Anyone ever get caught by their school for file sharing?

[lancestorm]

No, because back then they didn't care really, it was free reign.

What was remarkable was that back in my freshman year all things on the network were so quick. Internet surfing, sending files to upload folders for classes on the network, etc. But by my senior year everything was crawling because mp3 and sharing of movies had become so prevelant.

 

[Mookow]

I've caught people. It is sort of fun to make them worry.

Not that my school does anything much to them. We dont log IPs, so when the RIAA emails us saying "last week, IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was hosting Y number of files", we cant help them. But we do track bandwidth usage, and if you are using a lot, and it is on the filesharing ports, we pay you a visit. But we dont actually do much, just pay them a visit, act pissed, and tell them to stop sharing or we turn off their port.

 

[Bassyhead]

I've heard of one person at my university (RIT) being subpoenaed and I think I heard somewhere our information technology services department gets like a dozen or so complaints daily. Interestingly enough, a search of "subpoena" or "subpoenaed" on Google mainly gives you stuff about the RIAA and DMCA

 

[Chaotic42]

I posted this last june.

Ok, let me all tell you a little story.

The year is 1998. A 16-year old college freshman has his first high speed (10Mbit) connection to the internet at one of America's 10 most internet friendly schools (at the time anyway). The student also has a fresh new Debian install, and a copy of wu-ftpd.

The student begins to rip all of his CDs into MP3 format. It's convienent. The student also gets CDs from others, MP3s from others, and finally MP3s from various little FTPs at other colleges.

By early 1999 the MP3 collection is at a quite large 12GB. It's quite large for the time anyway. So what does the student do? Puts up an FTP server. Just 10 users. The music is free, he just asks that you upload something cool for his troubles. Many do. The student gets pre-release albums and some weird things he's never heard of before. Sometimes copies of programs or even the occasional porno movie out of nowhere.

The student's computer is pretty good, but has lots of hot components in it. It's fairly cramped up, and the hard drives are the oh-so-unreliable Maxtor brand.

The student leaves for a while and what happens? The computer heats up on an especially hot day. The hard drive fails, or atleast part of it. The MP3s are still intact, but the FTP configuration file is corrupt. Gone is the limitation of 10 users. In this period the new Lycos MP3 search picks up on the server. It's fast, has lots of content, and has no ratios.

So when the student comes back and the internet access is cut off, he is confused. He checks the logs. Eventually he finds out that 600-1200 people were connected/trying to connect to his FTP server.

Enter the dean. Apparently the student not only took down his dorm access, and not only campus, or city, or county, or regional access, but from the *entire* northern half of the state. Schools, businesses, residents, none of them could access the internet reliably for days.

Enter the FBI. So the student is threatened with confiscation of equipment, etc. Fourtunately this is before the RIAA was *too* angry about this stuff. The student appears before the network admin, dean, FBI, etc and appologizes. Luck comes into play and the whole thing is dropped. The student is only ordered not to run anymore servers of any kind. He got lucky.

So yes, running an MP3 FTP server can be dangerous. Trust me, I know from first hand experience!

 

[daniel1113]

Not yet... hehe.

 

[thawolfman]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
I posted this last june.

Ok, let me all tell you a little story.

The year is 1998. A 16-year old college freshman has his first high speed (10Mbit) connection to the internet at one of America's 10 most internet friendly schools (at the time anyway). The student also has a fresh new Debian install, and a copy of wu-ftpd.

The student begins to rip all of his CDs into MP3 format. It's convienent. The student also gets CDs from others, MP3s from others, and finally MP3s from various little FTPs at other colleges.

By early 1999 the MP3 collection is at a quite large 12GB. It's quite large for the time anyway. So what does the student do? Puts up an FTP server. Just 10 users. The music is free, he just asks that you upload something cool for his troubles. Many do. The student gets pre-release albums and some weird things he's never heard of before. Sometimes copies of programs or even the occasional porno movie out of nowhere.

The student's computer is pretty good, but has lots of hot components in it. It's fairly cramped up, and the hard drives are the oh-so-unreliable Maxtor brand.

The student leaves for a while and what happens? The computer heats up on an especially hot day. The hard drive fails, or atleast part of it. The MP3s are still intact, but the FTP configuration file is corrupt. Gone is the limitation of 10 users. In this period the new Lycos MP3 search picks up on the server. It's fast, has lots of content, and has no ratios.

So when the student comes back and the internet access is cut off, he is confused. He checks the logs. Eventually he finds out that 600-1200 people were connected/trying to connect to his FTP server.

Enter the dean. Apparently the student not only took down his dorm access, and not only campus, or city, or county, or regional access, but from the *entire* northern half of the state. Schools, businesses, residents, none of them could access the internet reliably for days.

Enter the FBI. So the student is threatened with confiscation of equipment, etc. Fourtunately this is before the RIAA was *too* angry about this stuff. The student appears before the network admin, dean, FBI, etc and appologizes. Luck comes into play and the whole thing is dropped. The student is only ordered not to run anymore servers of any kind. He got lucky.

So yes, running an MP3 FTP server can be dangerous. Trust me, I know from first hand experience!

:Q

 

[Jittles]

I got caught once for forgetting to disable sharing. Port turned off for one day until I went and talk to the tech office. Tech guy (college student ha) came to my room to remove the file and enable my port. I promptly renamed the file and he found nothing so my port got turned back on. I had to appear before a peer review board who basically didn't give a rat's ass about sharing and let me off with nothing.

The thing is that every other person I knew that got a warning at all got it for uploading the same file as I did. Must have had that one flagged or something I don't know. Never got caught for anything else.

 

[Nanotech]

Originally posted by: virtuamike
Got a DMCA at work for BT. I got off easy.

What's a DMCA? I may get one of these in the future and would like to be prepared.

Thanks!

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: Nanotech

Originally posted by: virtuamike
Got a DMCA at work for BT. I got off easy.

What's a DMCA? I may get one of these in the future and would like to be prepared.

Thanks!

nice to see you're planning for the future

 

[clamum]

Bump for the night folk

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: thawolfman

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
I posted this last june.

Ok, let me all tell you a little story.

The year is 1998. A 16-year old college freshman has his first high speed (10Mbit) connection to the internet at one of America's 10 most internet friendly schools (at the time anyway). The student also has a fresh new Debian install, and a copy of wu-ftpd.

The student begins to rip all of his CDs into MP3 format. It's convienent. The student also gets CDs from others, MP3s from others, and finally MP3s from various little FTPs at other colleges.

By early 1999 the MP3 collection is at a quite large 12GB. It's quite large for the time anyway. So what does the student do? Puts up an FTP server. Just 10 users. The music is free, he just asks that you upload something cool for his troubles. Many do. The student gets pre-release albums and some weird things he's never heard of before. Sometimes copies of programs or even the occasional porno movie out of nowhere.

The student's computer is pretty good, but has lots of hot components in it. It's fairly cramped up, and the hard drives are the oh-so-unreliable Maxtor brand.

The student leaves for a while and what happens? The computer heats up on an especially hot day. The hard drive fails, or atleast part of it. The MP3s are still intact, but the FTP configuration file is corrupt. Gone is the limitation of 10 users. In this period the new Lycos MP3 search picks up on the server. It's fast, has lots of content, and has no ratios.

So when the student comes back and the internet access is cut off, he is confused. He checks the logs. Eventually he finds out that 600-1200 people were connected/trying to connect to his FTP server.

Enter the dean. Apparently the student not only took down his dorm access, and not only campus, or city, or county, or regional access, but from the *entire* northern half of the state. Schools, businesses, residents, none of them could access the internet reliably for days.

Enter the FBI. So the student is threatened with confiscation of equipment, etc. Fourtunately this is before the RIAA was *too* angry about this stuff. The student appears before the network admin, dean, FBI, etc and appologizes. Luck comes into play and the whole thing is dropped. The student is only ordered not to run anymore servers of any kind. He got lucky.

So yes, running an MP3 FTP server can be dangerous. Trust me, I know from first hand experience!

:Q

That story is fing awesome.

 

[her209]

I tried to root the schools Nix box.

 

[cessna152]

Rutgers Shutdown

 

[PowerMacG5]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42
I posted this last june.

Ok, let me all tell you a little story.

The year is 1998. A 16-year old college freshman has his first high speed (10Mbit) connection to the internet at one of America's 10 most internet friendly schools (at the time anyway). The student also has a fresh new Debian install, and a copy of wu-ftpd.

The student begins to rip all of his CDs into MP3 format. It's convienent. The student also gets CDs from others, MP3s from others, and finally MP3s from various little FTPs at other colleges.

By early 1999 the MP3 collection is at a quite large 12GB. It's quite large for the time anyway. So what does the student do? Puts up an FTP server. Just 10 users. The music is free, he just asks that you upload something cool for his troubles. Many do. The student gets pre-release albums and some weird things he's never heard of before. Sometimes copies of programs or even the occasional porno movie out of nowhere.

The student's computer is pretty good, but has lots of hot components in it. It's fairly cramped up, and the hard drives are the oh-so-unreliable Maxtor brand.

The student leaves for a while and what happens? The computer heats up on an especially hot day. The hard drive fails, or atleast part of it. The MP3s are still intact, but the FTP configuration file is corrupt. Gone is the limitation of 10 users. In this period the new Lycos MP3 search picks up on the server. It's fast, has lots of content, and has no ratios.

So when the student comes back and the internet access is cut off, he is confused. He checks the logs. Eventually he finds out that 600-1200 people were connected/trying to connect to his FTP server.

Enter the dean. Apparently the student not only took down his dorm access, and not only campus, or city, or county, or regional access, but from the *entire* northern half of the state. Schools, businesses, residents, none of them could access the internet reliably for days.

Enter the FBI. So the student is threatened with confiscation of equipment, etc. Fourtunately this is before the RIAA was *too* angry about this stuff. The student appears before the network admin, dean, FBI, etc and appologizes. Luck comes into play and the whole thing is dropped. The student is only ordered not to run anymore servers of any kind. He got lucky.

So yes, running an MP3 FTP server can be dangerous. Trust me, I know from first hand experience!

What state was this?

 

[ChefJoe]

Heh.. once upon a time I did the whole ftp thing, then scaled back some, then put movies out in a fairly popular IRC channel. A few months later the MPAA was doing scans and they sent a letter to the admin of the Big Ten school I attended. I was told to stop infringing by later that day. I shut down the server and said that I'd deleted all content. "Someone in a channel had setup a program on my computer but said things were cool because these movies were from other countries (hence the subtitles)." Ah, the joys of 2001. We had a packetshaper installed around that same time.

 

[Valhalla1]

interesting story..

however no way I'm buying the BS about hot components somehow corrupted (only) yout FTP configuration file.. even if this did happen, the ftp daemon was up and running while you were away and the conf file was in memory already so you could delete the one on disk and the ftp server would still function with the same limits until you went to restart it

and then giving you the benifit of that doubt, say it did somehow get restarted, how is a hot hard drive going to change ONLY the 10 user limit ? if the conf file is corrupt and the server got restarted, then the ftp daemon would just refuse to start up, not open up to the world

also I seriously doubt 1 computer on a dorm could take out a whole state's internet access

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

Originally posted by: BillGates
I got nailed by the RIAA in '98 - verbal warning. I had a sweet FTP going long before mp3 trading was mainstream. Napster came around 1-2 years later and things haven't been the same since.

Same here, but it was accompanied with a email from my ISP saying that me having a server use their pipe was againt the ToS.

I did stop though.