Fighting for more open network at LinuxTag

I'm currently in discussion with the networking team and trying to talk them into a more open policy for their conference network.

In the previous years, they have adopted a security policy that effectively blocks any traffic that is not for a very limited list of destination ports (spop3, simap and others). You were unable to use protocols like cvspserver, rsync or even IPsec.

Apparently this kind of policy was adopted on behalf of the ISP who sponsored network access, in fear of the legal risk of providing an open network.