Okay, so I’ve heard all the horror stories and know that using torrents in universities is a bad idea. So, my question is this: if I use sites such as Rapidshare and Megaupload to download music, movies, and so forth, can the university see what exactly I’m downloading and will they care/ take action against me?
Chosen Answer:
yes they can take action using there broadband for non-academic usage, since most college/universities will have a usage policy what you can and cant do, and yes they can monitor everyting you do on the machine and most of the time there is nothing to show that they are remote monitoring you, since they will have broadband monitoring their servers and if they see a high spike they will just disconnect and better have a good answer.
yep they can .. and do now..
and yep everything goes thru their gateway.. so they know..
IF it was say torrents and NOT copyrighted material, then no problems..
some companies use such things to help reduce their bandwidth.
yes they can take action using there broadband for non-academic usage, since most college/universities will have a usage policy what you can and cant do, and yes they can monitor everyting you do on the machine and most of the time there is nothing to show that they are remote monitoring you, since they will have broadband monitoring their servers and if they see a high spike they will just disconnect and better have a good answer.
Universities can monitor everything you send or receive if you use their internet connections. However, at least at my university, they didn’t care what you did unless you gave them reason to. I suspect most are that way. But my university would monitor your bandwidth usage. In the first couple years I was at my university, they would simply cut off your connection for a short while if you used too much bandwidth in a 24 hour period. They gave students a website they they could visit that tracked their bandwidth usage. If the student did this too many times, they would get in trouble, or possibly, have their connection disabled for the rest of the semester. I know some other universities implemented similar plans. After a while, to get around people constantly going over their bandwidth usage, my university implemented a different plan. They automatically throttled your bandwidth. If you downloaded (or uploaded) a certain amount within a set period of time, they would reduce your speed temporarily. If you continued to use all of your bandwidth after it was reduced, they would reduce if further. Eventually, you would wind up with a speed on par with AOL dial-up. until a period of time passed and your complete bandwidth was restored. My university only cared about bandwidth that transfered data to/from off campus sites and servers. They didn’t care about bandwidth between campus building because that was handled by their own infrastructure and not by their ISP, with they had to pay for. Because of this, a CS student implemented is own on-campus file sharing program that only worked for students on campus. They network managers conveniently looked the other direction as far as that was concerned.
How your school handles things may be different. They may be totally against anything that has a possibility of illegal file sharing and penalize you for it. Or they could be a university that protects the identity and anonymity of their students from accusations of external organizations, unless the accusers can provide proof to say you were guilty or have a warrant. However, most will monitor the extent of your bandwidth usage within a 24 hour period… just because excessive bandwidth costs them money. Most will ignore you unless your give them reason to scrutinize you. When you go the university, as other students about their experience with their network connections.