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University Raids Graduate Student Office for Using BitTorrent

torrentfreak.com — Students on campuses around the US are having increasing success in dealing with groups such as the RIAA and MPAA, and the frivolous, and often perjurous lawsuits that they send. It is very disturbing then, for a graduate student at the University of Northern Colorado (UNCO) to be targeted by his own university.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 26, 2007

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  • iceshake, on 10/31/2007, -1/+68Wouldn't it have been easier to just disable network access for that person's user name?
  • Aythun, on 10/27/2007, -4/+24"I didn't read the article"

    Comment invalidated.
  • aigulf, on 10/26/2007, -0/+16Read to the end. That 20Mb is a portion of the total university's bandwidth that is specifically allotted for 'P2P applications such as Skype and BitTorrent'. This isn't 33% of the total university bandwidth...it's 33% of what they've already portioned out for the very application that he was using.
  • leffunov, on 10/26/2007, -2/+17What crappy bandwidth for a university!!
  • dynacrylic, on 10/27/2007, -1/+16... or wouldn't have been easier to just disable the network port he was plugged into?
  • noisymime, on 10/27/2007, -0/+14Read to the end of the article, it clearly states that the 20Mb was an allocated portion of their total connection that was dedicated to P2P and VOIP applications.
  • aaronm67, on 10/26/2007, -2/+15Sounds like the univsersity should have some bandwidth caps. Allowing one person to consume 1/3 of the alotted bandwidth is ITs fault.
  • Rijnzael, on 10/27/2007, -2/+14config t
    interface FastEthernet0/24
    shutdown
    Any competent network admin could handle issuing that to a switch. The fact that this actually went to the computer to disable the applications in question gives insight into his lack of not only competence, but ability to effectively judge a situation. Not only do they need a bigger pipe, they need a new IT guy.
  • DivisibleByZero, on 10/26/2007, -1/+13"What makes Mr Lambden’s response more troubling, is that he’s also the person that deals with all DMCA requests/notifications that are sent to the university."

    This guy's trying really hard to find a conspiracy. I was shocked as well to find out that the General Counsel is the guy whose job it is to respond to legal notices AND press inquiries about legal issues....
  • Senn, on 10/31/2007, -7/+19A university with a 20Mb pipe? The uni I went to here in the UK had 155Mbit and even that wasn't enough sometimes. It was pretty sweet when I could be bothered to get up early though... ;)
  • KloroFormd, on 10/26/2007, -2/+12Does "uploading through BitTorrent" automatically mean "Sending out all mah warez and muzik"? Nope.

    What if he was being kind and seeding Ubuntu 7.10?
  • Rijnzael, on 10/27/2007, -1/+11That your university doesn't NAT dorm subnets is their fault. Still, as said above, RTFA.
  • marvinmatthew, on 10/26/2007, -0/+10But what was he doing on BitTorrent? Downloading copyrighted material? Or seeding the latest Ubuntu iso? I believe that the university considers the latter acceptable.
  • Jobe479, on 10/31/2007, -4/+14Keep your warez and other pirating activities at home people. And don't whine when you get caught violating policy that you signed in order to use their network.
  • vonskippy, on 10/29/2007, -3/+12Oh boo hoo. I remember when graduate students actually worked on, you know, studying and stuff, not wasting bandwidth and whining about getting busted for it.
  • inactive, on 10/26/2007, -2/+10pipes are old tech, you have to put threads on it, or solder it. All the modern stuff uses tubes and compression fittings.
  • capiCrimm, on 10/26/2007, -0/+8that's why they give you a roommate.
  • Haidoken, on 10/31/2007, -0/+6even though they violated their own policies, the guy can't bring them to task because its the university staff that committed the offenses
  • saifatlast, on 10/26/2007, -2/+8I dunno man, I can imagine some pretty big pipes... like pipes you could fit a supercarrier in and stuff. Or a pipe the size of a mountain. That's a pretty big pipe, IMO.
  • capiCrimm, on 10/26/2007, -1/+72TB is a ***** of stuff to be all illegal. If he was uploading movies, and lets say each one is 3GB, that'd be... now that I think about it your right.
  • Qeveren, on 10/26/2007, -1/+7Irrelevant. The university folk had no business operating his computer, for any reason whatsoever. They could have simply blocked his connection remotely, and not have violated their own policies and possibly the law.
  • tsunamisteve, on 10/29/2007, -1/+7"University RAIDs Graduate Student Office for Using BitTorrent" would be equally interesting.
  • Ugoff, on 10/26/2007, -0/+5At least they can get a connection there at UNC. They pretty much block all bittorrent traffic here at CSU :(
  • 80hd, on 10/26/2007, -1/+6No kidding. It's hard to know exactly but Purdue has somewhere between 500 and 1500 megabits of bandwidth. North Colorado doesn't seem to have it goin on :(
  • Davekcon, on 10/27/2007, -2/+7wow.
  • dynacrylic, on 10/26/2007, -0/+5Sounded like my university for a minute- "Instead, he has received lies, and obfuscation." - until I remembered it was University of Northern Colorado.
  • arcticblue, on 10/27/2007, -1/+6I did this all the time to people when I was deployed to Iraq. I set up a server to monitor and graph all traffic by IP address and sent out an email saying that traffic was going to get strictly monitored because of recent abuse. When I saw someone trying to use a proxy or trying to do anything that was against the network policy, I shut down their port and told them to have their superior get in touch with my captain. Pissed alot of people off, but bandwidth usage dropped dramatically.

    Now, I'm out of the military and unemployed in Japan. Man, it's HARD to find a job here!
  • kindrobot, on 10/26/2007, -1/+6Yeah, tubes are the new pipes.
  • cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+4That's probably a better backbone than my ISP has =/
  • 80hd, on 10/27/2007, -2/+6Between gigapop (indiana's subsidized fiber network) and internet2, Purdue has some of the best backbone access I've ever seen. I'm not even sure of the aggregate size but it must be at least 500-750megabit
  • koroginagisa, on 10/29/2007, -0/+4The IT guy was able to uninstall programs on his computer? IT dude is either pretty good with computers (which I doubt from the fact he had to physically go to the computer to disable it's access), or buddy forgot to lock his computer. Either way, both are idiots.
  • ydt89, on 10/26/2007, -1/+5boulder? or denver? the answer determines what college all im going to.
  • kurtwinter, on 10/26/2007, -3/+7Once again the incompetency of others is criminalization of the user. If the admin was worth his/her title, they would have implemented QoS and throttled that traffic.
  • ferric21, on 10/26/2007, -1/+5CSU is in Fort Collins; bittorrent traffic isn't a problem over at the Comp. Sci. building :).
  • pr0gr4mm3r, on 10/29/2007, -0/+4...and that's why we have passwords on our computers.
  • HentaiJeff, on 10/26/2007, -1/+4This is different. a Uni network you're not really paying for. Comcast you have to pay 40-50 bucks for and you want your money's worth
  • kuzotz, on 10/26/2007, -0/+3Of course. Japan's economy sucks in terms of number of available jobs vs. demand. Though my friend is planning on working for an architecture firm.. I'll be at Asian Pacific University in Beppu soon..
  • otw7, on 10/26/2007, -4/+7A 20 megabit connection for a university seems incredibly slow, but thats just me...
  • BrandNewJesus, on 10/26/2007, -0/+3Ahhh *****, deleted, it was stupid anyway.
  • misterjangles, on 10/26/2007, -4/+7He implemented the old-skool QoS - getting up in the guy's face.
  • psyjoniz, on 10/29/2007, -1/+4the article did not say whether or not he was downloading legit stuff or not, so everyone berating the guy for 'illegally downloading' can stfu.

    the admin should have throttled the bw.
  • arcticblue, on 10/26/2007, -1/+4Yeah, I'm about to have to settle at a pizza place down the street. Don't think they could use an IT guy, but I worked for pizza hut before I joined the military so maybe they'll hire me. It's not the job I want, but it's a paycheck.
  • TheMidnight, on 10/26/2007, -1/+4My undergrad had a 45 Mbps connection to the Internet. The bandwidth will depend on many factors: 1) Number of students at the university 2) University IT budget 3) Maximum provided speed by ISPs in the region 4) Amount of research done at the university. My undergrad was a large school, but was only regional, didn't do much research and was a state university with mostly regional attendance. Someplace like Purdue or my graduate college where major computing research is done (or in larger cities) are bound to have better bandwidth. I imagine northern Colorado isn't the nexus of gigabit ISPs.
  • dafunkmonster, on 10/29/2007, -1/+3Um...can't UNCO afford managed routers? You know, for throttling bandwidth based on mac address? My university makes everyone register your ethernet cards with your student username, and then throttles your connection speed based on how much you download. For every Gb of data you download in 24 hours, you get throttled down a tier, starting with 3M up and down, and ending with 56K. It takes 8 Gb in a week to get down to 56k.
  • Rijnzael, on 10/26/2007, -1/+3CU doesn't. :)

    They shape, but encryption solves it. Plus, you can get about 10Mbit off of peak hours.
  • Ziak, on 10/26/2007, -0/+2haha got to love people saying stuff they don't even understand..... honestly please before you ridicule someone pick up a freaking Data Comm book and read....... it can occur very very often, even on properly configured network. Now we could very easily say that noise,static, and attenuation would cause collisions as well. The time for the switch hopefully to have a correct path to the MAC address its sending packets to. Now ignoring the word Ethernet and moving past to lets say fiber optics brings up refraction and reflection of data both causing problems achieving max speed. There is also overhead for the type of protocol you are using for sending the data... full speed is almost 99.99% impossible to achieve.
  • marvinmatthew, on 10/26/2007, -2/+4So if he was seeding/downloading the latest version of Ubuntu, that will be a violation of copyright? I thought that most open-source software was legal to bittorrent.
  • SyberMile, on 10/26/2007, -2/+4i say sue and make them pay all your tuition off
  • aaronm67, on 10/26/2007, -2/+4I'm not saying they should cap torrent usage, I'm saying a university with 20mbit of P2P/VOIP bandwidth needs to split that bandwidth evenly between the people using it. As in, slow all traffic, limiting to a .5-1mbit connection per user.
  • cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -1/+3500MB per week? At my University (in Australia) we're limited to 400MB per semester (15 weeks) :-(
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