<p>Apparently, too much of my school’s bandwidth has gone to streaming porn, so they’re beginning to block some porn websites with no way around it. Stony Brook is slowly becoming a school without porn.</p>
<p>If you’re connecting through your school’s network, they absolutely CAN tell what you’re doing and what you’re downloading most of the time. Even if you try to obfuscate things by using torrents or Tor/Vidalia or a proxy, there are countless ways to piece things together in a short timeframe. It’s much, much harder to go undetected than it is to detect. All you need is one weakness to justify further investigation.</p>
<p>Have you ever played around with stuff like Wireshark or packet sniffers? </p>
<p>If the network admins want to hardcore-check your activity, they can. The difference is that most schools don’t really bother. Even at my old university, I know of a few cases, but I know there are countless others:</p>
<ol>
<li>A student who got in trouble for torrenting a few songs.</li>
<li>Another who got in trouble for child porn (turns out it was a file embedded deep within an unrelated zip file somewhere within the otherwise innocuous torrent). They came and had to inspect his hard-drive (which is the legal procedure – it’s only hacking if they get into these files remotely/illegally without consent).</li>
<li>Another who got a notice for torrenting Photoshop.</li>
<li>Another who got a notice for torrenting a game.</li>
<li>Another who got a notice for torrenting an anime series.</li>
</ol>
<p>So to some extent schools do occasionally analyze this stuff (you’re always being monitored – not necessarily analyzed). The only way is to connect to the internet through other means. If you’re logging on through school network, ANY information that gets sent or received can be tracked. Most of the time if you try to bring your own APs/routers/etc, the school will find out one way or another and ask you to deactivate them. Most people connect to the Internet through their school networks.</p>
<p>Stuff like Tor is an implementation of onion routing. It bounces encrypted network traffic off a variety of servers anonymously. But even so, there are methods for detecting Tor/proxy/VPN usage (and, if you wanted, the traffic trail with reasonably high certainty), and it’s oftentimes not hard to connect the dots. Some programs/games connect to the Internet in some form upon installation/use that alerts the school. Sometimes students get caught as a result of trying to download from “honeypots.” Furthermore, students that channel large amounts of network traffic are singled out (if you’re downloading multiple gigs of illegal, copyrighted content, you’re asking to get inspected by the admins). Even if you use Tor, not clearing your cookies between sessions can screw you. Platforms like Java and Flash can also make unprotected connections behind Tor’s back and expose your IP address and the calling source (and henceforth your MAC address to your school).</p>
<p>Your connections themselves can usually be backed out so that even if they can’t directly show that you downloaded a specific file, they can monitor how much traffic was processed and see what sites you visited and usually piece together a probable case and send you a notice. Typically, these notices are just warnings. Students typically get scared and lay off the downloading (I know many who stopped for a long while) or will admit to the download if questioned. But if there is certifiable proof that your computer made a certain connection (e.g. if you do something absurd like download a pirated game through an http connection such as a Mediafire/Rapidshare/Megaupload link), then the school can usually check your hard drive without consent according to school policy (or they can just block your computer from using the school network).</p>
<p>A school can easily see if you’re making encrypted connections to Tor entry nodes. They may not be able to immediately tell what you’re downloading, but usually people are using Tor for a reason and it’ll cause alert. It’s also generally frowned upon to use clients like uTorrent or Azureus/Vuze with Tor because high-bandwidth applications causes overload on the Tor network and can result in port blockage/slowdown anyway (and last I heard, is being rectified – download speeds are often so slow that it makes 56k look fast). </p>
<p>Most students simply aren’t aware of what they would have to do to maximize their protection, and as such, they’re usually easy to monitor and track. The slightly more careful ones that use torrents are still not fully protected. You can keep adding levels of security as much as you’d like in order to make it harder for the admins to monitor you, but any competent admin is going to know what’s up. I’m not even a network guy myself and I know how to look for this stuff – I can only imagine how much more sophisticated the actual admins are with this sort of thing.</p>
<p>All in all, as long as you’re connecting to the Internet through your school’s networks, you’re not guaranteed true anonymity. There’s always a risk. You’re playing around with fire and it’s typically just not worth getting into. You can get most songs at maximal quality for dirt-cheap prices nowadays anyway. Games are typically much more functional when purchased (trying to play cracked games online with fake keys oftentimes requires a lot of time and effort to get working properly). Free versions of graphics programs like Photoshop/GIMP/etc will serve your purposes just fine without any risk.</p>
<p>^ it’s cool that you like to wall o text and all, but i’m not sure if anyone would want to read that after a 4 month necro</p>
<p>tl;dr version: There’s always a risk to downloading stuff through your school network, no matter what you do. But there are plenty of free or low-cost alternatives to getting what you want without that risk if you’d rather go that route.</p>
<p>If you are worried about porn, dont worry, they dont care what you watch and do with their internet. If you are thinking of pirating, dont use torrents and stick to megaupload or other FTP methods to pirating. They cannot track those.</p>
<p>
According to an article about Cisco
Given that they see the destination IP address, the protocol, and the port number, it does not take “a substantial amount of digging” to see what web sites you’ve visited. That’s a standard part of what is recorded.</p>
<p>And there is technology for sale that looks deeper into what is being sent
</a></p>
<p>Much of the recorded network traffic doesn’t require much digging at all.</p>
<p>my nerd detector is going off in this thread</p>