<p>I originally posted this in the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor forum, but any relevant insight would be greatly appreciated!</p>
<p>I've searched the forums and other resources, but have not yet found solid answers. If anyone could kindly answer one or any of the following questions regarding networking that would be immensely helpful. </p>
<p>-What else does U of M monitor besides File Sharing? Bandwidth, etc?? </p>
<p>-How so? Viewing URLs? </p>
<p>-If both my friend and I will have a laptop and a desktop, will we require a router? Routers are disallowed from what I've heard, but many people do it anyways? (How?)</p>
<p>-What is the registration process like? As in, I've heard of people "registering" computers. </p>
<p>I ask these questions because I value online anonymity and would like all of my networking as secured and under-the-radar as possible.</p>
<p>I have no idea what U of Michigan does, but virtually all campuses require you to register your computer in order to get onto their network, and they monitor bandwidth to prevent individuals from degrading the network. You may value your anonymity, but colleges have the right to figure out who it is that may be abusing their network privileges.</p>
<p>At my daughter’s campus, the dorms have wired ethernet connections, and like many colleges, their policies forbid the use of wired or wireless routers. Still, many students use them, and I suppose that the college can still figure out which ethernet port is potentially causing problems.</p>
<p>Thank you for your reply. I myself am not a huge P2P user and do not intend to cripple any network. From this viewpoint, I can certainly understand why colleges want to secure the integrity of their network. I am, however, concerned more in the security/anonymity of sites I visit and was hoping to ensure that.</p>
<p>Thinking of spoofing my routers MAC as my PC’s and disabling SSID broadcasting, lowering wifi range and using a VPN. Any loopholes in this scenario?</p>
<p>My advice is simple. Don’t fileshare. Not on your production machine. If you have a “beater” that you don’t use for work, fine. Too much risk for getting viruses and malware. Just don’t. Trust me, you’ll be happier.</p>
<p>That helps a bit but it’s really when you run the stuff that you run a risk because you don’t know what it is, what it’s origins are and what trojan horse was planted in it. D/L to a beater machine, run it there, and then if it’s ok, transfer it to your machine.</p>
<p>^You could also run the software in a sandbox type environment which doesn’t allow anything permanent to be written to your PC (no registry/system file changes.) I do agree though that a separate buffer machine would be even better protection. A cheap P4 would be perfect. Cost you ~$100, maybe nothing if you can find somebody willing to give one away which shouldn’t be extremely hard given the age of the hardware.</p>
^^^</p>