What's in a title?

Speaking of UC lawyers fighting lawsuits, I had a conversation today with a colleague to change 'resource-sharing' to 'file-sharing' in the title of a paper we submitted today. The paper was aimed at an audience who probably wouldn't understand what 'resource' is, but would understand 'file' - so I thought it'd be best to change it.

Part of our research into decentralized architectures can (and does) apply to file-sharing applications. I don't view file-sharing as a terribly interesting decentralized domain, but it's one that connects with a lot of the audience. Therefore, we inevitably mention it in our papers. In this particular case, we had a group of undergraduates working on a project to create a file sharing application using PACE. It turned out rather well - all things considered.

What's interesting is that the campus forbids any use of file-sharing software automatically. All BitTorrent traffic is automatically blocked and if you do use it, your machine gets black-holed by the campus firewall. We had one of our servers in the office blocked because we downloaded Knoppix via BT. Lovely. As more and more legitimate uses are found for BT, I'm continually locked out due to the wide blanket NACS casts over the campus network.

We can write the software, write papers about the software, but we're forbidden to actually take advantage of it. Isn't the ivory tower nice?

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