Last year at the end of the year I recieved the email from a member of my university's administration:
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Dear Madskater212:
Early this week, <school president> received the attached files from the RIAA. They sent them to inform him of their awareness of file sharing activity on campus, and to highlight cases where extensive sharing was going on. Two individuals were cited in the communication.
<some guy> asked ITS to research the information so that we could communicate with those people. I received the names of those individuals today. As <school's> copyright officer, I’m writing to let you know that the RIAA has ready access to this kind of information and they used it as an example of illegal file sharing on our campus network. The RIAA did not ask us to provide your names or take action per se, and we have not provided that information to any external group.
Nevertheless, you should take this as a warning. If you continue to participate in illegal file-sharing, you are at risk of legal action. Please take this information as a serious warning and consider other, legal options. As you know, <school> now offers a legal music service on a subscription basis. You may want to look into that option before you leave campus, as you can use it over the summer.
Please let me know if you have questions,
<adminstrator>
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The attachment was a word document with this in it:
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"Name","IP Address","Physical Address","Location","OS","Title","Status"
"<my last name>, <my first name> - Desktop","<local ip address>","00:11:2F:26:76:80","<room number>","Connected","Connected"
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In the email, there was apparently one other person who was being watched. That was a friend of mine, and both of us had been using i2hub (www.i2hub.com) a lot. Neither of us were sharing, and apparently that program uses DC++ (i think), but only people on verified college campuses can connect to it, so I thought the RIAA couldn't see. Whoops.
This year, I have tried to resist downloading, but it's getting hard to do.
I want to find a way (I know I can not guarantee being 100% invisible) to download without being caught. I have looked around a lot but I don't know what is really secure and what is not.
A friend of mine told me he uses linux and doesn't have to worry about it because its a different operating system. I installed linux, but I would need to find a way to download decent p2p software, and also a way to transfer files to my NTFS hard drive. And I have TRIED to figure out how to install programs on linux, but there are always dependency issues and I can never figure out how to make things work.
Is there any software that I can use and be reasonably worry-free? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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