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Hey everybody,
I'm moving to an apartment building that is exclusively inhabited by students and uses the university's gigabit wifi. My first impulse was to applaud this fact, then I read the terms of service: apparently we're only allowed to use the internet for purposes of study and illegal downloads could lead to termination of our access. As someone who likes to watch the occasional American or British tv show, which I can't acquire legally, and as someone who loves playing and watching SC2, I'm basically fucked. I can hardly justify watching hours of twitch or downloading the most recent Game of Thrones episodes as educational, can I?
If I can't even destroy the occasional noob on ladder, I'm really missing out.
Getting a surfstick is stupidly expensive and has an extremely low bandwidth limit.
What can I do to circumvent the limitations?
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Does it specify exactly how much bandwidth you are allowed? If you are really unsure then you can go ask. I really really doubt they care how much you use plus anything that you download/watch/play can be interpreted as "study" depending on what your program is or if you're undecided lol.
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It's highly unlikely that they'll ban you for playing SC2 or browsing TL on their connection, despite it being for "study purposes" only. Universities typically don't care that much as long as you don't cap out the bandwidth nonstop.
Torrenting can be a bit trickier, depending on how actively they try to block it. Just enable encryption in your torrent program and you should be fine.
The best thing to do is just ask a few fellow students about how strict they are with their policy. Asking the IT department of the university has a good chance of you only getting a reply quoting their official policy (though you may get lucky and get someone who will give a more straight answer).
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A VPN service is 5 EUR a month. Your university's IPs won't show up anywhere in the logs of the guys trying to catch p2p users in Germany, which is what the university is worried about I'd guess.
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They really won't care if you use it to play games. If you live there, you cant study 24/7 right? Torrenting might be a bit more tricky, but im sure even they wont care about that. Even if you still doubt, just ask your fellow student, I bet they torrent alot anyways. If they can do it, you'll be fine
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I've considered a VPN-service, but that only hides my IP from the outside, right? The tech guys who supervise the network can still see what I'm doing, can they not?
I think the advice to ask around a little is pretty good and torrent encryption is always on. Does the Blizzard-downloader work via p2p as well?
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On March 25 2013 20:34 kafkaesque wrote:
I've considered a VPN-service, but that only hides my IP from the outside, right? The tech guys who supervise the network can still see what I'm doing, can they not?
The tech guy can see that you're connecting to the VPN service, but since traffic from and to the VPN provider is encrypted, he doesn't know what you're doing precisely. Doesn't take a genius to look at the amount of traffic and come up with a pretty good idea what is going on, but there won't be any evidence, which is probably what matters the most for the IT folks (since it means they can't be harassed by anti-piracy organisations)
I think the advice to ask around a little is pretty good and torrent encryption is always on. Does the Blizzard-downloader work via p2p as well?
Yes, the Blizz-downloader is just a basic torrent client that also downloads directly from the Blizzard servers. You can turn the torrent-part off completely and only download directly from Blizzard, but it'll be slower.
But unless the university is superstrict about its "for study purposes only", you can just leave the p2p function on in the Blizzard-downloader. There's nothing shady or illegal about it and the odd SC2 update every now and then isn't going to clog the network.
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The tech guys only see one single connection to some machine on the Internet. If they have something that can look inside the packets transmitted, the most they can deduce is that it's a VPN connection as everything is encrypted. They will not see you connecting to hundreds of different IPs for your p2p stuff. All those connections are done by the machine on the Internet, not on your local computer.
The Blizzard downloader is BitTorrent. A VPN service can be good enough for playing SC2, but you'd have to try it.
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You will most likely be fine for everything except maybe torrenting. My freshman year of college I had a friend who just downloaded tons of music and eventually he got an e-mail from IT that basically said "hey we noticed like shit tons of downloads coming from your room - we're not necessarily saying its you but if you like the internet I'd recommend not doing that anymore."
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On March 25 2013 19:54 kafkaesque wrote:
Hey everybody,
I'm moving to an apartment building that is exclusively inhabited by students and uses the university's gigabit wifi. My first impulse was to applaud this fact, then I read the terms of service: apparently we're only allowed to use the internet for purposes of study and illegal downloads could lead to termination of our access. As someone who likes to watch the occasional American or British tv show, which I can't acquire legally, and as someone who loves playing and watching SC2, I'm basically fucked. I can hardly justify watching hours of twitch or downloading the most recent Game of Thrones episodes as educational, can I?
If I can't even destroy the occasional noob on ladder, I'm really missing out.
Getting a surfstick is stupidly expensive and has an extremely low bandwidth limit.
What can I do to circumvent the limitations?
You live in Germany, streaming/downloading is legal for you, you're just not allowed to share. That rules out torrents, but leaves you with websites such as 1channel.ch to enjoy your shows.
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On March 25 2013 22:53 DJFaqU wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2013 19:54 kafkaesque wrote:
Hey everybody,
I'm moving to an apartment building that is exclusively inhabited by students and uses the university's gigabit wifi. My first impulse was to applaud this fact, then I read the terms of service: apparently we're only allowed to use the internet for purposes of study and illegal downloads could lead to termination of our access. As someone who likes to watch the occasional American or British tv show, which I can't acquire legally, and as someone who loves playing and watching SC2, I'm basically fucked. I can hardly justify watching hours of twitch or downloading the most recent Game of Thrones episodes as educational, can I?
If I can't even destroy the occasional noob on ladder, I'm really missing out.
Getting a surfstick is stupidly expensive and has an extremely low bandwidth limit.
What can I do to circumvent the limitations? You live in Germany, streaming/downloading is legal for you, you're just not allowed to share. That rules out torrents, but leaves you with websites such as 1channel.ch to enjoy your shows.
He's worried about his university's terms of service, not the police.
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At least here at this university, a healthy majority of the torrent trackers are firewalled / blocked, so they just simply do not function. A few worked last year, but they don't work this year 
I still do some heavy downloading, just through DDL sites now. I sometimes get worried if I do too much in a 24 hour period, but so far they haven't done anything, even if I did / do 10 gb+ in a day.
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So as it turns out, the connection functions like this:
I'm required to install a free VPN-tool per default but the suggested one (Cisco Anyconnect) is provided by the university and I use my uni-login to get a connection.
I tested running the SC2 downloader and it didn't seem to download anything, even with an off-turned p2p-connection.
µTorrent doesn't seem to connect to any peers, either.
wat do???
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Well, for bittorrent, I'd install that in a VirtualBox VM. I'd choose Ubuntu as the VM's OS as that should be where you get the most search results with Google if you run into problems. Running Ubuntu in a VM should get to the Internet over your PCs Cisco VPN stuff. I'd then install something like Mullvad (https://mullvad.net/en/) in the Ubuntu VM and try my luck with that. You can test Mullvad for a few minutes free. It's using OpenVPN.
You could also try Mullvad now in Windows. Install Mullvad, connect with the Cisco VPN client, then try running the Mullvad client. Perhaps it simply works. Check here what your current IP looks like for the outside world: http://www.iplocation.net/
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As it turns out, p2p does work, but is painfully slow.
DDL: 7mb /s
p2p: peaks at 40 kb/s
I could live with that without any further ado, but does the university-provided vpn actually encrypt my data?
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I don't think so. It's used to connect the place you are in to the main network of the university. You are doing stuff on the internet with a university IP, and the university might get a letter from some movie industry lawyer if you torrent something sold in Germany. Use http://www.iplocation.net/ to check.
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You're absolutely right, it does show my uni's name as ISP and an IP-address.
So I suppose I have to try and do what you suggested, which sounds horridly complicated.
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http://www.tvmuse.eu/ this site is your friend. Search for whichever show you want to watch, select the episode, then select whichever site you want to watch it from. I recommend putlocker, vidbull, vidxden, and allmyvideos. I've found those sites to be safe and good. And you don't download the shows you just watch them using their on-site player.
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On April 06 2013 03:21 kafkaesque wrote:
does the university-provided vpn actually encrypt my data?
Of course it does, that's the point of VPN. However, only the connection between you and the VPN server, which I assume is part of your university's network, is encrypted.
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i studied at a german university and lived within the university dorms with internet of the university...
noone cares. literally.
i wouldn't recomment getting terabytes of illegal stuff, but you're worried about streaming and playing games? or other noneducational stuff? then about 99% of all students would have gotten their internet access removed.
relax 
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The "fixes" people have been mentioning with respect to bittorrent would work if your problem is the university monitoring your traffic, but it very likely isn't. If anything, the greatest source of risk of you losing your connection is some third-party copyright agency contacting your university claming that you downloaded X file that you don't have the rights to. It's very unlikely that your university would actively monitor and arbitrate what constitues legal and illegal traffic.
Direct download is actually quite safe for your situation, as it becomes much more difficult for said third parties to identify that you downloaded a file when you're not broadcasting your IP address to a swarm of peers trying to download the same file.
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EPT
