Illegal Downloads on College Campus

[poppe]

So I am the Student Body President of my small little college, and I just got word that Illegal movies were being downloaded using our campuses free internet. The first film was of all movies, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. There was a massive warning sent out and the school thought they were done with it, but on Friday they got word that someone had now downloaded Entourage.

My question for you guys is how do we handle this? The school has now asked for my advice on how to combat this problem, and I am not exactly sure how to do it. I would love to tell the school to tell Time Warner to shove it, but that will not happen in any way. So if you had to, how would you handle this?

NOTE: Our network is open and set up so that you can turn on your computer and your online.

 

[Osarkon]

Your network has no encryption on it whatsoever?

Surely the college will be in trouble for that to begin with, so would I be right in assuming that any member of the public could be using your college's network?

 

[mufflon]

block everything but port 80 on the open network, make a few more available if they login on a separate wifi... ... only problem is that the second network would need new hardware (==$) and logging (==server==$)


easiest is really just to block everything but the basics - and get new hardware later on

 

[EricNau]

Then you need to change your network. Having an open network is a huge liability for the campus.

Registering the computers by MAC address might be the easiest method. Simply forbid any unregistered MAC addresses from accessing the network, thus forcing all students/staff to have their MAC address registered with the IT dept (linked to their name and student ID).

Also, once you identified the offender, does your university have any disciplinary procedures in place to deal with them?

 

[OutThere]

I believe that my college uses this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Security_Agent It's super easy the first day of school every year to put in my school ID#, run a program and be hooked up to the network.

That and you cannot download .torrent files at all (they time out). Draconian perhaps, but effective.

 

[EV0LUTION]

You should rove the school with guns. Force random inspections and shoot the person's computer if it doesn't comply!

or you could simply block torrent sites, and the .torrent file type.

Your call man, but the gun one sounds so much more fun

----

Kids download stuff (software, movies, music, etc) all the time on our network and the college hasn't said anything about it yet. I'm waiting for the school police to rush in and confiscate all the laptops.

The person who downloaded on your college's network is utterly retarded. School wi-fi is an FBI agent's wet dream.

 

[poppe]

Your network has no encryption on it whatsoever?

Surely the college will be in trouble for that to begin with, so would I be right in assuming that any member of the public could be using your college's network?

We are out where no one else has access to the Wifi, so yes while it is bad it's not encrypted it is how it is. Also Surprisingly enough I have been to do other campuses recentely with open networks - those two schools were 5-10,000 students. My school is 400 students.

block everything but port 80 on the open network, make a few more available if they login on a separate wifi... ... only problem is that the second network would need new hardware (==$) and logging (==server==$)


easiest is really just to block everything but the basics - and get new hardware later on

We have a server. I'm not sure I understand what you posts means?

Then you need to change your network. Having an open network is a huge liability for the campus.

Registering the computers by MAC address might be the easiest method. Simply forbid any unregistered MAC addresses from accessing the network, thus forcing all students/staff to have their MAC address registered with the IT dept (linked to their name and student ID).

Also, once you identified the offender, does your university have any disciplinary procedures in place to deal with them?

This is what I was thinking. Very good idea. Hopefully they'll go for something like this or the mention below.

I believe that my college uses this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_Security_Agent It's super easy the first day of school every year to put in my school ID#, run a program and be hooked up to the network.

That and you cannot download .torrent files at all (they time out). Draconian perhaps, but effective.

Good idea. Thank you.

You should rove the school with guns. Force random inspections and shoot the person's computer if it doesn't comply!

or you could simply block torrent sites, and the .torrent file type.

Your call man, but the gun one sounds so much more fun

----

Kids download stuff (software, movies, music, etc) all the time on our network and the college hasn't said anything about it yet. I'm waiting for the school police to rush in and confiscate all the laptops.

The person who downloaded on your college's network is utterly retarded. School wi-fi is an FBI agent's wet dream.

Been there done that. It didn't work... They weren't afraid of my guns. And yes they are utterly retarded, but what can you do...

 

[mkrishnan]

It's fairly pro-forma for schools to block access to file-sharing or peer-to-peer services, too. People don't like it, and one problem is that there is relatively a lot of activity in the OSS segment at schools, and they also use filesharing (particularly bittorrent). Bandwidth metering is also a potential solution -- make it take three days to download a movie and it will become much more infrequent.

I'm duly impressed they went this long, however, before this became an issue.

 

[poppe]

It's fairly pro-forma for schools to block access to file-sharing or peer-to-peer services, too. People don't like it, and one problem is that there is relatively a lot of activity in the OSS segment at schools, and they also use filesharing (particularly bittorrent). Bandwidth metering is also a potential solution -- make it take three days to download a movie and it will become much more infrequent.

I'm duly impressed they went this long, however, before this became an issue.

Yeah well what is even more surprising is this is a film school, so you have to wonder why in the world more people haven't tried to do it at our school. I suppose its the school that is changing. For the longest time this school was more of a night school for people working and wanting to become filmmakers. This has slowly changed and people in the 18-19 range have become the average entrance age, where it used to be 24-28.

 

[toolbox]

Do you have the ability to track what websites there going to and the ability to deny ports? You could get into the router and deny incoming and outgoing torrent ports?

We use squid at work, i simply just get a list of sites say every month, if i find one that has been accessed that is not work related it gets blocked. If they winge about it, they need a good explanation as to why they need it.

 

[r1ch4rd]

Firstly, I would question whether or not this is really your responsibility. Shouldn't the colleges IT department be dealing with this? After all, that is their job.

Secondly, google packet shaping or traffic shaping.