CibbuanoStanford University decides to use BitTorrent
October 24th 2008 01:45
BitTorrent is often demonized as a tool of pirates and malicious downloaders, crippling the music and movie industry by shamelessly stealing from the big, bad Web.
As a result, many universities have started clamping down on BitTorrent, and some ISPs will block any data that uses the protocol.
Of course, these are lame duck solutions... as soon as one protocol is blocked, it's a trivial matter to make a minor change to the datagrams to make them look unlike BitTorrent and, no matter how good your filter, there's someone smarter than you out there, with an idea about how to get around it.
It's with this in mind that Stanford University decided to stop fighting and embrace BitTorrent.
After all, the benefit of BitTorrent is that it makes the distribution of large data files a breeze... instead of your server uploading it to thousands of clients, it's collectively shared among users. All you need to do is back and have a Coke and a smile.
"The University not only gives away videos of lectures, but also syllabi, handouts, homework and exams. In addition to offering torrents, the courses are also available on YouTube, via iTunes and Vyew. With the project Stanford aims to spread knowledge on technology worldwide."
That's how you can tell that Stanford wants to stay on top of the game - they embrace the burgeoning technologies, and quickly move away from old models. Sure, you can get the course content for free, but Stan U correctly recognizes that people pay the big bucks, not for the material, but for the environment and reputation.
"For now, only the 10 most popular computer science and electrical engineering courses are published online, but additional courses will be added later. All course materials are published under a Creative Commons license, which allows others to adapt, remix and share them as long as it is for noncommercial use, and if they link back to the university."
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