Sent out letters to the top 25 "pirate universities" offering them software to help "identify and categorize" the traffic on their networks.The MPAA recently sent letters to the presidents of schools it claims are among the top 25 for movie piracy occurring on their networks. In it the MPAA stresses that a "significant level of online piracy is taking place via university networks," and that steps must be taken to curb it (It conveniently leaves out mention of last year's record-breaking profits of course). It goes on to announce the offering of the University Toolkit as an application schools can use to illustrate the level of file-sharing on each of their networks. "It is designed to be user friendly and require as little time as possible to run and collect meaningful information," the letter reads. "The program cannot distinguish between legal and illegal activity and does not identify the titles of the files being passed across the network." Among other things it promises the following:
However, as the Washington Post points out, some of these promises by the MPAA are fairly misleading. For example, it claims that it doesn't communicate with the MPAA. But, the very first thing the University Toolkit does is connect with the MPAA's servers and check for any updates, thus telling them every IP address that's running it. It also claims that "the content of traffic is never examined or displayed." This too isn't the full story because it creates a Web server that "...automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited." Without proper firewall protections in place the Web server can be accessed from outside the university, and presumably the MPAA if it so desires. Now Craig Winter, the MPAA's deputy director for Internet enforcement, said the toolkit is currently a beta version and that the MPAA is considering making it mandatory for administrators to guard access with a username and password, but it seems that "considering" is the operative word here. He also mentions that future versions may prompt users for permission to check for updates on startup. Winter emphasized several times that the toolkit was not designed to determine whether someone is infringing on copyrights. "It can tell you how much traffic is going back and forth on BitTorrent, but it can't see what's in those files or what the names of those files are, and it doesn't communicate anything back to the Internet." "It's certainly not a tool intended for us to come and inspect [university networks] without permission," Winter said. "We wanted to make this as easy to use as possible, to accommodate system administrators who might want to go back to their dorm and monitor it remotely." I think it's ludicrous for any self respecting university to allow the MPAA to be a part of network monitoring, no matter how independent or anonymous they claim it to be. Looking for more stuff to watch or download?
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So, what the true meaning of that statement is, is: It's really a tool that WILL log the information that we want and need, but we'll only use that info if we have permission of which if you don't give us that permission, we will take you to court and force you to let us look at the logs!
What idiots! A network admin does not need a tool provided by MPAA/RIAA to show a graph of bandwidth usage. There are other free programs that can do that!
and again they got more traffic in their own computers trying to "find us" than we can imagine.........they are trying to make "better" what could get even worse..
my advice would only be to change ports for torrent clients
As much complaining that we might do about our ITD Department, they are just not this stupid!