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The flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server. Thankfully I shared a cube
by debacle 6y ago
The flip side: When I was an intern I once had four people arrive at my desk (including an HR lawyer) for torrenting ubuntu server.
Thankfully I shared a cube wall with someone smart enough to realize the confusion, and explain me out of being walked out.
They were monitoring for torrent traffic, but weren't paying attention to what was being torrented. Apparently a company-wide warning had gone out the week before I started.
- Symbiote 6y agoI was "caught" by some monitoring system sharing Knoppix on a machine in the CS lab at university. I'd forgotten about it, and it had been running for months. One of the helpdesk staff told me that it had been noticed, since the bandwidth to that machine was very high, but he unofficially liked the idea of the university being top of the seeding table, so I should leave it running :-D [1] http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18c22d1877dde2e61c916dac406220521bb4 http://torrent.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/stats.html?info_hash=8dcb18... (but mine would have been in 2007 or so).
- marvelous 6y agoMy university did ban p2p, no matter the content. Officially for upload bandwidth savings.
- Scoundreller 6y agoMine did too. Though oddly the wifi in the classrooms was fair-game, but this was before most people had laptops, and even fewer ones that could last more than 2 hours without charging. I remember downloading some content over IRC to share on the campus network because I knew how to use it and it was slow, but not blocked.
- josefx 6y agoMy university had bad wifi and I think 50mb drive space per student. I ended up plugging in my laptop directly and spoofing a whitelisted IP/MAC combination (the PCi just plugged out) for several assignments.
- Symbiote 6y agoThose fees they charge the international students did go somewhere, then :-D I had as much backed-up space as I could justify (some gigabytes by default), plenty of space for laptops where there were power sockets as well as 1Gb/s wired and fast wifi connections, personal webspace/server, a PostgreSQL database, a Tomcat server, remote SSH access to all computers and a distributed computing system (Condor). Looking at the current guide for students[1], they also get access to a local Gitlab instance, a private IaaS cloud and a GPU cluster. [1] http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/csg/services/ http://www.imperial.ac.uk/computing/csg/services/
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoI don't blame them, it can end up costing a lot of the available bandwidth, and it's a finite resource.
- ben_w 6y agoMy industrial experience year at university was at a research lab, working with satellite imagery. I got two urgent panicked phone calls from the same person within five minutes of each other for bulk-downloading satellite images from, if memory serves, NASA.
- tinus_hn 6y agoHow are they supposed to know what you’re torrenting?
- nsilvestri 6y agoI suppose they could have known by using a tool such as the one linked in this post.
- loeg 6y agoThe protocol is more or less all plaintext. The "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it. The tracker announces can run over HTTPS, but often run over plain HTTP.
- userbinator 6y agoThe "best" peer to peer cipher available is rc4; almost no one uses it. ...which is unfortunate because even something like the anonymous DH that is specified, or more standard, TLS with random/self-signed certificates, would force monitors to need to MITM all connections in order to find out what they contain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption
- Hyperborian 6y agoOh god... you're not under the impression that bittorrent is a secure or anonymous protocol, are you?
- tinus_hn 6y agoNo but all they see is parts identified by hashes. How are they supposed to know whether is a Linux distro or a movie?
- Hyperborian 6y agoBecause, quite frankly, parts identified by hashes is not all they see. If you're monitoring and logging the traffic then it's trivial to not only determine the filename of a bittorrent download, but also everything you need to connect to the torrent yourself and download it to verify that it's what the filename says, if that's what you wish to do. And, personally, I'd expect someone to at least check the filename before accusing me of committing a crime. :(
- sixothree 6y agoNot long after we started WFH I needed to share a pre-configured VM with a coworker. We tried all sorts of stuff and finally just decided to torrent it. Zipped it up tight with a password and private torrented it overnight. Next morning we were up and running.
- aaronchall 6y agoHow do you do that?
- Arnavion 6y agoUse your client to create a .torrent. Send the .torrent over. Other party adds your IP as a seed. No trackers or DHT required.
- inopinatus 6y agoMany, many years ago I used to build distributed content delivery infrastructure for K-12 education systems, state and national. I remember one customer (a state department of education) in particular had a server at each school with reasonable private bandwidth but unreliable routing and dismal internet connectivity, so we used the BitTorrent protocol for eventually-consistent asset distribution between their sites. See also: using NNTP as your pub/sub message bus.
- toxik 6y agoCan’t you just scp it at that point?
- lostlogin 6y agoI torrented a couple of Ubuntu versions from a VM and then forgot about it. In one month I got though nearly 5TB of data before I noticed. It was a home connection and unmetered, but it gave me a fright.