They can track it easily… since you log in to the wifi PUID. VPN will not obscure that layer
Well, here’s the thing. Purdue doesn’t care about torrenting. They care about not getting into legal trouble or having to deal with DMCA notices.
“Torrenting a lot” doesn’t actually make a difference
Use a VPN.
I will use a paid VPN just in case.
Unfortunately, dtella was shut down, and I don’t recall hearing about any efforts to spin it back up.
Fuck me. 4000 dollars in 2007 was a lot of money.
How’d they figure out who’s laptop it was?
“Torrenting a lot” doesn’t actually make a difference
Sure but each torrent increases your chances of getting a DMCA sent
I don’t really believe this protects you much on the Purdue side, but if you’re torrenting that should be the minimum protection from the outside world.
They look out for heavy users among other things, so just don’t go crazy with it and you’ll probably be fine.
Be exceptionally careful, some vpns do not route all traffic. Make sure you read up on what you’re doing and that it is configured correctly.
Brutal, when did it go down?
Yeah so it was something like 75 different songs/mp3’s. They said they’d sue for $750 per song ($56k total) or settle for $4,000. My attorney advised to settle.
How people used to pirate music before torrents were really popular.
Don’t you have to use your Purdue login to access wifi?
Original commenter is under the impression that Purdue cares about the bandwidth usage from excessive torrenting, which is not true.
I’ve uploaded close to a terabyte in the past week. Not sure they care.
What do you mean by “this doesn’t protect you on the Purdue side”?
It 100% protects you from the Purdue side, in that the DCMA letters don’t go to your ISP.
Purdue doesn’t care about the bandwidth you use. This campus probably runs through multiple terabytes of data a day. Your 20 torrents aren’t a drop in the bucket.
Purdue IT has the ability to figure out certain information out to identify someone even with a vpn while on their network.
You are assuming this person only is looking at 20 torrents… they didn’t say their use case. Also, size matters. All I am saying is that keep it simple and don’t go crazy with it.
I’m not contesting any of this information. Of course they still know who you are because you’re connected to an AP in your room and they know what you’re doing because you have large amounts of traffic to a single server.
I’m saying Purdue IT doesn’t care.
Except that when somebody has a vpn active DMCA can’t identify where they are located, and their traffic is encrypted so IT can’t even tell they’re torrenting, unless I’ve completely misunderstood what a VPN is
Well, they can identify where the traffic is going.
It’s just that the traffic will go to a VPN server. And when the VPN server is asked, “Who downloaded this torrent?”, they will say we don’t know. We don’t keep records of where traffic is going.
That’s the point of a (good, not free) VPN. Everything can be traced back to the VPN company, but the VPN company keeps YOUR identity private.
So, if I’m a lawyer, I can see my copyrighted material going into the VPN server, but I don’t know where it goes from there.
And if I’m Purdue, I see traffic going into a VPN server, but I don’t actually know what you’re trying to access