<p>I'm off to college in a couple months and I have a concern about torrent downloads. Please ignore the ethical ramifications of torrents in this thread, and please focus on the question that I will pose. I'm a heavy downloader, and I was wondering how piracy works in college, specifically college networks. Is it monitored and barred, monitored and limited, or not monitored at all? </p>
<p>Now, I know this may vary from school to school, and if it is, can all of you share how this isssue is dealt with at their school?</p>
<p>I downloaded a decent amount of files via torrent...although I don't recommend it; there are FAR better ways of downloading things you need. Torrents leave your IP exposed, for everyone to see; too many risks involved with that. Stick with private trackers if you must. The school will probably try and block the port, but you should be ok regardless.</p>
<p>My school blocks downloading services, but I don't know about torrents. If I need to download anything, I use MegaUpload or Pando.</p>
<p>I recommend irc/usenet before anything, fyi. It's for the best, trust me.</p>
<p>im only school affiliated apartments and they black p2p things..i dont know if torrents would fall under that. i, personally, wouldnt even risk it. i stopped downloading things when i got here.</p>
<p>Just because you are downloading something using torrents doesn't necessarily mean that you are pirating something.</p>
<p>xsharex.info paired up with rapidshare.com or megaupload.com, heaven</p>
<p>You're far less likely to get caught using a torrent than say a p2p network like limewire or bearshare. If you must use one of the later, it is strongly advised that you turn off your uploads, as the majority if not all of the legal actions taken against file sharers are brought against them for uploading, not downloading.</p>
<p>Depends on how strict they are with your school's network. At mine, if you have a Windows PC, you're required to install a piece of software that is your gateway to the network, but the program monitors all the software on your PC. So if you have a torrent downloader or P2P, you won't be allowed to get online (it also makes sure that your Anti-Virus and stuff are on and up to date).</p>
<p>I'm a Mac user so I never dealt with it, but I also don't download using P2P or torrent, one of my Mac using friends tried though and found out that you can't use them on our networks either.</p>
<p>And if you managed to find someway around that software, the bandwidth of the network is monitored. They caught the guy who lived in the room next to me doing this. They were monitoring his bandwidth and investigated further and found out he was downloading music.</p>
<p>Also, for people who use the network for more legal purposes, but let their computers downloading/uploading all night will deal with the fact that the entire network is reset at 4AM so anyone still logged in will get kicked off.</p>