Torrenting in College

[L0rd_M@dness]

So... I finally made it to college :p
And torrenting is such a nice way of sharing files (totally legal ones, of course)
One of the professors (or just some sort of teacher) in one of our orientation sessions said that he's caught many of his students torrenting illegal stuff and he will punish this.
Of course I won't have to worry about this (since I'll totally never torrent illegal stuff), but just out of curiosity, is his threat empty? If not, what to do in order to not get caught?
Just curios, since torrenting clients are considered to be 'safe', and are supposed to encrypt connections...

[hanorotu]

I hope you are kidding about the last sentence..

You need to do some 'your end' computer stuff like proxies and whatnot. It also helps to have a client that has extra security features.

[s0uthboy]

Not every clients encrypt your traffic, some does (vuze, uTorrent ...) but it comes useless if the teacher you mentioned, got physical access to the machine used for downloading illegal stuffs.. since he can just check the history of downloads.

[Thor]

If it's on your personal laptop just spoof the mac address when you're connecting to the wireless to torrent. Unless you have to sign into a college gateway to access the internet he won't be able to identify you. (I'm assuming your professors threat is related to students using the college network to torrent).

Your professor sounds like an asshole.

[Kulverstukas]

In such cases a seedbox is the answer if you have money to spare. Torrent on the seedbox and download the content via FTP to your machine.

[bluechill]

In such cases a seedbox is the answer if you have money to spare. Torrent on the seedbox and download the content via FTP to your machine.

Or HTTP. Basically just do the torrent not within the college network and you're golden (so long as the place isn't like your house...)

[L0rd_M@dness]

Well doing the torrent out of college network is out of question since I live on campus :p
I mean ultimately I could just purchase a VPN and use their proxy on my torrenting client so all they'd see is my connection to the proxy.
Seedbox sounds creative, I'll have to see which one will be more economic...
So the threat is real after all, even on uTorrent... right?

[Kulverstukas]

uTorrent has an option to encrypt traffic, but I don't know how effective it is... probably not much.

[vezzy]

uTorrent has an option to encrypt traffic, but I don't know how effective it is... probably not much.

All major torrent clients do, not just the putrid bloat that is uTorrent.

Not to mention it isn't actual encryption, but more akin to obfuscation (the strength only averages around 60-80 bits). Traffic analysis is still a viable solution that ISPs use to discover torrent traffic.

[AlchemyVibrates]

Hi, I created an account the other evening and have been wniftyg for an opportunity to write the "hello world" for my profile and introduction so unfortunately, I have no info posted yet.  After noticing the topic, I see a chance to pitch in so I'll get to the About Me later.

A few neat things to look at:

• Peerblock is a nifty little application that helps weed out nonsense. Looked sketchy to me at first but it is worth a peek
• Hotspot Shield VPN has a college discount that is pretty nifty
• Running Utorrent on a VPS or in a virtual Linux distro
• Proxy chains can be quite nice

Your professor sounds like an ignorant prick.  Yes, the tracking things could be done but the resources necessary to do such a thing are generally not in enough surplus to warrant a college doing that unless they have a tiger team IT department.

If you need elaboration on any of the things, I'd be more than happy to help. OP, I love your tagline and understand the feeling.

[taters]

Hi there, sysadmin here. Just thought I'd pop in and point out several things:

It's incredibly simple to figure out who's torrenting on a school network. We did it with an IT team of 2 people and some good documentation of ports. Most firewalls and QoS gateways have the functionality built in, and couple it with several different methods of figuring out who is doing it.
Also:

Peerblock: doesn't work.
VPN: possible, but it's likely it's blocked.
VPS: Always a good thing, unless your provider gets pissed and knocks your service off

I've always found that the best thing to do is seedboxing with sftp. The provider I use is whatbox, https://whatbox.ca/plans
I like their heat plan, good price and great speeds.