Cornell Blog: An unofficial blog about Cornell University

I left the following comment on Christian Montoya’s post about The College Freeway, a new site which collects college-related documents, but it appears it has been deleted caught in the spam filters:

I took a look at The College Freeway and I’m not impressed. I hate to be so negative, but it seems like a less-useful Scribd ripoff designed expressly to either (a) help college students cheat on work or (b) violate the copyrights of people running the course. Scribd, like Google docs, is a generic document sharing and collaboration site, whereas TCF seems to encourage abuse.

Since there are already a few thousand documents, I can’t give numbers, but stuff in CS100 is ripped off of Charles F. Van Loan’s textbook, and the CS211 resource is stolen from a TA’s online course notes. Neither of these is public domain, or under a copyleft license.

You should take a look at TheCollegeFreeway yourself, and see if my assessment of the site is correct. To Christian’s credit, the site is nicely designed, but personally I wouldn’t want to work on a project I knew to built on a business model of theft:

To give you some examples of material that shouldn’t be copied:

• 9 chapters of Charles Van Loan’s Introduction to Computational Science and Mathematics
• 31 course problem sets and prelims for COMS381
• More prelims and problem sets from AEM 221
• The entire course materials for BIOG 110
• Lots of the professor’s ECE 303 hw solutions, which are handwritten.

On the other hand, there is some useful material there, like these class notes for ORIE 568, which falls on the legal side of the line. I usually side with pirates when it comes to electronic copying, but pirates are people stealing from the big bad record companies, who are also basically evil. The two morally negate each other. However, non profit educational organizations are not evil; their copyright materials are what they use to educate you. So, I get more irritated when they’re ripped off.

Attention all students interested in business: the Wall Street Club is Cornell’s newest finance-related organization.

Recently founded, the Wall Street Club’s mission is to promote a better understanding of financial markets and macroeconomic events through an invigorating, open-discussion forum.

The Wall Street Club is open to all undergraduates, and is geared towards students with a strong interest in finance and related careers. All members are expected to be active participants and should be willing to take on leadership roles. Previous knowledge of finance/financial markets is not required.

If interested, applications are due Sept. 25. Please send a paragraph of interest to thewallstreetclub@gmail.com. Thank you.

Regards,
Stanton Lenahan ‘08

You may have heard that years of Media Defender emails have become publicly available. Media Defender, a company which uploads and shares fake media files on various file sharing networks to try and reduce piracy, is the RIAA/MPAA’s first line of defense in their fight against illegal file sharing. And you, as a college student, are probably one of their targets.

Media Defender recruited heavily at Harvey Mudd, and also tapped university pools for interns. The best way to fight a young generation of file-hungry students is clearly by hiring some of them to turn against their peers and protect big-media. Their concern with educational institutions seems limited at best. On April 12th, Media Defender president Randy Saaf asked:

Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down. They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself). Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

So, Media Defender understands that it can’t win against University students well supplied with bandwidth and torrenting knowledge, and it doesn’t seem to care. Other emails suggest that .edu ip addresses comprised 2.5% of their Gnutella network monitoring in April, but only .65% in July. Either way, .edu is a small fish in Media Defender’s pond.

Does this mean you should relax? No. Media Defender is still out there poisoning a shared resource, wasting bandwidth, and trying to bait Americans into downloading “fake” files. Even if they don’t care about you as a University student, and aren’t trying to sue you (see RIAA and MPAA for that), they’re still just making filesharing a less efficient environment. Blocking their ips is a good way to start; reading more about the leaked email is another trail to follow.