University Bans BitTorrent Sites

[Hairbautt]

While students at universities in the US are pressured by the RIAA, Cardiff University citing pressure from increasing numbers of copyright infringement notices, has taken out a blunt instrument and banned it’s students from accessing some of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites, regardless of the legitimate content they contain.

The Information Services department of Cardiff University in the UK has notified 25,000 students of its intention to protect the university from a rising tide of copyright infringement notices due to ‘inappropriate use’ of P2P. It will accomplish this by the wholesale banning of a whole range of BitTorrent search engines and trackers from the university network.

Previously, students using P2P applications Aimster, LimeWire, KaZaA, Mactella, Morpheus, Phex, iMesh, Qtella, Audiogalaxy, SwapNut, NeoModus, XoLoX , BitTorrent, WinMX, Gnutella, Gnotella, BearShare, Gnucleus and GTK-Gnutella had been told: “IMMEDIATELY ensure that your system is set to prevent the application from acting as a provider of unlicensed materials to other users.”

Its quite obvious that this message did not stop students from continuing to share files and the banning of the above sites is unlikely to stop them either. New sites appear all the time and although the blocklist takes out some major torrent sources, there are many hundreds more - e.g TorrentReactor.to is blocked but not TorrentReactor.net.

The excellent Yotoshi gets no mention and even President Bush’s torrent site is unbanned and fully available. Interested students will find the Linux stuff here.

Source: TorrentFreak
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Feel free to view the letter that was sent to students from the College's Security Team at TorrentFreak. The list of banned websites is also listed there.

[delimare]

I understand the desire these large organizations have to cleanse their hands of P2P but I laugh on the inside knowing that it will always be there, ever changing and evolving.

Pirating and file sharing has become a part of every day life. People will always step up to the plate to devise new ways to share pirated software and such and to release it to the masses. How can you stop a non-profit pirating organization? We do it because we can, because it’s us against them and we will not stop until we’re all dead.

I’m glad I finally walked the ropes and got the whole newsgroup thing down. I’m not at a University but it sure does make newsgroups seem that much more sweet.

[maxehhh]

Thanks to the 3rd world!

[mr. nails]

couldn't u use a software firewall or maybe an ip blocker so the university wouldn't know wtf ur doing? idk. also, i use newsgroups also, but it doesn't always provide what i want and when i want it. sure, u get fast dl's, but it has it's share of probs and then u have the fact of damaged pars that u gotta find a fix for or hopefully able to fix urself. meh, i'll stick with bt.

[Hairbautt]

couldn't u use a software firewall or maybe an ip blocker so the university wouldn't know wtf ur doing? idk.

Peerguardian or a proxy? I only go on my school's network for legit business...

But I don't live on campus so... Stupid nonetheless if you ask me...

[gamer4eva]

I never use the college or anything for bittorrent.

[Colt Seevers]

couldn't u use a software firewall or maybe an ip blocker so the university wouldn't know wtf ur doing? idk. also, i use newsgroups also, but it doesn't always provide what i want and when i want it. sure, u get fast dl's, but it has it's share of probs and then u have the fact of damaged pars that u gotta find a fix for or hopefully able to fix urself. meh, i'll stick with bt.

Who the hell rattled his cage??

[aktiv8]

Will have to check this out more closely in work....

Well finally the sites have been blocked...

Looks like they;ve been told of a few private trackers too...

Still there is an easy way around it which I've been playing with all day

[ahmed205]

in may uni its like that since 1 year

[loujob]

Come on this wont prevent anything? My school tried to stop us by putting up a software firewall that prevented the transfer of certain file types like filetypes with the extension .bc at the end n so on n so on. It did pretty much nothing