Georgia College's New Policy — Reporting All P2P Users To the Police 421
An anonymous reader excerpts from an article at TorrentFreak: "Georgia's Valdosta State University has updated its network with software that can pinpoint students who use P2P software. The university is committed to stop file-sharing on its network even if that results in prison sentences for students. Offenders will be disciplined by the school and then handed over to the police, the university has announced."
School policy is one thing ("don't use file-sharing software on our resource-constrained network, or we may kick you off"), but I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools.
Update: 11/15 18:27 GMT by T : Reader (and VSU alumnus) Matt Baker contacted the school; he reports that the school's IT director Joe Newton in response flatly denied the claims in the TorrentFreak article, and says the school hasn't installed such P2P tracking software, and doesn't hand students over the police, and says instead "I cannot foresee that we would ever do so." Thanks, Matt.
Any forms of file-sharing? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this related to any forms? What about downloading cc music or shows and isos of linux?
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This is abolutely ridiculous. Furthermore, copyright infringement (even if it was real) is a civil matter. Referral to the police st
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Referral to the police station is of very quesitonable legality.
Uhh, referral to the police is foolish and a waste of time but it's not of "questionable legality". I can refer anything I want to the police. Doesn't mean they will investigate it or do anything but it's not a crime to tell the police about a civil affair.....
Re:Any forms of file-sharing? (Score:4, Insightful)
That might be a good "I am Spartacus" situation.
If college students are good at any one thing (besides getting wasted and pulling all-nighters) is raising hell for a good cause. Why not teach a few hundred students how to use Bittorrent and have them download Linux ISOs and other legitimate, legal stuff nonstop to, in effect, flood the system and make something like that completely ineffective. Or better yet, maybe a student could create a DDOS software variant where a bunch of computers would connect peer-to-peer on the college's network and trade junk data between each other via Bittorrent, Gnutella, and other similar filesharing protocols.
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Actually, copyright infringement can be a criminal matter. It's just that you need to make money from it for it for it to be criminal.
What is criminal is using the university's network against their authorization. They don't authorize anyone to access their network using P2P file transfer software. That's probably going to be a tricky legal situation, but they do have the right to set the terms of use for their own network.
What's really funny, though, is that P2P swarm-style file sharing software isn't the
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Copyright infringement can be a criminal matter. However, it is a *federal* criminal matter, not state.
The local cops would have to call up the FBI. Unless Georgia has separate copyright laws on the books, the state police have nothing to charge the students with.
Re:Any forms of file-sharing? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to make money. The No Electronic Theft Act of 1998 changed the definition of "financial gain." 17 USC 101 now reads:
In other words, now they can go after people trading. I don't doubt that a prosecutor could convince a jury that the ratio system on a Torrent site, for instance, shows that the defendant expected to receive other copyrighted works in exchange for continuing to seed whatever it is they downloaded.
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More properly, if you want to ban peer to peer software, you need to ban the use of TCP/IP on the network. There are networking protocols that won't permit peer to peer connections at all. Perhaps this college needs to consider some other network architecture for their internal network instead.
Of course doing so would have some far reaching consequences including leaving their students unprepared for life outside of the university, but such things don't matter in higher education circles, do they?
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Or patching WoW... It is fun when the clueless come out of the closet..
Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I'm no expert on the US legal situation, but what's to prevent a situation like this from happening:
1) Student installs 100% legal copy of World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2 or any other game which uses a P2P updater system on their PC in their dorm room.
2) Game does its P2P stuff to get its patches.
3) College spots P2P activity and calls police.
4) Police charge college administrators with wasting police time.
5) Student sues college.
Like it or not, P2P isn't just about illegal filesharing. Yes, I'd fully accept that most P2P traffic is illegal, but a blanket policy like this just seems doomed to (probably expensive) failure.
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One would hope so. Recall that ATT did this during the Bush Administration with its warrantless wiretaps. The only difference is that ATT allowed access to everything, rather than a specific subset of everything.
This is a clear breach of 4th Amendment rights. I wonder when the police will be sued.
I would suggest the ACLU take this case, but with their late track record of kowtowing to the government (full body scanners anyone?), I wouldn't look for help from them.
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What does occur to me - and this is where I'd welcome input from somebody who
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Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed, but a blanket policy of reporting all attempts at P2P filesharing (which may not be a crime) to the police as copyright infringement is going to result in a large number of false accusations. As I said in my OP, a large number of legal pieces of software, not least games, use P2P methods for their update systems. If I were running a police department, with limited resources, and suddenly began receiving a large number of false accusations from the local college, at the very least I would want to get the college's administration in for a polite but firm chat about the appropriate use of police resources.
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One key problem here is that using P2P software itself is not a crime and may not necessarily indicate illegal activity.
That was rather the entire point of the example in the OP.
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actually if you distribute more than 1000 dollars worth of copyrighted material within a given timeframe (can't remember the limit) then it can be a felony.
Now given that some software retails for more than that uploading even a single copy of the latest adobe creative suite could push you over the limit.
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There's no 4th amendment problem here. You're a guest on a private network and the network administrator believes that you are committing a crime, so they report you to the police. There's no problem with that.
The problem is that Valdosta is taking the proper steps to verify that the behavior is actually illegal and they are going to end up wasting police time as a result.
But, if you're on a private network, you shouldn't have any real expectation of privacy, besides what state law may give you.
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It's not a private network. This is a state school. It's the government reporting these kids to another government entity, a clear. I smell a civil rights lawsuit just waiting to happen here (especially if the police start acting on these reports).
Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they're not guests, they're paying users of that network - that's part of what tuition pays for. Are you a "guest" of your ISP's network? Do they have the right to go through your data? Then why is it any different in this case?
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No, your tuition isn't for the network. The network is a benefit of being a student (in most cases). And yes, actually your ISP does have the right to go through your data if you broadcast it on their network. Perhaps you need to read your ISP agreement sometime.
Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, I got modded "flamebait". Amazing.
To answer the replies I've gotten so far:
-Yes, it's a private network. My lab on campus is funded by the NSF and the state, but that doesn't mean that you have any right to come in off the street and use my desk. Similarly, most public libraries require you to register (ie, get a library card) before you can use their networks and even then they tend to block a lot of services (including p2p).
-The fourth amendment has typically only been applied to your own personal property (ie, your house, your car). I'm unaware of any 4th amendment legal precedent that the government is not allowed to monitor the traffic on its own network. Again, the 4th amendment works on the idea of the expectation of privacy and I don't think you can have that when you're using a state-funded Internet connection on a state-funded campus.
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I'm unaware of any 4th amendment legal precedent that the government is not allowed to monitor the traffic on its own network.
I'm going to refer to your post the next time somebody suggests that we need a municipal owned last mile to "fix" our broken broadband market.....
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But we're not just talking about labs, we're talking about dorms -- i.e., the students' homes. There's a difference between a lab (i.e., work) Internet connection and a dorm Internet connection!
Mass-downloading of legal software (Score:5, Insightful)
Students should just start downloading legal p2p software... at a massive scale.
Make sure that the university and the police department are getting overworked from false claims of illegal downloading.
It's a peaceful, harmless and non-violent way of teaching stupid people that p2p is not always illegal.
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Problem: While the police may not do anything, the university would be entirely within its rights to ban you from their network or dismiss you from the university altogether. It's their network, and they do have the right to be dicks about it.
The only solution I know of is to go to the few universities which get it right. I'm at Iowa State, which does just about the bare minimum -- if they detect you using P2P software, they send you an automated email which says something along the lines of: "If we can see
some more questions then (Score:2)
TFA mentions that this is about the "campus" of a university.
Does that mean the university-owned computers that are meant only for educational purposes? Or does this mean the privately owned computers that students have in their own rooms where they live?
Makes a LOT of difference to me.
If I lived at a campus where the university would rat on me everytime I would download something that may be illegal (but isn't necessarily) - I would be out of there.
That's not a free country anymore... You'd be guilty until
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It's at the least in bad taste to be hogging the uni's network for non-essential massive downloading, too. The uni's got a legitimate interest in making sure that the students can use their net for actual education-related stuff.
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Almost all bittorrent clients are 'legal' P2P software. It's what you choose to do with it that makes it illegal, just like a gun.
I highly suggest they all start downloading and deleting repeatedly any recent linux distros. See how fast the cops stop paying attention to the reports.
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If the schools internet policy bans p2p software, they're still going to discipline and possibly expel the student.
Sure there may be little or no legal consequences, but screwing up your degree because you breach a contract you freely entered into might not be the smartest move.
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Re:Mass-downloading of legal software (Score:4, Informative)
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Stupid or desperate, I agree. However, in almost every case where someone is signing such a contract, there is literally no alternative. Would you just not go to college, because all of the colleges have this phrasing in their IT contracts? Would you not buy a cell phone because all of the cell phone companies have this phrasing in their contracts? Would you not receive power from the electric company, not receive gas from the gas company, not work for
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I agree with the strategy, but it's easier said than done. It's a significant investment to get into school, and an even bigger one to upset the applecart: daddy paid some tuition, you borrowed the rest of
Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:5, Insightful)
End result: College bans games. Games aid terrorism by masking real illegal activity in a shroud of legitimate traffic; they are therefore illegitimate by proxy.
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Yeah, I use my network connection in my lab to seed a few dozen different Linux distributions, uploading 10's of GB/day. If I was at Valdosta State, I'm sure I'd be one of the first to be contacted.
Dtella (Score:2)
Someone should setup their own DTella [dtella.org] server. It's some pretty slick software that you can limit to on campus IP addresses.
The downloads there are only for the Purdue Campus, but you can setup your own server. They have some pretty complex IP allow rules. For example you can't use the wireless network between 8 & 5. Nothing off campus. Certain buildings etc. It doesn't count against off campus band width usage. Minimum share requirements, etc.
I've hit 40MB/s from some computer labs (that have GigE) with
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Sounds like a plan! Get them all to install utorrent and pull down and share Linux iso's and creative commons music. A great way for the kids today to stick it to the man.... Oh wait, college kids today don't really try to protect their rights and take the time to protest anymore..
The Ohio State massacre really taught college kids to obey and stay in line.... Very few have the guts to do public disobedience anymore.
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More like
5) Police charge college administrators with filing a false police report.
This is a serious charge akin to perjury.
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Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
I dunno, there are a LOT of WoW and CoD players out there. Especially on a college network. With Cataclysm set to release in a month, and CoD just released (Hence needing to be patched most likely, games being what they are) it seems to me that there's probably a lot of legitimate P2P traffic on a university network right now. Gigs and gigs worth per client in WoW's case. I think my computer has downloaded something like 5 or 6 gigabytes worth of patches and preloads (They're making Cataclysm available for direct download rather than making you go to the store and buy a copy) in the last month or two with another 3-4 gigs expected before Dec 7. Then probably another 500MB to a gig in patches to fix the stuff that didn't scale like they thought it would.
Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:5, Informative)
You beat me to the punch on this reply, but since I had already typed up some back-of-the-envelope calculations, here they are.
World of Warcraft has around 12 million subscribers according to Wikipedia. The past couple of months it's been pushing out updates in anticipation of the Cataclysm expansion. Let's round the size of those updates to 5GB (although they may well be closer to 6GB by now). Perhaps not every subscriber is actively playing and has downloaded those updates, but they'll be outweighed by the active players with two copies of the client software (desktop and laptop, or work and home), so let's underestimate the number of updated client programs as 12 million.
You can divide World of Warcraft players roughly into two categories: the majority who let the game client automatically update itself using the BitTorrent protocol; and the minority who prefer to manage their patch downloads manually using BitTorrent. The set of players who pay enough attention to download their patches manually but choose FTP over the more convenient BitTorrent is minuscule. So we can safely estimate the portion of patch downloads that use a P2P protocol as 100%.
12 million subscribers times 5GB per subscriber is 60 million gigabytes of legitimate P2P throughput. And that's just getting ready for Cataclysm this autumn. There must have been several hundred million gigabytes more with the last two expansions and over the life of the game, to say nothing of Starcraft II (huge pre-loads of the entire client!) or other game companies than Blizzard (gasp!).
So, indeed, 60 million gigabytes != all but "almost every single byte of it". Even if piracy does account for a lot, even a majority, of P2P traffic, it does have a nontrivial legitimate usage that Internet users have a right to.
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could you point us to some numbers substantiating this?
Re:Isn't this going to get expensive? (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad there's not a "-1, ignorant" mod, or you would have been spared the "troll". BitTorrent is P2P, and most of its traffic is legal; Linux distros and the like. Plus, there is ten times as much indie music as RIAA music on P2P, it's just that the indies, not having radio, rely on P2P, MySpace and Facebook, which is why the RIAA is against P2P; it isn't about piracy, it's about stifling the competetion.
I bet.... (Score:2)
I bought some lighter fluid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you point me to the appropriate police department to turn myself in as a possible arsonist?
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The best way to put it.
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I passed a free newspaper to someone else on the bus this morning. The police showed no interest when I told them.
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Good one!
So (Score:5, Insightful)
You're young, living on your own for the first time, and the place that's supposed to be teaching you stuff announces that at the first sign of a misstep they'll "discipline" you and then hand you over to the police for a second helping of same, with a permanent record attached to boot.
What a wonderful way to grow up.
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Hey a university is no place for the free exchange of information young man.
You should be spending your time doting on dusty old profs and their stale ideas.
not necessarily a bad policy (Score:2)
the police have discretions about pursuing perps. if they catch you parking where you shouldn't or smoking a joint or speeding, for example, they can just waive you off if the "crime" isn't that major. so the college wins: no administrative headache, the student wins: the police will mostly ignore the pirating. the only people who lose are the police, who have to look through a bunch of emails and hit "delete", and the RIAA, who will have a hard time justifying onerous financial impositions on what amounts
Re:not necessarily a bad policy (Score:4, Insightful)
the student wins: the police will mostly ignore the pirating
Until it turns out to be a student who runs a blog that criticizes the police department, or some politician wants to run on a "tough on crime" platform, or some police officer whose cousin works for the RIAA. Relying on the police to not prosecute people who are reported to them for breaking the law is not something I would do.
Re:not necessarily a bad policy (Score:4, Funny)
of course the police can abuse you. of course anyone can abuse you. but you need to learn that, just as crippling in this world as an overabundance of trust to people who don't deserve your trust, is the existence of people like you: those with such a crippling poverty of distrust that you won't even expect a simple human baseline of behavior in civil society
the abuses you imagine above are rare. of course you might someday suffer from these kinds of abuses. and of course the ceiling can crash on your head right now. you can't live in a shell, expecting the worst all the time. you need to place some trust in your fellow human beings if only because you suffer the most when you assume the worst possible scenario all the time. most people are good and decent. really
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those with such a crippling poverty of distrust that you won't even expect a simple human baseline of behavior in civil society
Look, I do not distrust everyone around me, but I really do not think that trusting the police to not pursue someone who breaks the law is a good idea, even for mild offenses that harm nobody. Where I live, the police suddenly and unexpected started ticketing people en masse for jaywalking, traffic violations by bicyclists, and other offenses that were previously ignored. When I was in college, the police used to go around looking for students who were smoking pot in their dorm rooms -- in private -- an
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How is this going to prevent RIAA from suing them?
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it's not. how is not reporting them to police going to prevent the RIAA from suing them?
the point is, it makes their job of imposing six figure sums on financially poor students look that much more vile, when the police obviously don't consider it a crime, by not pursing it
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this new file sharing app Ares?? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did I miss something? Have the people coding Ares implemented a new protocol, or is this college 5 years behind? Of course, having actually been involved in writing software to track computers on a college campus I am also curious how the college is fingerprinting machines to detect MAC address spoofing, but since this is a press release I wouldn't expect any technically informative information.
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Did I miss something? Have the people coding Ares implemented a new protocol, or is this college 5 years behind? Of course, having actually been involved in writing software to track computers on a college campus I am also curious how the college is fingerprinting machines to detect MAC address spoofing, but since this is a press release I wouldn't expect any technically informative information.
Come on, really. How many college kids do you think are actually spoofing their MAC address? Very likely it's 1%.
Even if it's higher than I think it is, those who DON'T spoof their MAC address are not going to be sophisticated to use this as a defense "It wasn't me! Someone was spoofing my MAC address! I don't even know what a MAC address is!" and, lacking the technical background to muster a defense, they'll roll over.
They don't need to find the guilty party, they just need to make a few examples, does
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"Most college networks require a login to use- even from your personal computer(s)."
Actually, not a login, for the simple reason that that breaks all non-browser devices. They require registration of your device, but if they required a login then no Playstations, Xboxes, or iPhones would work, because you can't login with an email client or a video game. Once a machine is registered (Identified by the closest thing there is to unique, the MAC)then all the bad guy needs to do is check to make sure the targ
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since MAC addresses usually are bound to the network card (pcmcia, usb, pci, even onboard) it might be 'fun' to have a nic-trading situations where people have a POOL of usb wifi dongles and they simply do what they want on the net, drop their usb dongle into the barrel and pick another. could EASILY be done on campus.
keep switching the mac's around to make the whole process useless. ie, make one of their 'tools' worthless.
next up, have linux os's on thumbdrives that can be recycled in a similar fashion (
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Don't know about the college in the OP but at mine they had a WPA2 enterprise network with username/password required and also mac registration.
I could change my laptop mac to match my phone or a second laptop but if the mac and password don't match then you can't connect.
If I got someones pass off them then I could spoof their MAC but if anyone set up a pool like you describe they'd all just be kicked off the network as giving away your pass is against the AUP.
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My guess is it has something to do with "Small college in Georgia" and the fact that the network administrator for said college probably thinks you just said something about McDonald's best selling sandwiches. Luckily for them the students in question probably have no idea what you're talking about either. So it all works out I guess. Until someone does use MAC spoofing, and they screw some poor kid.
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Managed switches don't help prevent MAC address spoofing unless you actually allow a MAC to only connect through the port it first connected on, which kinda gets in the way of people roaming on wifi. Yes there are actually wireless solutions that will approximate physical location by access point triangulation, but good luck in a busy spot. Actually identifying a specific computer on an untrusted network (which they all are these days) is extremely difficult. Knowing what port a particular machine is plu
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I think that the time is ripe to have full authentication of each network node in corporate/campus environments. 802.1X FTW. This of course raises the bar for spoofing only somewhat: if you have physical access to someone else's machine (think helping out a 'friend'), then you can copy the certificates and private keys. Then the spoofee is in even more trouble: it'd be so much harder to convince a jury that the spoofing took place.
Online gaming against policy? (Score:2)
Blizzard (and indeed most MMORPGS these days) uses filesharing to upload patches to their games. So I guess online gaming is not allowed for students there.
No biggie I guess if that's the way they want it. They'd just better make that clear to prospective applicants. "No gamers wanted here."
It's official (Score:2)
Why should the police care? (Score:2)
If the university cared about catching file sharers, t
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Why should they go to all that hassle for something that'll have no negative effect on their district and only serve to push up the crime statistics and take officers off the streets?
For the same reason that the police go after people who possess drugs: it keeps them employed.
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No. A drug bust will garner the cops involved some glory. This is why the cops and the FBI are all over drug enforcement and ignore things like BitTorrent.
No one wants to be the loser that gets the college pirate collar. No. They want the drug bust.
There is a good chance that the local cops don't want to be bothered by this crap and want to waste their time doing something that can get them promoted.
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Valdosta State's rep in Jeopardy (Score:5, Funny)
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When I grew up in Georgia (north of Valdosta, in the Atlanta suburbs), Valdosta was the home of Georgia football. Parents would hold their kids back a year before kindergarten so they'd be bigger for football in hich school (I kid you not). I don't know if it's as stupid a place as it was 35+ years ago, but it sounds like at least some part of it is.
This is absurd. I am quite sure the Valdosta police have better things to do.
As A Georgia Resident... (Score:4, Informative)
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Despite the fact that the first sentence of the very short story clearly names Valdosta State University, and the fact that everyone learns as a child that significant words in headlines are capitalized, you still managed to confuse yourself into believing that the school in question is Georgia College? I don't buy it. You are feigning confusion as an excuse for posting. Behave yourself.
making homework illegal? (Score:2)
When I was in college one of my classes required that I download, install, and play around with Linux.
At the time, BT didn't exist so the downloads were primarily FTP. But if a professor were to give a similar assignment today I'd guess that just about any distribution you tried to download would want you to use BT.
So, are we going to see students getting disciplined and handed over to the police for doing their homework? Or are the professors going to have to change the assignments to comply with these n
Higher education, by morons... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. Can see that all the dollars from tuition that haven't gone into their "resource constrained" network have gone into getting quality staff there! They've all had the highest quality lobotomies that money can buy!
Criminal vs. Civil (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought your run-o-the-mill copyright violation was a civil matter. Shouldn't they be reporting the students to the copyright holders?
You really think police will try to "sort it out"? (Score:2)
I suspect the police wouldn't appreciate the task of sorting out legal from illegal use of widespread, essentially neutral software tools
Once the school reports someone, they're implicitly making an accusation that illegal activity has already occurred. I don't think it is up to the police to decide at that point; it is a matter for the courts.
So... what next? (Score:2)
lol (Score:3, Interesting)
The universities play these games because the students let them. I eventually just moved off campus. My rent was 1/3rd what the dorms were and I didn't have any more trouble with the university police. I recomend the same for everyone living on campus at this university as well.
So Then Is Windows Banned? (Score:2)
I refused to do this when I worked in Uni IT (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work for a university's network dept. at a fairly high level and it fell on my shoulders to handle the RIAA complaints, I pretty much refused because it was ridiculous. When I would be forced to turn info over, I would just give them IP's which were basically useless but they would never get back to me for more info. When the pressure really got strong, I decided the only way I would comply would be to install a device that did actual audio fingerprinting. This way it wasn't just a witch hunt or false positives based on someone simply using P2P or a filename but verified inspection and reporting. Even then, it had it's own way of handling it internally, after each offense it encountered it would email the user with the info and a warning, after 3 infractions it basically cut the port speed to 56k for that user so they could still do school work but little else, any additional infractions resulted in reporting.
It put the onus on the student and was as reasonable as could be for the screwed up system in place. In the end the RIAA should never have as much power as it does and the fines should be at most $5-20 per song which is between a 500% and 2000% penalty which is quite enough without being so insane as the current system is. No matter how you slice it, it is B.S.
Legal torrents are easily distinghuised (Score:2)
I see a lot of replies about legal torrents, false accusations, etc. These kind of news items tend to be purposely sensational and leave out the practical stuff. I'm pretty sure that in reality their P2P filter will check which torrent tracker is used before determining whether something should be forwarded to the police or not. Sure it's possible that "illegal" trackers host something legal, but I bet it will get them a 99% accuracy or better.
That said, a school should simply block all torrent use and leav
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I'm not disputing that torrents are useful. But do you need to get your WoW updates at school?
quick... (Score:2)
Everyone download the latest Fedora.
GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc. (Score:2)
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yep, and they account for a whopping 0.001% of bittorrent traffic.
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Not just WoW. The new StarCraft game uses BitTorrent for updates as well.
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Re:Parents will appreciate this (Score:5, Interesting)
the 'you must go to college' meme is slowly dying.
actually, it should. not everyone should be in college. furthermore, the 'thinking arts' that america uses to be known for is fading (overseas). the notion of going to school, doing your time in studies and having it pay back is a BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACT and those of us already at-age know this ;(
if I had kids, I would not send them to college. I'd send them to a trade school where they work with their hands in some form (mechanic, plumber, electrician, capenter, etc). these are the outsource-immune jobs. they're less 'sexy' than IT work but IT work simply won't exist in this country when elementary school kids reach the workforce age. like I said, the social agreement of 'study hard and you will get a good job' is busted now and will be even more as time goes on. american 'thinkers' are something companies are now considering to be *too expensive*.
universities are VERY expensive and often don't pay for themselves (again, lack of jobs can make school a pure expensive and not ever by worth what you paid for).
and now you have universities being openly hostile to their students.
I would simply drop out (in fact, I did, back in my day) and get my own education. work experience matters more than a paper degree for most jobs in IT once you get beyond entry level.
the day where you assumed 'grow up and go to college' was for everyone just does not apply anymore. in fact, sending 'everyone' to college was a failure waiting to happen.
if I was trained in construction or plumbing or auto repair, I'd still have a job. but being in software development means my country has sold me out to india/china/etc. I really wish I was in another field and I hope some of you software-thinking kids will reconsider this already saturated field and find something PHYSICAL that you can do for work. those things tend not to be outsourced.