Privacy Help

[Maguspk]

Okay I got charged $250 for downloading the season premiere of Heroes back in September just recently and it pisses me off. Not only did they say if I do it again I will lose my priveleges but the fine will be 500 dollars. Now what the fuck? They tell me months after it happened and will probably nail me for a later download (I downloaded episode 5 or 6) soon. This is fucking bullshit. How can I get privacy on my uTorrent to prevent asshole schools from prying into my download business. It's not like I couldn't have watched it on the NBC site, I mean what the fuck.

So basically, how can I make sure my school can't nail me again for this bullshit?

[Cephius]

Ouch.

First of all, downloading any copyrighted material on a school network is a bad idea. It's their network, they can do whatever the fuck they want with it including monitoring any and all traffic that goes through it. The RIAA and other anti-piracy organizations lobby schools all the time to filter out illegal downloads, and most schools have no choice otherwise they face a metric fuckton of lawsuits.

Anyway. Your best practice is to just not download new copyrighted stuff (yes it counts even though you can stream it) like Heroes. I can tell you the best ways I know of to keep yourself private, but just a warning, you have zero rights to privacy from a network standpoint as long as you're on a university network.

So:

1) Within Utorrent there are a few things you can do. First, force encryption for all torrents. Options -> Preferences -> Force encryption. This will encrypt your traffic so sniffers (hopefully) won't be able to distinguish between torrent and normal internet activity.

2) Download, install and use PeerGuardian2. This is updated frequently and blocks bad IP addresses (those of the government agencies and anti-piracy sites, ect) from connecting to you. Link: http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ Note this blocks an enormous amount of IP ranges, it will be annoying browsing the web with it running but it does the job.

3) Avoid public trackers if possible like isohunt, piratebay, ect. Get on a private site like bitmeTV which is much more secure and lowers the risk of undesireable people from connecting to the swarm and obtaining your IP.

4) Use a personal firewall like ZoneAlarm or something similar to monitor your network traffic

Thats all I can think of right now, good luck with it.

[viperlasson]

Run PeerGuardian like said above and encryption on Utorrent is at options > preferences > BitTorrent > "Protocol encryption: Outgoing". Try that if you want to still risk it, looks like your college IT people have sand in their vaginas.