this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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Policing this crap isn't trivial and not worth the effort.
We just gave up and block 100% of all P2P traffic on both our university wireless and student wired networks.
In our corporate network, we just detect for common BT applications on the endpoint and alert on that instead.
What do you mean by blocking "100% of all P2P traffic"?
100% of all P2P protocols, literally are blocked by our University F5 BigIP by rule.
All of them (including certain Lemmy features).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_P2P_protocols
When your IT has a small budget, you do what you need to do in order to mitigate the actions of the few.
Sorry I still don't understand. Did you just block typical ports?
No, there's no direct port blocking involved because P2P can work on all ports.
As such, the F5 BigIP identifies the packets themselves with the p2p protocol in them and blocks the packets themselves that are identified as P2P.
This way, the only torrent traffic that may get through is the kind running inside a VPN. Even then though, we can identify encrypted torrents by other means (Deep Flow Inspection, trace the VPN traffic or directly monitor the student machines that are owned by the university).
My university just blacklisted the questionable trackers' DNS, not the actual data traffic
So basically I would tether to my cell phone, wait for it to fetch a list of peers from the tracker, and then switch back to the uni wifi to complete the download
Why would you care? Is it a legal issue of some sort?
Likely is. When a dorm resident does the torrenting, the university would be receiving those naughty letters.
Oh, those naughty letters! There's a reason Seaseme Street is never brought to you by the letter J or Q. Such naughty letters.
Sorry, I've never lived in a country which bootlicked the copyright owners so much. I've read up on it and wow it sounds kinda insane, someone spies on your traffic and sends you legal threats for pirating stuff.
Eh yes and no. Usually a representative of the rightsholder will join the swarm of a torrent, note all the IP addresses, and send their love letters to every ISP on that list. From there, the ISPs will forward the letters and may take action depending on jurisdiction and local law, which usually amounts to soft threats or suspending your account after multiple interactions. It isn't that the ISPs are spying on your traffic (at least in this instance), they just don't want to get caught up in "enabling piracy" or whatever nonsense. Hence why VPNs are a thing.
I'm not saying it's the ISPs spying on you, it's the copyright owners; and the ISPs bend over to them (because the legal system forces them to).