "morpheus". We have seen an absolute saturation of our web connection over the past several weeks from students using this software. We've had conversations with some of the folks in the dorms about this who were concerned over our bandwidth usage (Dustin Grau, most notably).

Eventually, we plan to implement some limitations on the use of kazaa that are transparent to the users. However, our web connection was being used beyond capacity today, and as it is registration time we were forced to cut off access to kazaa.com completely. This is likely to elicit much complaining from students, possibly in the form of "the network is broken".

We just thought you should know in case it becomes an issue. Once we get some development time we'll work on a way to restrict, but not eliminate, access to this site."