Question about bandwidth monitoring

[TnT]

My school has decided to monitor bandwidth for potential copyright infringements. According to the school they get a list of highest bandwidth users and then take a look at what they are downloading. If it is violating copyright laws than they shut down that user's ports. I'm thinking that the only way they can tell between if someone is downloading a 500 meg movie or Linux is by monitoring certain ports only (those used by file sharing programs). Is this a correct assumption? I'd ask the network admins directly, but I'd doubt they would go into details of what they are doing.

Thanks

[impact]

I doubt it. I think they'll just monitor everything people dl and then make a list of the biggest bandwidth hogs and check their computers.

[RichL]

If they have a bandwidth monitoring setup that allows them to see what individual users/PCs are using the internet, then that implies they have some sort of proxy server.
In which case, the proxy server will be able to tell them what website you were going to and what files were accessed.
I'm not quite so sure about non-HTTP / FTP programs such as Morpheus or Napster-a-likes, but I'd imagine they'd either block the relavent ports or do as Impact says.

[Bohrn]

sometimes it is just a case of "we wanna nail you" and so we are gonna make it sound official. If you are downloading alot of large files, you must be a hacker. Especially if you are asking to use one of those 3rd world AMD chips LOL

I hope you have a good home connection, as it looks like your school one is gonna be one big BIG BROTHER.

best of luck

[TnT]

Yeah I know for sure they just shut down ports of violators. Just wasn't sure if they only monitor those ports or all of them. If the school does use a proxy server wouldn't that mean I had to set my computer to connect through it? I'm not set to use any proxy manual or automatic settings.

As for the big brother thing - most schools have privacy rights where they can only look at the data if there is strong suspicion or hazard for another involved. UO has no such clause so they can monitor anything on their hardware.

[Wombat]

TnT,
How is your networking set up? If it's DHCP, you could be thrown through a proxy and not know it. Also, some routers are getting very smart these days, and at least do some kind of logging.

[TnT]

They are probably doing it through DHCP then.