Note, again, that the Penalty Box does not affect a computer's connection to on-campus sites.
One's LAN jack is put into the Penalty Box once the total amount of incoming and outgoing Internet and/or Internet2 traffic exceeds 2 Gigabytes over a 72-hour (3 day) period. Two Gigabytes over a 72-hour period is a lot of traffic; "normal" Internet use will never generate this amount of traffic. One's jack is removed from the Penalty Box 72 hours after the amount of off-campus Internet traffic over the prior 72 hours falls to 2 GB or less. This reduction in speed is what causes the general Internet slowness, possible dropped AIM connections, and slow Web page loading about which students whose connectivity has been reduced have complained.
A jack can also be put into the Penalty Box if an excessive number of Ethernet addresses, or IP addresses not assigned by DHCP, are observed at the jack within a 72-hour period. Such jacks are removed from the Penalty Box 72 hours after any bogus addresses time out from the jack. Since the time out period for addresses is itself 72 hours, this means that once a jack goes into the Penalty Box for these reasons, it will not come out of the Box for six days assuming no additional bogus addresses appear at the jack in the meantime.
A student can determine whether his or her jack is in the Penalty Box by first going to
www.lehigh.edu/network (user ID and password must be entered for access)and then clicking on the "WIRED Rate Limiting Status (Penalty Box)" link.
As stated above, file-sharing programs such as KaZaA are the primary cause of students exceeding their off-campus Internet traffic limit. By virtue of the way the software works, even if a student isn't downloading files, KaZaA (or other file-sharing software) is probably still active in the background allowing anyone in the world to download files from his or her computer. When a student (whose network speed is not currently being reduced) experiences slow connectivity, it is quite possibly because media (music, video) files are being downloaded from the student's computer by other KaZaA (or other file-sharing software) users. This downloading can cause the student's off-campus Internet traffic to exceed the limit, triggering the automatic reduction in speed to off-campus Internet sites.
The only reliable way for a student to keep his network connection speed from being significantly reduced due to excess off-campus traffic is to uninstall all file-sharing programs from his or her computer.
It is very important to keep in mind that, when you buy a CD or movie (all content of which is copyrighted), you are actually only licensing that product for your own personal use; under U.S. Copyright law, the distribution of copyrighted materials is the exclusive right of the copyright owner (17 U.S.C. 106(3)). Since neither you nor anyone else who purchased a given CD or movie has distribution rights to that material, the vast majority of material flowing through Kazaa and other peer to peer networking programs is in violation of copyright law. Representatives of the copyright owners regularly monitor these peer to peer networks for illegal distribution of their copyrighted works and notify the University of such infringement. Upon receipt of such notification the University must take action to block access to the infringing materials. Hence, the use of KaZaA or other peer to peer networking programs can result in the total loss of network connectivity.