The Alligator has published another article about ICARUS, the university’s anti-filesharing software.

The article quotes a few student members of a Facebook group called Stop ICARUS as well as Associate Provost for IT Marc Hoit. For some reason, the reporter never contacted us for our opinion. Even though we’ve been on the front page of the newspaper talking about it in the past. Oh well.

The article mentions that ICARUS has a patent pending and that it “may soon be available to universities nationwide”. This is a claim they’ve been bandying about since ICARUS was created, and we haven’t seen anything yet. Of course, we wish UF hadn’t tried to patent ICARUS — we hope the university will come out publically in opposition to software patents. But if other universities want to use ICARUS, even though we’d like to change how it operates, that’s OK — the university can just place the software under a free / open source license like the GPL. Problem solved!

Here’s the article, anyway: UF prevents legal downloading of file-sharing software.