I'm living in an on-campus apartment next semester at a large university, and a couple of people I know have gotten "caught" downloading stuff, but I believe there is a first warning before any action is taken.
I occasionally use LimeWire for a quick song, and I use BitTorrent when I need to (for a TV show I missed that week, or something), but usually I do the bulk of my downloading on my home computer. I go home on weekends, burn it, and take it back with me.
I'm sure I have more of a sense of bandwidth (and file sizes) than my friends do, and that's probably why I haven't gotten in any trouble yet.
I plan to do something new this semester: remote admin to my home computer, where I can start any Torrent that I want, and it'll be ready for me when I get a chance to go home. I also plan to do any P2P (LimeWire) downloads at home, and then use FTP to pull it back onto dorm computer. That, however, will take a while since my upstream at home is capped at about 35kbps.
I have a couple of questions:
1. What can the University "see," and what can they not see? Do they see the software I use to DL, do they see the servers I connect to, or do they judge only on bandwidth? If I connect to my home computer directly via FTP, can they see the actualy file name\type that I transfer, or can they only see the "data" that is transferring? (i.e. can they tell if i'm transferring a 3mb mp3 or a 3mb digital image?)
2. What should I specifically avoid doing on my dorm network?
3. What are some more efficient ways of hiding what I'm downloading (i.e. running remote admin and FTP on my home computer)? Any ways of proxying to hide the servers I connect to?
Thank you for reading! I will watch this thread for any responses!
