Depends on the college. Some colleges will basically block torrent downloading and you won't be able to do shit, others are really lax about it as all hell.

This is in the US tho, so that's all I know.

if a university gets caught with copyrighted content they get fined a tonne, so they usually will, if you're boarding, include a small cost for internet fees for a legal loophole or whatever.

hm i'll be moving to a campus pretty soon and i didn't consider this. i mean surely if you've got your own isp and everything it's none of their business? i don't really intend to use the uni wireless cos i'm guessing it will be slow as heck.

and even with this stuff, there's always the zoo.

Torrents and P2P applications will almost certainly be blocked but nobody is going to inspect your hard drive for pirated material.  Don't worry about it man!

(PS I am a college student)

actually, my roomate was caught downloading movies and he was given a stern warn and got his internet blocked for three days.

so yeah, it happens.

Would downloading a lot of music from rapidshare (and other such sites) be suspicious?

From what I've seen, file hosting sites are the most discrete way to download. Torrents and other P2P programs establishes multiple connections to the other users, which throws up flags if downloads are being monitored. Be wary that while colleges might not enforce rules against illegal downloads, most have a download cap and will look into a student's log accordingly. I worked for my former college as a computer technician, and we would get this all the time. One of the computer lab employees got fired because he downloaded like 20-30 GB of televisions episodes (plus a movie or something) while working in a month.

Nothing was filtered except not being able to play Xbox live and playstion 3 online at my uni, but this is in England.

I always think if you really adamant, you can find other ways around the system

actually, my roomate was caught downloading movies and he was given a stern warn and got his internet blocked for three days.

so yeah, it happens.

same when i was in the dorm except it happened to me, and i used a lot of precautions even; if i got caught again, they said it was possible i could be put on suspension from uni. torrents were blocked when i got there (even a .torrent file or w/e would not dl in firefox or IE), but after messing with some settings i got some stuff to work. at another university in the state it made the news that a group of girls had been put on suspension there for downloading tons of movies around a year ago.

so yeah, it can happen depending on the place but i'm sure they'll at least warn you before throwing you on the street



oh yeah, xbl was never blocked there yay

i think if universities do anything, they'll typically try to block p2p shit like torrents and uh... stuff like LIMEWIRE or whatever when people still used it.  if you do most of your downloading through http locations then i don't think there's much they do about it!  thankfully you can find pretty much anything on shareminer or similar sites so not being able to torrent isn't even as huge a deal as it might've been two years ago.

yeah pretty much what headphonics said

i'm at a fairly big college that blocks torrents and IRC (lol). I don't know of any school that would check if you download things off of just websites. As someone else said, the only thing you could potentially get in trouble for is transferring many many gigabytes of data in a short time, and that's probably only if it was a recurring problem that they decided to look into.

I'm assuming the bigger the school, the less likely the chance that YOUR internet activity will be monitored unless you are like the HENTAI LORD heh and download 50 gigs of videos a month. Either way, you usually get a warning first if caught.

I'm at a very SMALL college that blocks torrents and IRC, but they don't really do anything if you bypass the blocks.  It doesn't really matter though because they limit bandwidth so even though speeds aren't really that bad there, if you were trying to download large files your bandwidth would be throttled so bad it'd be useless.  I usually just torrent things when I go home.

I just think it's ridiculous that IRC is blocked, I don't even use it for any sort of piracy.

IRC is REALLY GOOD for piracy if you know the right places.

the metal detectors are retrofitted with mp3 scanning technology
you're all FUcKEd

I don't know much about IRC so have never managed to get it to work at Unis. Can you change the port on IRC easily to one that bypasses a filter?

When I was living in the dorms a buddy of mine got in trouble for piracy.  They blocked internet access from his dorm room for the rest of the year and he wasn't allowed to access it from his PC for as long as he lived on campus.  He ended up moving into an apartment because of it.

He was hardcore downloading though.  Like, over 3000 mp3's.  My best suggestion would be to ask around and see if anyone who lives in your specific dorm has ever gotten into trouble for it.

haha I go to the largest public university in the country... and their IT staff has many more important things to worry about than piracy. Also our endowment is so huge that any fine the FCC or RIAA or MPAA or whoever tries to slap on us that it would likely just cut funding to one small college for like... one quarter lol