Tracking anything is quite easy. It's only a matter of knowing what to sniff. A properly-configured (free) Snort box can sniff pretty much any P2P traffic, and I wouldn't be surprised if your school has the grad students developing rulesets and/or monitoring the boxes as a part of their courses. Try downloading Snort and look at the docs. Even if you're a newb you'll find learning and writing IDS rules is a piece of cake if you have any sense of programming; if you have taken a programming course, you'll find it even easier to master. If you are reasonably computer-literate, you'll master Snort in a day, if that. It's all about pattern-matching. That's how easy it is. The purpose of this exercise is to impress upon you how easy it is to track what people do. Furthermore, in a university environment, your school has access to zero-cost labor.
Let me add in some of my knowledge here, just to show WHAT some of you are falsely assuming. WRONG! MAC adress, system number and name, and sometimes your system's MOBO identifier are ALL given up when a connection is made. Like Dunker said, look at snort. Wrong again. If your windows is registered to your name, they have that much as well. And let's not forget your talk of proxies. Are you forgetting that since the school is the WiFi access, HE CAN'T USE PROXIES TO ANONYMISE HIMSELF FROM THEM THAT WAY? 'Nuff said here, i feel Dunker already did a more than adequate job at telling you why you where wrong, i'm just here to remind you that as long as you keep making these silly assumptions and keep reading *intentionally* misleading info, it'll be YEARS before you even become worthy of the tag "scriptkiddie", let alone be able to call yourself "hacker" *or the more consumer friendly "IT Security specialist"*. @ the original poster : The RIAA has companies that conduct research online, trying to gather ip's of folks on P2P networks, Usenet, etc. As for disciplinary actions in school, think among the lines of having your internet turned off, suspensions, and in bad cases, being kicked out of school. Bottom line : don't do it, or if you must, use whatever internal sharing there might be, most colleges have drknets and other ways of students sharing stuff amongst each other.
They Can Tell Who You Are Because Of Programs they have they can access you computer and see you files
Wow, that was enlightening, i don't think that was mentioned yet... Oh wait, yes it was.... silly me.
thank you, dan! i was hoping you'd show your mug and straighten a few things out. *edit* i think i see more evidence for that rant now. do we have another Master of the Obvious? why yes, we do. Master of Crappy Grammar, too. ^.^
I feel my blood beginning to boil, just slightly. If i find more of this, i'll be making that new audio rant you've been craving so much, my furry friend ;-)